Ab at Fakeologist contacted me and offered me three dates this week to do a podcast with him. I chose last night, Tuesday. Participants were Ab, Gaia (speaking from Colombia), and me.
The podcast can be found here. It is 90 minutes, all free. Below is a short list of things I learned last night.
I need to understand camelistic Kabbalistic Androgenimandrogyny? I think that is what I heard.
Castrato is the word used to describe any singer boy who is castrated before puberty, thereby preserving his/her childlike singing voice. Thus did we have a Vienna Boys’ Choir.
Andrew Wakefield has a new movie out called Infertility, A Diabolical Agenda. Here is a podcast about it at a website called Against the Wind. You can watch the movie itself here and for free. [I watched the movie … someone noticed a ’33’ lodged in it, and it is co-produced by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Just sayin’.]
We talked about nuclear power. Neither Ab nor Gaia think it is real. They gave me insight into it that I consider enlightening, so to speak. I had heard before that it is fake, but drifted back to my old beliefs as a result of my exposure to right wing websites like Heartland and Cato.
Silver Gate, Montana rests two miles from the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It is a collection of stores and shops and motels. Most of those on the north side of the highway are owned by one man, or one company – I don’t know for sure. The good thing about him or it is this: He does not cater to motorcyclists and snowmobiles. You can always be sure, if you stay there, that you will have silence. The air will not be full of exhaust fumes, as is Cooke City in the winter, four miles down the road.
His goods are very expensive. He requires an up front deposit to make a reservation, and keeps it if you cancel. You can say that this is the price of being in business there, but no one else in the area does that. However, it is tough to be in business in a tourist trap. Cooke City addressed this problem by opening up to snowmobiles in the winter, delivering year-round revenue.
These kids are not playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, but rather Spring, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I guess this has gone viral, and why not. The looks of joy as they play are contagious.
Earlier this week John le Bon and I had a 2-1/2 hour conversation, which was saved for posterity.
I do not imagine I am that interesting, so relax. I am not suggesting that you go to John’s website to listen to me rattle on for that long, but there is a trove of interviews there. I am going to subscribe, but am waiting until my credit card rolls over, some time after the 20th. I am in that time frame where I can incur an expense, and then postpone payment for almost 60 days. It is an interest-free loan.
I do urge readers to visit his site, as this very interesting young man contributed tons to our interview. He is currently a resident of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, a beautiful city north and west of Greece. One thing I wanted to ask him is how he ended up there, but I never got around to it, you know, talking about me, me and then me.
Our family has lived in our small, humble abode for more than 25 years. Most of the trees on our property have stood here since we arrived in the late 1990s — already fully mature. It was the landscape of tall, proud, and abundant trees that invited us in.
The lush trees have provided not only beauty, healthy habitat for wild animals, and shelter from sweltering sun in the summer, but also a place on which to hang our hammock and swing, when our children were very young.
We actually kept the swing attached after all these years. Every once in a while, I have sat pensively atop it.
We have gratefully enjoyed the offerings of the majestic trees, attempting to not take them for granted. To echo the thoughts of this writer, the bold ash trees have served to anchor our front, back, and side yards.
June 2022
The photo directly above is not reflective of a storm (norclimate change), but, rather, the consequence of the blight of the emerald ash borer (EAB). Accordingly, twenty-one (yes, 21) of our trees (exclusively ash) were professionally felled. This week, it took the tree cutting service 24 hours over the span of 2 1/2 days — long days in the heat — to clean up the devastation created . . . by a frickin’ beetle.
The emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) is a destructive wood-boring pest of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.). Native to China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Russian Far East, the emerald ash borer beetle (EAB) was unknown in North America until its discovery in southeast Michigan in 2002. Today, EAB infestations have been detected in 35 states and the District of Columbia; Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Sadly, over the past few years, the green metallic-like ash borer beetle bore inside our ash trees, ravaging them — leaving behind massive decay, and destroying the natural green canopy above us. In the meantime, the dying trees provided a home for plentiful lichen.
After the post below and yesterday’s interview with John le Bon (which I will discuss in a later post -a very nice young man and a very good time had), I feel a need to set the record straight, to care what others might think. I am not a person who simply abandoned his five children. Of course I am flawed, of course I have made mistakes, but walking out on my kids is not in my nature. I am Mr. Do-The-Right-Thing, and when I do the wrong thing, I pay a psychic price.
The above video is at the center of my spiritual awakening in the early 1990s. Typical of me at that time, I was not aware of the song even three or four years after its release nor had I heard of the band called U2. I was busy working and being a dad to five kids, and growing away from my wife. In fact, I had already left her mentally, or as Kramer famously said in a Seinfeld episode, “George, in my mind I am already gone.” George’s look at Kramer after that remark was a classic deadpan. I still laugh.
By the way, I have not been kind to people who put up their favorite videos here, just out of the blue, as if saying “You must like what I like.” Music is personal. I am writing about this particular video because it represented an awakening, a turning point, a point in my life when I had a future that was going to be very different from my past. I will write first about my experience, and then about the song, the instrumentation, the video and the lyrics after. Rolling Stone places it at number 93 in its list of 500 best rock songs.
I invite others to use this post to recount similar experiences. Please limit yourself to one song or video.
The authors of the book Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, Mary Bennett and David Percy, think that Apollo 13, the failed mission that spawned the Ron Howard movie by the name, never left low earth orbit and that all the excitement was staged by NASA and the astronauts from inside a space capsule that really did contain astronauts.
That could well be the case, and those two certainly have the chops to make that case. I’ve long thought that all those launches in the period 1969-1972 served some purpose (except Apollo 11, which I think merely took off and dumped in the Atlantic). I do not know that purpose, and have speculated that it could have been a joint effort with the Soviets to install spy satellites and weaponry in space, later to be called “Star Wars”.
We live in the mountains and have a back deck that is, at its highest above the ground, about twelve feet up. There are many benefits of living here, and some problems. One of those is these things called Golden Mantled ground squirrels, and chipmunks. We cannot grow anything down on ground level, as these creatures will eat anything we put out there. We have managed to put out Russian Sage, as they show no interest in that particular plant, but everything else is quickly toast.
Everyone who lives up here has the same problem. The best solution is planters up on the deck that are large enough that the critters cannot get up and in them. That seems to work. Other solutions are sonic devices that supposedly disrupt their nests and force them to move away. Last year we tried these, and noticed that chipmunks would perch on them while they observed the horizon. In other words, they do not work.
They do not like water, and I delight in standing on the deck and surprising them with a burst from the hose. It brings me such joy to see them scatter and hide under and in rock walls.
We’ve been watching the TV series Yellowstone these past couple of weeks. It’s well-acted and the writing is intense, violence always threatened to break out anywhere. The series is supposedly set in Montana and near Bozeman. Indeed some of the street scenes are of Bozeman, meaning a movie crew did some filming there, but without the actors in the series.
The series stars Kevin Costner as owner of the Yellowstone John Dutton Ranch, a massive complex that appears to be located in Paradise Valley near Livingston, Montana. In real life, the outdoor sequences were filmed near Darby, Montana, a small town located near the far western border of the state. Indoor sequences are shot on massive sound stages in Park City, Utah.
Piece of Mindful 