Our Evolution Blog, One To Visit

I found a blog I like enough to post about it. Called "Our Evolution", the blog can be found at Our Evolution

Post shown is about 3rd world women having to carry
contaminated drinking water 3 miles on average.

It's about the survival of humanity and making survival a right for everyone on the planet. From Alexander M. Zoltai, here is his own description of himself:

"I'm a poet, essayist, journalist, and humanitarian. Everything I write comes from the desire to help, to heal, to educate.

Our Evolution blog is a process of bringing together Cultural Issues, Personal Commentary, and Spiritual Quotations to Explore the Crises of our time and provide a space encouraging Discussion, Reflection and Action."

Quote is from Alexander's profile here at Blog Catalog, the best blog directory:
Alexander M. Zoltai

This is definitely a ***** blog! That's five stars, not an expletive!

The Henry Miller Method of Diplomacy

Henry Miller was one of the more misunderstood writers, often censored or banned simply because of the use of profanity. A funny comment he made was "sometimes you just have to blurt out 'Shit!', as nothing else is as appropriate." He used a stream of consciousness technique that let his mind flow from one idea to another with little cohesion other than that it perfectly illustrated how our minds work, while revealing his underlying philosophy, which was a love for humanity, abhorrance of war, strife, and materialism.

My favorite books of his were the trilogy called "The Rosy Crucifixion": Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus. In all of these he has many dinners with a diverse group of friends. He says that he purposely invited about eight people of diverse beliefs and backgrounds, believing their differences would make for interesting debates and conversation.

He says after one of these that "if the world leaders would only get together, have a three hour dinner and share many bottles of wine, they would all agree to disagree, but would emerge as friends after the evening, and all wars could be prevented." He also thinks that the average citizens of each nation never prefer war, but the leaders are able to thrust them into wars without their consent, or use the media to manipulate them into wars for political reasons.

Most of his writing was done after WW1 but before WW2, but I think, along with the Dadaist art movement, that they could all see the potential for another war looming, and were all concerned with its prevention through common sense and comraderie. Too bad we can't seem to make this work in practice, on a large scale.

Miller's best book critically was edited by friend Anais Nin, who took about 2000 pages of outtakes from the pair of Tropic books and created the wonderful short story collection called Black Spring. If Miller's work is new to you, I'd start with this book. The stories "The Tailor Shop", about his dad's shop in the garment district of New York, and "The Angel is My Watermark", about painting a watercolor, are two of the best stories I've ever read. I suppose many writers could benefit from a great editor, as this book illustrates.

Is the Universe a Giant Hologram?

This is an interesting article at New Scientist.

Is our world a giant hologram?

Be sure to read all the 600+ comments. There's some heady and some funny stuff in there.
Our World May Be a Giant Hologram

ps- now don't tell me that the Washowski Brothers were actually right in The Matrix!

Photo of Saturn's Rings and Titan

This photo is from the robot spaceship Cassini.
That's Titan in the background, and the little "golf ball" is the moon Epimetheus.

Kentucky Derby Day - Huge Exacta and Trifecta

When I lived in California, we'd make each Derby day a group trip to the racetrack, since it followed my ex's birthday on May 1. I learned to bet a five horse exacta box (a "box", you get all your picks in separate bets) at $5 tickets for $100 even. This means that any two of my picks came in 1-2, then I'd win on one $5 ticket.

Not knowing horses and thinking all the "bloodlines" and racing forms to be ripoffs of the gullible, I relied on pure psychic intuition for the numbers, getting them just before the race. Today's were "16-8-4-2-1", and they came in "8-16-2"..

Not only would I have hit my exacta again, but had I bet it, the trifecta as well (many more tickets for that, so I avoided it). Todays winner, Mine That Bird, with jockey Calvin "The Rail" Borel, also a winner in 2007 aboard Street Sense, paid 50-1, the second longest shot to ever win.

The $2 exacta paid just over $2,000! My $5 winner would have paid just over 5,000. The $2 trifecta paid over $41,000! dang.. someone is happy - can you imagine: a $10 trifecta winner would have gotten over $200,000!

Update (5.04) - heard today on CNBC that six people won the "Superfecta" with $1 tickets that paid $276,000! yowie zowie..

I can't bet even on horses here in Georgia, nor can I buy alcohol on Sunday (I don't even drink, but still...) - due to "religious freedom", the ability of the majority religion to completely suppress the rights of the minorities.

Yep, that Bible of the imagination prohibits alcohol, gambling, drugs, consensual sex - all sorts of stuff if you just "read between the lines" (but it allows slavery and the raping of female slaves and genocide) - and listen to your country preacher, who "had the calling" so he didn't need theology school. I think when I need brain surgery, I'll take the guy with "the calling" over the one with education.

Woman Claims Her Dad Was the Zodiac Killer

This is a going to be an intense story. A 42 year old woman named Deborah Perez claims that her father, Guy Hendrickson, was the Zodiac killer in northern California. She says she wrote one note to the police, and still has the cabbie victim's glasses that her dad kept as a souvenir.

Here's the USA Today version of today's story:
Woman's Dad the Zodiac Killer?

Now, everyone interested should see the 2007 movie Zodiac, excellent examination of both the police and a journalist's investigations into the serial killings.

Dogs for Easter TV?

You simply have to love the tv programmers, who schedule these things. I just noticed that on Turner Classic Movies tonight, they have two versions of "King of Kings", followed by the Swedish comedy "My Life as a Dog"!

Actually, this is a brilliant comedy: a boy can only face his reality by believing he is the family dog. Yes, he hides under the dinner table and barks to beg for food. It's actually a better movie than either Kings film. A better choice for that would have been Pier Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew", my favorite gospel film, the only realistic one.

What this comedy has to do with Easter is anyone's guess, but they are showing it after midnight on the east coast, so it's technically after Easter, but it will still be Sunday in at least two western time zones.

Maybe Jim from "Taxi" is making out the schedule, remember when he did that?

Life on Mars Ends... On Mars!

The now cancelled tv series Life On Mars wasn't much.. unfortunately it was a replacement for one of three better shows that were cancelled by ABC:

• Pushing Daisies (the best of the new shows, nominated for 12 Emmys, very creative and unique, a 'fairy story')


• Dirty Sexy Money - not even a big and good cast could save this prime timer from being just another soapy yawner - too bad, I always like Peter Krause shows (Six Feet Under, Sports Night)


• Eli Stone - which had some promise when it was hallucinatory for no reason, then they had to make it all "make sense" and when it was just a brain aneurism, this also became just another soapy legal show with nothing extra...

Life on Mars had great beginning, a police detective in the present is hit by a car, go unconscious and wakes up in 1973, with the title song by David Bowie setting the tone for what could have been an interesting time travel story. But instead it became just "another police show", just set in 1973 - big deal, so were all the bad cop shows back then as well.

So in the finale, they had to do something unique, rather than just have the hero, Sam, awaken from a coma. The solution? Have everyone in the cast awaken from deep sleep aboard a spaceship, which is now landing on Mars! Great finish - now why didn't someone think of this while the series was losing viewers? The entire story of two alternate realities were all programmed into Sam's dreams while in deep sleep space travel.

..and all the other characters were there as well: Gretchen Mol, the romantic interest, was there, only with long brown hair and not short blond hair. Didn't they get that backwards? Long hair in 73, the hippie era, then short blond hair for an astronaut, a military woman? The grouch Harvey Keitel was there as well, only not as his boss only, but also as his dad! Now that was unexpected..

At least this showed more imagination than the finale of ER, which was more of the same: boring.

Religions Need Auditing for National Security

"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"

We should definitely end the tax-free status of religions. We're paying for CULTS as well! Most waste the money on themselves anyway, some send the money overseas to terrorists. Without government auditing, which making them taxable would enable, we have no idea where the money is going.

This affects taxes you and I pay, we're being forced to subsidize religious contributions. Is this fair to everyone? Athiests? The growing number of 'spiritual but not religious' people? Religions like Buddhism or Taoism that don't ask for money, have no word for "tithing"? Why should all of them pay for donations to televangelists? Most would rather feed the poor than air-condition a big building that's empty 98% of the time.

This also hinders national security, the big buzz-word allowing big brother intrusions on all our rights. OK, the government is going to hamper individual rights, why not the self-proclaimed rights of religions - why are they immune to examination and responsible actions?

There actually was a televangelist 'church' raided by the feds recently, because they were trying to buy guns with silencers, granade launchers, all sorts of other nasty stuff, that is not for 'self-defense'. What they found was a minor army of weapons everywhere, cash everywhere (150 million in all, one secretary had 30,000 in her drawer!). They also found a list of proposed islands to buy, and more weapons they wanted to obtain. I hope everyone saw this, and realize that this is sometimes where you're hard-earned charitable contributions are really going.

Both the OLD and NEW testaments warned that churches are for hypocrites, even Jesus said the truly devout pray in private at home, not in public! (Matthew 6: 5-6)

I have this and more at Bible Decoded. This blog is aimed at cutting throught the materialist hypocrisy rampant in religion today and revealing the underlying metaphysical philosophy that I believe religions have forgotten and are hiding from the 'worshippers', who get no education, just a place to worship and sing.

My former Methodist church in Macon, Georgia now has a security guard in the huge parking lot, and a bullet-proof glass and a locked-door for their main office! you talk to the receptionist through a hole in the glass! UNREAL -- when I found out after my mom died, I decided to NEVER go back to this church again. They waste enough money to feed half of Georgia annually (they built a gym and a movie theater on the same site! what's next, a water park?), and brag about their huge income from annual tithes ("fourth in the nation" at one point). This is not a church, this is a banking fortress with armed guards. Any day I expect walls and a locked gate and the military compound will be complete.

What would Jesus think about this, done "in his name"?

Eulogy for Jessie

___ Jessie [1994-2009] ___


The other four cats and I ("we") just lost Jessie, 15, a shiny jet black female who usually liked to keep to herself but who loved female visitors. She got sick about a two weeks ago with a cold and fever, and we cured that, but she was losing weight and energy.

So her treat was getting to go outside for hours each day, which perked her up. They haven’t been outside since moving back to Georgia from California in 2001, due to foxes, bobcats, roaming dogs. She had felt ok enough even today to go outside, she walks around out there, seems to enjoy it and never got bad enough to be falling down.

Tonight about 9:30 pm was the first time she acted like she didn't feel well - she kinda moaned at me, I held her and she got down after not too long, so that didn't feel good either... I almost called the vet to put her down then but figured it may take awhile for them to come if available anyway. So I did a healing and asked her to go ahead and leave so I wouldn’t have to take her to the vet, and she crawled back under the computer again, in the warm hole by the woofer (that's usually on so it's warm, it's the power for the whole computer speaker system)..

She seemed to be going to sleep or try, so I left her alone.. a little later I sorta sensed she was gone - but was afraid to look, afraid I might wake her and she'd be uncomfortable again. I lit a candle for her and tried to talk to her spirit and tell her how great she was, and how pretty, which was her favorite word; she knew it was a compliment. When I finally had the guts to touch her, her body was already turning cold.

For some reason I didn't let the other cats see her dead like I did with Scooter, who died at 18 on New Year’s Day, and was the “cathouse matriarch”, so I let all the other cats smell her and check out out when she was gone. Not this time. I went to the garage and got one of my rubbermaids with the snap lid, covered her with a towel and put her in that - when I carried her out, Sarah was following me and giving me such a look that I had to stop and tell her it was Jessie - she knew anyway, you should have seen the look I was getting.

Tabby, her littermate brother, the only other one to survive (we think a hawk or owl got the 3rd one when real small), followed me to the door and was waiting for me when I came back in and I had to try to tell him too - he's been sniffing her all week and looking at me like "what's wrong with Jessie?".. I’m sure they sense the aura of death, it’s likely easier for animals to pick up.


[Jessie when a kitty] At least I held her a lot when she'd let me and took her out every day for hours, she loved that, it’s been warm and sunny with lots of birds who would come squawk at her. The others would watch and were jealous and I had to tell them "Jessie doesn't feel good, she deserves a favor"..

In her prime, Jessie was the best dragonfly catcher I've ever seen, back in California. She'd see them coming and time her leaps and grab them about 4-5 feet off the ground. Then with the big wings sticking out for inches from her mouth, she didn't know what to do with them. She had the same wide-eyed look you see in the photo at the top. I'd gently pry them loose and let them go, they'd always fly off again, apparently unharmed from a mere carnivore's big teeth. Feral cats are actually the most efficient hunters in nature, successful around 75% of the time.

I buried her today next to Scooter. She liked to lie on my cool slate stepping stones in the garden, so I pulled one up and put that over her as a marker.

Epilogue
Tonight I'm burning an outdoor fire for Jessie. I think we do that because the flame represents their spirit, and somehow this makes us feel that its still there. But no matter how hard we try the flames will also eventually go out.