Orders of Magnitude

Rob sent along a cool site from FSU. Explore the universe an order of magnitude at a time.

18 November 2003

More Onion Fun

Just can't get enough blogging today. Read a funny installment of Red Meat today. Well, they're always funny, but today's is about a jealous God, so I couldn't just leave it alone.

12 November 2003

Horoscope

Check out my horoscope from The Onion:

Pisces: (Feb. 19-March 20) You've always had trouble controlling your base impulses, but they do lead you to have fun and experience cool things.

12 November 2003

Searching for Kerouac

Added a new piece of fiction to the prose section. Enjoy.

12 November 2003

Cleanliness and Godliness

I was reading up on soaps today when I came across the philosophical writings of Dr. Emanuel Bronner, creator of Dr. Bronner's, favorite soap of hippies around the world. His ALL-ONE message really struck a chord with me. You can read his rants on the soap bottle label.

Dr. Bronner's writing made me think of a recent conversation with Caroline. I was espousing my oft-recited position on the silliness of a jealous God in monotheistic thought. If I were the one true God, omnipotent, creator of the universe, and all that, I would scoff at any attempts to worship anyone or anything else. "Worship what you want!" I say, "For I am everything and anything you worship is me."

Caroline corrected the error in my thinking. The important advance in monotheistic thought (and perhaps this is reflected in Buddhist thought, just without the theist angle), is not that *this* one God is the real one, but that there must be only *one* God, and it is that all-encompassing God that we should worship, never any particular god. All-One or None! ALL-ONE!

It sure is nice hanging out with clever and educated people who can clear up my clouded thinking.

12 November 2003

Kill Bill

Todd Wolff of Club Wolff Cinema writes:

"All the makings of a cult classic . . ."

Seems like me and Dad are about the only people who liked this movie. I have trouble understanding why. It's visually stunning. It's full of classic Tarantino dialogue. Check it out, let me know what you think.

12 November 2003

More Psychedelia

Here's another piece in the same vein as "Feeling Alive". Criticism is appreciated.

I think they're putting something in the water here at Nimiyo Elementary. Everything's gone all trippy again. The wall across from my desk is comprised entirely of windows, idced up into small panes by sloppily painted wooden slats. Not every piece of glass is perfectly flat (where did they buy this cheap crap?). I like the way the world behind the warped glass ripples as I move my head left and right. I must look like a fool sitting in the teachers' lounge swaying back and forth to an imaginary beat. I'm not worried. It's worth it to watch the stone wall outside flap like a sheet hung out to dry. I unfocus my eyes and let the light from outside flood my visual field. The dark slats between the panes of glass become cracks in a world of light as figure and ground invert. It's been too long since I've looked at Escher and even longer since I've read GEB. Still, I haven't lost what they shared with me; if anything I've been feeling it more lately, the magical sensation that the whole universe is alive with Pattern and meaning. I feel filled with the beginner's mind, not childish but childlike.

How perfect that this composition was just interrupted by an invitation to join the children playing house. This was no boorish acquaintance knocking on Colleridge's door with some mundane business. No, I was taken instead to a fantastic little world the children had created for themselves. Under the vine-covered trellises they had made a perfect Japanese home, complete with kotatsu. Most of the chilren sat around this, really just an old tire with a blanket and pillow thrown over it, while Saori and Ryuichi climbed on the branches above them. I wanted to serve them green tea, to sit down with them in the speckled light that filtered throught the vines, but the chime rang and recess ended. Cooleridge's boor had arrived at last, an unwelcome summons to the adult world. Fortunately, I didn't have to join the children in their studies. I was free to return to my desk where endless worlds awaited on blank pieces of paper and behind wavy panes of glass.

11 November 2003

Quotes for Today

Stuart Walton, in his book Out of It, wrote of being drunk:

[it is] funnier than TV comedy certainly, and perhaps even funnier than sex . . .

On an unrelated topic, Sarah wrote:

. . . what Heidegger did was expose the limits of logic's ability to detail and preserve. he should have walked away then, knowingly, to experience the moment whole and undistorted; but instead, as one does, he wrote another thousand pages.

11 November 2003

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I got sent another link to a political Flash animation. Not nearly as funny as The Meatrix, but well put together. At the end I noticed that the creator was Free Range Graphics, the same people who made The Meatrix. Turns out they've done a lot of creative stuff. Check 'em out.

11 November 2003

The Meatrix

This site is too funny. Then, sadly, it's too true. Rich sent me the link. Great flash animation.

7 November 2003

Stop-Go

Martyn has redone his website. It's looking quite respectable now. He's got some good pictures of life in Japan there. I stole this one off his page:

I hope people will believe me now when I tell them traffic signals in Japan are confusing. Apparently at this intersection you have to stop unless you're going left, right, or straight.

5 November 2003

Old Person Humor

While I'm on the topic of redistributing copyrighted materials, I thought I'd throw in this Boondocks strip. It really made me laugh, mostly because it reminds me of my Grandpa Wolff. Not that he'd be caught dead in a church. Or reading The Boondocks for that matter.

30 October 2003

Rip-Off Artist

Some of you may know that I've recently become a vegan. Thomas sent me a funny Nonsequitur strip on the topic.

I'm sure I'm reprinting this illegally, but you all should know what I think about that: Fuck intellectual property! I talk tough because no one reads this. Anyway, the image links to the original comic.

30 October 2003

Define Your World

I've been wasting some time on a sight called Urban Dictionary lately. Lots of fun. Look up "talking salmon".

20 October 2003

Fighting vs. Cooking

I was chopping some vegetables tonight, when I brought the knife down perilously close to my extended thumb. I quickly tucked the endangered thumbs under my curled up fingers as one should when chopping. A thought sprang into my mind: the thumb goes under the fingers when preparing food, but over the fingers when preparing to strike. The fist and the cooking hand are opposites. Well, this naturally bounced around my brain a bit, and I feel the metaphor could be extended. So please contribute. In what ways is cooking the opposite of fighting?

15 October 2003

Overpackaging

Overpackaging is rampant in Japan. While I've gotten used to most of it, there is one instance of it that still really annoys me: plastic wrap on foods you peel before eating. While I don't think it's necessary, I can see why you might wrap your spinach or broccoli, but bananas? lemons? Ma Nature already wrapped them for you, fool!

15 October 2003

Curiosity Killed the Catechism

Ain't that a great one-liner from Common? It's from "G.O.D." on One Day It'll All Make Sense

8 October 2003

Feeling Alive

Chris might get mad at me for including his name in something with such New Age leanings. He'll have to blame Sarah for that. Somehow her vocabulary and tone infected my brain and writing today. Enjoy.

The world came alive today. Maybe I should thank the students of Nimiyo Elementary; they attacked their lessons with unusual vigor. Maybe it was something else. My brain took its usual siesta after lunch. While the children played, and my stomach digested, I drifted in and out of consciousness, only pretending to study Japanese. Perhaps I wasn't fully awake when I made my trip to the toilet. Hypnagogic imagery swirled on the floor, the mottled stone transformed into a swarm of sparkling gnats against a background of fog.

Later, driving back to Kuma, the Earth seemed unnaturally illuminated. This was no normal sunlight shining down on the cedar-covered mountains. No, the world around me glowed as if lit from within. I found myself thinking of Chris Locke's quote, "I tried to imagine a world in which such a thing was possible. Suddenly and with some considerable amazement, I realized I was already in it." Only I was sober, and the whole universed was my iridescent soap bubble.

For once, I didn't dread returning to the Board of Education. The boorish office environment no longer seemed so oppressive. I ran through a mental list of things to do and thought of how quickly the time would pass. What was the source of this newfound optimism? How could I capture it? I studied these questions only briefly before abandoning them. This wasn't a feeling to capture, only one to revel in. Maybe it could be pursued, but never in hopes of actualy catching up. The pursuit had to be for the sake of the chase only, for the path, not the destination.

8 October 2003

Am I Ugly?

No, I don't really mean that. Recently though, I've been hanging out with this guy Thomas who studied graphic design. He's really into it, and is good in my opinion. Don't listen too closely to my opinion though. The point of this post is that I don't know anything about design. Thomas and some of his friends do. Thomas has an old site called 'Mayunga Brotha' he doesn't show anyone. I still think it's worth looking at. I also met Nate in Hiroshima, cool guy. He runs Wicked-Decent Productions. The rest of these sites are by friends of theirs I don't know, just links I followed. Check'em out.

Mayunga Brotha
Wicked-Decent Productions
House of Chen
Jeremey "Inst-O-Design" Biddle
JANT
The Art of William Thideman

I feel that all these sites just look better than mine. Not just look better, but look more alive, exciting, inviting. So, what am I supposed to do? Learn about design? Pay someone to do it for me? I was all set on the idea of having a really simple design, just focusing on content and ease of navigation. Now, I'm thinking, "I want a page people want to look at." Not just want to read, which I hope people already do, but want to LOOK at. Who knows where this is going to take me. I'd definitely appreciate feedback on this.

21 Sept 2003

Mars

	Maybe you've heard that Mars is closer than it's been in a long time. I planned a trip to the observatory with my adult English class. One of my students, Akimasa Nakamura, runs the telescope, so we got a special viewing.
It was a cloudy night, so we almost called it off. Some people had driven a long way though, so we decided to give a go and hope for the best. The clouds parted just when we needed them to, just where we wanted them to. In a vast cloudy sky there was a gap exposing Mars.
	I took a couple pictures through the telescope. They didn't really do any justice to the beauty of actually looking at the Red Planet. I played with them a bit in Microsoft Photo Editor to see if I could get something a little more gripping. Still doesn't really capture the effect.

20 Sept 2003

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