Te-oo banches o' voylets trad in the maad.

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Two Weeks To Go.   Make Up Your Mind! The People's Climate March website is replete with good information. The good folks at 350 Toronto are coordinating return bus from Toronto and lodging in NYC including on-line ticketing. If you can't get to NYC, please find a way to support this important and historic event.  In Toronto Avaaz, 350 & Greenpeace are organizing a solidarity march: Sunday, September 21 @ 1:00 pm, Nathan Phillips Square/In front of City Hall. Call this 'the ground' or 'the range' or 'the domain' ... whatever: Here's 1$ after bank charges - 25¢.   [I was going to explain but you get it, right?] And this, a preliminary vision of Saint George: It doesn't make the least difference to me if Marina is a candidate.   A brief digression through Canadia & Austria: Tony Abbott’s scientific and business advisers at odds over climate change. Hahahaha, that's funny - The Guardian changed the headline - on the 17th it was "Australia’s chief scientist tells PM's business adviser to stick to economics". We certainly don't want to insult Maurice and make him feel stupid do we? Dallying with cynicism: Attention.                     When the Herald blows the trumpet                                     I want you to give me all your love.       Blow Herald. Dallying with dalliance: It looks like Brasilians have a real choice for their next president on election day, Sunday October 5th (and possibly again in a run-off Sunday October 26 - a simple majority doesn't do, must be more than 50%). How long has it been since there was a really really REAL election anywhere in the so-called free world? Where the candidates are far enough apart that you can actually see light between them? If you don't vote in Brazil you are penalized, quite heavily - both fines and loss of perks; so nearly everyone will vote. Marina's candidacy is being reported just a few days old in English in instruments like The Wall Street Journal - this is news in itself. [The link may lead to a pay-wall but the article is not really worth archiving. Standard bumph. The important thing is seeing Brazilian news in English the day after it happens. That is noteworthy.] Her running mate is Beto Albuquerque; from the south, Passo Fundo (350 clicks north west of Porto Alegre where Verissimo comes from); and a socialist, or rather a Socialist. Could this be the long awaited emergence of a New Left equal to the name? Is this the Second Coming? Many of the cartunistas are not being kind to our Marina; everything from 'communist threat' to 'Madama of La Mancha' - conservative bunch I guess. It could be a secular backlash at her christianity, or ... fear of change? Dunno. Interesting (a uniquely Brasilian sensibility I believe) that her racial features are often exaggerated, caricatured, but without the bigot edge. Anyway, Luiz Fernando Cazo & Reginaldo Moreira seem to have it about right: Analysts say that Marina's entry will make things worse for Dilma and Aécio: It looks like there will be a struggle in the middle of the field. [In the upcoming debates] Dilma intends to leave the direct confrontation with Marina to Aécio: You go first! Ibope [Brazilian pollsters]: Marina will beat Dilma in the second round. [Since this cartoon was drawn the 29% has gone to 33%.]   Notwithstanding a suspicion (verging on outright prejudice) of anyone carrying any religious imprimatur whatsoever but especially of all officially certified Romans, Moslems & Evangelical Protestants; Notwithstanding a pronounced pretty princess psychological pathology known as the 'Fuck Little Miss Muffet AND The Tuffet She Rode In On' syndrome; Notwithstanding a 0% success rate on rubbings of various old lamps found on beaches and a firm conviction (if only occasionally deployed) to be careful what you wish for; IF I WERE a prayin' man and thought it would help Marina, I would be down on my knees. Silly eh?

 
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Spacious gracious moments (in k-k-k-Canada).

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Reminder

(or: specious salacious, spurious supercilious ... &c.)
(or: What we need in k-k-k-Canada is a tax revolt!   ...   Whoa! Waidaminit!    We?)

First, a bit of housekeeping: 1) I tried to inform the few Toronto 'activists' I know about of the coming Harmonic Convergence. No interest at all. I went along to the 'weekly 350 meeting' (advertised on a schedule here) and found that they had changed venue - nobody there, perfectly par. I sent them an email (a polite one) and no reply ... so far. Livin' in hope (as the fricken' Christians like to say). 2) Some texts mentioned in the last few posts: Ian McEwan, End of the World Blues (from 'The Portable Atheist', Christopher Hitchens, 2007.   From 'The End of the World As We Know It', Daniel Wojcik, 1997: Acknowledgments, Approaching Doomsday, & Conclusion.   From 'The Singing Neanderthals', Steven Mithen, 2005: Preface, The mystery of music, & Finis.   3) The FAO Food Price Index updated: Cute that someone there in the UN somewhere chose red for the 2014 line. 4) Islands in Lake Turkana: Three islands in a relatively narrow lake running north-south - what the heck, call 'em 'North' 'Central' & 'South'! (Imaginative folk those European explorers eh?) No trace that I can find of anything like original or authentic names for them though there surely are some, somewhere. Wikipedia makes a stab at naming the lake itself: Lake Turkana name. I like 'Jade Sea' (for what should be obvious reasons by now). Given its shape and the fact that it is at or near the original human homesteads we could call it 'Lake of the Eternal Vagina' (with polyps). A-and a joke:   Millennarian Apocalypticism:   'Apocalypticism' has a certain ring to it - once you practice a bit, out loud. Almost no one talks to me. No mystery there in the end, and after a while you get used to it. But still, on rare encounters with (what should be) close family members I may open up and even ask how their air-miles bonus tally is doing (with a smile y'unnerstan'). So one of 'em says to me, "Oh, that climate thing's like when the magnetic pole flips eh?" It took almost a full day for the penny to drop. (I was not aware of the specific association of nutbars focussed on the planetary poles.) How crazy must they think I am then? Very, very crazy I guess, to put me into such a basket. I had not imagined. In our youth in our Toronto neighbourhood the Salvation Army Band would regularly, weekly or so, hold impromptu parades. And of course all the kids followed the music down the street towards their meeting hall. We demurred when it came to going in for cookies & milk (we were instructed to demur by our Anglican and United Church mothers), but loud & outright evangelists were a welcome relief from what, even at 7 & 8 years old, was an obviously stultifying miasma of control. Later on, we were lucky enough to catch the last few years of the Victory Burlesque, music figures there too ... but that's another story. So ... What if the poles do flip? What if an asteroid hits? What if the planet ends with a bang? The difference is that such events have no moral dimension, none. Ending with a whimper though is a distinctly human possibility. And who cares about ethics either? Since all such matters end when the languages end. In the meantime baffle their brains with bullshit (BBB) since even some of the best among them (Lula thinking the 2005 earthquake & tsunami were somehow connected with environental abuse f'rinstance though he later corrected himself - I said 'best' remember) cannot distinguish suicidal terrorists or nutbars cutting off their genitals hoping to be picked up by space aliens, from people standing up with integrity on real issues. DOH! Joke's on me, obviously ... as usual. No problem. The origin of money: I swear I saw it. The guy who brought the food came out of the bathroom and didn't wash his hands! There goes a typical modern guy. Darth Vader t-shirt, daily schedule in his hand, Converse sneakers, iPod ...A perfectly conceited nerd. What spoils it is his hair in bangs. Nothing that a truck tire in the head won't fix ...   Medusa getting capillary nutrition treatment. The party's over and I've got the bill. I'd like to be poor for a day. Just to know what it's like.                     I'd rather die not knowing. If the princess won't come to the prince ...                                 The prince will go to the princess. With kissing it costs more.   Two solitudes: Feel free to sexually molest. Numa Perrier (at the right) has been praised here before. Now it's makeup & plucked eyebrows, hair done up (or a wig-hat) ... and yet the qualities mentioned before - resourceful, self-possessed, strong, substantial, admirable, gorgeous - shine through all that. This illustration to the right was in The Guardian on some article about labour unions. No idea what he is trying to get at. According to the glyphs, the red things are vibrating? Shaking? Or something? So. There it is. What about spacious gracious moment?   My friend Keith introduced me to Erik Satie saying his music sometimes creates an open space, free. We were in Newfoundland at the time, late 60s, and imagined an equivalent architectural space - it was still largely unrestricted by building codes there then. All safely shut & buttoned up now, such notions. And yet at times certain music opens me upon spacious internal landscapes - Arvo Pärt & Simon Jeffes as noted here recently; Erik Satie, Bela Bartok, J.S. Bach himself - though just for the duration and a few moments of echoing reverberation, diminishing. The 'gracious' is just stuck on - comes from my father's Southern roots which I put on like airs. One'a these days an' it won't be long, goin' down in the valley and sing my song. Gonna sing it loud, sing it strong and let the echo decide if I was right or wrong. (Silvio, Down in the Groove, 1988.)   There it is.    And I'm not hearin' any echo.   That's funny ... on that same album is 'Ninety Miles An Hour down A Dead End Street' so I listened. It's a love story but the verse: Warn-ing signs are a'flashing everywhere but we pay no heed; 'stead of slowin' down the pace we keep a-pickin' up speed. Disaster's getting closer every time we meet. Goin' ninety miles an hour down a dead end street. comes across to me as humanity (not) facing the environmental apocalypse as it unfolds. Not exactly an echo ... but ... better than a kick in the head.   :-)   Bob says "It's too late to listen to that warnin' voice," BUT as I have recently been reminded (by none other than Jim Hansen - in an email directly and personally to your's truly) IT IS NOT TOO LATE! (very handy on it but not quite). More to come on this soon, when I have carefully read a few 'scholarly articles' pointed out to me by Mr. Hansen, viz.: 1) Assessing "Dangerous Climate Change": Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature, James Hansen et al., PLoS ONE, December 3 2013.   2) 'A2009' Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne, Myles R. Allen et al., Nature, 30 April 2009.   3) 'M2009' Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C, Malte Meinshausen et al., Nature, 30 April 2009.

 


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