Mr. Gaia Remembered

James Lovelock talks about his Gaia hypothesis and climate change in 2014 interview – video - Guardian

Gempa

 That's Indonesian for earthquake. Katrinka and I felt it but Kadek didn't. Katrinka was downstairs I was up just falling into a cat nap when BAM! and bam, a big bam followed by a little one. No shaking no aftershocks no follow-up. Should we run outside? No I want a nap. Later downstairs we talked. I knew it was too much to be a big truck on our gang delivering something massive and going over a  bump. Kadek was on a couch in the living room folding dry and ironed clothes. She hadn't noticed. There are so many sounds and it was so quick it was understandable. About an hour had passed. I wrote "earthquake bali" and one of the scientific sites with immediate reporting came up. 

Strongest quake today: Mag. 3.7 | Bali Sea, 14 km SE of Denpasar, Provinsi Bali, Indonesia - 54 minutes ago

Environmental PR Victory

 For the bad guys

Not So Quick

 Fighting the Climate Doomers (like me)

1000 legs all over Bali

Sara said her place was getting to be full of centipedes every morning when she got up. They're not centipedes Sara, they're millipedes. Centipedes are poisonous. Millipedes aren't. There may be exceptions I suppose. This was a big year for the little millipedes. They were all over - in the garden, on the walks, crawling under doors. This brand tended to be short, slow, seemingly always on the move to whatever was in front of them. Indonesian for centipede is lipan. For millepede it's seribu kaki, a thousand legs. Centipedes They're segmented with two legs per segment. They can have them in the tens or hundreds depending on what type but they always have an odd number of segments so they can't have 1000 feet. There are some with more but they're rare. The type we have here roll up into a circle if bothered. They're sometimes called pill millepedes. I still find an occasional one moving slowly across the floor and when I do I get the dust pan and brush to give them a nice ride to the outside. If I accidentally step on one I hear it crack and crunch. Sorry Kim says one year they were so many that the streets were getting covered in their crushed carcasses. 

Ant Antics

The tiny tiny ant. They come in so many sizes. I saw ants in Malaysia that were like half an inch long - while walking in zori in approaching darkness. We've got a few sizes here in our home, all pretty small, almost always black which never seem to bite. I do feel little stings sometimes walking barefoot and I think maybe that's an ant I'd stepped on that I didn't see. There was just one on the book I was reading that is as tiny as I've ever seen. It was like a 64th of an inch maybe. I blow ants off my computer screen and books. Don't worry about them. So I blew on this one. Wow. It's still there. So I blew harder. Still there. No matter how hard I blew, it just kept walking. So I banged the book on the table. Still there. I banged hard. I realized I had to brush it off but it was so small I was afraid to hurt it. I'm not afraid to hurt them by brushing them off onto the floor as I wouldn't off a high cliff. It went into the binding and I couldn't find it. It seemed to me to be greatly more tenacious than its larger cousins. At first I said to it, "You must be the strongest thing on earth," surely an exaggeration, but one it had earned.  But then I thought it might hang in there not with its strength as much as its design or composition. The little cacak lizards that populate and bless our home I guess have suction feet because they walk on the ceiling as easy as the floor, and much more safely. Maybe the antlet has suction feet or barbed feet that hooked into the paper. Maybe they're aerodynamically built so that wind whips around them with minimal interference. I'm sure there are ant experts who could clarify all this but I don't think it's likely I'll get that far. For now I'll just marvel.  

Anniversary Report

For our seventh wedding anniversary (after 18 blissful years together) we decided to go to a snazzy hotel on the Sanur beach called Andaz which is part of the posh Bali Hyatt. The plan was to walk down the beachwalk to there later in the morning, about half an hour. We'd pay for a day pass, an exorbitant amount, 300,000 rupiah each, about $21 dollars US. Food and drink to be deducted from that. They have a great long pool by the beach, beautiful gardens. We planned to read, swim, relax with no laptops. When we arrived I could see only one person in the pool. Perfect for laps. But then we learned that now that Bali's opened up, they have full occupancy and have canceled the day pass program. On the way we'd passed a couple of musicians performing for the lunch crowd at the Bali Hyatt - Jimmy who's a classical guitarist and Agung with a mellow voice. We'd stood and listened to them do Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely? So we decided to go back there and have lunch and listen to them. But lunch was a ridiculously expensive at 380,000 each buffet and we don't eat enough for a buffet anyway. So we walked back toward home on the beachwalk and stopped at Lila Pantai which is always good. We ordered kelapa muda which means young coconut which really means coconut water from the young ones. The young ones have slimy meat and the old ones have hard meat which is what you almost always get in the US. But before it arrived Katrinka gasped and remembered she hadn't turned the burner heating her soup stock off so she trotted a couple hundred yards back to the street to get a taxi. I sat and read an interview with Richard Baker for an in-house book on the creation of Dharma Sangha. I had Lila's special salad Katrnka had a seafood brochette and we shared, took our time, gazing out at the outriggers and gentle waves. A nice walk home followed by a nap. Our iPhone health apps said we'd walked over 7000 steps. A good anniversary day. 

Happy Wedding Anniversary

 to Katrinka!

7 years of marital bliss

18 Years together

Looking forward to more of this.

Love,

David

Unique Cheap Energy Storage

A Sand Battery 

Priests here and there

 Sometimes conversation here with locals here in Bali leads to explaining some of the differences between Buddhism from Myanmar and the Buddhism I'm used to. I can say that our tradition is more like the Chinese Buddhism and the Hinduism here in that the priests' get married and are also laymen. I's say lay people but there aren't any female Chinese Buddhist or Hindu priests that I know of here.

IMHO

 This is by far the worst news coming out of the good ole USA recently:

Supremes EPA decision - Trevor Noah - Bloomberg - ETC ETC