Prometheus brings fire to mankind
Art: Heinrich Füger (1751-1818)
Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it up well when he said, "The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next." At one time there were magnificent temples of Apollo and Zeus, people prayed to them, made offerings to them. Today no one believes that those gods and goddesses were anything but figments of ancient people's imagination. Today we learn about these gods as part of myths.
Monday ride
Is anyone interested in a ride this morning?
George,
I'm interested. What time suits you? I'm
free till 3.
Ray
Morning George and motps, I’d love to but too much going on today.
Wednesday looks good if the weather cooperates and anyone’s free. Have a good
ride if you go! Thanks, Al
Ray,
Great -- I am good to go whenever, the
earlier the better, but I have no restrictions.
If I don’t get a response back from
Pat in the next few minutes I will call him – and will get back to you. W
Love Corinne
Hi:
Sound like you are enjoying friend family and libations as per usual!! My 6 hour session in changing my email in many online accounts proved tiring and frustrating as the new requirements for naming your address doesn't comply all the time with some businesses. .That would mean phone calls and chat lines galore. I pay everything online so it was quite the task.
I was getting porn requests and advisements that I had won copious prizes, cash as well as the fact that I was being investigated by my bank, insurance company and the FBI. All emails trying to get personal information of course. All this because a friend's computer's address book was hacked while in Florida. Also Twitter is not secure! I cancelled my account there. First I just changed my email address with Twitter but within the hour another 'relationship' request came through. These also stopped after cancelling Twitter.
We went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with friends yesterday afternoon too. I thought Smiley was a little too wooden at the start but enjoyed him more as the story unfolded. I didn't like that he sat down at Control's desk at the end. That wasn't in character at all. Glad to see that Ann was kept out of the picture physically in keeping with the book and I loved the fact that when the scene returned to the Christmas party he was still an elderly man.. looking back from a different perspective. Nice touch! Cheers Bren
Hi Brenda Louise!
Glad your changeover is finished! I have to keep myself from taking up offers to manage millions from Nigeria. Seems like easier than winning the lottery! I agree about Ann and Christmas party but didn't feel quite as strongly about Control's seat.
Had a grand ride with Whirlygig and Raymondo this afternoon. Just before noon I took Her Majesty to the Pan Pacific where she was attending BC's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, (established in 2003), an invitee of VPL. Back home to meet lads and we proceeded to do an up-and-over LG, going as far as Argyle, in West Van, before returning. Quite a strong headwind as we rode towards Stanley Park but, surprisingly, not bad on the bridge deck itself.
Both Giorgio and Raymondo had commitments later in afternoon so after we waved goodbye, (Ray at Cypress, Whirlissimo at Macdonald), I continued on to UBC and made a foray into campus to given me requisite distance to lob 72.33K on odometre by time I was back at The HeartBreak Terrace.
Off to watch a recorded episode of MI-5. Cheers, Patrizzio!
Hello to everyone!
We are back on Sunday, 19 th, and will stay in Van 2 nights.
Look forward to seeing you all.
Not sure when the skiers return?
Let us know what works to get together.
En route shortly to Lake Taupo, then New Plymouth for last few days.
Cheers, Gregg & Francesca
Hi Lake Taupoites!
We spent a night there in '92. Bought two rugby shirts at a local store.
Cora Lee is chatting, as I scribe, with Ayn/Teens about her arrival time tomorrow. Off to watch a recorded episode of MI-5 and have a late dinner, once The Sisterhood stop talking! Cheers, Patrizzio!
Hi Charlie, please buy the 21 day
Japan rail pass, the ordinary class for us. We will be ready to buy
medical insurance by the end of the week.
Thanks so much, Corinne
Thanks so much, Corinne
Hi Corinne,
Will do. Trust this means you’re on the road to recovery! Charlie
Hi again Corinne,
Just
wanted to clarify the cancel/refund policy. However, since these are
for May dates sure will be OK. Will receive the passes within 7-10 days
once purchased so have time.
Will go ahead and purchase on Wed. once you have OK’d the policy below.
Thanks, Charlie
Refund
fee is 15% of pass fare plus 12% HST and has to be made within 6 months
of purchase. The full set of ticket has to be returned to our office in
order to process refund.
Taiwan Story is now a short blog with photos:
This is a short blog with photos about a trip into the mountains:
(one of my readers has complained that my posts are "a bit too long" -- this was probably not Patrick)
--
Randall Nadeau
Chair, Department of Religion
Professor of East Asian Religions
Trinity University
Who are all these people? OK, then, guess I might as well
participate in the mix. Attached please find an intro to the people who
are as important and real to me as yours are to you. Dana
THE CLOVEN
PINE
As Recorded By
D Garrett Nadeau
‘
…Thou, my slave,’
‘As thou
report’s thyself, was then her servant;’
‘And, for
thou wast a spirit too delicate’
‘To act
her earthly and abhorred commands’
‘Refusing
her grand hests, she did confine thee’
‘By help
of her more potent ministers’
‘And in
her most unmitigable rage’
‘Into a
cloven pine; within which rift’
‘Imprison’d
thou didst painfully remain’
‘A dozen
years….’
The
Tempest, William Shakespeare,
Act I,
Scene II, lines 270-277
PART ONE
1964
Chapter One
It was May 2nd, 1964, my 10th
Birthday. That’s when I decided to
leave home. That’s when I had my
first alien ‘encounter’. That’s
when I began on the long road to becoming a Private Detective. And that’s when I started a series of
horrific events for which I have blamed myself ever since.
Dad roused me early that morning, real
early – about 4 a.m. He was
standing there in his ‘fishin’ gear’ beside my bed waiting for me to wake up.
‘What do you think of this outfit then?’ he
said.
I lay in bed rubbing my eyes. It was the same outfit he always wore
when he went fishing. ‘It’s fine,
Dad.’
He began then to take all his clothes off,
and he started tying them up in knots, first his shirt, then his trousers. He tied them all together, not in a
bundle, but in a sort of long progression: trousers, shirt, t-shirt, underwear,
even his socks like he was making some sort of rope to escape from somewhere.
It was really embarrassing. Not the tying up of the clothes. I was used to Dad being a bit
weird. But his nakedness. That made me real uncomfortable.
On first impression, Dad had the look of a
1930’s politician, a Huey Long: fat, confident, jolly, with a bombastic if not
pompous carriage – until he opened his mouth and all that fell away.
‘Dad?’ I said. ‘Dad, what do you want?’
‘It’s time,’ he said in a high, nasal rasp
that seemed more like the grating together of grasshopper legs. ‘Time for you to see. The evidence. The absolute proof.
Irrefutable confirmation.
Unequivocal….’
‘Dad, I’ve already seen quite enough, thank
you.’ But I threw the covers back
and slid my feet to the floor. I sat there on the edge of the bed. I would have to go with him. I wasn’t being curious, just obedient.
We lived then some ways off old US Route 30
up at the top end of Lake Meriwether, near Wilkes Butte, Idaho, in a grand, old,
run-down hotel. The hotel sign had disappeared way before I was born, but the
post it had hung on was still there – like the ghost of some old prison guard
the warden had forgotten to take off duty. Really though it wasn’t any kind of
hotel anymore. It was just a big,
old house. Nobody ever stayed in it – just us: meaning
me, Mom, Dad, my older brother and sister – us and two geese, an old mongrel
dog, some chickens, a grouchy rooster, and a rabbit. The animals were all Mom’s. Dad said he’d been employed to look after the place, not a
bunch of ‘dichotomous’ animals. But
he never got paid, so Mom mostly got her way. She earned all the money. Dad technically was unemployed, though none of us ever said
it. Actually, he wasn’t at all
handy, so he probably didn’t deserve to be paid anyway.
My Mom, Calista May Evans, a round, black
woman from Mississippi, met my Dad, Christopher John Hardy, equally round, but
white, from Idaho, when she was only seventeen and he was twenty-six. They met in a train station in St
Louis. A white ticket inspector
with a pencil behind his ear was scolding her for being in the way, calling her
a ‘fat Nigger’ and telling her to get herself on back to the ‘Nigger
carriages.’ Dad, who wasn’t my Dad
then of course, intervened and told the inspector he had no right to speak to
her like that. The inspector
called him a ‘faggot’ and a ‘Nigger lover’ and stomped off. Dad asked her where she was going and
was delighted to hear she was headed up to Twin Falls, Idaho. That was where he was going, too. He escorted her to her carriage,
carrying her bag for her. Most
everyone, white groups and black, stared at them. The station was full of soldiers returning from Europe, and
I guess she was curious because Dad was the only one not in uniform.
The carriage was dirty; the seats,
worn. There weren’t many vacant places;
here, all the passengers were black and most of them were laughing and joking
or drinking and playing cards or sprawled out sleeping. The carriage went all quiet when she
and Dad came on board. He asked a
soldier to move and placed her next to a window. He said the window would be the best place for her...
'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.'
Levels within levels here. Did not all of Europe go into the making of Joseph Conrad? Is Kurtz any less real than Joseph Conrad himself? Is my Calista May Evans any less real than Randy's Taiwanese dentist?
For Randy, from his perspective because he has seen and talked to the old man, he might say his dentist IS more real. But for me his dentist is a mere description (albeit a good one) whereas I have lived with Calista May for years. I know what she likes to eat, how she dresses, what terrrifies her, how she dies. She is more real to me than Randy's dentist.
Next time you read a work of fiction, imagine how the author lived with, felt for, experienced his/her characters: more 'real' perhaps to them than people they have merely heard about or met momentarily on the street. Think then on that depth, on that Heart of Darkness. Dana
Good points, Dana! Indeed, my "dentist" is just a glimpse of a man, incomplete and even caricaturist! Who knows, maybe he left his practice because few survived his dentistry! Randy
Far be it from me to 'imagine' your dentist anything other than competant - though, of course, there have been dentists who've been accused - shall we say - of taking advantage of their female patients.
Ah, the power of suggestion - thus a purely innocent man turns ....
I would suggest that we, each of us, had formed an impression of your dentist (sometimes it's better not to say too much), and now look what's happened to him - poor chap! Dana
Hello Lads!
Far out, man! You are jivin' like the crazed photographer played by Dennis Hooper in Apocalypse Now, Dana! Far out philosophy man! Or else Pirandello in his Six Characters in Search of an Author, or Woody's brilliant, for me at least, The Purple Rose of Cairo or, more recently, of course, Midnight in Paris. (Speaking of films, we watched Moneyball last night and wondered if you "ball freaks" had seen it and, if so, what you thought.)
Dana, I enjoyed the snippet of The Cloven Pine you attached. Liked the transition from "present" to when Garrett's parents met. To answer your question, however, at the moment, Calista is a little less real, to me, than Randy's randy dentist, who is, in turn, slightly less real than Conrad himself, who is definitely less real than Kurtz! Let's face it, we live, most of the time, in other moments of time, the past or the future, using memory and/or imagination, very rarely in Eliot's "eternal present", unless you happen to be one of the monks, Taoist or Buddhist, or one of the nuns in those several Buddhist nunneries, our visiting Confucian scholar mentions. Ironically, when we do inhabit the present we usually don't pay it much nevermind or, if circumstances force us to confront "harsh reality", we try to distance ourselves from it through wishing to be elsewhere, in time and space, invoking nostalgia, (Things were much simpler in the '50's!), or cliché, (After the war...), or numb ourselves to the pain with Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Nothing wrong with any of these "tools". You pays yer money and takes yer chances! Cheers, Il Conduttore!
Ha, ha, I'm gonna go tell the dentist what you said, Patrick! R
Hello again, Gander, et al!
How do we know that you are not simply projecting yourself onto the so-called dentist? After all, we only have your word for his existence. Where is he in the Reality Richter Scale? He is but a shadow in Plato's cave. Are you gonna spill da beans on his "existential reality", his professional competence or his libido, or all three? What are you smoking in them thar mountains, boy? Cheers, Il Conduttore!
Hi Lads!
Talked about this video on today's ride so thought I'd send it along:
http://www.aplacetolovedogs.com/2011/11/heartwarming-military-reunions-with-mans-best-friend-video/1486624437/
For those in Hawaii or otherwise unable to cycle, had a grand ride with Whirlygig and Raymondo this afternoon. Just before noon I took Her Majesty to the Pan Pacific where she was attending BC's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, (established in 2003), an invitee of VPL. Back home to meet lads and we proceeded to do an up-and-over LG, going as far as Argyle, in West Van, before returning. Quite a strong headwind as we rode towards Stanley Park but, surprisingly, not bad on the bridge deck itself.
Both Giorgio and Raymondo had commitments later in afternoon so after we waved goodbye, (Ray at Cypress, Whirlissimo at Macdonald), I continued on to UBC and made a foray into campus to given me requisite distance to lob 72.33K on odometre by time I was back at The Heart Break Terrace.
Robo Ray cannnot ride on Wednesday. I probably have to take a friend to YVR before noon, (If I don't, then I'm free from (9:00am-4:00pm), so if I am to ride it would have to be around 8:30am or after 12:30-1:00pm. If anyone is interested, let me know what you might like to do. Cheers, Il Conduttore!
'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.'
Levels within levels here. Did not all of Europe go into the making of Joseph Conrad? Is Kurtz any less real than Joseph Conrad himself? Is my Calista May Evans any less real than Randy's Taiwanese dentist?
For Randy, from his perspective because he has seen and talked to the old man, he might say his dentist IS more real. But for me his dentist is a mere description (albeit a good one) whereas I have lived with Calista May for years. I know what she likes to eat, how she dresses, what terrrifies her, how she dies. She is more real to me than Randy's dentist.
Next time you read a work of fiction, imagine how the author lived with, felt for, experienced his/her characters: more 'real' perhaps to them than people they have merely heard about or met momentarily on the street. Think then on that depth, on that Heart of Darkness. Dana
Good points, Dana! Indeed, my "dentist" is just a glimpse of a man, incomplete and even caricaturist! Who knows, maybe he left his practice because few survived his dentistry! Randy
Far be it from me to 'imagine' your dentist anything other than competant - though, of course, there have been dentists who've been accused - shall we say - of taking advantage of their female patients.
Ah, the power of suggestion - thus a purely innocent man turns ....
I would suggest that we, each of us, had formed an impression of your dentist (sometimes it's better not to say too much), and now look what's happened to him - poor chap! Dana
Far out, man! You are jivin' like the crazed photographer played by Dennis Hooper in Apocalypse Now, Dana! Far out philosophy man! Or else Pirandello in his Six Characters in Search of an Author, or Woody's brilliant, for me at least, The Purple Rose of Cairo or, more recently, of course, Midnight in Paris. (Speaking of films, we watched Moneyball last night and wondered if you "ball freaks" had seen it and, if so, what you thought.)
Dana, I enjoyed the snippet of The Cloven Pine you attached. Liked the transition from "present" to when Garrett's parents met. To answer your question, however, at the moment, Calista is a little less real, to me, than Randy's randy dentist, who is, in turn, slightly less real than Conrad himself, who is definitely less real than Kurtz! Let's face it, we live, most of the time, in other moments of time, the past or the future, using memory and/or imagination, very rarely in Eliot's "eternal present", unless you happen to be one of the monks, Taoist or Buddhist, or one of the nuns in those several Buddhist nunneries, our visiting Confucian scholar mentions. Ironically, when we do inhabit the present we usually don't pay it much nevermind or, if circumstances force us to confront "harsh reality", we try to distance ourselves from it through wishing to be elsewhere, in time and space, invoking nostalgia, (Things were much simpler in the '50's!), or cliché, (After the war...), or numb ourselves to the pain with Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Nothing wrong with any of these "tools". You pays yer money and takes yer chances! Cheers, Il Conduttore!
Ha, ha, I'm gonna go tell the dentist what you said, Patrick! R
Hello again, Gander, et al!
How do we know that you are not simply projecting yourself onto the so-called dentist? After all, we only have your word for his existence. Where is he in the Reality Richter Scale? He is but a shadow in Plato's cave. Are you gonna spill da beans on his "existential reality", his professional competence or his libido, or all three? What are you smoking in them thar mountains, boy? Cheers, Il Conduttore!
Hi Lads!
Talked about this video on today's ride so thought I'd send it along:
http://www.aplacetolovedogs.com/2011/11/heartwarming-military-reunions-with-mans-best-friend-video/1486624437/
For those in Hawaii or otherwise unable to cycle, had a grand ride with Whirlygig and Raymondo this afternoon. Just before noon I took Her Majesty to the Pan Pacific where she was attending BC's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, (established in 2003), an invitee of VPL. Back home to meet lads and we proceeded to do an up-and-over LG, going as far as Argyle, in West Van, before returning. Quite a strong headwind as we rode towards Stanley Park but, surprisingly, not bad on the bridge deck itself.
Both Giorgio and Raymondo had commitments later in afternoon so after we waved goodbye, (Ray at Cypress, Whirlissimo at Macdonald), I continued on to UBC and made a foray into campus to given me requisite distance to lob 72.33K on odometre by time I was back at The Heart Break Terrace.
Robo Ray cannnot ride on Wednesday. I probably have to take a friend to YVR before noon, (If I don't, then I'm free from (9:00am-4:00pm), so if I am to ride it would have to be around 8:30am or after 12:30-1:00pm. If anyone is interested, let me know what you might like to do. Cheers, Il Conduttore!
Patrick James Dunn What,
precisely, do you mean? If you are a weak person you need permission?
What does gender have to do with it? Furthermore, why does anybody need
permission?
Nadienka Wyss U definitely need permission to do whatever u wanna do! Reason why: u're a cruel Host Father! So next time u wanna leave your house you better ask your favourite Host Daughter first
Patrick James Dunn Dear Host Daughter can I go swimming tomorrow, at the Aquatic Centre, at 10:00am? Pretty please with sugar on it! Your Cruel Host Father!Hi Kids, Molly and Jake!
Ayn posted this video so thought I'd send it along:
http://www.aplacetolovedogs.com/2011/11/heartwarming-military-reunions-with-mans-best-friend-video/1486624437/
Cheers, Maggie!
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