Daily Archives: March 11, 2012

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Week Ahead

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Imbolc                                       Woodpecker Moon

Hello.   Another week of spring is upon us.  If puddles are here, can mosquitoes be far behind?  We may have to suck it up and adapt, folks.

The Great Comet of 1996, Hyakutake as photographed from latitude 56 north near Ketchikan Alaska. As noted by the photographer “By including the north star in this short time exposure, Hyakutake and the night sky are given a real sense of motion”. Chip Porter

Tomorrow morning the novel gets first pick of time and attention, this time until I’ve finished this draft.  Then Stefan’s paper will go in the printer and I’ll crank out the first complete rough draft.  I know already things that need attention, amplification, cutting, but I’m going to leave those alone for now.

My new schedule with the Latin:  an hour or so on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and a full day on Fridays seems to be good.  In the paper this morning there was a story about a kid, 16, who is a hyperpolyglot, who knew there were such people?  He learned the arabic alphabet in four days, then it took him, he said, a week to read fluently.  That’s just one of many languages he reads and speaks.

Well, he’s him and I’m me, still slogging through the grammar and the vocabulary almost two years on.

Reimagining has not got much attention this last week or so, but it will pick up again.  I plan to work on it episodically over the next couple of years.  I do have to crank out 3,000 words or so Groveland by April 1st.  That’s a good target.

 

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Politics, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

A Year of No Winter, Now With No Spring?

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Imbolc                                         Woodpecker Moon

OK.  So, there was this place that used to have winter but had it replaced by a season of cloudy skies and what passes for cold in the southern states.  Then, that season ended and summer began.  Minnesota 2011-2012

Not kidding.  It’s 60 degrees here today, March 11th.  And this doesn’t seem to be an aberration, the temps go like this for highs:  59, 65, 70, 67, 68.  And that gets us through Friday.  It may throw the bee season into a conundrum since my package bees don’t arrive until mid-April and the bloom cycle could be accelerated by as much as a month.

This is also a year when I didn’t start any vegetables.  Not a one.  We moved the hydroponics into the garage for storage so we could consolidate the dog crates in one place. I imagine the places I buy plants will have used the same calendar as usual and we could waste a month or so of available warmer weather.  In other words we could have a growing season up to 6 weeks longer than normal.  But we’re not ready for it and won’t be.

The Great Wheel continues to turn, but the holidays may usher in different weather than usual.  Climate change is well under way.  I hope the climate change deniers have a ringside seat in hell to the catastrophe they’ve created.  I know, that sounds extreme, but I mean it.

The deniers will not and never could change the basic science behind global warming, all they could ever do was slow down humanity’s response to it, a slowing down that amounts to a criminal act, a felony against generations yet to be born.  They need to be held responsible for their greedy, stupid, infantile actions.

But they probably won’t be.  They’ll die off before the worst of it hits.  That’s why I hope hell has a special viewing room for these shrunken souls.

Would you like me to tell you what I really believe?

Aging, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family

Shun Yen and Falun Gong, once more

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Imbolc                                    Woodpecker Moon

One more thing about Shun Yen (see below).  Their pitch is that they produce performances that draw on and therefore promote 5,000 years of Chinese culture.  Maybe.  They have dances based on various Chinese myths and legends, like Monkey’s Journey to the West, and on ethnic Chinese communities, but there are also contemporary dance pieces and, scattered throughout something very, very odd.

The contemporary pieces feature a common theme.  Black clad police thugs with red hammer and sickle insignia on their shirts.  They beat senseless the gentle, meditating citizens who hold up a sign that says Falun Dafa is Good.  Yes, Chinese police have beaten Falun Dafa or Falun Gong members and persecuted them.  That’s not at issue here, but, again, I paid $90 a ticket to see several dance numbers that were propaganda against the Chinese government.

There was no balance here, no context, no alerting the audience to the fact that this was their intention.

These vignettes, I think there were four, were not the oddest part of the evening however. Four times during the performance the dancers would remain off stage and a Steinway, a big black concert Steinway, and either a tuxedoed male singer or a formal gown clad female singer, all Chinese, would sing short verses, maybe they were songs, that declared some piece of Falun Dafa dogma.   Continue reading Shun Yen and Falun Gong, once more →