Taomeow

Million, billion, trillion -- in many (most?) people's minds any which number with many zeroes is just "a lot." But there's lots and then there's other lots. Here's an interesting way to put them in perspective: A million seconds ago was May 23rd A billion seconds ago was 1993 A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 B.C. The US national debt is now rising by $1 trillion every 180 days.

Himalayan Lynx ( (Lynx lynx isabellinus) Photo Credit: CGNP, Camera trap clicks. Chitral Gol National Park, Pakistan

Not just the animals' behavior changes under those temperatures, it looks like the human physique changes too, and with uncanny speed at that. Once I noticed, I just had to follow all those amazing transformations. At first the man is beardless and has a full head of hair, then at 3:33 he's still beardless but bald as a knee, at 4:13 his hair is back, praise the Lord, at 4:48 it turns black and he's grown a lush black beard in the past 35 seconds, only to shave it off at 5:24, then at 7:14 his beard is back with a vengeance but now it's grey, so at 8:03 he gets rid of it, and by 10:40 it's grown back and it's not grey anymore. I should have been looking at the cats the whole time instead. AI or not, real story or not, cats (with the exception of the poor artificially bred sphinx) are always furry. It's humans that can't seem to decide on the proper level of hirsuteness.

I chanced upon a Magritte exhibition in New York once, at the Met. It's interesting how reproductions give one an idea of "what it's about" and of whether "I like it," but originals do more -- not speaking out of snobbery, just my experience. I believe this "more" is about qi. Magritte played a lot with one of my favorite ideas -- increasingly displaced in modern times -- that the map is not the territory, the cat walking in the street is not the cat video, the caffeine pill is not coffee, the symbol/image/representation/idea is not reality. "The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao," ditto the tao that can be painted, videotaped, AI generated, reduced to a meme, a slogan, a simulacrum. Sometimes he was more than explicit about conveying this idea -- as here, driving the point across with no frills: This is not a pipe. And sometimes, less obviously, the idea that our inner representation/evaluation of things is not proportional to their actual nature, significance and dimensions: Personal values Rape:

How about this one? Rene Magritte, La reproduction interdite, 1937

Is it located so inconspicuously that the drivers only see it at the last moment, and is it named after what they interject?..

@心神 Thank you! These are wonderful. I'm often tempted to go beyond just the visual impression and try to imagine a story -- of the moment, of a life... What was it like to be that person in that time?.. Interesting how "madonna-like" paintings by women differ from the male (religious) renditions of the image of the mother and baby. (Somehow ALL of the latter get the proportions of the "baby Jesus" all wrong -- either he appears macrocephalic or morbidly obese or has a facial expression of -- I don't know what, bitter resentment? refusal to interact, to have any baby-like expression?.. Yes, even in the celebrated masterpieces the baby is always off somehow ) The Duenna looks a lot like my late mother-in-law in her old age. Uncanny resemblance. One comes across those "twins lost in time" occasionally and has to wonder -- is this actually a relative?.. a reincarnation?.. Marie Bashkirtseff's painting is Spring, google tells me it's the spring of 1884.

This is not a reflection in the mirror. This is a mystical sci-fi connection of cats across time and space that happened in the home of someone I know, who's the son of one of the Strugatsky Brothers. Who had a cat named Kaliam at the time the sci-fi Brothers wrote "One Billion Years to the End of the World" in the 1970s and made that cat into its main protagonist's pet. It's been a family tradition of theirs spanning decades to name all their subsequent cats Kaliam -- alas, cats' lifespan is shorter than that of humans, so there were several Kaliams. This one is the current one, the photo is of the original one. The scene was not staged and the picture was taken accidentally.

I specified that it's about a pine tree brought indoors as a Christmas tree, not a live pine tree in the forest. I love the smell in nature too -- in fact the last thing that still remains of my once profound love of California is the smell of Torrey pines and cedars mixed with the smell of sage and the ocean on a hot summer day. When coming back from somewhere else I used to smell it even just stepping out of the door at the airport, despite many miles of highway fumes in between. BUT a pine tree that's been cut god knows how long ahead of the holidays and brought indoors is a different story. All those terpenes that give it the unique piney smell are volatile -- and largely fizzle out and disappear in transition. Fir trees, on the other hand... I don't know, they are stronger or maybe they were fresher back when I had access to them for the holiday season. That was the New Year's smell (that's what we celebrated) -- fir tree smell mixed with the smell of mandarins hung on it for edible decorations and the smell of fresh snow that intermixed with it every time someone opened the door.

@Nungali Why are you the prettiest boy in those pictures? Did you use a filter?

J.R.R. Tolkien CAT The fat cat on the mat may seem to dream of nice mice that suffice for him, or cream; but he free, maybe, walks in thought unbowed, proud, where loud roared and fought his kin, lean and slim, or deep in den in the East feasted on beasts and tender men. The giant lion with iron claw in paw, and huge ruthless tooth in gory jaw; the pard dark-starred, fleet upon feet, that oft soft from aloft leaps upon his meat where woods loom in gloom — far now they be, fierce and free, and tamed is he; but fat cat on the mat kept as a pet he does not forget.

He's Eastern European, hence he got the original and the best -- a fir tree. Not a pine tree. Big difference in smell -- the fir tree brought indoors smells like a whole forest, and with pine trees you have to stick your face into the needles for any noticeable olfactory impact. The downside of the fir tree is that it starts shedding those little needles from day one, but a daily sweeping takes care of it.

A strange musical interlude

And an extreme version:

OK. Let me try to deliver.

I don't know what his transgressions were as I didn't much follow his posts, but I remember he was being goaded... maybe it's an extenuating factor? (Maybe not -- like I said, I haven't seen the bulk of the interactions, but that was my impression from what little I've seen.)

Thanks, Mark. I still don't know much about Jimmy Buffett -- except for that one song. I've always liked this refrain: Some people claim that there's a woman to blame but I know it's my own damn fault.

Obsessive neat freaks are often people who feel dirty inside. Health nuts are often the sickest people trying to fix themselves... great if they stop right there and don't try to fix everybody else. Militant anti-smoking is an induced hallucination*. My first reaction to perfectionists is compassion (it's nearly always of traumatic origins...) -- unless they're in my hair. In which case my second reaction: mild compassionate contempt. And if they don't let me be at this point, then the third one: all bets are off. There's taoist practices that are about "perfection, nondecay, immortality," but they are just that -- practices with a lofty personal goal, not an invitation to holier-than-thou stances, moral judgment of whoever appears to fall short, or any of that self-aggrandizing BS. *

I can't think of anything except cite an instance of someone facepalming in real life. Or semi-real, i.e. online. I just remembered how Brian (RIP) facepalmed to my mentioning this song, Margaritaville. "Please! No Jimmy Buffett!" It stuck in my memory because I had no idea who Jimmy Buffett was, but I had heard of there being this billionaire, Buffett, vague on his first name though. So in my mind I conflated the two and imagined that this guy was not only a business mogul but also a singer, and briefly marveled at his versatility. It's a good thing I didn't post something to that effect or there would be no end to facepalms in response. What I wanted to write but didn't was, "what's wrong with being a singer AND a billionaire?" (Now that there's Taylor Swift I know exactly what... Triple facepalm...)

I guess this leaves some of the most famous teachers who were also formidable undefeated fighters out in the cold... but thanks for correcting their ignorant ways. Cheng Manching (the first master to bring taiji to the West and establish a school here) stands corrected: Yang Chengfu stands corrected: And as for the spiritual types, sheesh, even the Buddha stands corrected: (By the way, just so you don't suspect ulterior personal motives -- I am, and have always been, thin with no special effort.)

With some personality types you find them in every profession methinks, I've seen self-important assholes among plumbers, computer tech support on occasion, receptionists!! -- well, some DMV clerks, obviously cops, TSA!!! -- HOA ghouls, anyone with a smithereen of power over you or over anything you have the tough luck needing that they have the power to control. In higher positions there's more of them, and they're more vicious. According to Jordan Peterson, sociopaths comprise 4-5% of the general population but 10--15% of CEOs (the numbers are derived from both his primary research and general psychological data.) I'm sure in politics it's closer to 100%, well maybe 99% if I want to be generous.

There's the taiji way to go very low and the not taiji way. The not taiji way is gaining flexibility chiefly via overstretching the ligaments -- which eventually wreaks chaos with the joints, but starts out looking impressive. The taiji way is via gradually creating space inside the joints and lengthening the spine, separating each joint into the lower (yin) part and the upper (yang) part and moving in a way that maintains that space and safeguards against the cartilage grinding, synovial fluid leaking, alignments compromised, the whole structure suffering damage. That part of the taiji skill that is referred to as sung, relaxed dynamic softness, largely depends on this kind of joint use. (Every time the teacher reminds the students, "drop the shoulder," "drop the elbow," "suspend the head," etc., it's about that space you are learning to create.) The knees are a bit different from other joints because we walk on two legs and something somewhere has to make sure we don't turn into this toy from my childhood (don't know if anyone growing up later, or elsewhere, has ever seen those -- you press the bottom where all the threads are connected and it collapses. You can get it to dance this way and that way like one of those for-show wushu practitioners... fun when you're four years old! But eventually the threads holding it together overstretch and it can't do shit anymore!)

The masochist in me subscribed to the medicine subreddit -- populated by MDs and other professionals -- and aside from sheer horror from reading their conversations with each other (well, some people like watching horror movies, I don't, but this is sort of my equivalent, I read it when I feel like getting my hair to stand on end), I learn some valuable behind-the-scenes stuff... So today they discussed allergies mentioned on patients' charts. They are, generally, livid about it. How dare a patient claim an allergy when it's merely a side effect! So half of them said that they just remove the "allergic to" entries from the charts because they find most of them ridiculous. And they were mocking the patients incessantly for mislabeling their symptoms from drugs "allergies." Some of them don't believe anyone can have allergies to any painkillers or to penicillin (well I do, incidentally) and unless there's proven anaphylaxis in the history, they mostly don't believe anyone is allergic to anything. Fun read.

Well, having been blessed with a great teacher, I never once hurt my knees with taiji but I know from others' stories that the (almost only) way to hurt oneself with taiji outside sparring is by misusing the knees. In fact, I had a hiking accident at one point and it gave me a canary-in-the-mine knee for a while -- after it healed for all everyday use purposes, it still reminded me to be mindful at all times in taiji -- if even slightly misaligned, it issued a warning and I self corrected. That was a long time ago. Since then the canary hasn't been awakened even by tennis (a far more dangerous endeavor for the knees), knock on wood. (But that one time a student came to our taiji class who happened to be a yoga teacher and was allowed to take a few minutes to teach us some yoga, an unfamiliar kind even though I'm not a stranger to yoga, I immediately felt that what she got us to do was a knee-buster... but being a good sport I went along... and instantly regretted it. Not all yoga is created equal... as well as not all taiji, of course.)