Where is my left foot?

Day after day after day…

Daughter is running for President of Student Council

We think she has a very good shot at it.

It seems in my mind to have been a long time since I posted any photos of the kids. Here’s our two girrls, Adele…and Henry! (Henry’s locks, eyes and lashes have consigned him to the other sex when in the presence of the inattentive or elderly).

Full moon at sunrise:

I have been spending some time looking at historical aerial photos of South Florida, to coincide with my reading (and now completion) of “A Prehistory of South Florida”. I noticed that it seemed like Hollywood was very near to the 26th parallel north, so I opened Google Earth to look and see. To my surprise I discovered that 26°N, exactly, runs through the back yard of the people across the alley. We are at 25 degrees, 59 minutes, 58.2 seconds (the house with the pin next to it). The recently updated Google Earth images seem to have been taken in the Winter of 2006, as I can see evidence of my planting, but not too much, and the shadows indicate the sun is in the southern sky:

I also discovered a visual record of our house being built, from above:

1949. Dead center of the image, no house. Our two neighbors to the east are built, though.

1952. Dead center of the image, house! Construction debris is visible in the back yard. I find it when I dig.

The 1957 photo is not a good, but I can see one new feature on the lot: the shed. It still stands today, and is put to good use.

I found “A Prehistory of South Florida” to be one of the most interesting books I’ve read in some time. It gives one an odd, in fact eerie sense to know that there was human habitation here for a long, long time before we arrived (perhaps as far back as 9,000 BP). The book also chronicles the arrival of the 4′9″ Ponce De Leon and the devastating consequences for the native Tequesta population over the following centuries, and the arrival of competing tribes pushed from the north.

Bluntly, the mistake of loading nuclear weapons on a combat aircraft in combat-ready position is simply not possible to make. Safeguards are far too stringent and far too many people would be involved. Particularly given that the mounting was in violation of policy that’s been in place without exception for almost 40 years.

This crossed my desk today. Check out the sign by the water:

Only this week have I learned to define inwardly and candidly two different sets of material.

1.) life stuff

2.) Centered Being

The upside is that I can say, for a time, “go away life stuff”. The downside, of course, is that it comes back.

My birthday, “Oh Yeah”, that was last Wednesday, my 43rd, on 5 September.

This is what I really meant:

This one was part of my vinyl album collection, when I had some vinyl albums, and I wondered why it never came out on CD. I checked from time to time to see if it had, and now it has (as of 2006! I hadn’t checked in a while). What I enjoyed so much about this record its the funky playfulness. It’s as complex as Hammer’s Mahavishnu Orchestra past would suggest, but Fernando Saunders, Steve Kindler, Tony Smith and David Earle Johnson, play with a lightness that suggests a real enjoyment of the material. The opener, “Magical Dog”, swings like a beast with a great, incredibly catchy melody, and sets the tone for the rest of the recording. The playing is at an incredibly high level, and never falls into the noodle bowl. The title track is a four-on-the-floor rave-up with a strange little coda, and “Evolove”, despite the suspicious title, kicks like a lost mid-tempo Mahavishnu track, and Bambu Forest echoes the MO’s flavor of dramatic melodicism.

There are a couple of vocal tracks, the first, “One To One” a go’er, the second, “Let The Children Grow” perhaps less so, of its time, with some nods to Stevie Wonder.

The closer “Red And Orange” opens with some 32-note classicism before mutating into an altogether different beast with some trading of lighting-fast solos between Kindler and Hammer, and closes with some Crimson-esque chordal hits under the final melody.

Guilty pleasure? Yes. Worth it? without a doubt.

“Mind or thought is not yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind (it is in that sense mind is a myth). There is only mind, the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing.”

But first…

From Get Your War On

From Wikipedia: On March 22, 2007, U.G. Krishanmurti passed away at Vallecrossia in Italy. He had slipped and injured himself and was bedridden for seven weeks before his death. Friends of U.G., including film-maker Mahesh Bhatt and Larry and Susan Morris, were by his side when he died.

According to his friend AP Frank Noronha, U.G. asked that no rituals or funeral rites be conducted; also, he did not leave instructions on how to dispose of his body. U.G.’s body was cremated by Mahesh Bhatt.

“Nobody has given me the mandate to save you people or save the world. The human species should be wiped out for what it has done to every other species on this planet! It has no place on this planet. If I am sure of one thing, it is that. If it were not for your destructive weapons, you would have been wiped out a long time ago. And you are going to be wiped out, because now others have the means to wipe you out. But you are not going to go gracefully without taking every form of life on this planet with you.”