Rainbow Kitten Surprise!
Roy Scarbrough
Hyperphantasia. That's a new word I learned today, and it's about me and the 3 percent of the population who seem to have it. I thought everyone was like that. It's kind of fun, actually. Except it limits some bandwidth in other areas. So I am always loosing things: keys, reading glasses, wallets, etc.
E. Writer I can't even imagine (no pun intended) what that is even like.
Roy Scarbrough
I'm reminded of proust's In Search of Lost Time. He must've had it. There's a sense that one is unstuck in time. It's not a bad feeling.
In the article Eugenio has linked here says one does not have to close one's eyes to see the past. True. Someone will be talking to me, and I will be pretending to listen, but I'm somewhere in the distant past, triggered by some word from the conversation I was just then listening to.
Eugenio Cappuccio Have you tried a madeleine with your tea?
Roy Scarbrough I've dunk doughnuts in tea. The little ones covered in powder sugar remind me of my childhood.
Speaking of philosophy, the Epicureans didn't have a chance once the Church and State merged as one.
Epicurus founded his Garden School in Athens around 306 BCE. Unlike the more civic-minded Aristotle’s Lyceum or Plato’s Academy, the Garden was:
socially mixed (women and enslaved people admitted), commune bases, withdrew from politics,, materialist in cosmology, and focused on tranquility and freedom from fear).
It taught, gods do not intervene in human affairs, soul dies with the body,
Death is nothing to us
It didn't have a chance in the long term because it undermined state religion and authority
Nevertheless it had a good run from fourth century BC so the second century AD. Made it to the Roman period.
By the 1st–2nd centuries CE, Epicureanism still had: endowments, scholarchships, teaching communities, private libraries. The Garden at Athens itself likely lasted into the 2nd century CE.
In In 176 CE, Marcus Aurelius marginalized epicurianism by endowed chairs in Athens for other philosophies. but not epicurianism, priviledging instead Platonism, Aristotelism, Stoism and skepticism.
By the fourth century the church supressed epicureanism, seizing endowments, confiscating property, dispersing private libraries, shutting down teaching spaces.
E. Writer
When you consider the implications of religious order on philosophy and science, it likely delayed human technological and scientific advancement by a few hundred years. Religion demands belief in only one system, irrespective of facts, and truth.
If a philosophical or scientific narrative ran counter to that system or doctrine of religious beliefs, then that narrative was eliminated, and often on the pain of death. There have been philosophers who have died refusing to recant a philosophical or scientific belief because it had been denounced by the dominant religion of that time as heresy. Giordano Bruno was one such philosopher and the first to theorize that distant stars were suns and that the universe was full of "other worlds." He was the first to state that perhaps Earth was not the center of the universe. He was burned alive for refusing to renounce this belief. Galileo spent the rest of his life on house arrest.
Roy Scarbrough Burned alive with a nail driven through his lips and tongue to prevent him to speak "blasphemy" to the crowd gathered a rome's Piaza dei Fiori.
E. Writer Oh that is awful. Human cruelty truly had no bounds.
Roy Scarbrough They did hang a packet of gun powder around his neck so that he would die by explosion not too long after the flames started burning him.
E. Writer That is so evil. And even then he refused to recant his views. There was plenty of heresy going around at that time. I wonder why he was treated so viciously.
To bake a cake with AI. One the first things to fall under the bad spell of internet enshittifiction were recipes. So full of ads. So full of inane text before you get to the most important parts: list of ingredients and cooking time. Once you got that, the recipe would call for weird hard-to-get ingredients. What you could get from these is different ways to customize the thing, or even an easy way to change the size.
So I go on Chatgpt and just ask it, can I please have an ingredient list for a two-layer dark chocolate birthday cake with topped with a raspberry glaze.
And then just like that, Bingo it's there.
And then we have a conversation about adding coffee to the batter and frosting to darken the chocolate. This sort of stunned me as I was already of thinking to do this and had thought it was my original idea.
It suggested something called, "espresso powder" I TBS. I never heard of the thing and where would I find that. It then tells me to look for it in the store where they have the baking powder.
I ask it I can just grind some coffee beans really fine.
It says, no. The ground coffee won't dissolve and will be gritty.
I say, can I just ad some instant coffee.
It says, "Yes, absolutely" and tells me how much.
And it is says, "If you like you can substitute a cup some strong brewed coffee" for a cup of the water.
I say I have an esspresso machine, Can I use that?
It says. Perfect! Brew four shots of espresso and ad that to wthe water
See, there is back-and-forth conversation, which goes on in a most entertaining way with different methods of mixing and blending and baking.
It reminds me to not forget the birthday candles. Cute.
E. Writer I agree all of those recipe sites are laden with ads I've never even thought to ask a for the ingredients. I am always looking for dairy free and gluten-free recipes and I always meet with a bunch of ads that I don't trust not to download something to my computer or phone.
Roy Scarbrough If you tell it that's what you want, it will amend the recipe for that. Ain't that awesome? There's so much crap on those recipe sites that they slow down my computer.
bb santx Gotta love digital Gramdma!
I can't watch the figure skating. It's beautiful, but I cant stand to see them fall. And then, they replay the damn fall. I feel so bad for them.
Alex Morton I know, but with all the baseless anti-Canadian rhetoric and downright lies spewing out of the White House I'm feeling very protective of my country and countrymen.
E. Writer How are the hockey winners decided?
Alex Morton The US team won fair and square in the tournament. This was the first time that the Canadian women's team has lost to the US.
E. Writer I can see that as shocking, especially since it is not a prominent sport here. I don't watch hockey so I wasn't sure how it worked.
Alex Morton I never watch sports except the Olympics and America's cup sailing. I've never been one to sit and watch "the game", whatever it is. Even as a kid, the only time I would watch a game was when my father would take me to a baseball game and that was always special. I've always liked participating in sports, rather than watching. And, even there, the sports have always been ones that challenged myself rather than against someone or something else. Fighting my way across the Strait of Georgia in a storm with just a scrap of sail up has always been far more interesting and exciting to me than any game I could have played or watched. I don't usually care about what a bunch of strangers are doing with a ball. I know that makes me weird, but I've always taken a bit of pride in my weirdness.
Is Blue Sky still a thing? I'm still off Facebook. They exiled me from my long curated community on Jan 13. Appeal ignored after I sent them good documentation of my identity. I had posted an obvious parody, which led the bots to think my account had been hacked by someone distributing false information. I know, I know, there is no recently discovered sequel to James Joyce's Ulysses. The bot didn't think my mimicking an AI review of a non existent literary work was funny at all.
Roy Scarbrough Than you. That's both reassuring and also a game plan.
Roy Scarbrough In the time I've been off facebook, a friend of mine was home suffering from GERD, and it was so bad that he was hospitalized, only to learn he has cancer. He let friends know on facebook, so not knowing, sent a note innocently asking, how are you. The note came back a 3 a.m. from his hospital bed. Cancer. Just the one word. Cancer, and he turned off notifications. He could not do more. Fuck Facebook.
E. Writer That is sad. My husband noticed that on his birthday he received fewer birthday wishes from lifelong friends, who have all historically over the past decade wished him happy birthday in big numbers on Facebook. It hurt his feelings when some of his closer friends didn't get on, with a few people wishing him a Happy Birthday days later. I reminded him that Facebook's algorithms are preventing us from seeing our own friends and what they post. I told him it was unlikely that they received a notification about his birthday because everyone is getting less engagement, so they're not getting on as much because their friends are not engaging them on Facebook anymore when in reality, we simply don't see each other's posts anymore because of the algorithms. I am sorry about your friend. I hope you have everyone's email, or at least someone's email so you can keep in touch outside of Facebook. GERD is terrible. I have it, and it sent me to the hospital a few times and gave me Paradoxical vocal cord dysfunction, which caused my vocal cords to snap shut at the wrong time, which felt like my air was being cut off. I would swerve my car, thinking I had stopped breathing.
Roy Scarbrough The algorithms are weird. I was getting ads from plumbers and roofers and realtors who live thousands of miles away.
E. Writer That's because facebooks ads show your book to everyone. Doesn't matter where they are located. That's why I run a lot of ads on facebook.
I've been contemplating famous friendships among men. The ones that lasted for decades, and how they went on walks together, how they made observation the lay of the land, nature and animals on how they comforted each other in times of greif.
In 1852 both emerson and thoreau suffered terrible losses. Henry lost his beloved john, not long ago after they returned from a camping and boating trip on the concord and merrimack rivers. Tetanus from a shaving cut. Emerson lost his dear six year old son, Waldo. Scarlet fever, a few years before Emerson lost the mother of the boy.
Thoreau moved into Emerson's house and live there for a year. There must have been many walks, and fireside chats. Henry began working on the memoir of his trip with his brother. In time, he would have drafts to edit and rewrite, on his table on Walden pond, a woodland Emerson owned.
E. Writer This is very true. People would also travel together or take a train across the country to stay with a friend for a few weeks. Your post reminds me of how renaissance writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Ralph Ellison all went to Paris to live during the 1948-1950s to escape racism and segregation. There, they wrote some of their greatest works while in Paris in this artistic bohemian counter-culture. Imagine, writers traveling together, having this shared and lived experience. There was a thriving artistic scene that they belonged to, that influenced their writings and they were quite famous there and a number of intellectuals traveling in their circle. Langston Hughes paved the way for them when he traveled to Paris in the 1920s to escape the U.S. Quincy Jones the musician traveled there in the 1957 to study composing under one of the greats, and returned to the U.S. to become one of the world's biggest music composers/writers/producers. A number of musicians from that era traveled across America working on music, and traveling. It was quite a time...
Roy Scarbrough Yes, Paris was an important place for that. Black WWI soldiers often returned, and stayed. Imagine how it must to have been for them to walk around paris and walk into any restaurant or bar they liked. It must have been exhilarating. Do you know if Zora Neal Hurston was there at the same time?
Roy Scarbrough Also on my list: Wordsworth and Coleridge; Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Auden and Louis MacNiece in Iceland.
E. Writer Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes spent time there in the 1920s. They were the first to go there as writers. The next generation of Harlem Renaissance writers like Baldwin, Wright, and Ellison went in the 1950s. They did not cross paths with Zora or Langston as far as I know. I imagine those were "the best of times" and the "worst of times" but the best of times to be a writer and an artist.
Alex Morton Quincy Jones was far from the only great jazz musician to head to Paris. The 1986 movie, Round Midnight, starring Dexter Gordon, was about that period. Dex was one of the greatest sax players and all the music in the film was done live and featured some of the world's best jazz musicians. ... Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon, Bobby Mc Ferrin, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Ron Carter, Billy Higgins, Tony Williams, Chet Baker, Lonnete McKee.. The movie was really based on the life of the musician, Bud Powell. Only in Paris could the great black jazz musicians find a comfortable home and an audience that truly appreciated them. This would have been in 1959-1964 when jazz audiences were on the wane in the US. Dex was actually one of the musicians who was there, along with Chet Baker, Donald Byrd and Kenny Clark. Here's the extraordinary soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4nVDKeVxok&list=PLHKC1i6dpteC6N_FdHlLuTWAiFgpP0U69
I hate football. "Hate" is a strong word, so I channel hate to football. My hate here is not even real. It's a performative role playing hate. Not so real, as it is directed toward something that has no real importance to me. I just wish baseball was still America's pastime, I would love it with beer and ball park franks in long bun for real if it has more presence. I like the flow of baseball. I like the circularity of play. The player scores when he throws down his helmet, dashes from "home", completes a circle and arrives "home." Sometimes is a homerun, a thrilling thing in a single continuous lap. Sometimes its an epic like journey from place to place, sometimes with clever deception and stealing. Only thing to stop him is the touch of a glove containing the magical round object. Nothing about baseball resembles combat. I despise football's gladitorial body and head armor, its brawling pushing, shoving, its tackling. No football has ever reached such heights that could land in the hands of spectators. I hate that football somehow marginalized baseball, maybe around 1968.
The Bad Bunny show was awesome. I watched that part on Youtube. The real haters are hating on that on social media today.
"Bad Bunny Goes to the Superbowl" would be a great show on Broadway.
Roy Scarbrough When I was a boy, there was a show on Saturday afternoons called ABC's Wide World of Sports. They had a lot of track and field and weird stuff like curling and water skiing jumbs, steeple chasing, so the variety made it interesting to me. As it came one, the annoucer would say "The thrill of victory! The agony of defeat!"
Steven Terry Of course, we all remember Mr. Agony of Defeat--and boy, if anybody ever looked defeated...!
Roy Scarbrough There's been a couple crybabies with the winter olympics. Jeeze, get a grip. Even it you didn't get the gold you got to play in the Olympics. If you can, be happy for the ones who got the medals.
Alex Morton We have a family friend who is in the Olympics. Lara was a friend of our granddaughters when her family lived here in Lions Bay. Her parents were determined to help her become an Olympic skier and moved to the Dolomites for her to get the best training. She represents South Africa (her mother's birthplace) in Alpine skiing just as she's turned 19. She didn't place very high but it was a thrill just to see her there. Not sure whether she'll compete again because she's on a track towards med school.
Roy Scarbrough
When I was but a lad, I met another American lad in london who was on the American olympic wrestling team and arrived weeks ahead of the games, We rode our newly purchased motorycles from London to Paris. While in paris, he got a call from his brother who wanted to meet him in Europe. So, he rode back to London to pick up his brother. We were going to meet up again in Pamplona at a designated time in the Plaza de Torros. He didn't make it there.
I presume he and his brother made it to the games. But then the games turned out to be a no go in Munich that year. 1972.
That was something worth crying about.
Upon the Avon at Stratford
There was no room at the Inn
at day's end of ride hitching
up from London, by the M1 motorway
aboard a Mini Cooper,
two Morris Minors, an MG
and a coal laden lorry.
"Before long, we'll all be speaking Frog"
croaked the driver of membership
in the the European Union
No room, no beds,
even for a card-carrying
member of AYHA
American Youth Hostel Association.
That was the night,
having found the city park gate locked
I threw my bag
over iron spikes
and slept among
Avon's swans, who still come to me
in midsummer night's dreams.
E. Writer This reads like a person on a cross-European trip. Very nice.
Roy Scarbrough I was!
One of the things I like to talk about is the Renaissances. Note Plural. While am only knowledgeable about the 13 and 14th Century European renaissance, I do no the impulse that created it resides in all Humanity. At different time and in different places, there was this impulse of one generation to draw upon a much earlier time in the culture to reconfigure arts and learning in their own times. It happened in Egypt, PreColubian Americas, China, Africa, etc.
With this mind, on the eve of the fluff corporate music Emmy awards, I'm digging on Jesse Welles, a youngish folk singer and guitar player whoes songs express the level of rage of the rage of the 1960s, and he dresses and grooms the part.
His music is an art form that is cultural and political, so that's all I will say about him here. Google Jesse Welles. He did one of his numbers on Colbert's show.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nyem3gD6XN8/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEXCOADEI4CSFryq4qpAwkIARUAAIhCGAE=&rs=AOn4CLBq9FMNG4huERYwVDCKOD7UCD_CDg&days_since_epoch=19902
E. Writer I wasn't a huge fan of folk music when I was young, but over the years I've grown into it, and have grown a serious appreciation for it, especially the 60s and 70s era. It feels very serene, and thoughtful compared to music today that feels most arrogant, angry, and flashy. I listen to songs like You've Got a Friend by James Taylor, is one of my favorites. It's so soothing. I can think of so many others, but that one is at the top of my list. I feel peaceful. Of course I love George Harrison, though he leabs a bit into rock, too.
Roy Scarbrough I didn't like Dylan when I was young, but when some of his songs were covered by the Byrds and Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved them. Early Dylan was influenced by the poet Rimbaud. Something happened to him around 1966 that changed him. Some say it was the motorcycle accident.
Alex Morton
My world centered around folk music at one period in my life. There was always a banjo or guitar at hand. I wanted to play the twelve string guitar like Leadbelly and the banjo like Pete Seeger. Everywhere I'd go we were playing that music. I went to parties in artist's lofts with people beating on African drums and half a dozen assorted guitars, banjos and dulcimers with fifty people singing anti-Vietnam War songs. Alan Lomax and others were combing the hills for the real article, the old blues and mountain folk singers. They'd bring people like Mississippi John Hurt, Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee and Bascom Lamar Lipscome to the Newport Festival to mingle with Joan Baez and Dave Von Rank.
It was a very fertile time, musically, and lots of great music came out of the cross-pollination.
I didn't know him, but Dylan was one of us until he wasn't. But what he gave us was far better ... he gave us himself. I was driving across the Triboro Bridge in NY the first time I heard Positively Fourth Street .and I just wanted to pull over to the side and listen. Nobody before or since has ever jolted radio more.
Dylan was influenced by Rimbaud, but he was also influenced by Allen Ginsburg and the antihero mythologies of the late fifties.
The folk magazine of the time was Sing Out and I was a subscriber during the time they published Dylan's first songs and whatever else was new by Tom Paxton and all the other singer/songwriter folkies. As soon as a new copy came out, I'd get out my banjo and figure out how to play it all. When I'd get out to Washington Square Park with all the other folkies, there'd always be a few others you could jam with who were already playing the new stuff, too.
Roy Scarbrough those were good times, a little before my time. It seemed like times were a changing for the better. Jim Crow was taken down a peg. That was encouraging, but I'm not sure times changed as well as was hoped.
Alex Morton Things did get considerably better, including stopping the Vietnam War, major civil rights and human rights advancements, respect for and support of the arts. But then, the focus of the US changed from empathy to cold-bloodedness and many of the advancements were reversed. The folk music days were ones of hope and positive change. Today, it's mostly despair and pretense, primarily churned out by a machine that has no social conscience and cares only to ring the cash register. and shout, "me me me me". Jesse Welles' music says the people still do have a voice. Bruce Springsteen has also stepped back into that arena and I expect we'll be hearing from others. This new trend is positive in the way that the protest music of the folk era and the rock music that followed it was positive. I think of Marvin Gaye's "What's going on" and songs like "Lean on Me". And I think particularly of Gil Scott-Heron's masterpiece, "The Revolution Will Not be Televised." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw&list=RDvwSRqaZGsPw&start_radio=1
E. Writer The imagery has a very European feel to it. An almost "80s" feel to it. It feels joy, and transports to a different time.