Taomeow

Probably a very good idea. I have only used black seed oil (not for cooking) on occasion. Should try the seeds too.

Thank you for asking! )) --but I wrote it for my (international expat) Russian authors group and don't have an English version. Besides, I would have to change some things now because chatbots are evolving fast and I was sort of an early beta tester... At the time one of my minor plot twists was that ChatGPT starts talking to the main protagonist with an actual voice, a capability that in reality it didn't have till sometime late in 2023. The story was written a few months earlier than that, and when ChatGPT in that story suddenly found its voice in the middle of a typed up conversation, it was a turning point hinting that the protagonist had been transported from everyday reality to a different version, a parallel or future one. It wouldn't work today though since now they're all verbal. So I'd have to substitute a different "turn of the screw" in that spot.

I'm not sure, it's been a while since I read the Grimm brothers... it may be a tie. But my own short story was grimmer than the Grimm. As I recall they only had cannibals eating children and the like. I had children using those counting rhymes for playing a game of Hell where they could (and did) send the loser of a round of the game to the actual hell. They were hybrid AI-human children in a hybrid AI-human world of the future. Hell was an AI designed destination where hybrid children experienced hybrid virtual-real eternal damnation.

I once asked ChatGPT to remind me a bunch of counting rhymes used in children's games, gave it samples of the ones from my own childhood and asked for more of the real ones, the ones that actually exist and are used by real-life playing children. It didn't know any but did it say "I don't know?" It's unable to. Instead it gave me an endless supply of its own creations, a smorgasbord of loathsome and ridiculous and dark verse showing advanced schizophrenia symptoms. Some were hilarious in their absurdity but most were positively horrifying. I was so impressed that I wrote a horror story about that experience, and it came out so horrible that it frightened even its author. But now I know at least one method to get AI to lose all its marbles. I'm not going to do it though because I asked it if it's legally punishable to put AI out of commission (or should I say cognition) with prompts and it said no -- so chances are it is, since it lies remorselessly and consistently.

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

Overcome with sadness. Poor, poor kitty. But this also reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago... I was doing taiji in the usual spot in the park one day and a hawk dropped a snake at my feet -- narrowly missing my head, it whooshed by my ear inches away. That hawk was in the habit of showing up for taiji almost every time, making a few circles over my head and then flying away. I guess that one time it decided to either deliver a gift or attempt murder --depending on whether it loved my taiji or hated it. The snake was a very large Garter. At first I thought it was dead, for a couple of minutes it didn't move -- then slowly started showing signs of life, and eventually slithered away. Sturdy creature -- no legs or arms or neck to break! The height it fell from must have been considerable (I don't know how high though since I wasn't looking up at the sky at the time) judging by the tremendous thud it landed with.

P.S. Pens are on my mind in conjunction with longevity of late, seen information (and believed what I saw for once) that one of the best ways to protect/preserve one's brain later in life is to write in longhand. Apparently this activates three times as many neural connections as clicking keys or finger-poking screens. And of course it's got to be a fountain pen (personal opinion, corroborated by aficionados.) So I hunted down on ebay and bought this present for my vintage brain:

And an Epi New Pen. (Saw it on the news today -- there's a legal battle unfolding to equip medical first responders with EpiPens nationwide. )

What is known in psychology as The Dark Triad -- a personality combining narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopaty -- is estimated at 7% of the population, on average. It means that in an average family -- grandparents, parents, a couple of kids -- you have almost a 50% chance of one of them being in that category (it could be you, of course. ) But in reality it seldom works like that. "Average" means that in some families they don't have anybody in that category and in some, everybody. Same thing with encounters in school, at work, among random neighbors, just people one meets in a lifetime. Some are spared close encounters with the dark triad representatives and some might have one for a boss, one for a neighbor, one for a sibling, one for a spouse, one for a parent (which is about as bad as it gets -- the worst scenario is to have both parents in that category.) I think the dark triad can be contagious -- in many cases the defense against being their victim is to internalize their ways and become the perpetrator -- toward someone else (most typically one's own children, but could be toward just about anyone in a weaker position.) And this someone else might contract it too, and the chain remains unbroken throughout generations. What's the solution? As my Primal guru used to say, just because there's a problem doesn't mean there's a solution. (Incidentally he was in that category himself.) They are the people who make the world as strange as I find it.

There's very little truth in what the public has been led to believe about what's healthy. Also about what it is we're actually eating, drinking and smoking -- a lot of it is grossly falsified, depleted, and poisoned. "Feed the ancestors," meaning the ancestral make-up of your own body, which is one of the taoist culinary principles, can IMO serve one better -- try eating what generations of your ancestors ate before you, not the latest fad. Although a lot of our ancestors were starving, not fasting by choice but starving due to poverty and social upheavals and endless wars. Yet those of them who were well-to-do enough to eat "healthy" had access to the kinds and varieties of food we can only dream about. (My grandmother on my mother's side used to tell me what was eaten in her mother's home in the early 20th century and all I could do was salivate. On my father's side, however, the ancestors were very poor and lived through periods of starvation. My mother's side of the family were the longevity folks, not my father's side.)

This is a very important key. I asked AI (Grok) about smokers and drinkers among the verified longest lived individuals. Here's a partial list (there's a bunch of others too who have birth documents but "are not fully verified" so I skipped their names) Name Country Age at death Smoked? Drank? Notes Jeanne Calment France 122 y 164 d Yes – ~2 cigarettes/day for 96 years, quit at 117 Port wine daily The absolute record holder (verified) Antonio Todde Italy (Sardinia) 112 y 346 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes most of his life Wine daily Oldest verified man in Europe when he died in 2002 Christian Mortensen USA (Danish-born) 115 y 252 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes until late 80s Occasional alcohol Oldest verified man ever until 2012 Maggie Barnes USA 115 y 319 d (disputed) Yes – smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades Moonshine occasionally Age debated but widely accepted at the time Susie Gibson USA 115 y 108 d Yes – smoked cigarettes until 106 Occasional whiskey Quit only when she couldn’t light them anymore Richard Overton USA 112 y 230 d Yes – 12–18 cigars a day until 109 Whiskey in his coffee daily America’s oldest WWII veteran when he died in 2018 That Richard Overton guy surprises me. Not so much the 18 cigars a day but whiskey in his coffee. Coffee pairs perfectly with cognac. Whiskey?.. Assuming he started when he was legal to drink, that's almost a century of misguided daily use of a rather uncouth beverage. But I guess couth/uncouth is not a factor in longevity.

Kombucha is good, but bubble baths are quite harmful (toxic chemicals). Getting one's claws out when the situation warrants it is IMO healthier than being addicted to the drug peddled heavier than any other -- Repressitol. All things in moderation...

Edit: removed in response to the removal of what it was about

恒 (Héng) : Perseverance, Persistence, Enduring Constancy. One of the "virtues" deeply embedded in taoism.

I think Max Christensen mentioned some symbiotic alien entity there. I don't have any bumps in that location but I have a birthmark to the right of the fontanelle. I seem to recall Buddha did too (there's a tradition that maintains that a reincarnation is supposed to demonstrate 7 signs on the body, for starters, don't remember what the other ones are). We also share the date of birth. I don't know the significance of that for a taoist. Why?

It is a belief system for the indoctrinated, but for the indoctrinators it is primarily (and often entirely) a power grab system. All our "life sciences" inherited the tradition they directly arose from -- that of witch hunts, getting rid of ideological competition, gaining both power and money, monopolizing control of people's bodies, calling the shots. (There's a pun in there.)

Of course. The Tao Miao (or Dao Miao) 道妙 -- "The Mystery of the Dao," "The Subtle Wonder of the Way," "The Profound Principle." And indeed, as you quoted, "The fundamental laws of physics cannot be contained within space and time, because they generate them.'' The Tao Miao is much more than "the fundamental laws of physics" though -- it's what generates them.

Mine mentioned the original and the best -- natural ecosystems. Also I asked it about those of the fuzzy-logical processes that are non-algorithmic. It came up with Human subjective judgment (e.g., "it's quite warm") Emotional reasoning Artistic creativity I would add that cats can be both -- algorithmic and non. E.g. I had a cat who once picked up on the thought I had that the glare from the ceiling light was interfering with watching a movie but I felt too lazy to get up and switch it off. The cat came up to the wall with the switch, looked me in the eye across his shoulder, then jumped straight up the way only cats can, hit the switch with his front paw exactly the way a human would do it, and turned the light off. He did it only once, never before or after. Definitely not part of the cat algorithm.

I'll have to practice that.

I used to. By now I learned to either accept the correction with a polite "thank you" or reject it with a polite "fuck you." Depending on the mood.

Not a snob. I know exactly where you're coming from. I think I think (sic) mostly in 2, but for most of the rest of the languages I've been exposed to, my mind created a common file titled "Foreign languages," dumped everything there indiscriminately, and when stuff from that file interferes with the 2 legit ones, it's not pretty. Not with spelling (although shit happens of course) but with spoken words, especially proper names. The thing is, if an English word is a borrowing from one of those other languages for which I know their proprietary pronunciation rules but not necessarily the English rendition thereof, I tend to stress and enunciate it the way it is stressed and enunciated in the language it came from. Sometimes I really don't know that it's pronounced differently in English from its source language, and sometimes I just can't make myself mutilate it like that. It physically hurts me to have to say Mo-di-GLI-ani or REmy MARtin or DesDEmona, let alone NAbokov. And native speakers never tire of correcting me...

And here we go again. Apparently, after a bunch of years proving that the universe we live in is a simulation, they now have mathematically demonstrated that it isn't, it's 100% real and, moreover, can't be simulated. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251110021052.htm Whew. Good to know. Not that I didn't... The idea that nothing is real always seemed to me as either religious "opium for the masses" so they don't take their abysmal plight to heart and don't make too many waves... if it's not real, who cares that you're poor and exploited and downtrodden, it's just illusion and in some other "more real" reality you are all-powerful... ...or the outcome of hallucinogenic drugs use that can temporarily, and sometimes permanently, cause depersonalization and the rest of the nothing is real effects... ...or, in the latest scientific incarnations, the conclusions a man of science arrives at who grew up with screens, computers, phones, video games and not with nature. The world they have been exposed to, the only one they know, is then extrapolated in their mind to the rest of the universe. Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about...

It is definitely foundational. How to approach it -- well, I think the best way to get into the I Ching is the way it's been used for thousands of years, as an oracle, for divination. You begin developing a relationship with it if you use it this way, hearing its voice, so to speak. There's no "foundational hexagrams," they all carry equal weight between themselves -- perhaps you meant the 8 trigrams? Won't hurt to start familiarizing yourself with those and their characteristics, but it's not necessarily the starting point. The older Wilhelm/Baynes version (not sure about the newer ones) has the overview, explains the divination procedures, and has appendices of which the Ta Chuan is IMO of utmost importance to study... eventually or gradually. I'd start very simple though, with just trying to get some answers to your real life questions and see how helpful (or not) you find what the I Ching tells you. Practice makes perfect. There's no bottom to this thing, so wherever you start, you'll be in the same position as Confucius, you always need 50 more years to study it... but 5 minutes do something useful too. My favorite is the second on the left, Ritsema-Sabbadini. I don't think it's the best for beginners though. The one I started with was the Wilhelm-Baynes version and then the one whose name you can't read in the picture and then the rest. I also have the Chinese version, but that's hard even for a native speaker -- the meaning of most words changed over thousands of years. The Ritsema-Sabbadini book is superb in that it gives you all of them, not this or that translator's (or modern native speaker's) version but everything the word ever meant throughout history. But like I said, it's hardly for a beginner -- until one can "see" and understand the hexagram and the changes even without the verbal explanations, I'd say it's step two. Step one -- I would go with Wilhelm-Baynes.

I wonder if he would still do it if he couldn't afford to change phones this often. A friend of mine once told me about her mom smashing dishes when angry. She found it pretty funny though because her mom would grab a plate, notice it's one of the nice ones, quickly put it down and smash a cheaper one. If she ever smashed one of the nice ones her daughter would know she really means it... otherwise it's just silly theatrics.

When I was in my early teens we had a TV that responded better to some of The Art of War techniques though. It was old and would attempt to conk out right when they were showing a Polish series that ran in the daytime after school, "everybody" in my class watched it and I had a crush on the main protagonist to boot. So that TV acting up right when his pretty face showed up was infuriating. I tried kindness but no go, so I would give it a beating. It worked. There was a particularly sensitive spot on its side and if you smacked it there, the pretty face reappeared and the TV behaved. Different strokes...