Category: Uncategorized

Apparently, a giant ice shelf has snapped loose in the Arctic:

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said.

The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada’s remote north.

Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.

“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead,” Vincent said today.

In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said.

The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up tremors from it.

The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 66 square kilometres in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada’s Arctic.

Atually, my favorite quote in the entire article is “the remaining ice shelves are 90 per cent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906.” Boggles the mind.

Yet more signs….

So tonight I did two things: first, I fixed the laptop power cable (not a complete fix, more like get some more life out of it for a while… but I’m confident I can solder it for a complete fix, after a quick trip to radio shack).

Second, I launched the new freakwitch.net tonight, so I’ve been hacking WordPress a bit.

Also, the EP is finished, so go check it out. You can get it from the website above, or go to our MySpace page.

I can feel things shifting again….

OK, I haven’t been writing much. Or reading, unless you count musical engineering forums, magazines, and books.

I have had my reality so focused on music recording as of late that my writing and research has come to a virtual standstill. I haven’t updated my notebook in almost two months. This blog has only seen 5 entries since around then, too.

My laptop is having a power supply problem. I need a new power cord (which is ridiculously expensive), and my OS install is over a year old. I’m running Firefox 1.0.7 (2.0 just came out).

I can see a shift in my Virtual Reality coming. Fix the laptop, install a new OS. Switch this site over the really amazing WordPress software.

In my abundant free time, of course.

Well, I had some minor dental surgery today. And as I told a friend, a day including dental surgery is not likely to be included in your best days. Everything went fine, thanks for asking.

Last night, I told another friend that “I can’t wait to laugh sardonically at the euphoria that will sweep (sleep?) the land when the Dems regain Congress….” Turns out to be true. The Democrats regained the house, have a majority of Governorships, and are presently up 50-49 in the Senate, with only the outcome in Virginia left to decide the balance.

And to top it off, Donald Rumsfeld “resigned.”

Whee. Cue the chorus of midgets singing “Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead!”

The most interesting statistic on cnn.com’s front page, when counting the number of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in Congress, was that there are ZERO independents on the list. This reminds me of when Nader ran in 2000, and I was convinced that there wasn’t a difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Turns out that’s not the case. My view back then was not nuanced enough.

I am now convinced that my mistake was in terms of how each party serves the power structure, which generally I prefer to call Empire. I saw clearly that both parties serve Empire as their prime function, and mistook this fact for a complete equivalency among the two parties. That’s what my mistake was.

But the difference between them is in how they serve Empire. And in general, I know believe that the function of the Republican is to push the bar of Empire, to seize, consolidate, and concentrate as much power as possible while they are in power. Then, the function of the Democrats is to maintain those newly-drawn lines of power for Empire, helping to normalize them and assimilate them into popular consciousness.

So time will tell. In the coming months, we’re going to hear a lot about “partisanism” and “party politics”… and while in general I prefer a government doing nothing because it is in a state of gridlock to the behavior of the BuShites over the past 60 years, I seriously doubt that all of a sudden the US government will become committed to ending its global waging of low-intensity warfare, its commitment to torture, its blatant servitude to corporatism, and its general disregard for the poor of the world.

I need to stop typing, I can feel the novocaine starting to wear off….

BoingBoing pointed to Media on ‘Second Attention’ today, a place where there are lots of audio/video files from people like Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, etc.

Their server is being hammered right now because of the link from BoingBoing, so I wanted to mark this for the future. Definitely want to check some of these out….

OK, this is what I would call bad magic:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A Dutch woman, who had meticulously planned her own funeral after the death of her husband last year, died next to the grave in Amsterdam where she wanted to be buried, a newspaper reported.

The 65-year-old widow probably died of a heart attack while she was visiting the family grave where her name, but no date, was already inscribed, De Telegraaf daily reported Wednesday.

The woman was carrying a bag with her containing her will when she died and had already organized details of her funeral including the music she wanted played, the paper said.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the notion of “bad magic” as an extension of Sartre’s existentialist notion of “bad faith,” as applied to a modern pagan.

Bad faith, in short, is “a philosophical concept first coined by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon wherein one denies one’s total freedom, instead choosing to behave as an inert object.”

Similarly, bad magic is where one denies one’s ability to create one’s reality, and acts as if one’s actions have no bearing on what happens.

So for this woman, to have obsessed over the details of her death arrangements, brought about (on a metaphysical level… I’m not talking about scientific cause/effect here) her own death under those circumstances.

Another way to put it: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

Scott Adams, the creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, has his voice back.

To explain:

As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis….

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

This is very cool, obviously on a personal level for Adams, but also it is very philosophically interesting to me.

One of my favorite philosophers, Suzanne Langer, theorized that the mind — more specifically, human consciousness (as differentiated from non-intellectual animal consciousness) — evolved because of rhythm. The repetitive patterns that we feel in rhythm (think drumming) tend to jumpstart our brain to higher levels of consciousness.

Sounds about right to me….

I haven’t updated in a while. This seems to be a recurring theme on this blog lately. And that’s fine; this blog is what it is and my writing attention has been elsewhere both on my Everyday Systems log and in my other writing projects.

I’ve been to the top of 3 different mountains in the past couple-three weeks; first I took my sister, my niece, and my daughter to the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is one of my absolute favorite views in the entire world. It was a beautiful day, and the drive to the top of the mountain was uneventful.

Then later in the week, I took my daughter and a friend of hers to the much smaller and less-spectacularly-located Bradbury Mountain in Pownal, Maine, about a half-hour drive from Portland. This one does require a climb to the top, and while I was huffing and puffing to the top, it wasn’t what I would call overly strenuous. It was fun, though.

Earlier this week, I went camping with my daughter to Camden Hills State Park; we had a wonderful time and saw a pretty spectacular full moon rise over Penobscot Bay from the top of Mount Battie. I learned that there are only 2 places on the entire Eastern seaboard where the mountains meet the sea in this way; Camden is one of them, the other is Mt Desert Island. And truly, these two views are amazing. While a much smaller mountain (800 feet high), the view from Mount Battie is equally spectacular, with the port town of Camden just below.

I think from now on when I am playing “tour guide” I will have to include a trip to the top of Mount Battie as well as Cadillac Mountain.

The moonrise on top of Mount Battie was especially poignant for my daughter and I, as earlier that day we had learned that a dear friend of ours who was 4 months pregnant had lost her baby. I wrote a poem about the experience, and I may post it here.

Apparently the Duluth city government are nothing more than UnAmuriCon Damnable Hippie Drug Abusing Terrorists, Every Last One Of Them, And They Should Be Sentenced To Years In Prison Because They Are Criminals, And Not Even Sick.

Or something.

Another possibility, of course, is that Duluth has a courageous and skillful prankster on its hands.

Either way, it proves the utter futility of outlawing certain plants.

… and for a variety of reasons. The sky in Maine is wondrous; a rich shade of deep blue on clear summer days, yet invitingly close at night (the moon and stars seem closer somehow); the beaches, sand and rocky, connect one with the salt-water blood of the earth in a compelling way; the mountains rise majestically from the pine forests; the people are generally friendly and laid back, and will cut you a lot of slack if you’re a freak like me.

But mostly, I think it’s the foul-smelling, raging evil mutant wolf-beasts from hell that make me feel so at home here.

Just sayin’.

EDIT: this story is still growing….