Hurrah for Saturday. Hurrah for sleeping in today. Hurrah for going for
cheesesteaks in a little while.
Had a good night last night. Friend of mine's favorite aunt was in town,
and she wanted her aunt to meet her weirdo friends. So I drove by and
snagged Amythest, we went by
Target to get stuff for the party, cheese for the buffalo burgers that were
planned and fruit for dessert. We also looked at pool toys for
Nymaz's new place, and I
snagged a battery powered shark toy that's black and neon green. *grin*
Also, got a copy of the latest Discovery Channel dvd release of shark shows.
So it started as a very sharky evening. *grin*
Get to Pat's place, say hi to everyone, meet the aunt. Nice lady, fun to
talk to. Dinner was good, buffalo is yummy. We chatted about all kinds of
subjects, including the new catch phrase of the week. 'Kitchen glock'.
Always good to keep a gun in the kitchen, in case of food critics ;)
Headed home around 1am, after lots of chatting. Dropped off
Amythest, came home to hyper
ferrets who needed to play NOW. So they played while I tried to stay awake.
Finally went to sleep around 3am.
A very good start to my weekend. Now, to order and get lunch, and then
figure out the rest of my day. Ciao people :)
An interesting case of mass hysteria justanothersean's latest article for The Daily Texan is an interesting case of mass hysteria. 600 Evacuated from Towers, about mass evacuations of a high school cheerleading camp from off-campus dorms at the University of Texas -- all because of burnt popcorn.
EXCLUSIVE CONTENT. Haha. Not that anyone really cares, but I'm trying to make an effort of going back to the epic post days. In that, I've kinda decided to write "essays" or "editorials" or whatever you want to call them on specific subjects that I'm interested in. A lot of these come from the conversations I have with my nephew, but I'm gonna try t write them down instead of yabbering away at length whenever he asks me a question. I've got a rant going on in my head about console exclusives, and exclusive downloadable content for specific consoles, I've also been thinking about writing something to do with Alan Moore... there's two girls on my television hocking some sort of internet business and they've both got HUGE fucking tits. Goddamn. Anyway, so... these essays -- if and whenever I do get to writing them (I'm going to write them in a notebook first) are going to appear here and only here. So, exclusive content. :B I wanna do interviews, too, but I'm such a peon, I don't think I could get an interview with much of anyone. Not the sort of interview I'd wanna do, anyway. I'm also open to suggestions, but not for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, just stuff I'm interested in. Heh.
Ok.
Oh, and to be really nerdy, someone should offer to do an interview with me! Haha... about random things. 'Cause I need that kinda entertainment right now for some odd reason. O_o
GAME NERD GO. Remember Marvel vs. Capcom? You SHOULD.
Well, it looks like Kevin Feige, President of Production for Marvel Studios was asked at ComiCon if a new Marvel vs. Capcom game was possible and the dude says, "Yes. And maybe sooner than you think."
Could we be seeing Marvel vs. Capcom 3 soon!? We might. The second boom of fighting games is just beginning with SFIV, Mortal Kombat vs. DC, Tekken 6, Virtua Fighter 5 R, King of Fighters XII and Soul Calibur IV.
Something that seems to be a central and reoccurring theme that runs through your discussion of a lot of this is really looking at the question of mysticism or spiritual states of consciousness or visionary states of consciousness, and of course you do raise in your book the controversy between what we can consider mainstream religious practitioners who tend to look down on the use of visionary medicines as being inauthentic spiritual experiences, at least within Western tradition, but certainly you're asking the larger questions of how this relates to spiritual experience. What is your view on that?
It's not any clearer than when I set out on this work. An interesting aspect of my involvement with the Zen community that I was with for over 20 years - I was a lay member - I was never a monk - I was ordained as a lay member and I ran a meditation group that was affiliated with the main temple - I never shaved my head and donned robes though and never got an Asian name, but I went up there fairly regularly, and frequently, and underwent lay ordination and was entrusted with teaching meditation and Zen for a couple of decades. So in the beginning of my relationship with the monastery - I was in my early 20's, as were most of the monks who were there at the time, and every chance I got I would take one of the monks aside and ask them if they had taken LSD, and if they had, how important their LSD experience was in their decision to enter a monastic lifestyle.
At the time, this was probably 1974 that I started to spend time at the monastery and be friends with the monks, I'd say at least 3/4, maybe 80-90% of the monks had an LSD experience, and the vast majority of them, probably every one of them, felt that their LSD experience was their first glimpse that there was another way of looking at reality.
In Buddhism, that's what's called bodhicitta, which is the thought of enlightenment, which, for a lot of Buddhist thinkers, is the most important step on the road to enlightenment - the realization that enlightenment exists and is possible to experience. So strictly speaking, for almost everyone - 3/4's of the monks at that particular temple who had had an LSD experience - their first entry into the enlightenment stream of life was through an LSD experience. So that validated in a lot of ways my thinking of the similarities and overlap and the relevance of the psychedelic experience to a spiritual lifestyle and a spiritual worldview and a spiritual way of interacting with people and with things.
I described some of the ins and outs of my relationship with the monastery over the years and pretty much as long as I kept the level of discussion and discourse just between me and a monk, and they for sure all chatted together about the laymen and laywomen who had come through for workshops and retreats and made sure that everybody was on track - so I'm sure that they were talking about my interests in psychedelics and the role that they play in spiritual growth.
So I got quite a bit of explicit encouragement over the years from these monks who had taken LSD and were climbing the hierarchy of the monastic organization. But it was only when I was actually starting to put the rubber to the road in doing my studies and both speaking and writing publicly about the association between the psychedelic experience and the spiritual life and practice, that the monastery started getting the jitters and for a number of reasons had to disavow any relationship between the two and any relationship between me and them. So that was a fairly good example of even an Eastern religion, which ostensibly puts more faith in the truth than in orthodoxy or any dogma, being faced with the public relations fallout that might be associated with any linking of their organization and me promulgating psychedelics as a possible way to work on one's spiritual life.
Back in 1984 or 85 I attended a workshop given by Robert Anton Wilson at the Starwood Festival. It was my first face to face contact with Bob, so it impressed me deeply as I had read all of his books which were available. Bob said something which really rang true to me. He said that back in biblical times, when people had a paranormal experience, they interpreted their experiences as angelic visitations. In the middle ages, people interpreted their paranormal experiences as demonic. Now, people see aliens and flying saucers.
Bob went on to postulate that whenever one attempted to delineate or classify a paranormal experience thru the lens of a popular mythology (angels, demons, space aliens) one was real prone to missing the point of the paranormal encounter.
over the years, I have met many many people who have literal belief that a paranormal experience really was space aliens, or pagan gods, or elemental forces, etc. To me, the paranormal experience is real, but any mythology I attempt to wrap around it is just a case of tunnel vision which muddles up the experience. Sure, I use any and all mythologies to communicate the experience to others, but I always keep in mind that there is a whole fuck of a lot going on and any particular mythology is misleading when excised from the fabric of the holistic experience.
Below if from adayinthelife. The article is interesting, but I feel it attempts to limit transcendental experience to a particular mythology, which may or may not really apply. Now I have only done DMT once (back about 25 years ago) so I am sure no expert. But I never felt any space aliens, or if I did experience them, I interpreted the experience thru the lens of alien geometries rather than beings.
The post below is long. So it is split into two posts.
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Voyaging to DMT Space with Dr. Rick Strassman, M.D. Martin W. Ball
Dr. Rick Strassman, pioneering psychedelic researcher and author of the book, DMT - The Spirit Molecule, discusses his new book, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies, Zen Buddhism, psychedelics and spirituality, Old Testament prophecy and more in this fascinating interview. Dr. Strassman conducted the first federally approved psychedelic research in the US in nearly a generation with the compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, in New Mexico in the mid 1990's. Though expecting mystical raptures and deep psychological insights, in his study he was astonished to find many of his volunteers reporting unexpected encounters with strange and sometimes disturbing alien beings with advanced technology in what amounted to classical UFO "abduction" experiences. Unable to explain away the volunteers' experiences, he concluded that these were genuine encounters with independent sentient beings in otherwise normally invisible dimensions.
For this interview, I visited with Dr. Strassman in his home in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, where he currently works in a clinic for psychiatric medicine and is busy laying the foundation for his new research facility, the Cottonwood Research Foundation, where he plans to do continued research on psychedelics and their relationship to spiritual experience, creativity, and higher states of awareness and perception. More information on Cottonwood can be found at www.cottonwoodresearch.org.
Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms' Transcendent Effect Lingers
The title of this post really should be: "Clueless Scientists Finally Figure Out Wheels Are Round"
When I started tripping ~1979, I quickly realized that each trip made a permanent impact on my consciousness. Idiots who never tripped like to label this a "flashback". It's like a blind person trying to describe the visual experience of a sunset Such labels are bound to be erroneous and vastly misleading.
Whey the fuck did it take the scientists so long to figure out what Leary and Wilson were talking about over and over again for decades? Are they really that dense? Why the fuck are these turkeys getting paid to research the fucking obvious?
And they write that the effects of a shroom journey will last "more than a year". Shit man, I am proof that such effects last about 30 years, and counting. I have no proof, but I suspect the effects of high dose tripping can transcend a lifetime.
Below from Alternative Medicine Forum. URL At end.
=========================================
July 1, 2008 in Mind & Brain
Survey shows that profound mental changes induced by psilocybin have lasted for more than a year
By David Biello
People who took magic mushrooms were still feeling the love more than a year later, and one might say they were on cloud nine about it, scientists report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."
Griffiths gave 36 specially screened volunteers psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. The compound is believed to affect perception and cognition by acting on the same receptors in the brain that respond to serotonin, a neurotransmitting chemical tied to mood.
Robert Kirkman is writing a new six issue comic series for Image featuring art by Six of the original Seven Image founders. I'm really digging this idea 'cause each of the founders is going to do the layouts for a single issue, then the art boards are going to be passed around so that each creator is drawing their own creations in the book, and then the "main" artist of the book will render the backgrounds (or lack thereof depending on who's drawing it) for an almost completely unique comic book experience.
Kinda like that! In that pick alone we have Rob Liefeld drawing Youngblood, Jim Valentino drawing ShadowHawk, Todd McFarlane on Spawn, Erik Larsen on the Savage Dragon, Whilce Portacio and his new character ('cause his original creations for Image were WetWorks whom he sold to Jim Lee during a familial crisis) and Marc Silvestri doodling up a Witchblade and CyberForce. I'm excited for this! Haha. Now... when it's actually going to be released is another topic altogether. Kirkman said they have two pages finished! HA. One of the reasons I'm excited about this is 'cause this isn't something you can really do in a Marvel or DC superhero book. 'Cause there's no definitive X-Men art guy, or Batman art guy, so on and so forth. Too many people've drawn them.
Book post: OKay: books I'm reading or plan to read!
Jeri Smith Ready-
Eyes of the Crow-apparently this is very Native American esp since all the characters in this world have an animal spirit guide. Voice of the Crow-sequel. Apparently I ran across a used copy on Amazon that was signed by the author. kewl.:) Requiem for the Devil--I'm reading this. Lucifer gets redemption just by falling in love--FOR REAL. He's a lawyer for a living--BIG surprise! I love it so far.
The Urban Shaman--by C.E Murphy--like the series and the author. She has too other books in this series, which I picked up from Amazon. This is about a Native American cop with a Coyote spirit guide. House of Cards--sequel to Heart of Stone, where the main character is a human rights lawyer who runs into a Gargoyle--one the 5 supernatural races. House of Cards is about a Dragon. There is another coming out soon, in September.
I also finished "The Summoning" by Kelly Armstrong. A young adult series set in her 'Otherworld' universe. Easy read, since lower than my reading level, but still enjoyed it. Want to grab the next two as they come out.
I have a few others coming out and will grab when I can.
I also finally found a book to a cheesy sci-fi movie I like. It's been out of print for years. I finally found it after 20 years! woo hoo! I also replaced my copy of Fright Night.
Trying to replace a lot of books I lost awhile back. Making good headway. Well anyway--off to bed!
Tentacle Shirts! So, some of you may remember the tentacle tank tops I was going to start making and selling. I had initially wanted to price them at about ten bucks, given that the pack of 3 shirts wasn't that expensive. But I have also tried to make these a little more permanent than mine, as that was just an experiment with something I was going to toss anyway.
The two I made today took me nearly four hours apiece, finepoint marker under-sketch, broader-point, then black acrylic paint mixed thin like ink to help with permanence, and I'm not finished. I have yet to wash them, and then go over the lines again, probably with india ink.
I know several of you expressed interest. Let me know if you still are, and give me a ballpark of what you'd both like and expect to pay for this, and I'll weigh all of it. I'll post pictures when I've done all three, probably tomorrow. I'm planning and seeing if I should go out and pick up another pack of shirts, just in case.
I'm also going to give black ones a shot, when I find someone selling packs of them. I've seen a bleach pen several places, in the laundry detergent section of the store, and that will be fun to mess with. Other designs, and colour, will probably happen as I get better at it.
Towards a lasting peace? I am so tired of hearing the Democratic Party called the party of peace. From some idiot at the DMV whose little Democratic heart I broke by informing him of history to genuinely educated people this is what I hear. However, it involves treating the last ten years of history in a vacuum, and being shockingly ignorant even of what went on then.
Perhaps we can forget that a Democrat got us into World War I. And even that a Democrat got us into World War II. And of course the fact that a Democratic president remains the only person ever in world history to order the dropping of an atomic bomb during wartime. Maybe we can overlook the fact that that same Democratic president got us into the Korean War, and that it was part of the succeeding Republican president's campaign platform to get us out. Yes, General Eisenhower, a genuine war hero, first achieved a peaceful solution to the war and then warned against the power of the military-industrial complex. It was the Democrat JFK, no peacenik he, who escalated Vietnam into a full-blown war, while that bean-counter McNamara accounted soldiers into oblivion. Democrat LBJ mired us still further. It was the Republicans Tricky Dick and Ford who withdrew American troops.
Even looking only at the last few administrations, although that monster Cheney got us into the Gulf War, Panama, and the two current wars, Clinton didn't entirely shy away from violence. Although he withdrew American troops from Somalia in shameful defeat, proving that dragging soldiers' bodies through the streets is an effective tactic of demoralization and allowing that country to disintegrate into anarchy, becoming a haven of terrorists, he never let up bombing Iraq and the Balkans. People also tend to forget the invasion of Haiti. Indeed, when one compares his record with Reagan's, they are strikingly similar when one simply looks at how often military might was used and how it was used.
I believe it was Clausewitz who wrote that "War is diplomacy conducted by other means." And when one considers all the overt U.S. military interventions in history, one can easily see that deadly force has been used throughout our history to a greater or lesser degree. It will be the same no matter who is elected. I'm tired of people who think Obama will end the wars, since he's now talking about escalating the Afghan War. The differences between him and McCain, so far as I can determine, are: 1) McCain has some military experience, and therefore is more likely to actually listen to the officers who know what they're talking about -- and is therefore less likely to do something stupid, like send soldiers meant for Iraq to Afghanistan without the proper training. 2) Each will use his attitude towards the wars as ways of winning points with the American people, just like all presidents of the past. Obama recently voted to extend the President's powers to spy on the people, and now he's banging the war drum because he knows the American people love it. If only we had heeded Eisenhower's warning:
We must never let the weight of this combination [the military and industrial] endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Oddly enough, this very off-topic post came by way of C_3 list. Some racists get really bent out of shape when a black person and a while person kiss. I suspect those folks would get their undies all in a bunch over this video.
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I’m a fan of kind-hearted practical jokes. If you can do it right, even the victim has a good laugh. This practical joke pulls it off flawlessly.
Several women answered the call for a cosmetics test. They were asked to test lip balm. All they have to do is put on a blindfold. And then they would kiss a couple of hunky models. Their performance might even end up in a national advertisement.
It sounds like a pretty good deal. But as the women are blindfolded, the models leave the room. And what replaces them? You’ll have to watch the video to find out.
"We won't let the Venezuelas or the Nigerias or the Saudi Arabias or the Irans jerk us around by the gas nozzle." — Senator Larry Craig of airport bathroom stall fame, Source: Newsweek, July 28, 2008
Current Music:As Lonely As Dave Bowman - Pod Three (Drone Zone: Atmospheric ambient space music. Serve Best Chille
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