Taomeow

Overcome with sadness. Poor, poor kitty. But this also reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago... I was doing taiji in the usual spot in the park one day and a hawk dropped a snake at my feet -- narrowly missing my head, it whooshed by my ear inches away. That hawk was in the habit of showing up for taiji almost every time, making a few circles over my head and then flying away. I guess that one time it decided to either deliver a gift or attempt murder --depending on whether it loved my taiji or hated it. The snake was a very large Garter. At first I thought it was dead, for a couple of minutes it didn't move -- then slowly started showing signs of life, and eventually slithered away. Sturdy creature -- no legs or arms or neck to break! The height it fell from must have been considerable (I don't know how high though since I wasn't looking up at the sky at the time) judging by the tremendous thud it landed with.

P.S. Pens are on my mind in conjunction with longevity of late, seen information (and believed what I saw for once) that one of the best ways to protect/preserve one's brain later in life is to write in longhand. Apparently this activates three times as many neural connections as clicking keys or finger-poking screens. And of course it's got to be a fountain pen (personal opinion, corroborated by aficionados.) So I hunted down on ebay and bought this present for my vintage brain:

And an Epi New Pen. (Saw it on the news today -- there's a legal battle unfolding to equip medical first responders with EpiPens nationwide. )

What is known in psychology as The Dark Triad -- a personality combining narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopaty -- is estimated at 7% of the population, on average. It means that in an average family -- grandparents, parents, a couple of kids -- you have almost a 50% chance of one of them being in that category (it could be you, of course. ) But in reality it seldom works like that. "Average" means that in some families they don't have anybody in that category and in some, everybody. Same thing with encounters in school, at work, among random neighbors, just people one meets in a lifetime. Some are spared close encounters with the dark triad representatives and some might have one for a boss, one for a neighbor, one for a sibling, one for a spouse, one for a parent (which is about as bad as it gets -- the worst scenario is to have both parents in that category.) I think the dark triad can be contagious -- in many cases the defense against being their victim is to internalize their ways and become the perpetrator -- toward someone else (most typically one's own children, but could be toward just about anyone in a weaker position.) And this someone else might contract it too, and the chain remains unbroken throughout generations. What's the solution? As my Primal guru used to say, just because there's a problem doesn't mean there's a solution. (Incidentally he was in that category himself.) They are the people who make the world as strange as I find it.

There's very little truth in what the public has been led to believe about what's healthy. Also about what it is we're actually eating, drinking and smoking -- a lot of it is grossly falsified, depleted, and poisoned. "Feed the ancestors," meaning the ancestral make-up of your own body, which is one of the taoist culinary principles, can IMO serve one better -- try eating what generations of your ancestors ate before you, not the latest fad. Although a lot of our ancestors were starving, not fasting by choice but starving due to poverty and social upheavals and endless wars. Yet those of them who were well-to-do enough to eat "healthy" had access to the kinds and varieties of food we can only dream about. (My grandmother on my mother's side used to tell me what was eaten in her mother's home in the early 20th century and all I could do was salivate. On my father's side, however, the ancestors were very poor and lived through periods of starvation. My mother's side of the family were the longevity folks, not my father's side.)

This is a very important key. I asked AI (Grok) about smokers and drinkers among the verified longest lived individuals. Here's a partial list (there's a bunch of others too who have birth documents but "are not fully verified" so I skipped their names) Name Country Age at death Smoked? Drank? Notes Jeanne Calment France 122 y 164 d Yes – ~2 cigarettes/day for 96 years, quit at 117 Port wine daily The absolute record holder (verified) Antonio Todde Italy (Sardinia) 112 y 346 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes most of his life Wine daily Oldest verified man in Europe when he died in 2002 Christian Mortensen USA (Danish-born) 115 y 252 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes until late 80s Occasional alcohol Oldest verified man ever until 2012 Maggie Barnes USA 115 y 319 d (disputed) Yes – smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades Moonshine occasionally Age debated but widely accepted at the time Susie Gibson USA 115 y 108 d Yes – smoked cigarettes until 106 Occasional whiskey Quit only when she couldn’t light them anymore Richard Overton USA 112 y 230 d Yes – 12–18 cigars a day until 109 Whiskey in his coffee daily America’s oldest WWII veteran when he died in 2018 That Richard Overton guy surprises me. Not so much the 18 cigars a day but whiskey in his coffee. Coffee pairs perfectly with cognac. Whiskey?.. Assuming he started when he was legal to drink, that's almost a century of misguided daily use of a rather uncouth beverage. But I guess couth/uncouth is not a factor in longevity.

Kombucha is good, but bubble baths are quite harmful (toxic chemicals). Getting one's claws out when the situation warrants it is IMO healthier than being addicted to the drug peddled heavier than any other -- Repressitol. All things in moderation...

Edit: removed in response to the removal of what it was about

恒 (Héng) : Perseverance, Persistence, Enduring Constancy. One of the "virtues" deeply embedded in taoism.

I think Max Christensen mentioned some symbiotic alien entity there. I don't have any bumps in that location but I have a birthmark to the right of the fontanelle. I seem to recall Buddha did too (there's a tradition that maintains that a reincarnation is supposed to demonstrate 7 signs on the body, for starters, don't remember what the other ones are). We also share the date of birth. I don't know the significance of that for a taoist. Why?

Of course. The Tao Miao (or Dao Miao) 道妙 -- "The Mystery of the Dao," "The Subtle Wonder of the Way," "The Profound Principle." And indeed, as you quoted, "The fundamental laws of physics cannot be contained within space and time, because they generate them.'' The Tao Miao is much more than "the fundamental laws of physics" though -- it's what generates them.

Mine mentioned the original and the best -- natural ecosystems. Also I asked it about those of the fuzzy-logical processes that are non-algorithmic. It came up with Human subjective judgment (e.g., "it's quite warm") Emotional reasoning Artistic creativity I would add that cats can be both -- algorithmic and non. E.g. I had a cat who once picked up on the thought I had that the glare from the ceiling light was interfering with watching a movie but I felt too lazy to get up and switch it off. The cat came up to the wall with the switch, looked me in the eye across his shoulder, then jumped straight up the way only cats can, hit the switch with his front paw exactly the way a human would do it, and turned the light off. He did it only once, never before or after. Definitely not part of the cat algorithm.

I'll have to practice that.

I used to. By now I learned to either accept the correction with a polite "thank you" or reject it with a polite "fuck you." Depending on the mood.

Not a snob. I know exactly where you're coming from. I think I think (sic) mostly in 2, but for most of the rest of the languages I've been exposed to, my mind created a common file titled "Foreign languages," dumped everything there indiscriminately, and when stuff from that file interferes with the 2 legit ones, it's not pretty. Not with spelling (although shit happens of course) but with spoken words, especially proper names. The thing is, if an English word is a borrowing from one of those other languages for which I know their proprietary pronunciation rules but not necessarily the English rendition thereof, I tend to stress and enunciate it the way it is stressed and enunciated in the language it came from. Sometimes I really don't know that it's pronounced differently in English from its source language, and sometimes I just can't make myself mutilate it like that. It physically hurts me to have to say Mo-di-GLI-ani or REmy MARtin or DesDEmona, let alone NAbokov. And native speakers never tire of correcting me...