Dead grandfathers, Norse gods, and Hammering

Things in my reality are going quite well lately. We mourned our dead and celebrated our ancestors over the weekend. It was very good for us (meaning my wife and I) on a symbolic level; it triggered a really good release that was timely. I found myself thinking quite a bit of my maternal grandfather. I never met him; he died when my mother was 12. But in many ways, what he represents in terms of spirituality has been resonating with me; he was a Mason, representing a spiritual and metaphysical departure from the Catholicism of my family, and I owe my Norse heritage to him. It almost feels as if he has somehow been speaking to me these past few weeks. My grandfather had a Masonic ring given to him by my grandmother (who I knew well, she just died a few years ago), and recently my mother passed his old Masonic ring down to me. Funny how the ring fits perfectly on my right ring finger.

Indeed, my fascination with the Norse Old Ones continues; my happy local booksellers (consider this an official plug — cheaper and better mailorder service than amazon) supplied me with both the (Elder) Poetic Edda and the (Younger) Prose Edda for study. I’ve been reading several other texts on the matter; the thing about the Norse mythos is that pretty much any summary is going to be summarizing the Edda, which is The Original Text that nearly all our knowledge of Norse mythology comes from. It is certainly the earliest known reference to the stories of Odin and his clan. So the scholar in me will always prefer to go back to the original, primary texts; the fact that the Edda was written in relatively simple, plain language, with a good translation, make it a pleasure to read.

My exercise/diet regimen is continuing well; I’m noticeably smaller and fitter than I’ve ever been as an adult. Though last week I slacked a bit as I wasn’t feeling great, this week should see a return to my normal regimen, with new vigor since I picked up a 16 pound sledgehammer 2 weeks ago (I’d been using a 10 pounder with a 3 pound ankle weight wrapped around it). I’m working now, and quite tired from the weekend, but once I rest up tonight I expect to get back to my exercise regimen with a bit more vigor. I really enjoy hammering, the fact that it has spiritual resonance for me is only a bonus.

more tweaks

I’ve made a few more tweaks to this site. IE seems to still be quite unstable with how it renders this site, it still crashes occasionally, mostly when I scroll over the title of this site at the top. Also, the color of the text in the title is not quite right. I may mess with it some more today to try to fix that error. But then again, why should I go out of my way to adapt to a broken browser?

The background image for the quotes still does not render correctly, this is probably because it is a transparent .png image, and if I remember correctly IE doesn’t render those correctly. Stupid.

Aluminum Foil hats

This is funny. For those uninitiated with the culture of conspiracy theory/paranoia, the idea is that there the “Evil Geniuses are building Orbital Mind Control Lasers …aimed at you!”

Since then, the idea of Tin Foil Hats (TFH) as an effective means of protection against such diabolical technology usage have become something of an urban legend, especially in Internet culture and the subculture of conspiracy theorists.

Anyway, an old friend recently pointed me to a recent (only partially tongue-in-cheek) study at MIT called On the Effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study. It’s quite funny, and worth the read, especially since the study concludes that

The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ”radio location” (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

So any paranoiac who reads this will only become more paranoid, and one favorite protection device only exacerbates the paranoia. Brilliant!

Only at MIT….

a Freakwitchery clean slate

so last night I wiped the studio hard drive clean. It’s amazing how quickly you can fill up a 140GB hard drive, when you record 8 tracks of 24-bit audio, several hours at a time.

We’d been recording our rehearsals, the fruit of which is our new demo (also available in ogg format). So I backed up the relatively small amount of data we needed to save, and now we have a nice, clean, defragged hard drive upon which to record our album, now that the band is approaching Tight(tm).

Despite the fact that we now have a clean slate, we are closer than ever to getting the album done. Album recording can be done one of two ways: first, have a tight band, and capture a performance; second, build the album a track at a time by overdubbing. Because we never had a tight band, we were forced to use the latter method, with mixed results and sloooooow progress. But now that we have a tight band, the first method is a possibility, and will be far superior for our style of music.

We’re also starting to actively seek gigs, for the first time in a long time. Wish us luck!

“armed only with our sense of human degradation, we came together”

I was lucky enough to see Utah Phillips tonight, he was at the Lewiston-Auburn branch of USM. Utah is part historian, part storyteller, part folksinger, part anarchist, part peace activist, part wobbly organizer, part elder; in short, Utah is the modern-day embodiment of the bard.

He is, by his own admission, Socratic in his methodology through-and-through, as he puts it, “I love books, but I keep them in their proper place.” He’s more about storytelling and listeners than the written word. My first exposure to Utah was through a collaboration with Ani DiFranco called The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, which still ranks among my favorite albums of all time. I remember my daughter, barely old enough to speak, walking around the house singing “you’ve got to mess with people, day and night, you’ve got to mess with people”; one of my favorite nuggets of wisdom from Utah.

It is also from Utah that I learned to think about politics from two perspectives: top-down and bottom-up. The top-down perspective is the dominant one in our culture, and is hugely depressing for those of us who pay attention. How can one be optimistic about the state of power politics, empire-building, and militarism/nationalism dominant in the US?

But from a bottom-up perspective, we are surrounded by optimism, hope, and goodwill. People come together despite differences, live and learn together, form communities, and all that other goodwill-hippie stuff.

So tonight, there was a small room, with perhaps 75-100 people listening to his stories. There were several nuggets there — including a beautiful moment where he pretty much voiced an opinion I’ve held for a long time, the essence of which is that most Christians aren’t very Christian — that caused probably a dozen people to get up and walk out of the room. Heh.

But the one quote that resonated most strongly with me is in the title of this entry. And it got me thinking about my pessimism regarding people coming together in our divided society. The problem is, Americans are by and large still far too comfortable in their ignorant, wageslaving existence to think about alternatives. But as things continue to worsen — and I don’t feel I’m pessimistic to believe that Things(tm) will continue to get worse before they get better — more and more people will share in this sense of human degradation, providing a powerful motivation to come together and organize, to move from a state of passive acceptance to direct action, which for Utah is the only way to make a difference in bottom-up politics.

So when Things(tm) get bad, they in a sense will really only start to get good, because that will be the switch when people finally are able to let go of the paradigm of dominance, of exploitation, of competition, of systematic violence and oppression, and of nationalism, and will finally be able to embrace cooperation, and community, and justice, and equality. So without attachment to the current dominant paradigm, one can very much have hope for a better future when the paradigm crashes and burns. I just hope that there are enough of us who survive this crashing and burning.

So yeah. Due to various health problems, Utah isn’t travelling as much as he used to, but if you ever get a chance to see him for yourself, I highly recommend it.

Fighting the Good Fight

I remember being surprised at how little we in the states heard about the US assault on Fallujah last year. Well, new stories are finally coming out about that assault:

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

So add white phosphorus to the horrid weapons historically used by the US military, joining napalm, nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, and who knows what else.

What is so horrible about white phosphorus?

“Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone … I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for.”

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: “A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact.”

The US government admits that it used phosphorus, but it claims it only used it “for illumination purposes.” Uh-huh. And now the BuShites are advocating torture, trying to set a precedent for treating detainees and/or prisoners, yet their policies are already causing unimaginable pain to their victims, without regard to the political consequences of such brutality.

And now people wonder why Bush’s approval rating is so low.

unrest in France

Like many, I’ve been hearing a lot about the riots in France, but I wasn’t sure what the riots were about. And I have had neither the time nor the inclination to investigate, until today.

There are several things one must understand about this. First of all, France has the highest Muslim population (about 5 million) in Europe. Secondly, much of this population, who are largely derived from centuries of French colonialism in North Africa, exists in poverty:

The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many immigrants and their French-born children live on society’s margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts.

In case there was any doubt about “Muslim extremists” (nee “Terrorists”), it is important to note the following:

France’s biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that forbade all those “who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.”

So it seems that much of the unrest comes from the horrible poverty, unemployment, and racism that exists in France, that has existed for a long time. To put this in perspective, the largely Muslim areas where the rioting is mostly happening have a much higher unemployment rate than the rest of France, nearly 40%, compared to the national average in France of 10%.

It is also important to note that the rioting is not new:

… riots like those going on right now have been going on for years, on and off, in towns and suburbs far outside of Paris, led by disaffected children of immigrants, black, Muslim or both, and for the usual reasons: high unemployment, nothing to do, resentment of racism. The difference this time is that the trashing and burning and assaults that have broken out over the past ten days in the northern suburbs of Paris are too close to ignore. What’s new is a desperate desire to make sense of these events.

So I’m not alone. These events are somewhat inexplicable; those in power are by definition those of privilege, and are not accustomed to systematic racism affecting their means of survival. So they don’t really know how to respond, except to protect their privilege (ie, their property) with overwhelming force, promising further violence and punishment for rioters. Yeah, that’ll help.

The violence seems to be spreading, for right now to Belgium and Germany. It will be interesting to see how the US government responds if/when unrest of this sort comes to the US.

Internet Exploder

Well, I’m at work, where they only have Internet Exploder installed. Since this horrible excuse for a browser still commands overwhelming market share, I was eager to see how the new design looks from this browser.

Grade: F

It doesn’t render the site correctly, because IE does not adhere to web standards in terms of how it renders HTML and CSS. For those of you who don’t know what this means, basically IE doesn’t render web pages correctly. It’s a problem because so many people use IE, that they think this broken, ill-conceived piece of “innovation” (ha, ha) is actually correct.

Furthermore — and I absolutely LOVE this — this little ol’ web page seems to crash IE. Of course I’ve had no problems whatsoever with Firefox, further testament to the power of Free software over proprietary software.

I think I’ll keep this page as is. If you’re using IE, you should stop. This page is proof of why. Get a better alternative.