Taomeow

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

I know it's a serious matter, but I can't resist offering my favorite movie scene dedicated to anger management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEE7xzwogMc

You are, first and foremost, a smart man. Consequences may occasionally pan out to be -- what's the word I'm looking for -- severe? alienating? politically incorrect? I used to have a roommate and friend who was a gay white man. He was not proud of being either, but it so happened that I helped him accomplish something he became so proud of that he kept bragging to everybody every chance he got, even though for everybody else it wasn't an accomplishment at all... He came from a wealthy family and grew up in a community completely shielded from the rest of the world, and all he knew about swimming was always done in swimming-pools, by everybody he knew. (He was alienated from his family at the time I made his acquaintance.) So we went to the beach and I gave it all I had to convince him that the ocean was, well, swimmable. He doubted it. Waves. No boundaries. Sand, wind, all that weird stuff you don't encounter in a swimming-pool. I shamed him into trying, and he discovered he liked it so much that I had a hard time getting him to finally get out of the water. He was happier than I'd ever seen him. So he proceeded to brag to everybody he knew and even to strangers, just mentioning nonchalantly something along the lines of, "how was your weekend? Me, I went swimming in the ocean..."

Mint breeze enfolds me. Don't know about the people, but scarecrows look cool. (with a nod to Kobayashi Issa's late Edo period classic: "Approaching my village: Don't know about the people, but all the scarecrows are crooked.")

Interesting bilingual play of words for me. Lei is, incidentally, the Russian for "pour" in the imperative mood. Leika -- a watering can, and also the diminutive of Leia. Lei-ka -- same as lei but the imperative mood is expressed more informally.

I care for others, I don't care for still others -- like the falling rain.

That was such a silly movie. But of course Raquel Welch was an inspiration. I remember thinking she had nothing on me except for that leather and fur bikini -- but I so envied that outfit! (We had to wear uniforms in school... brown dress, black apron, white apron for holidays. A white collar and white cuffs to go with that dress -- you had to sew them on by hand, or rather baste so you could remove them easily enough because you had to change them often -- the ones that weren't pristinely white weren't tolerated. Civilization is overrated.)

Double double post and trouble

Depends on what you borrow that money for... I suppose it can go either way, or even both ways. E.g. if I borrowed money from myself to invest in gold 30 years ago, it would have made me poor then but wealthy now. Conversely, if I borrowed money from myself to invest in Enron 30 years ago, it would have made me wealthy then but poor now. Our situation is different though -- American government borrows money from American me the taxpayer but owes it to American them -- the Federal Reserve (20%), government trust funds (25%), private domestic investors (25% -- banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, etc..) to a total of 70% of the $33 trillion dollar debt owed to them, not to me. The remaining 30% owed to foreign countries is obviously also not owed to me even though it's been taken from me.

I don't know his work at all, but I've seen the structure of Time through ayahuasca-opened eyes. The "present" was like an observation point from which I could look at Time in all directions, the easiest was looking down onto the past. It was like a layered cake of winding rivers (or maybe of one river snaking this way and that way, its segments layered on top of each other), going all the way into deep infinity. The layers were see-through, so I could look down at the recent past, further down at the past that was more remote, etc.. Rivers were not just loopy but some loops did indeed cause Time to flow backward. I could focus on a particular section and "zoom in." It also appeared that I could dive anywhere into that river from my observation point -- but it was as scary as jumping from the edge of a cliff into an abyss, so I didn't. (I also didn't want to go UP but SHE dragged me there anyway and showed me the source of all that flow. This source I should liken perhaps to a dripping sink or some plumbing piping underneath it -- Time we experience and everything in it was apparently a side effect of operations of that "sink," That World -- a very incomprehensible place where you couldn't tell biology from technology, a bit like one of those Borg cubes and a lot like one of those Mesoamerican bas reliefs. SHE wanted to show and explain things to me but that place terrified me and I begged HER to get me outta there.)

I'd be all for being sent back to the stone age -- provided my own age would be prenatal, or to be precise, pre-conception. Once you're carried in the mother's womb and born and raised in the technology age, it's game over for the stone age adaptation purposes -- to the same, or greater, extent as being born and raised in the stone age is game over for your functionality in the technology age. If I were to choose a reincarnation plan though, I would definitely have my intent set tens of thousands of years back. I wonder if reincarnating back in time is possible. (Don't see why not -- some folks even retain vague impressions of technology from their previous incarnations into times that are "future" to their present ones. Some of those carriers of slightly under-erased memories of things-to-come become inventors and some write sci-fi, the rest just have strange dreams from time to time. I sometimes get future tech dreams -- I even thought of trying to patent some of the things I saw, but I'm too tech lazy. The ones I saw were very benign -- e.g. a far superior thingie as replacement for the cast they presently put on a broken limb, a large feather-weight umbrella that, when folded, can fit in your wallet... stuff like that.)

/\ key word "art." Meaning maybe murals, artistic photos, collages, what not that might fall under the category? "AI art" is an oxymoron though. What it really is is a technology for producing banal kitsch in order to stunt people's esthetic development, as part of the overall dumbing-down effort. (Although acclaimed art in the traditional sense has also produced many atrocities of abysmal taste and quite a few money-laundering scams, presented as "art" by corrupt critics and accepted by the public because there's many ways to play the public like a fiddle.)

@Nungali It's most definitely a direct quote from Lenin who asserted, in one of his numerous fantasy stories economy-related articles (which poor me had to study in school) that "once we've built communism, we will make toilets out of solid gold." I doubt Trump is a communist, don't know about the authors of the article (didn't open it because my computer issued some kind of warning about a redirect somewhere I didn't dare tread), but I think this is something that would find itself at home in the Current Events section... oops... presently nonexistent. I do not intend to break the rule about its nonexistence here -- if I mention something like the dynamics of the national debt, that's not "current," it's "habitual" -- started in the 1980s and then sharply skyrocketed in 2020 and onward. Incidentally we owe most of it internally, to our very own money-reinventing companies -- Japan is but a drop in that bottomless bucket.

Million, billion, trillion -- in many (most?) people's minds any which number with many zeroes is just "a lot." But there's lots and then there's other lots. Here's an interesting way to put them in perspective: A million seconds ago was May 23rd A billion seconds ago was 1993 A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 B.C. The US national debt is now rising by $1 trillion every 180 days.

Himalayan Lynx ( (Lynx lynx isabellinus) Photo Credit: CGNP, Camera trap clicks. Chitral Gol National Park, Pakistan

Not just the animals' behavior changes under those temperatures, it looks like the human physique changes too, and with uncanny speed at that. Once I noticed, I just had to follow all those amazing transformations. At first the man is beardless and has a full head of hair, then at 3:33 he's still beardless but bald as a knee, at 4:13 his hair is back, praise the Lord, at 4:48 it turns black and he's grown a lush black beard in the past 35 seconds, only to shave it off at 5:24, then at 7:14 his beard is back with a vengeance but now it's grey, so at 8:03 he gets rid of it, and by 10:40 it's grown back and it's not grey anymore. I should have been looking at the cats the whole time instead. AI or not, real story or not, cats (with the exception of the poor artificially bred sphinx) are always furry. It's humans that can't seem to decide on the proper level of hirsuteness.

I chanced upon a Magritte exhibition in New York once, at the Met. It's interesting how reproductions give one an idea of "what it's about" and of whether "I like it," but originals do more -- not speaking out of snobbery, just my experience. I believe this "more" is about qi. Magritte played a lot with one of my favorite ideas -- increasingly displaced in modern times -- that the map is not the territory, the cat walking in the street is not the cat video, the caffeine pill is not coffee, the symbol/image/representation/idea is not reality. "The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao," ditto the tao that can be painted, videotaped, AI generated, reduced to a meme, a slogan, a simulacrum. Sometimes he was more than explicit about conveying this idea -- as here, driving the point across with no frills: This is not a pipe. And sometimes, less obviously, the idea that our inner representation/evaluation of things is not proportional to their actual nature, significance and dimensions: Personal values Rape:

How about this one? Rene Magritte, La reproduction interdite, 1937

Is it located so inconspicuously that the drivers only see it at the last moment, and is it named after what they interject?..

@心神 Thank you! These are wonderful. I'm often tempted to go beyond just the visual impression and try to imagine a story -- of the moment, of a life... What was it like to be that person in that time?.. Interesting how "madonna-like" paintings by women differ from the male (religious) renditions of the image of the mother and baby. (Somehow ALL of the latter get the proportions of the "baby Jesus" all wrong -- either he appears macrocephalic or morbidly obese or has a facial expression of -- I don't know what, bitter resentment? refusal to interact, to have any baby-like expression?.. Yes, even in the celebrated masterpieces the baby is always off somehow ) The Duenna looks a lot like my late mother-in-law in her old age. Uncanny resemblance. One comes across those "twins lost in time" occasionally and has to wonder -- is this actually a relative?.. a reincarnation?.. Marie Bashkirtseff's painting is Spring, google tells me it's the spring of 1884.

This is not a reflection in the mirror. This is a mystical sci-fi connection of cats across time and space that happened in the home of someone I know, who's the son of one of the Strugatsky Brothers. Who had a cat named Kaliam at the time the sci-fi Brothers wrote "One Billion Years to the End of the World" in the 1970s and made that cat into its main protagonist's pet. It's been a family tradition of theirs spanning decades to name all their subsequent cats Kaliam -- alas, cats' lifespan is shorter than that of humans, so there were several Kaliams. This one is the current one, the photo is of the original one. The scene was not staged and the picture was taken accidentally.

I specified that it's about a pine tree brought indoors as a Christmas tree, not a live pine tree in the forest. I love the smell in nature too -- in fact the last thing that still remains of my once profound love of California is the smell of Torrey pines and cedars mixed with the smell of sage and the ocean on a hot summer day. When coming back from somewhere else I used to smell it even just stepping out of the door at the airport, despite many miles of highway fumes in between. BUT a pine tree that's been cut god knows how long ahead of the holidays and brought indoors is a different story. All those terpenes that give it the unique piney smell are volatile -- and largely fizzle out and disappear in transition. Fir trees, on the other hand... I don't know, they are stronger or maybe they were fresher back when I had access to them for the holiday season. That was the New Year's smell (that's what we celebrated) -- fir tree smell mixed with the smell of mandarins hung on it for edible decorations and the smell of fresh snow that intermixed with it every time someone opened the door.

@Nungali Why are you the prettiest boy in those pictures? Did you use a filter?

J.R.R. Tolkien CAT The fat cat on the mat may seem to dream of nice mice that suffice for him, or cream; but he free, maybe, walks in thought unbowed, proud, where loud roared and fought his kin, lean and slim, or deep in den in the East feasted on beasts and tender men. The giant lion with iron claw in paw, and huge ruthless tooth in gory jaw; the pard dark-starred, fleet upon feet, that oft soft from aloft leaps upon his meat where woods loom in gloom — far now they be, fierce and free, and tamed is he; but fat cat on the mat kept as a pet he does not forget.