Answer To Why The Grandkids Giggled

One of the grandkids happened to look in the mirror of the dining room photo.

Stencil Board Site

One of many hobbies my mother did when I was a child was stenciling, which was the rage for homemakers in the 50's. These were not one page stencils, but a form of stencil multi layering. A rose edging a tablecloth could have 5 layering sheets with 5 colors. That was then, this is now. Check out this site...

Stencilboard Instant street cred lurks just a few clicks away at this hip gallery of stencil-based graffiti art. Found on urban sidewalks and walls throughout Europe and North America, stencils tend to feature political screeds ("I Heart Sweatshop Labor," "Buy! Buy!"), Warhol-like portraits of icons (Marilyn Monroe with a black eye, a leering Richard Nixon, good ol' Andre the Giant), or unique, standalone images (a skeleton in a grass skirt over the caption "Born to Hula"). Stencil art burst onto the scene in Paris during the `80s, and then quickly spread to Berlin, New York City, and other metropolises, welcoming or not. Naturally, trendy advertising firms have picked up on the style and are now using spray-paint stencils for their own nefarious purposes. So, check these out before they're lost to the corporate beast. (in Graffiti and Street Art

THE ATHEIST AS PROPHET part 2

"Mysticism is a rational enterprise, religion is not."
Sam Harris

This is the second of two postings by Sam Harris, posted to The Huffington Post, titled The Politics of Ignorance.
You can read part one here...

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium. Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God. There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not "rule out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe -- that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone. Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them." Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world. The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

Biotechnology Develops Anti-Pollutant Plant

Toyota Motor Corp has developed a derivative of the Cherry Sage shrub that is optimized for absorbing pollutants from the air.

The new Kirsch Pink plant is reportedly 1.3 times more effective at absorbing NO_x, SO₂ and other air pollutants than its parent stock, the Cherry Sage. Toyota is targeting first-year sales of Kirsch Pink at 10,000 plants, priced at ¥380 (US$3.34) each.

The new plant, which flowers between May and November, also diminishes the urban heat-island effect 1.3 times more effectively than the Cherry Sage, according to the company.

Read On...

Why the Grandkids Giggled

Grandma was having 3 girlfriends over the coming Tuesday for cards and was justifiably proud of her table setting. She asked grandpa to take a photo with his new digital camera and download it to the computer when he had time, which he willingly did, whereupon she proudly emailed the photo with some other photos grandpa had taken to the kids and grandkids and 20 or so friends which she included in her weekly email to friends and family.
But the next day one of her granddaughters in college emailed her back and suggested she remove the dining table photo and wouldn't give a reason why.
Can you see what the granddaughter saw?

Here for a larger photo.

Answer Tuesday.

Thanks to Kinda Steele

ERVIN SANTANA

Star Pitcher of LA Angels Injured in First Inning of American League Playoff

22 Year Old Rookie Ervin Santana Replaces Star Pitcher Against Mighty Yankees to Win 5th of AL Playoff

Santana Unlikely Athletic Hero for "Halos"



Santana Starter In Third Against White Socks

Cinderella Story Goes Wrong.

Ervin Flops Against Socks

Socks over Angels 8-2

THE ATHEIST AS PROPHET

"Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not."
~Sam Harris


Our friend Sam Harris has been blogging for the Huffington Post, the new ultra liberal mega-blog site started by the longtime media personality Arianna Huffington.
Sams first post was August 2, 05 titled The Politics of Ignorance, the theme being Bush's pseudo-scientific notion of "intelligent design" being the legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution,
and great reading it is and a good introduction of Sam to liberals preparing the way for his later radical blogs on religion.

Here is the first of two post from The Politics of Ignorance.

President Bush has now endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of "intelligent design" (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, as he has always maintained that "the jury is still out" on the question of evolution. But the jury is not out -- indeed it was well in before President Bush was even born -- and anyone familiar with modern biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.

It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID "theorists" with a response. While understandable, I believe that such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now spilling out.
According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution. As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma. More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States -- in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

The second and final edition tomorrow.

Miracle Plasma Pencil

News of a “plasma pencil” developed by Old Dominion University researcher Mounir Laroussi was flashing through the World Wide Web in late September, adding to his reputation as a pioneer in the field of cold plasmas.

PhysicsWeb noted Laroussi’s creation of a “hand-held device that can produce room-temperature plasmas … to kill bacteria, heal wounds and treat plaque.”...
Plasmas, sometime called the fourth state of matter along with solids, liquids and gases, are generated anywhere atoms are stripped of electrons, creating soups of neutral particles, charged ions and electrons. Plasmas can be found in solar flares and around lightning bolts, and, in fact, make up 99 percent of the known universe because of their common presence in interstellar space. In the denser Earth’s atmosphere, most plasmas are super hot and hard to control.

During the last decade numerous researchers have produced low-temperature plasmas, but Laroussi, since the mid-1990s, has been at the forefront of the research. His focus has been on ease of use and low-cost generation of plasmas. Business Week magazine named him an “expert” in cold plasmas, and gave the same designation to Karl H. Schoenbach, ODU’s eminent scholar of electrical and computer engineering, who is director of the Reidy Center and holds the Batten Endowed Chair of Bioelectric Engineering.

Cold plasmas are generated when an electrical source is tailored to kick lighter electrons into high speeds without doing the same for heavier ions. This can be done with electricity that is turned on and off—or pulsed—thousands of times a second. The relative inactivity of the ions eliminates the high heat that plasmas can develop in the Earth’s atmosphere and gives researchers the more manageable cold plasmas.
Read on...

WORLDS LONGEST SUSPENSION BRIDGE TO BE BUILT

The 2.5 mile bridge will link Sicily to Italy spanning the Messina Straits. The Bridge has it's detractors who accuse it of being nothing more than a vote winning white elephant putting Italy billions of euros in debt, ($5.3bn), and an earthquake disaster waiting to happen although it is engeenered to flex 30 feet during an earthquate measuring 7.1 Ricter. It will have a double six lane highway and four tracks for a high speed railway line.

During the Punic Wars, Roman consul Gaius Cecilio Metello wanted to march elephants into Sicily across a wooden bridge; in 1870 a 2-mile tunnel was proposed to link the island with the mainland; and in 1971 a fixed link was declared a “prevailing national interest.” But the area’s 100 active seismic faults—including four directly through the Strait of Messina itself—and powerful winds and ocean currents have long been formidable engineering obstacles.

Advances in computer modeling mean structures can be designed lighter and stronger, making possible a single 2-mile-long, 10-lane span suspended from 4-foot-diameter cables hanging from 1,000-foot towers built on the mainland and the island. The span would beat the current world-record holder, Japan’s Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge, by 66 percent. The land-based towers eliminate the problem of building support bases in the turbulent water.

SLOW COMPUTER STARTUP

The ole lap box has been taking longer and longer to fire up, which means too many programs are cranking up when I hit the start button. Yep, one of the solutions is to not to select the auto startup when installing the program, but often programs are not well mannered and don't give that choice so you have to track down the problem.

If your running Windows, click Start>>Run. Type in "msconfig" (without the quotes). Click OK. This launches the System Configuration Utility. Select the Startup tab. Uncheck boxes for programs you don't need to have running (RealTray, Winamp or other audio utilities are good candidates). You're not deleting the program, just preventing it from automatically launching. But be careful, as there are a few programs that should be running (including SystemTray and your firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus software). If you are trying to figure out what something does in your startup, you can find a list of entries and explanations here: http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

Good luck.

THE HOLY LONGING

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the moth and you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

Goethe

RECONSTRUCTING THE OLDEST OF TRADITIONS: GAY MARRAGE

Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal has a great take...

A cloudy afternoon on a recent Saturday in western Massachusetts. Rain sprinkles the Berkshire hills. Strolling in twos and threes along paths between broad lawns, 80 or so wedding guests make their way to a performance barn on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow. Rustling, cheerful, curious, they take their seats. Gray light filters through high windows and casts soft shadows among the rafters. The barn is not a sanctuary, but it feels like one today.
A violinist, one of the relatives, begins a Corelli prelude, and the wedding party enters. Both grooms wear tuxedos and boutonnieres. The minister, a young seminarian in the United Church of Christ, tall in his robes, begins. Under order of the state Supreme Court, same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and today the minister will marry Jamie Beckland and Michael Pope.
"Every relationship of love is holy, sacred, and worthy of public affirmation and celebration," he says, with a touch of emphasis, slight but sufficient, on the word every. "We pray that this couple will fulfill God's purpose for the whole of their lives." Emphasis again, this time on the word whole. Not everyone in the hall picks up the inflection, but the grooms do.
Jamie is 27, originally from Wisconsin, now a development officer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael, also 27, works at a private research company. They plan to move to Massachusetts, the place where Jamie lived when they met and the only state where their marriage has legal force. Jamie is taller, blond, bespectacled, thin, with the bearing of the former dancer that he is. Michael is dark, heavyset, as reserved as Jamie can be bubbly, a product not of the liberal Upper Midwest but of conservative southwestern Virginia, a state notorious for its gratuitously anti-gay legislation.
For all the differences, Jamie and Michael and their families have this in common: divorce. The newlyweds' immediate families count eight divorces between them, four on each side. Michael's parents divorced when he was 6, Jamie's when he was 10. "I think there's a whole generation of kids from broken homes who only want to be married once," Michael says. This marriage of two men, so radical by some lights, aspires to reconsecrate the deepest of marital traditions.
A few weeks before the wedding, over coffee at Starbucks, I asked Jamie why he wanted to marry. For my generation of gay men (I am 45), legal marriage was unthinkable, and emerging into the gay world often meant entering a cultural ghetto and a sexual underworld. Jamie, who could just about be my son, replies with an answer that turns the world of the 1970s and 1980s upside down. Once he realized he was gay, he says, he simply expected to marry.
"Why does anybody get married?" he asks. "I wanted the stability, I wanted the companionship, I wanted to have a sex life that was accepted, I wanted to have kids. For me, it's not a choice. A marriage evens you out."
Read on...

THE ATHEIST AS UBER BELIEVER #01

"Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not."
Sam Harris

I have quite a bit to say about this author, philosopher, teacher (aren't these 3 discriptives the same?) SAM HARRIS, but the words just haven't been there. I've been trying to write an introduction for several days and have been severely blocked, and after each attempt of 5 or 10 minutes, nothing, then I return to his book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, And the Future of Reason which is taking a very long time to read because every paragraph is so rich, (after purchaseing the book, check out the bibliography, years of reading) that I have to put the book down and come back at it a later time after sadly, sparse assimilation. So up until now going nowhere fast.
This morning I was goggling for a photo, and the photo I've used here popped up, a common photo of Mr. Harris, let's call him Sam, surprisingly the article attached to the photo had been posted only minutes before I did the search, and the article, a review of the book, a run of the mill review, but the kicker for some reason was it was in the Sikh Times, which added an entirely new level to this story, (and by the by, filled with excellent essays). I read the review, and the wow of the timing somehow unblocked the block and this beginning of a "study" of Sam and the following review just tumbled out.

The Review...

A Fear of the Faithful Who Mean Exactly What They Believe
by DANIEL BLUE (The review first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 2004) (And sorry to say I can find nothing about DANIEL BLUE)(Could he be a Porno Writer?)


Sam Harris is tired of being nice to religious people. Why, he wonders, should we be expected to respect individuals who in the year 2004 still believe in virgin birth? And Christians rarely return the favor. Instead, they're down in Washington holding prayer breakfasts and smiting 'sinners' through mandatory drug sentences, intrusive sex laws and prohibitions against stem cell research.

If Harris mistrusts Christians, he's openly mocking of Muslims, whose beliefs, he suggests, 'belong on the same shelf with Batman.' In fact, he doesn't like any religion much at all. As he points out in The End of Faith, believers of every denomination constantly engage in civil wars. They are also responsible for such historical lows as the Inquisition, witch hunts and the sustained anti-Semitism that eased the way for the Nazis.

What most annoys Harris, however, is that the faithful are averse to development and change. Fixated on ancient scriptures, they ignore the accumulating insights that have transformed the world. Every other field redefines its positions in the light of fresh data. Only religion takes increasing pride in being backward.

There, indeed, exist moderate clergy and flocks who try to accommodate their faith to the times. Harris, however, dismisses such people as decoys who distract our gaze from their dangerous brethren. The true believers are the fundamentalists, and they want to turn the clock back 2,000 years.

At this point, the reader's eyes may begin to glaze. Writers have been arraigning religion for 300 years, and much of this has been said already. Never before, however, have weapons of mass destruction been so available. For Harris, the apocalypse arrived on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, which he believes commentators misunderstood. 'The evil that has finally reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism. It is the evil of religious faith at the moment of its political ascendancy.'

The point for Harris is that religious people mean exactly what they say, and this does not bode well for the rest of us. Curiously, principles of faith are often discounted by political observers, who ascribe the deeds of religious people to any motive but religion itself. The rebellions of fundamentalist Christians are often treated as reactions of the disenfranchised. Islam-inspired terrorist groups are seen as acting out of political grievance. Harris takes fundamentalists at their word. 'The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were . . . men of faith - perfect faith, as it turns out - and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.'

Under pressure, Harris reveals ideological biases that will trouble some readers. He has nothing but good to say of Samuel P. Huntington's notorious The Clash of Civilizations. He quotes with approval a rhapsodizing comment about Israel's treatment of Palestinians, even though one might think that religion plays a role in that country's troubles, too. He seems to loathe Islam with a fury the more surprising because he doesn't seem to know much about it. (His quotes on the subject stem mostly from the works of Bernard Lewis and a university Web site.)

Harris is also wont to speak with a dogmatism that suggests that he might be a person of faith himself. The reader may be startled when he announces, 'It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter.' Pat Robertson and the ayatollahs might have said the same.

How, then, does Harris distinguish himself from the competition? In later chapters he argues that Hindu and Buddhist meditation practices, when stripped of their metaphysical overtones, offer measurable insights that can underpin ethics. In short, his view has a scientific justification that no theologian can match. This is a clever tactic, but there is a difference between entertaining a hypothesis and proving it. Scientists have begun to explore the claims of meditation, and perhaps someday they will bear out Harris' belief to the letter. But until 'the science of good and evil' regularly appears on the biology syllabus, his claims will appear more wishful thinking than accomplished fact.

The End of Faith offers something to offend everyone and is certainly not for those who read only what they agree with. Yet, despite its polemic edge, this is a happy book - Harris is obviously tickled by his own intelligence - and he writes with such verve and frequent insight that even skeptical readers will find it hard to put down.

Besides, we might all check our belief systems for deadwood. Because it touches a nerve, The End of Faith is a good place to begin. The fundamentalists' greatest asset is that they believe what they say. If Harris is right, the rest of us will be sitting ducks unless we discover - and then live - what we really believe as well.

Stay tuned, much more coming!

One instant is eternity;
eternity is the now.
When you see through this one instant,
you see through the one who sees.

Wu Men (Hui-k'ai)
1183 - 1260

THE MECHANICS OF CREATING CD's

A friend and I were talking about a CD which was damaged and the conversation expanded to the general mechanics of the technology. I knew very little, and later did a goggle and the longtime computer techie Kim Komando's web site popped up with this simple and beautiful explanation. So read and learn.

"CDs are a great example of how fast technology moves. Ten years ago, CDs were high technology. I remember buying an expensive computer just to get a CD player (CD-ROM). Today, we burn CDs at the drop of a hat, to play in our cars. But it's still good to know how this stuff works. The technology is pretty cool.
Digital information, including music, is stored in binary (1's and 0's). To represent all those 1's and 0's, a CD contains tiny spots that are highly reflective or poorly reflective. A laser is used to read the sequence of spots. The sequence can then be interpreted as sounds.
A CD-R disc has two important layers of material sandwiched between plastic. One is a layer of metal, typically aluminum. In front of that is the other layer, a special dye. The aluminum layer is highly reflective. The dye is mostly transparent, so overall the disc is completely reflective. But the dye can be changed by the laser in your CD-R drive.
The laser heats and burns tiny spots on the dye layer. The burned spots become nontransparent. They block light from reaching the aluminum layer. So a finished CD-R ends up with both highly reflective and poorly reflective spots. These are the 1's and 0's, respectively.
Your CD-R drive uses a strong laser to burn a disc's dye layer. Typically, CD-Rs have a second, weaker laser, used for playing. It is too weak to affect the dye's transparency. CD-ROMs also have only a weak laser.
The chemicals used for the dye layer eventually degrade, ruining the disc. Disc manufacturers use various dye formulas, some sturdier than others. But the cheapest last only a couple years. And price tag aside, it's difficult to discern the quality of CD-R brands. I always buy name brands.
Rewritable discs use a layer of crystallized material instead of a dye. A CD-RW drive's laser melts tiny spots of the layer. The spots cool too fast to re-crystallize; that makes them opaque. Those spots are 0's, because they do not reflect light. Crystallized spots, which are transparent, are 1's.
When data is erased on a CD-RW, the spots are melted again. But they're heated to a lower temperature and cool slowly enough to re-crystallize.
Commercially produced discs like software or music albums are not burned. They use tiny bumps or dips to represent 1's and 0's. The dips and bumps are molded directly into a disc's plastic. The sequence is then coated by a layer of metal, usually aluminum. These discs can last for decades.
Thanks to Kim Komando...

Crossing a River

If a man is crossing a river
And an empty boat collides
With his own skiff,
Even though he may be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty,
He would not be shouting, and not angry.
If you can empty your own boat Crossing the river of the world,
No one will oppose you,
No one will seek to harm you.
Chuang-tzu

RABBIT IN THE MOON

The flooding from hurricane Stan has devastated so many Mayan villages in Southern Mexico. Hardest hit have been the states of Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Puebla, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Jalisco and Tabasco, and the Central American countries of Honduras, and Guatamala, mostly Mayan villages already negatively impacted by poverty.

This site, RABBIT IN THE MOON, celebrates the Glory Days of the Mayan Empire, with information cross spectrum on such things as the Mayan Calendar and Date Calculator, Culture, Games and Hieroglyphic Writeing, even write your name in hieroglyphics. Mayan architecture models and Palace Murals.

NO MORE MOUSE CLICKING

Why hasn't someone thought of this before. Clickless mousing. A new way to navagate a page without clicking on your mouse. Whats next? No mouse, your eye is the cursor, and you "think click"? Click it out here...

"The original mouse had the cord in front, but
we quickly moved it to the back end to get it
out of the way. It was a simple mechanical
device with two perpendicularly mounted
discs on the bottom. You could tilt or rock
the mouse to draw perfectly straight horizontal
or vertical lines."
Doug Engelbart

THE EINSTEIN TOWER

What a jewel this is. And yeah,
yeah, I recognize, ahem, it
could be considered phallic.

More here...

And here...

And a German site...

Also my first encounter with Erich Mendelsohn.

THE RCC'S OWN KKK???

Or it's Mafia.
Just wondering.
On this day in 1928, Josemaria Escriva founded Opus Dei, (Latin for "Work of God"), a worldwide organization of lay members of the Roman Catholic Church, Paul ll making it a part of the Catholic Churich in 1982. However, controversy surrounds the organization.

ISLAM'S ADVANCE TO FRANCE HALTED

On this day in 732, the northward advance of Islam was stopped near Tours and Poitiers. Known as the Battle of Tours, Charles Martel and the Franks defeated a large Andalusian Muslim army led by Abd er Rahman.

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.

Ludwig Borne

SAME OLE ANTI BUSH ANTI WAR SCREED

but with a great new presentation.

FREEWAY BLOGGER.COM

SURRENDER AND PRAYER

Someone posted an instructive homily on a group website a day or so ago following a subject thread of "how do you surrender?" the body of the questioning post was as follows:

"Hi all. A quick question - how do you surrender? What does surrender mean to you? Is it accepting the will of God in all that happens to us? If so, why do we still pray to God if we have accepted everything as being the will of God? Sorry for the strange question."

The thread reply's were many and varied, but one reply in particular caught my attention, it's heading was:

“This says it all re: Merlin Carothers Ministry on Surrender for Dummies.” and we were presented with a story of many prayers proffered, as here... The chaplain got down and he said, Now Lord, we've got to stop fooling
around. I mean we've got to tell this man something. He's got to know
something. " And then He said, "But anyway, thank you for them just
exactly as they are. "

The Lord said, "Finally! Finally, Merlin, that's what I've been trying
to get across to you all along. You can't help them." That's right
Lord I can't help them. But the Lord said, " I can. Now when they come
in this time, sit down, fold your hands, open your mouth, and I'll
tell them." And Merlin said, "Oh praise the Lord, that's what I wanted
Lord." well, read the short story

Scroll down about 28 paragraphs, or halfway through the document to the paragraph beginning, "I want to tell this story because it is so important...


HERE...

Now, these are my thoughts on the Merlin Carothers story...

And you know, I wonder if this teaching story, so inspiring on so many levels, might be about just about one man, the advancement of Merlin Carothers, whom we are informed, by Merlin Carothers no less, as a matter of course speaks with God, and in turn, is spoken too by God, we assume from this and his other stories, on a regular basis.

These conversations with God are certainly Biblically canonical for any Christian, commonplace, occurring repeatedly and often, and absolutely necessary for the establishment of the Jewish race, the Jewish religion and the Jewish nation as recorded so importantly and so often in the Tanakh, and the direct instruction from Allah to the Prophet Mohammad which established the Nation of Islam as proscribed by the Qur’an.
These days, God is also speaking to quite a few of the Protestant fundamental Christian Ministers, particularly those on the extreme right. And often this conversation is rather self serving for the recipient, or the recipients group, or rather damning to certain societal groups, gays and women seeming to often be the brunt of God’s ire as He goes his way punishing many innocents for the sins of the few, according to these modern day recipients of God’s private word. I remember one Minister who was in great need of money for his various projects and God told him that if the members of his rather large TV audience didn’t cough up the money God would take his life. He appeared on his television show,passed on God's message to his flock, and the "body of Christ" responded by sending millions to the Godly shakedown and the minister's life was spared.

God taking our personal phone calls directly somehow makes me uneasy. Large room for abuse there, custom made for despots and we’re seeing this play out in the current religious wars in the Middle East. Our own President it seems is chatted up by God occasionally as evidenced by "...the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did.” And another source...Shaath says, “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan’. “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And by God I’m gonna do it’,” Shaath quotes him as saying.

As I’m writing this, my on screen news ticker just upped the numbers on both the South Asia earthquake, 20,000 dead, estimated 3 million homeless in Pakistan alone, and higher numbers to come, and the Guatemala storm deaths, 1,500 from one Mayan village alone, not to mention the other devastations to humanity this year, the tsunami, New Orleans, the religious massacres in Iraq and Northern Africa, and the millions tangentially effected, the physically injured for life, the millions deeply grieving from loss of family and loved ones, and the astounding psychological havoc on both adults and a children.

I think my discomfort with personal prayer comes from time being spent by God on Merlin and his need for miracles such as those from the above story when that time might be better spent elsewhere. But then the ways of God are mysterious and acted out behind a curtain for most of us lesser mortals although apparently not to Merlin.

Today being Sunday, the Football games will be on across America, and often we'll see a look up and point up to Our Father In Heaven after the hero has scored his 6 points, letting the millions focused on him know that the glory of those 6 points belong to God and are the work of God and God's answer to the hero’s prayers and a testament to their special relationship. Ah the humility.

Merlin Magic indeed.

And it’s so easy to slip into this thinking so exemplified in this Merlin story and the many others he’s sure to tell. The need to present ourselves to an audience as the hero. Or, to elicit a powerful ally in the horror of this being in the world. Who’s theory in the First Noble Truth was the one about suffering?

When I was a child my Mother would kneel beside the bed with me before sleep and I would tell God my fears and my desires. And you know at a later date my Mother would always remind me of the boogie bears God had vanquished, and the desires and wishes God had granted. Yet looking back, these were everyday happenings which simply would turn out well, no more no less than for my playmate across the street who didn’t pray. Yet according to the adults, all those benifician happenings were prayers God answered. Very heady and powerful stuff for an impressionable child. O Lord wont you buy me. God the protecting Father, and God the beneficent ever providing Friend. Chogyam Trungpa’s clear view of 20th century Western Christianity right on target.

The self absorption of a Child, a self referential child who still appears periodically when as an adult I’m frightened or confused, or pained, to pray. However, now, it’s so much more helpful to remember the 1 Corinthians 13 bit about “understanding as a child, and putting things from childhood behind,” and when I do remember and realize that stress and fear has caused the child from the past to reappear, this adult has learned to attempt to focus on the breath, feeling the breath touching the upper lip just under the nose, to attempt to empty this grasping, controlling, knowing mind, this creator of lies trapped in the carcass of the past or the mad delusions of the future and that attempt is the closest to surrender and to a TRUE prayer this human may ever know.

I don’t mean to be harsh on Merlin, we’re all are where we are, I’m Merlin and Merlin is everyman, and Heaven knows emptying may be the off base and Merlin may have the true skinny and I may be missing blessing and powers beyond knowing and crossing a goal line before millions and pointing to God may be a highest worshipful statement. But there’s just something about this story by Merlin that makes me feel askew and this human has learned through many years of mistakes to heed the message of askew.

PODUNK USA

If you ever need information about a small town, a PODUNK type of town, this is the site to visit.

MORE MODERN ARCHITECTURE

D'Arcy Jones Design has an Island House in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. which was designed as a vacation house for an extended family. Three concrete and glass pavilions are linked with a large heavy-timber roof, connecting the volumes with a breezeway and 6'-0" deep overhangs (click for plan). The elevation of the house facing the ocean is a continuous wall of full-height glass doors, high on a steep bank above the beach.

hat tip a weekly dose of architecture...

NEWEST MEMBER OF SCOTUS HAS NIFTY BLOG

HARRIET MEIRS has just the best blog ever.

Please pay her a visit HERE...

Whoever Finds Love...

Who finds love
beneath hurt and grief,
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.

~Jelaluddin Rumi
(1207 - 1273)

English version by Coleman Barks

Thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

Captain Ian Fishback




















His story here...

ACT GREAT

What is the key
To untie the knot of your mind’s suffering?

What
Is the esoteric secret
To slay the crazed one whom each of us
Did wed

And who can ruin
Our heart’s and eye’s exquisite tender
Landscape?

Hafiz has found
Two emerald words that
Restored
Me

That I now cling to as I would sacred
Tresses of my Beloved’s
Hair:

Act great.
My dear, always act great.

What is the key
To untie the knot of the mind’s suffering? Benevolent thought, sound
And movement.

~ Hafiz ~ (The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

Dedicated to Captain Ian Fishback who has the courage to Act Great....