The grasshopper and the ants.

(A glance at ambivalent & ambiguous morality,
  in the hope of better understanding despair.)
Up, Down, A Bit More. 

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One by one the YouTube links are going dead, blinking out ... as if this obsessive concern with copyright is going to somehow motivate people to go out and buy things (?). Burros!

We used to ride up Cousin's Inlet to work in Tony's skiff listening to the Traveling Wilburys' End Of The Line:    "I'm just glad to be here, happy to be alive."

This one always does it to me: Playing for Change - One Love, which is funny in a way coming from a 99^44/100% atheist. Here's the original with Bob Marley. 

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Another heroine of mine - not much reason for it initially (maybe) beyond her name - Daysi Zapata (surely you can see how it would appeal to an old hippie). She is the vice-president of AIDESEP Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana / Interethnic Development Association of the Peruvian Jungle.

At the moment she is head to head with Miguel Piovesán, an Episcopalian priest (in the Purús parish) who has been proselytizing over a highway through Amazônia from Puerto Esperanza to Iñapari (which does begin to look very like a nexus in somebody's development wet-dream). Here's a map and here's another map.

From this distance who can say much for certain? Being far away makes it easy to pick up on simplifying characterizations: 1. left-lib feminist ideology, or 2. corrupt kiddie-diddling priests, or 3. Alan García's druthers if he were still president, or 4. eager would-be consumers (see The Walrus and the Carpenter a few weeks ago here) ... and so on.

But ... if I had to bet single malt it would be on Daysi. 

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Aesop's The Grasshopper and the Ants:

The ants were spending a fine winter's day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him, "Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?" He replied, "I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing." They then said in derision: "If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter."
Gutenberg Version #1.   {85}

One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.
       "What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"
       "I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."
       The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.
       "Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.
       There's a time for work and a time for play.
Gutenberg Version #2.   {144}

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
Proverbs 6:6-8

Easy to see some of the contradictions - self-righteous whatever-ness vs The Golden Rule and so on ... which may explain where some of the alternative endings you find in such purveyors as Disney come from.

What would Kipling's wise and perspicacious Solomon bin Daoud make of it I wonder? (See The Butterfly That Stamped.) 

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[Delving into Aesop ... he seemed to understand tiny stories well enough.    I have misgivings about these tiny stories. There has been a gradual increase in text size over the years, and concomitant (or at least contemporaneous) magnification of issues that maybe should be kept private, or that would be if I were not undone; and alongside that, the feeling, the conviction that it is only through the most direct communication that any counterforce can possibly emerge. So. When you ain't got nothin' you ain't got nothin' to lose.    Anyway, here are some more tiny stories with no shellac, or not much:]

 

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Shakti & Woodstock:    Shakti is the kitten in their paradise. They have no kitty litter and things go from bad to worse 'til he chokes her to force her to shit in the box and her intestines fall out. The girl carries the kitten to town where the vet says she can't be saved and puts her down.

He breaks the puppy's leg with his hands, hears it crack, claims he fell into the wood pile. They fix a sort of splint. Then one day when they are forced to leave drop kicks him into the garden like a football. Their only neighbour sees and takes Woodstock to stay with him.

Years later he returns with his children. The neighbour now lives in a tiny shed with a dozen dogs. They do not seem to ressemble Woodstock but he claims they are all descendants. "They are warm in the winter," he says. He gives them tea and tinned milk and sweet cream biscuits. Then they climb the hill and ring the old church bell with a stick that is there.

{179}

 

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Sex:    There is no telling when these things begin. He is seven or eight. His mother has gone to the hair-dresser. He must wait on the porch but soon finds himself a block away in the churchyard with two blonde girls, foreign - there is some difficulty with language. They want him to come with them to their back yard to play. He hesitates.

She happens to pass by there on her way home, sees him and orders him to go ahead. He is still laughing and hides behind the pillar to surprise her. She puts him in his room, "Wait there," and goes to the basement looking for something. She comes back with a stick, a piece of lath, strips him and beats him with it.

He is still weeping when his father comes from the office. "What's this?" he says, and then below in the kitchen, roars, "Never! Don't you ever strike my son again." In the weeks after he goes often to the churchyard and down all the lanes behind the neighbouring houses, peering in.

{178}

 

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Keeping Faith:    His parents come for an unexpected visit. He is busy with school and young children, other things. She is beyond control already. At 3AM they are there together, pinning her to a mattress on the floor, laughing. The next day as they are leaving his father looks a question at him as he gets into the car. He does not want to understand, and so, doesn't.

His friend, blood brother, is dying in a hospital somewhere far away. He calls on the telephone, begging him to come for a last visit. He is on his way to court over the kids. He doesn't have rent money. He says no and hangs up. He understands very well. He re-reads the letter, "If I had a ladder that would reach into the hole you are in I would climb down to help you."

{143}

 

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Old Man:    A few miles away lives a hermit. He went to town they say and tried to rape his young neice, or did rape her, no one knows. Others say she led him on when he was drunk though she is just thirteen. And others, "He's not a Christian." The Mounties come every month or so in their boat to pick him up but he hears them from far and sits up on the hill 'til they go away again.

They walk that way one winter afternoon and decide to stop in. Something wild leaps up at the door from inside when he knocks. It is locked. There is no other answer and they go on, uncertain. Weeks later he is found beside a hole in the ice on one of the ponds. He has taken off his coat and his boots and one sock.

{146}

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[Ahh, it's not a matter of shellac. Maybe I am simply not permitted. I'm sorry, it looked like a way. I don't seem to be able to even see the lines I am stepping over anymore. Oh well.] 

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The Event: 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Cairns Australia July 9-13 2012; and, The Outcome: Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reef endorsed by 50 pages of scientists; and,

One View: A World Without Coral Reefs by Roger Bradbury in the NYT:

It's past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation.

And Another View: in the comments to Climate change, Carbon taxes, and Responsible government:

a) how messages are received when they are all doom and gloom, b) the need to keep some optimism within our own community so that people continue to work to make the world better, and c) the immense difficulty of communicating with the movers and shakers who really decide how humanity acts.

None of these documents is very long.

I don't entirely side with either view - there is enough doubtful rationale in each of them - but at least they are relatively clearly put, 'out there', and the facts are more-or-less agreed.

It is, as Steve Gardiner has very clearly shown, a moral quandary in which every position contains tendencies towards corruption, backsliding.

If one accepts the awesome possibility that humankind is well and truely diddled (and the odds are getting shorter every day), then one tends to slide towards some downhill position, which one doesn't really matter (the common interpretation of despair - apathy, or adaptation, or futile technology, or geoengineering, or mitigation, whatever the fuck) when the necessary action remains the same as it has been for 50 years, very simple but unfortunately uphill: Stop polluting! (Doh! Whether you think it will 'work' or not.)

Again, if I had to bet single malt, it would be that truth will do more to sort out despair than any amount of polite & diplomatic discussion within any kind of status quo paradigm. (Untranscended despair being the bottleneck at the moment in my view. The only way to get to it is through it - to paraphrase Stompin' Tom.)

[Lord sufferin' dyin' dancin' ... that oh-so-earnest (k-k-Canadian) dipstick David Keith is at it again: US geoengineers to spray sun-reflecting chemicals from balloon. These odd few mis-spent millions here and there are all double jeopardy eh? They are squandered on shadow nonsense and are not applied to the root problem, so there is a double toll.

A-and reducing wind subsidies in Britain is not enough. I gues they figgure they can really throw a fuck into it if they simultaneously i) threaten subsidy reductions, and ii) dither and dawdle and delay over the quantum (here).

Turpitude!] 

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Pity Party:    A way of experiencing grief, in which you spend your time feeling sorry for yourself and whingeing endlessly about how crappy your life is. Pity parties can involve one or more people. (from the Urban Library)

Following along on Steve Gardiner's texts involving moral corruption, there's not much better than Oscar Wilde. Particularly his story The Devoted Friend read by Stephen Fry: 1   2   3 (total about 20 minutes) - and the text here; or download a whole CD of six Wilde fairy tales read by Stephen Fry from Demonoid, whatever.

You can hardly read (or listen) to these stories without picking up the crypto-Christian undertones, overtones, themes, and so on ... The idea of a deathbed conversion to Catholicism (?) when it is just possible that meningitis might leave you somewhat non compos mentis - oh well, it was 1900 after all. An interesting crit by Simon Critchley a few years ago in the Guardian: Oscar Wilde's faithless Christianity.

I guess the fear is that complaint is a means of manipulating someone towards a compassion they may not feel. (I trust that the parallels in The Grasshopper and the Ants and The Devoted Friend are obvious to all.) I know I hate it when a panhandler goes to lengths to look truely woebegone.

There is middle ground here. There must be that is, and presumably there is a technique to make the distinction - I just don't happen know that technique except as an emotional quality, a response of the heart.

Not the last word on this ... 

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Just a Doukhobor at heart I guess. Grand Forks - I wonder what it's like over there?

Be well. 

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A Bit More:    I thought of going to Mexico one time and Old Pius said, "Yes, Mexico, that must be over there somewhere on the other side of Montree-hall."

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Trouble in Timbuktu:    Radical Islamists go about destroying physical stuff, Bamiyan and now shrines in Timbuktu. "Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture," says Leonard Cohen. "They have a pussy problem," says Captain Beefheart. So what problem have the Islamists got then? Mistaking physical stuff for something else, looks like to me - in the same way that consumers, or, that is Consumers, mistake the stuff they are buying for something else. When it comes to filling up holes, or 'mitigating deficits' I also think of Gabor Maté and his Hungry Ghosts.

Where is the calculus that will give us the precise locus of the root deficit, whatever it is? And if we find it, how long will it take to become just another excuse to bring out the lash? You must be compassionate! And if you are not, we will lash you, or crucify you, or inquisition you. Right.

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I was asking a few weeks ago - where are Lewere? Kurchi? Yida? (They are in and around the Nuba Mountains and south towards the South Sudan border, Kurchi I found, and Yida (approximately), they are on this map I made.)

So, another 100,000 in Mbera to go along with the 500,000 in Dadaab. When the 'official' numbers start getting scary, well, you know something's not right eh?

And where is Mbera? Well, the NYT gives it approximately, but how long will you spend trying to find it more exactly on this useless Internet? And by the time you do find it, and remember that Bamako is indeed the capital of Mali you have forgotten what it was you wanted to know or find out, or maybe that is just the incipient Alzheimer's, dunno.

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You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?” and somebody points to you and says, “It’s his,” and you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well what is?” and you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”

Well ... yes, most of the time you are alone. Keith and I used to discuss this but never really got through to it. He called himself an 'isolato' and me a 'communal' (or something).

Of course we are all ultimately alone in some fundamental sense - the interesting question is how strong are the connections that do form in spite of it? Not very strong say I, but ... real, existent, without force or moment but there ... here ...

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A quick Geography lesson - Sahel: (now with Cape Verde correctly identified)

I count parts of eleven countries: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. The Guardian counts eleven too (but don't say exactly which ones, and seem to include Djibouti?), Wikipedia only counts eight, leaving out Burkina Faso (which does have a province, right in the zone, named Sahel), Nigeria, and Cameroon. (So don't feel bad if a lot of this is as new to you as it is to me, you are in good company.)

The Sahara desert (3½ million square miles) is on the move as well, southward by that same ~5 miles per year. No surprise that lots of bad news originates in the Sahel these days (Darfur etc.). The concept of a ten-mile wide 'Great Green Wall' being constructed (in the Guardian link just above) looks like more shadow work to me - several billion more World Bank dollars in double jeopardy. King Canute rides again! But hey, looks good on paper and makes you feel good doesn't it eh?

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100,000 people demonstrating in Tokyo on Monday (the organizers say 170,000, the cops say 75,000, either way it is LARGE in a culture of restraint such as you find in Japan).

I guess the real anal retention is going on in North America: k-k-Canada where 500 coming out for an environmental issue is a big number, and the US where the pooh-bahs tell us 1,000 or so will do it all, have already done it - "We won! We Won!" Right. And not hard to figgure why we stay mum either is it?

"Is there a place for those hopeless sinner who hurts all mankind just to save his own?"

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Poutine, I should'a called this post 'poutine'.

A side of (ambiguous) boobage with that (ambiguous) poutine?
 

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Down.

Trust.

Up, Down. 

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[Apologies to Dan Wasserman. The original is here.]

Music to accompany: reprise of Tom Waits' Singapore. "I've fallen for a tawny Moor ... When you hear the steeple bell ... Heave away boys! Heave away!"

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I love the way they talk: "The government's position as an advocate for nuclear power makes it difficult for the public to trust it as an impartial source of information," (British MPs in a report on Fukushima from the Guardian).

Ditto the rationale for subsidised Tar Sands development ... in fact, you name it, the entire institutional gamut, the whole Shitteree (!) is corrupt, as corrupt as can be. Nonsense raised to such a level beyond any epitome: the Titanic hits the iceberg and most of the passengers and crew drown - live on your TV & iPod!

Or ... 1: the British wring their hands and debate whether to reduce (?!) wind energy subsidies by 10% or 25% (here); and, 2: Thomas Lubanga, in the very first ICC judgement gets off with 14 years for his war crimes, less time served and with time off for 'good behaviour' - even if he loses his appeal he will be less than 60 when he gets out (Gets out?!); and, 3: Toronto firmly assumes the ostrich position on public transit (see here); and, 4: Stephen Harper will put those pesky scientists to work looking for the (elusive) adverse health effects of wind generation (see here) ... ad fucking infinitum. (For a more reasonable and composed view see here.)

It took fifty years to get here!? From there!? Bollocks!



Sometimes the IISD ENB, the (Canadian) UN propaganda arm, inadvertently says something: "As one delegate remarked, 'the less you want to do about it, the more you talk about it.'"

(Thirtieth session of the Committee on Fisheries, COFI, of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO: Highlights for Tuesday, 10 July 2012)

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[A note on process:    Striving for 150-200 words in a frame. It was also mentioned in the Guardian recently so why not? Bowing to the inevitable maybe. From the outset word processors have dealt best with a paragraph at a time if they're not too long, maybe two if they're short. Even in this (smaller, shorter) environment the slip-ups with HTML are numerous, but findable at least. Tractable towards local consistency, and there are advantages - switching easily back and forth from display text to HTML, getting two views side-by-each (thanks again Glen, and echoes of 'one side of one 8½ x 11 piece of paper'), montage and learning about the up side of cognitive dissonance.

Google search is so useless ... so, abandoning 'keywords' and working at completing the index to this blog. ... Polishing a turd? Maybe, and no guarantee that it will work much better. If I could just hook CTRL-F onto a mouse-click ...] 

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In protestant Toronto of the day the old joke goes like this:    A Jewish father is teaching his little son confidence by having him jump down the stairs. He places the boy on the second step and says, “Jump, you can do it,” and the boy jumps and lands without falling. The father places him higher and higher on the stairs telling him, “Jump, you can do it.” Though the boy is more and more afraid, he trusts his father, does what he is told, and jumps and lands safely. Then the father puts him on a very high step, and the boy is too frightened to do it. "Jump, I'll catch you," says the father. He trusts his father and jumps, but the father steps back and the boy falls on his face. As he picks himself up his father says, "There, let that teach you never to trust a Jew, even if it’s your own father.”

Anti-Semitic and hardly funny; but the story is about trust not Jews or fathers or even fatherhood, and it is solidly welded into the social imaginary one way or the other.

In Matthew 7:9, the Sermon on the Mount, Christ asks: "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?" And the honest answer is "not many perhaps, but yes, some." You can walk around and around it, build walls of doctrine & ideology, enforce faith and positive thinking with the death penalty if you like ... and still, some (many? most?) will give stones & serpents.

Even (giving us all the benefit of the doubt) out of ignorance or mistakenly making something true which might be but is not - and passing it on as received wisdom.

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My my ... Is all (some? most?) of Steve Gardiner's ethics just pissing in the wind then? Hair splitting shadow work? 

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[... polishing ... I am wondering if it is like having pretty tits? People used to tell me I was handsome and had a good singing voice. Not as repeatedly and earnestly (I don't imagine) as women with a certain pneumatic quality in their boobies get the message. Who knows? Having relatively recently acquired them (the old man variety) I may have a pleasant surprise in store (but not so far). So these tiny stories are exactly 'such as they are' - careful and conscious but not consistently down to 150-200 words yet. That's ok, just practicing, playing:]
 

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Ottawa courthouse:    They take his children in this place, almost dismember them, rip at their limbs like some medieval torture machine, grind them in the wheels of justice. His daughter draws a picture of her dream - two fire-breathing dragons tearing apart their prey on a hilltop. It seems he is the only adult in the room when he stops it. "Alright then, take them," he tells the judge. And then tells her to fuck off (she wants money) and walks out. Barely makes it. She pushes her red button and he just slips past the two heavies coming down the hall to get him. Good thing he is wearing a three-piece suit and not running. It is the end.

The kids could be worse. He never recovers. He thinks it saves them some grief at least; that's the best that can be said. He thinks they might eventually figgure it out but if they do they don't say.

His friend offers to sleep with him that night but he can't relate to her. Gets drunk instead and then stands looking at the stones in the statue's mouths until dawn. And again, often and often and often in the days and weeks and months and years, weeping. Oh yeah, he knows this place.

{213}

 

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Grandfather:    Today is Sunday. There is a family story in which his grandfather as an altar boy attacks the priest with the censer during mass. The family pew is locked when they arrive the next week. The great-grandmother makes a separate peace somehow but the great-grandfather will not parley and so spends subsequent Sunday mornings walking with his son in the woods and fields. Maybe he is smoking his meerschaum cigar-pipe with rearing horses carved in full-relief on the back of the bowl. It is still here on the shelf though the amber stem is gone.

The next father takes his children to the woods and fields of a Sunday too he guesses, and the next: down the Belt Line to the Don Valley before the days of expressways, into ravines, Hog's Hollow, to the Credit River after they get the car, the Elora gorge.

Maybe the priest is a kiddie-diddler. That's not in the story so who can say? But does the boy just whack him over nothing then?

{170}

 

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The Girl at Palmas:    One night he is drinking too much with some of the guys at Palmas, a sidewalk barzinho on Avenida Silva Paes. The woman who runs the place obviously wants to close but stays on 'for a regular'. A girl starts passing back and forth on the other side. They say, "that's not a girl," but he says, "yes it is," and eventually staggers over to see. She is wearing a short macramé skirt and nothing else and lifts it up with a smile. He takes her home. She flops back onto the bed. She wants 30. He gives her 50. She is enthusiastic and says, "I can cook too," so ... "come back tomorrow then," and her, "we can go shopping together."

Sure enough she calls and comes over, with creased pictures of her baby folded up and tucked into some invisible pocket. She sees the wallet on the table and quickly robs it, politely leaving the small bills and ID. He doesn't notice. When she says she is going to get more pictures to show him he waits on the doorstep for almost an hour.

They live in the neighbourhood. He sees her on the street. Sometimes he drinks at the bar on the corner where she comes in for smokes and soft drinks. The bartender gives her an approving look when her back is turned. He doesn't look though. He wants to but is afraid to say, "hello."

{243}

 

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Morena:    The tall morena arouses his honest interest and admiration. She is a waitress at the local. He is looking for language tutorial and when the subject comes up she says, "Eu 'tou uma boa professora, mas falo rápido e só uma vez," (I am a good teacher, but I talk quickly and only say things once). He doesn't take her up on it, not quite a real offer or seems not to be. Shortly after she is fired for mysterious reasons.

She stays in his thoughts, then turns up at the shipyard as a welder-in-training, then appears with one of the engineers. He is pleased for her but one night out-and-about he comes across them and neither one says hello. An oblique situation, not overt but not unintentional. Next day the engineer denies all involvement. Years later he tells. How she moves into the hotel with him for a few months but stays behind when the project winds up and he leaves town.

{165}

 

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Ski stories:    From a distance through the blue snowy air you can see trails cut into the side of the hill spelling out L O L. His father, one of the architects of this strange calligraphy, stops the car to point it out. They are on their way to the big party the year the deal is cut to go commercial; mid-50's sometime. He is a kid and does not know how to ski very well and so gets dumped on the bunny hill.

There is a microphone and PA system. A dare-devil is announced and ... There he comes! Dressed in flowing gauzy green veils, yodeling down the steepest parts. Airborne off every mogul and then crashing, spectacularly, again and again. Will he get up? How can he carry on? When he staggers to a stop there is so much applause and cheering that he makes a second run.

He spends the rest of the afternoon trying to imitate this green hero. No one notices. They stay in a cabin in the woods at a lodge with the magical name of Limberlost. There are elevated steam pipes running to the cabins which leak a bit making delicate sculptures of frost at the joints that shatter at the gentlest touch.

{209}

 

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Ski Tow:    It is a Model-A Ford up on blocks facing away from the hill. The rope loops around one of the rear wheels (tire removed) and runs over some idlers to another wheel tied high up into a tree at the top. If it's not too busy and if the guy running it trusts you he can gun it and make a real ride with 'air' in the hollows and at the landing.

The 'expert' skiers have heavy leather mitts with wire embedded into the palms for grip. But he explains that this makes too much wear on the rope, and big rope like that is expensive. He is drinking something from a pocket flask, not hiding it but with his back turned.

{124}

 

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Telemark:    They are skiing for the weekend near Huntsville. There is a T-bar where the Model-A rope-tow was the year before, and a big competition is going on somewhere nearby. Overnight it snows heavily and in the morning the hill is perfectly covered in many inches of new powder. It is early. The tow is just starting up. The hill is unmarked. It is cold enough that the snow squeaks underfoot. They are all laughing.

His father sets out to demonstrate a telemark turn. It is long and slow and graceful, arms held out from the shoulders, one leg trailing far behind - a ballet. But the snow is not as deep as it seems and he hits a rock and falls. One of his skis comes off and goes to the bottom before it stops.

Later on, at the lunch counter in the lodge, a man speaking in a heavy accent orders a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. Everyone laughs. The short-order cook says archly, "Would you like that ... toasted?" He thinks for a moment and says, "Sure, why not?" His father says to him in a whisper, "That guy just won the giant slalom - let them laugh if they want to."

{204}

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[Or ... you think you are doing one thing when you are really doing another thing altogether and the Guardian is really just shilling for Reader's Digest tyros.]

[Revisionism: It is tempting to revise the past, and easy in this blog environment. On second look, lack of capitals and punctuation seemed like an affectation so they have been approximately updated.] 

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Juan & Maria's young daughter was repeatedly raped in this trailer in Cleveland Texas during the fall of 2010, over a period of weeks, months. The city fathers have now torn it down.

Twenty (or so) men and boys are on trial for the crime. Some, many, turned themselves in. Some, many, are making plea bargains.    And none of this is strange,
             ... except that is, that it is not strange.

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My friend Simon was a carver. I wanted something to keep and asked him one day for an eagle hanging in his shop. He offered me a transformation mask instead - he may have wanted to keep the eagle because his assistant on it had been a lovely young woman we knew (one eye green and one bright blue). Like a fool I insisted and took the eagle. Years later he also gave me a maquette of Bear and Salmon made in some aromatic wood. My son has the eagle.

David Malouf's An Imaginary Life ... after a number of readings I still have no idea, and since there are large changes coming soon I am also tipped into dipping a finger or a toe at least into Ovid and his Metamorphosis (to see if there are any obvious dots to join up).

Either that or go to Ottawa and demonstrate with the scientists (here and here) which is ... almost enough to get me up to the bus station but not quite - I only leave this place to buy food and (cartons of) cigarettes these days; must be those subliminal despair effects kickin' in.

             Foole, thou thy Mother trusts in things vnknowne;
             And of a Father boasts that's not thy owne.
             George Sandys' translation (1632).

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Someone has hijacked Charles Taylor's email and is sending out spam asking for money. That's funny.

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Experiment:    Find out when ceramic toilets were first manufactured. Get some samples, bowl fragments, covering the period, say, five. Section and microscopically analyse the surface crystallography. Any bets? (That there is an evident increase in porosity that is.)

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Speaking of toilets ... Some things should not be funny (we may imagine in our anal moments) ... and then one day they just are funny; so here's Alzheimer's

'Vantage #10: "Vintners in the Hunter Valley area, who primarily produce Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Grigio wines, have developed a hybrid grape with anti-diuretic properties. The wine from this grape, which may reduce nocturnal micturition among the elderly, will be marketed as 'Pinot More'," (heard it through he grapevine).

[Sometimes spam can be eloquent: "Racking your brain trying to find a solution for your erectile dysfunction?"]

Triskaidecaphilia, c'mon down!
Diverte-se. Be well.

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Here, just for the halibut wrap your head around this - Dadaab, Kenya numbers of refugees as of July 2012 (explicitly including the 'Registered Somali Refugee Population', so actual figures are likely higher):

         Individuals  Households

Dagahaley  118,680      34,570
Hagadera   136,537      43,092
Ifo        108,753      35,467
Ifo 2 East  32,189       7,979
Kambioos    14,389       3,212
Ifo 2 West  41,960      11,271
           =======     =======
           452,508     135,591

(That's 3⅓ individuals per household.) For perspective: Somalia, 10 million; Mogadishu, ~3 million; Kenya, 45 million.

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The only half-ways good news that came to me lately is this from Lester Brown: Throwaway Economy Headed for Junk Heap of History. 

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Down.

What I know for sure.

There really IS a God! (Just kidding.)
Up, Down. 

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[Not very much, let's see what will fit into this frame.]
1. We don't think therefore we are not for long (evolution, climate change, growth economics ...).    2. Phyllotaxis (the divine proportion) is not a universal law but a fascinatingly prevalent tendency; that, and a tetrahelix never repeats, no tendency about it. (from Donald Coxeter) And there is no road (royal or otherwise) going anywhere without geometry.    3. [three / stability] Love is; ubiquitous and very slightly sticky like Higgs boson; but too infinitesimally tiny to register any effect (or be used for any purpose) however short the fulcrum or long the lever.    4. (And) like the man said, it does not alter when it alteration finds.    5. [five / humanity] The Greeks named the graces Aglæa Euphrosyne and Thalia. There are more, often appearing in threes but not always.    6. Carnaval is not about identity; it is liminal.    7. [seven / a lucky prime, pink] It's all personal: ad hominem or ad mulierem, and whatever happens is between individuals, at most a handful. [So, it is looking like eleven.]    8. Learning another language, even badly, lets in more light than any sort of belief.    9. [3³] Ditto playing a musical instrument.    10. Penultimate, Northrop Frye (pride of place for feet of clay): Neither paranoia nor dualism nor dialectic nor ideology but interpenetration. Yes.    11. The HTML bureaucrat holding these words (together and apart) is as long, longer than the words themselves. [Eleven then. Lucky eleven and save triskaidecaphilia for another day.]   {~260} 

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Measures of inequality.
Where are Lewere? Kurchi? Yida?

[Units: 1 metric ton/tonne (t) = 1,000 kilograms = 2,205 pounds, ton = 2,000 pounds, or 2,240 in the UK; 1 t Carbon Equivalent (CE) = 3.667 t of Carbon Dioxide equivalent (CO₂e); 1 t CO₂e = 0.2727 t CE. I understand CO₂e as a clarifying, simplifying, way of including other greenhouse gasses in one number, but ... Why do we need CE exactly? Was it invented by someone at the UN?]

A ratio of carbon footprints of 50:1 - in 2007 CO₂e, Bangladesh 0.3, Canada 16.4 (Ethiopia even less at 0.1 or 100 kilograms, annually) - ok; but consider a minimum economic footprint or per capita daily cost of living (survival) ratio of 100:1 - Bangladesh 0.50 Canada 50.00 (not quite guesses) - nevermind the stress & insecurity of living on even $3 a day (salário mínimo in 2012 Brazil 622R$ per month = ~300$ CDN).

It's the economy that drives the carbon isn't it? And the Antonov bombers in Sudan?

I wonder how long the green between the shelters at Yida will last?

Here's something from the OED: 'apocalypse' revelation, disaster, cataclysm etc. via Latin apocalypsis from Greek ἀποκαλύπτειν to uncover, disclose, ἀπό off + καλύπτειν to cover; and 'discovery' taking off the cover, uncovering, via French from Latin.

So: if we take Hobbes' vision, 'brutish and short' etc. as something covered up with more-or-less imaginary pretence - the Golden Rule, the Rule of Law, diplomacy, bureaucracy - then what would it take to pop the lid? Maybe not very much - relatively minor hardships (from, say, an Ethiopian or Sudanese standpoint), fear, misinformation, inability to think ... BlackBerrys, SmartPhones, complacency ...   {~285} 

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What I will bet single malt on, continued ...
Where is Toronto for that matter? (Remember that Frye found it perfectly congenial.)

Items with "I" in them:    12. When the inquisition 'shows me the instruments' and demands renunciation of Jesus Christ I will earnestly & immediately comply, but with an involuntary smile which they will not like and I will be done for. Ditto: Mohammed, Bahá'u'lláh, whomever ...    13. Three children were born directly into my hands and for a moment I held their lives there. (One I had to kick-start.) And no rubber gloves or masks in those days.    14. If I could tell only one story it would be The Good Samaritan but I resist all attempts to make a doctrine of it.    15. I arrived at tensegrity more-or-less independently from first principles.    16. This blog employs captchas on comments to hinder spam. When someone tries anyway, I briefly admire their indomitable human spirit. "Don't tell me what to do!"    17. I wrote software for Eddie and he liked my work.

18.  More and more feral & furtive in Toronto: At the end of three hours (1, 2, 3 if you can bear David Cayley) Frye calls technological introversion 'simply a hazard'. Even IBM 360's would talk to you when no one else would, and no real surprises. The source I have forgot, but the image of a wirehead plugged into an electronic computer ecstasy leading to death by starvation is etched in the cognitive imaginary. So, could it be a terminal hazard (inconclusive addiction experiments on rats notwithstanding) d'you think?

I already said 'feet of clay' didn't I? And I never said "causes Galileo's math book to get thrown," did I?    OK. That's it then.    {~300}

Be well. (And be aware,
                  shekinah an' kerygma ain't what them preachers say they are.) 

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Down.

Canada Day.

Up, Down. 

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Terry Mosher's Aislin (in the Montreal Gazette) is often, mostly, quite conventional. He gets the 'close but no cigar' maybe once a month or two. But this one deserves high praise: simple, topical yet eloquently layered, polysemous - even the colouring contributes.

Jenkins' mewling & maudlin nonsense is presented for a quick 'compare & contrast' exercise if you like.

There is some (qualified) good news here and here (no mistake I don't think, that both are provinces - the word 'parochial' will lose its pejorative edge if this keeps up), and some bad news, and some worse (video here, ~1 hour).

A dear friend who has been sinking into senility took up chelation therapy (administered by a homeopath yet!) and is obviously benefiting.

I cannot resist such evidence, and now wonder if we can possibly arrange a national, super-size, dose?

Be well.     [Bah. Humbug!]    {<150} 

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