The Meaning of Life

When son Clay was in the fourth grade, one night we watched Montey Python's The Meaning of Life, a delightful film to my mind. It had a lot about sex in it - sex education, contraception, and so forth. On the way walking to school in Sebastopol the next morning, Clay asked a questio. "Is sex when a man puts his penis in a woman's vagina?" he asked. "That's defintiely one type of sex," I said. "I think of it as the number one type of sex." He nodded, and then with a dramatic sweeping gesture he said, "And that's the meaning of life!" 

Gary Snyder's Sutra

 Smokey the Bear Sutra

Dinner Conversation

Katrinka and I were having dinner at the beach at Genius in Sanur as the sun set and the August winds blew on us almost chilly but not. Two women at the next table, the next couch in the sand with a low table in front. One of them asked about what we were eating and we got talking. Prima Dita is from Java. She's worked with the Ubud Writer's Festival or something related. Katrinka mentioned that I've been involved with the Bali Unspoken Poetry Slam and then Prima said Oh that's where I know you from. That was neat. The other is Kasia from Poland. She is a psychologist who specializes in working with survivers of childhood violence and trauma. She has a website: kasiamay.com. The four of us talked a bunch. As soon as Prima said something about being Muslim I went, Oh good. I explained I said that cause her English is so good and, well, I'd love to have her as a guest for a podcast, told her she can talk about anything she wants but I especially want to hear what she has to say about Islam and being a Muslim woman. Actually, she's the 2nd woman I've enlisted today for such a purpose. Now Prima is on board to be a guest on a Life in Bali espisode on Cuke Audio Podcast, I suspect this coming Thursday, one with her in it will go up.  Looking forward to seeing how that goes. Here's the Cuke Audio Podcast page on cuke.com.

BAD TIMES IN BALI – AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

Today's guest in Cuke Audio's Life in Bali podcast is the man who told this story from Bhikkhu Moneya's BaliforTulsi website. This site will disappear soon and be transplanted in Cuke Annex with a disclaimer from me that "Opinions expressed herein are not necesariy those of managment. But that doesn't apply to this article. - dc 

Weird Body Stuff - Eye Color

 When I was young, my eye color was called hazel. They were a mixture of brown, grey, a little green and sometimes a bit of blue. The colors would change somewhat and the shirts I wore brought out different ones. As I got older every now and then I'd hear blue when I was wearing a blue shirt but hazel remained the official color. No one commented on them mucnn but I got lots of comments on my once long eyelashes from girls then women. When I returned to the US in 1992, after living in Japan for four years, I had to apply for a new driver's liscense. The clerk at the DMV looked at the form I'd filled out and compared it to prior info. He looked up at me and said with a bit of disbelief, "What? Did your eyes change color?" "Yep," I said. The blue had been creeping up for some years and it finally took over. "Really?" "Yep. It happens I've learned. Not a lot." "OK." And he passed me on to the next counter.

Postnote: Katrinka says I have aqua-marine eyes. Hmm.

Go Bill Gates!

 Breakthrough Energy - As I see it, Gates is not into trivia, uses his resources for the general good. He's a friend of the biosphere. - dc

Katrinka gets a Mask

Katrinka was in a farmacy and the woman in front of her, another bule, foreigner she didn't know, found she was short 20,000 rupiah, about a buck and a half. So Katrinka gave it to her. The woman wanted to know how to pay her back but Katrinka said, "What goes around comes around." Flash forward a month. Katrinka's walking to yoga when she realizes she's forgotten to wear a mask. Oh darn, have to go back home, she thought. Just then a voice called out. It was the woman Katrinka had given the 20,000 to riding by on a bicycle. She stopped and said hello and thank you and I can pay you back now. Katrinka told her not to worry about it, do someone else a favor, and added she had to walk back home to get a mask that she'd forgotten to wear. The woman said she happened to have an extra one on her. So Katrinka didn't have to walk back home to get a mask. That worked out nicely.

NASA Global Climate Change Page

 Vital signs of the planet

Indonesia's Awful Response to Covid-19

 Al Jazeera - Meanwhile Bali seems to be doing much better than the other main islands - though mainly we just hear about Java.

California Wildfires

 CNN page for the California Wildfires

Dancing Plant

Back in 1987, Elin Schweickart who later became Chadwick and I were sitting in a little room off the kitchen by the back stairs of an old wood San Francisco apartment building near the SFZC's City Center. We'd been looking at the stars from the landing on top of the back stairs and had gone back inside. We sat down in that small space to talk before joining our friends in the living room. A long tendral of a green leafy vine that had grown in through a a crack between boards in the outer wall caught our eye. The vine was moving in undulating sweeps from side to side. "Why is it moving," she asked. "Maybe a little breeze in here," I said. We looked for a source of a breeze. We'd shut the door to the back stairs and to the kitchen. The window ws shut. We felt the wall for a breeze. We could find none. Feel none. It continued to sway. We sat and watched it. It was pleasant. I found a thin piece of material in the trash can and held it up in the air. It hung motionless. We gave up, assuming some force in the plant from outside or something about the nature of plants or vines that we didn't understand was in play. Later I asked a botonist, an orchid grower, a gardener. No one had any explanation other than to suggest we were high.

Another World Record Temperature

 Highest reliable temperature ever recorded on earth at Furnace Creek, Death Valley, CA, USA - August 16, 2020

Loosing Tooth

The way I lost the front tooth that had the little stalactite tooth behind it is a sad story. It was such a nice big fat tooth. Right in front, an upper central incisor. Zen Center had purchased a home in Muir Beach next to Yvonne Rand's. It was a mess. I had the task of getting it all cleaned up. Took a few months. Just me there most the time. 1976 summer. I needed to pull a nail out of a 2 x 4 that was above my head. It was stubborn. I used both hands pulling with the claw of a framing hammer. Pulled so hard my feet left the ground and I was hanging in the air supported by the nail - till it came out like an explosion driving the hammer into my mouth. Darn. Lost a tooth. That was dumb. Got a nice new one from a dentist in San Francisco. Driving back to Muir Beach picked up a hitch hiker who, serendipitously, was also coming from getting new teeth. He'd lost his entire upper front row as the teacher in a weightlifting class. He was on his back pressing up a bar loaded with big round iron weights on each side when a car crash sounded outside the window. His students ran to the window to see what had happened. He couldn't hold that much weight up long and couldn't vocalize loud enough to be heard so he was forced to slowly lower the bar and found he couldn't avoid it coming down on those teeth. He got four new ones.  

Dealing with a Spammer

 I guess Gregory sent me this is response to my posting the telemarketer prank by Tom Mabe a couple of days ago. Anyway, it's a nice diversion. James Veitch on Replying to Spam emails.

Weird Body stuff

 I have inner teeth. Or I used to have inner teeth. I've lost one so now I have inner tooth. It's not really another tooth, more like a little toothy like protrusion on the back of one of my teeth. The one I lost was the prize and I miss it still. I could get my fingernail between it and the main tooth and make a clicking noise. I did tend to play with it with my tongue so maybe loosing it improved my uninterupted concentration during meditation. They were my little stalactites. Now there's just the wee one. How I lost it. Oh, the pain of memory. Maybe I'll tell that tomorrow. Now I gotta run. - dc

Tom Mabe makes Internet History

With this phone conversation from long ago.

 How to deal with a Telemarketer by Tom Mabe - YouTube

More heating up toward the poles

Climate change: Warming world will be 'devastating' for frozen peatlands -  from BBC

Canada looses last fully intact ice shelf

An area larger than Manhattan

Unusual Phenomenae

A friend of mine had an electric girlfriend. He said when they made love she'd shock him, especially as things got hot and heavy with a strong long zap at climax. He said her father's electric typwriter would act up if she was near and that her condition was a problem for the family because light bulbs kept breaking if she was near them - at times, not all the time. As she got older it went away.

Greens and

Sent, via trusty Nyoman on his motorbike, a family we're friends with a kilo of our Mighty Muesli because we know they like muesli. They returned with him some greens and fruit from their garden. The fruit was round and yellow - about the size of snooker balls. We didn't know what it was. Kadek housekeeper said it's markisa - passion fruit. Neat. The greens looked like chard which I hadn't seen here. Wrote Eliot, the dad in the family. He wrote back that it's called sawi. Then I wrote back: Sawi translates with Google as mustard greens. Nah - chard. I used to sell chard, mustard greens, collard greens, turnip greens at the SF Zen Center's Green Gulch (our farm) Green Grocer in SF. They were big with us mostly white folks, Chinese and blacks. Anyway, we ate the markisa with passion and the sawi with eggs and toast for breakfast. We only have that type of breakfast about once a week. Usually we each eat when we feel like it except for dinner and then it's more muesli and yogurt and fruit for breakfast. I remember Reski said she used to make yogurt till the milk got too processed. Too bad. We used to make yogurt by the gallon. I bet you're up late. I'm up early. [It was 2am]

Global Lockdown Impact on Climate Change

Negligible - BBC - which gives a hint at the enormity of the problem and what we'd have to do to turn it around.

Weird Body Stuff II

I have feet that will crunch. Or I used to. I haven't done it in years. Forgot about it. But I could move my toes up and down, clinching my feet like one does with their hands. Opening, closing, opening closing. Except with the feet, it can only go so far each way. I'd get that going pretty fast and it would start making crunching sounds. Felt sort of neat. I'd spoke people with it in high school. Nobody else could do it.  I would imagine that there are plenty of people who could do it but maybe few discover it or maybe I've just never met someone who could do it in the limited amount of time it became a topic of conversation, But I've only met one person who reported the same thing. And that was years later when I happened to mention it. My sister.

Glitch

Today's post didn't upload due to user error. Appropriate measures have been taken to asure that this problem does not happen again today.

The Harpers Letter about cancelling Cancel Culture

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

Good News

How Red Sea 'supercorals' are resisting the climate crisis

Gatherin

Gatherin - A little song I sent to Katrinka recently for her and her son and fambly to hear. She's back now.