Taomeow

Beauty fades, but stupid is forever. -- Judge Judy

Inside a dead tree termites go to work, pay rent, pay taxes. Progress.

Somehow this reminded me of a real-life experience of long ago... When I was in my early teens, my father, an engineer/physicist, was approached by the director of the local beer brewery, a huge one, producing beer by the millions of buckets. State owned of course, like everything else then and there. They ran into a technical problem with their process, a serious one, which beer scientists and engineers were unable to solve. Apparently the tech for solving it didn't exist and whenever they tried approaching specialists, top authorities in the field, they hit a wall -- "nothing can be done, it is what it is." I don't remember the details, but somehow -- miraculously, accidentally, via out-of-the-box research, don't really know how -- it came to the director's attention that my father's PhD thesis, which had nothing whatsoever to do with beer production and everything to do with aluminum, described a production process that ran into a similar problem and successfully solved it. The brewery, upon discussion, commissioned an invention. My father was asked to invent some equipment based on the same idea he used for the aluminum thing but applied to beer fermentation. I remember those days -- while he was working on that invention, he had to visit the brewery often, and our home was awash in fresh top-of-the-line beer which he always brought back and which I was too young to appreciate. After the job was completed, it worked so well that that improvement was eventually adopted at all major breweries in the country. Alas, the country had the kind of laws that prevented my father from patenting the invention and becoming a billionaire, but the point is, specialists in that particular field couldn't think out of the box enough to solve the problem -- took someone from an altogether different area of knowledge to crack that nut. Kudos to the brewery director for having an open enough mind not to cringe at the thought that someone whose only prior beer technology expertise was limited to knowing how to pop a lid off the bottle might figure it out. Well, he did try the specialists first. All of them...

Isn't smart technology wonderful?

What a cool cat!

Moonrise lights the ice over the frozen river crisscrossed by skate marks.

When no one knows the way, anyone can become the guide. -- African proverb

In this particular thread, perhaps from my assertion that emotions are connections -- between the inner and the outer, and within the inner too, and in this sense are synonymous with aliveness. And aliveness is the path -- whether in this world or a different one. The systems that substitute "awareness" (usually with a qualifier "pure") talking about "the path" strike me as too narrow. Awareness is part of aliveness but is not enough to account for all aspects of aliveness. I am alive when I'm sleeping, unaware of anything -- from the fact that I'm fast asleep to the "I" that is asleep to the sound of the audiobook that put me to sleep and keeps playing while I'm not aware of it. When I wake up I discover that I'm at the end of the book and have no idea what happened in the part I slept through. All the while my audio player was fully aware of the audiobook it was playing -- it's programmed to be -- but it didn't make it alive. Aliveness, on the other hand, can't be programmed. It's a state in which emotions create connections that form meanings, regardless of awareness. 2+2=4 is an emotion if you're buying a cup of coffee and a croissant, a faint one if you've got enough money for this to be a non-expense in your budget, a strong one if you barely scraped together some change in your chronically empty wallet, a different one if you "needed" that cup of coffee and finally found a parking spot near a coffee shop, and so on. But to a cash register it isn't an emotion, it's just pure awareness. It's aware of the mathematical operation and performs it successfully based on that programmed awareness -- but to a cash register it has as much connection with the previous one or the next one it will perform as "I love you" or "I hate you" -- none whatsoever. Pure awareness is like that.

I'm stoked that it was your post #3,333. In one version of numerology I know, three (or more) 3s occurring in a row have the meaning/message "get ready for a lesson." Then if the next thing of this kind you see is 666(or more 6s) it means "you'll have to repeat that lesson." And if you see 999(or more) -- "you've learned that lesson." So... be prepared, the universe might have a lesson is store.

Geliy Korzhev, "Deprived of paradise," 1998

I reckon buddhist morals are like everybody else's: "Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth." -- Mike Tyson

Fragrance of Zhejiang. Proper tea ceremony. Far away, so close.

Of all artificially created myths pertaining to tobacco smoking, this one is the most innocent. AI is still in its age of innocence.

Are tolerable allergic phenomena the cat's fault? No way!

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. -- Galileo Galilei

To protect myself I open my umbrella, a private heaven.

I think the best thing about humans as a species is not that we're "intelligent" (I have serious doubts about that) but that we're omnivorous. Everything else is a function of that superb adaptation. We survived, by newer estimates, three million years of climate changes of the most drastic kind and survived precisely because we're omnivores, we had nothing else going for us, to be honest. In the meantime, nearly all species that went extinct died out of starvation when the next climate change made their specialized food choices scarce or unavailable. 99% of species failed to adapt -- that's how many that once existed are currently extinct. If we don't stop cooperating with some very dark life-hating entities' crusade against biodiversity (which is what "civilization" has always been about if you stop focusing on the myriad frills and distractions and look at the fundamentals instead), I'm pretty sure we'll follow suit very shortly even if nothing else we do does us in. Found this bit I wrote elsewhere about my direct encounters with what food is like in a biodiverse environment where it still exists (albeit hanging by a thread) -- where the word "vegetarian" is applied only to the context of a special diet a vegetalista curandero observes for a specific period of time (never forever) if a particular entheogenic plant he or she works with tells them that meat will adversely react with some of its alkaloids (no, I don't think the entheogenic plant uses that particular term, but it's that particular explanation, nothing more, nothing less): Far, far away from the touristy parts and paths, you take a boat trip to a market on a little island that serves as a trading post for the inhabitants of the surrounding villages and tribes offering a mix of farmer, forager, fisherman, and hunter-gatherer fares. The variety is stunning, from the rain forest fruits and vegetables you've never seen to humongous turtles, sold live, to freshly caught fish of many delicious kinds and even creatures that officially don't exist -- e.g. freshwater octopi -- I had them in a ceviche, I don't know why they officially don't exist... but then, there's more species of animals and plants on 1 square mile of Amazonia than in all of North America and Europe combined, and less than 1% of those have been "studied" by "science" to date. There's 4,000 varieties of potatoes in existence, the ones most often encountered had bright yellow or purple flesh but they come in all colors of the rainbow and are delicious. Also countless varieties of plantains. Both are used in many dishes or just sliced flatly and lightly roasted in lard. Coconuts are huge (bigger than an adult's head), the water from a freshly opened one is a soft drink of choice in those parts, and the flesh tastes good even raw. Fish -- freshwater fish has always been my favorite, and of course the Amazon has many superb kinds I haven't even heard of elsewhere. Wrote down a few names -- paiche (which is humongous and suitable for steaks), tambaqui, jaraqui, surubim, pirarucu... wouldn't recognize which is which now, but in a local ceviche, you could encounter all of them in one bowl. Rainforest spices and hot peppers of unfamiliar varieties, some of them brutal. A fruit of the palm tree that only grows by the water or almost in the water and only in that location, aguaje -- they started selling that as a supplement here of late, "to enlarge breast size," the advertisements go. I got addicted to aguaje while there, not for that ridiculous purpose but because it's the easiest, most satisfying breakfast food ever -- it tastes something like a mix of grilled cheese and roasted walnuts, and is indeed locally famous for regulating female hormones to perfection. (Men won't be harmed by it either, but women make a point of eating it regularly, often daily, and everybody's skin and hair positively glow from within, which they attribute to that fruit.) And for dessert, my favorite was a cake made with fresh passion fruit, which they called alfresco de maracuya. And in the city, there was a restaurant favored by the small community of expats, the Yellow Rose of Texas, where you could order either local or familiar American food, both excellent at the time (don't know about now.)

Meowing when you don't get it is the cat equivalent of making a scene. I also heard on the wide web that cats only meow to speak with humans, but I'm not sure I believe it. Living in or visiting places where there's stray cats allowed to roam free and remain fertile, I heard so many meows cats address to each other when looking for love or to pick a fight. I had a cat who spoke in clear statements, e.g. uttered greetings and farewells every time she entered or exited the room. Her "hi" and "bye" sounded different from the way we say it but they were consistent for this specific situation, like any words with specific dictionary meanings. In similar consistent words she asked questions ("when is breakfast?"), answered questions when asked ("what would you like for breakfast?" -- "not sure..." -- "how about some fish?" -- "yeah, OK"), never interrupted a speaking human, never ignored a question, and so on. My current cat is still too young for a broad vocabulary, but some phrases are already idiomatic -- e.g. a special way she says "try and catch me," "you can't catch me, you're too slow!" and so on.

https://futurism.com/microsofts-bing-ai-leaking-maniac-alternate-personalities?fbclid=IwAR2PXbVDrYmpRVZSTeeytvCx2OO59OZUeozrseQcfuD8jsX-f8mQ08J-Qfc

Cats

To get the thread back on track, one of the alkaloids of ayahuasca, later renamed harmine, was originally named telepathine by early 20th century researchers. I think at some point I told some of the story of my profoundly telepathic days in the Amazon, courtesy of the brew, beginning with an episode where I mentally addressed someone using a diminutive of his first name and a guy in the group whom I'd never met approached me and told me that in his mind he heard me call his name. Turned out the first name of my mental addressee was the same as the last name of that guy. Impressed by both telepathy and synchronicity, I later made a point of googling into how common that last name is in the US. About one in ten million.

This photo is called The Mob. It was taken in 1961 in New Jersey by Walter Chandoha. He was a professional cat photographer, shooting over 90,000 photos of cats. His work appeared in magazines like National Geographic and Life as well as calendars, books and cans of cat food.

I will leave opinions about his bagua performance to others, but since I'm a Chenster, I went to look at his Chen demo. Couldn't help recognizing the guy in the demo. It's Chen Yu, not the seller. (Hi Chen Yu laoshi! ) And I swear he can hold his own without the special effects superimposed on the video. I would look for a teacher who puts himself/herself in the demo of what they offer, not of someone else.