Daily Archives: February 3, 2008

General

Giants Walk the Land Tonight

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21  87%  26%  0mph EEN  bar30.00 steady windchill21  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

OK.  Here’s why I like football.  To the best of my knowledge it has no script.  That means from time to time unexpected and amazing things happen right before my eyes.  Like this Superbowl game.  Close down to the last minute, literally.  The undergods, as I called them earlier, came through.  The overgods, the Patriots, lost in a classic tragic performance, perfect, yet, in the end flawed enough to lose.  The moment when momentum changes races my heart.  Sudden turn arounds can sink my feelings.  Vicarious, yes.  But a hell of a lot of fun.

There is, too, the athletic performances.  Even in a loss Randy Moss looks like a ballet dancer.  Eli Manning stayed cool.  The Giants defense kept it up all game long, pressure pressure pressure on Brady.  Then, the intellectual game with co-ordinators for defense and offense, coaches managing the game.  This defense against that offense.  The game works on many different levels.

Yes, it is brutal.  Even violent.  Yes, it produces maimed and sometimes demented athletes at the end of their careers.  These are not things to celebrate.  Yet, they are products of conscious choices by adults.  I hope the affect of the high impact, sudden stop violence of the game will diminish through better equipment, different rules.  I know the disabled players, like disabled persons in every area of life, deserve a decent life. 

But for tonight, for this game, it was a super bowl game, one for the history books.

Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Fallen Oak Leaves in the Snow

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26  71%  24%  1mph EES bar30.02 falls windchill25  Imbolc

          Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

The Superbowl program started at 1pm.  1pm.  Kickoff isn’t until 5:17pm.  Geez.

Spent late morning putting together my workshop/presentation for the Woolly Retreat.  I plan to read sections from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, talk about it a bit as a fable for our time and a bit about what I call the ur-faith.  The way to name it still is not clear to me.  Maybe that will come as the workshop proceeds.  Sometimes presenting things to others helps flesh them out, identify new angles or flaws in the conception.   The sacrament I posted a few days ago will follow the reading and then we’ll talk. 

I may use a way to get inside material I learned in seminary.  In this method the audience gets an invitation to take on one of the roles in the reading, to hear the material being read from that person’s perspective.  In SGGK characters include Arthur, Gawain, Guinevere, the Green Knight, the two women in Hautdesert’s castle, and the servant who leads Gawain to the Green Chapel.  Sometimes this cracks open poetry or scripture in a way nothing else can.

Fallen oak leaves have begun to show through the snow.   The boulders in our boulder walls now peak out from caps of white.  This is an unlovely aspect of snow.  Snow has its most beautiful moments as and just after it falls.  If it remains cold, as it often does after a big snow, the pristine character of the snow can last for days.  Sometimes it does glint and sparkle in the sun.  Hope we get a big whack just before I leave for Dwelling in the Woods.

GeekWorld, Memories, Travel

Bloggin with Palm Trees

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18  89%  28%  0mph NNE  bar 30.12 steady windchill17  Imbolc

              Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Opened up my e-mail program today and had 29 messages.  A big morning for me is 5 or 6.  What the hell? 

Another lesson in the cyber world.  There are bots that crawl the web seeking out certain words or phrases, then link their source to another web page.  In some instances that’s google and can help others find your website if the title words you use resonate.  In most instances and certainly the most annoying instances the links go back to such intriguing locations as Addiction Levitra, Texas Facts Auto Insurance, Mexico Amoxil and HCL Dosing Tramadol.  Each one linked by some $%#@! algorithim to the words I had inadvertently used as the title for a post:  damn it!   A month or so ago I had a post that had the words body and flesh in it.  This was about the earth and her products.  You can imagine the links I got then.  Cyber world folks call these ping backs. 

I have had three ping backs out of hundreds that I kept, that is didn’t delete as spam.  One came in from a website for the Teaching Company from whom I buy the occasional lecture course, another from the NFL website and a recent one from Paul Douglas, the WCCO weather guy and his Climate Change website.  It’s a good thing wordpress has a straightforward, if not quick, way of eliminating ping backs.

In case you missed it–like you live in Singapore or Bangkok for instance–today is Super Bowl Sunday.  I tried to find out much beer we consume on Super Bowl Sunday but according to the Beer Institute (I know, but there really is one.) it’s not possible to track single day consumption.  A spokesman did say, “the Super Bowl is a good event in the ‘off season’ (cold months) to drive volume”

Each year I wonder why I watch football, yet, somehow, I’ve developed an interest and now have enough years watching to have a sense of historical perspective.  That makes it, for me, much more interesting. So, yes, I’ll be there in my seat, though sans beer, sans snacks and sans favorite, though I lean toward the Giants just because they’re the underdogs.

 Allison wondered if I plan to blog while in Hawai’i.  Yep.  Like football I’ve developed an interest in blogging, though this interest predates my football jones by quite a few years.  I have three bookshelves of journals of various types and sizes.  I imagine this habit came with mother’s milk, or should I say father’s ink and lead.  Dad wrote a weekly column for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, Smalltown USA, for many, many years. 

There is something about being able to read the breadcrumbs of your life, sprinkled out at various ages and stages.  In some instances it’s revelatory, in others it’s “Oh, my god.  What was I thinking?”  I suppose its a similar feeling artists get from paintings and sketches made over many years.  Or photo albums and all those home movies.