MORE FROM GANGSTAGTASS

I never thought I would dig rap.

the Ol'Buzzard

DAJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

A RAMBLING FROM NERD LAND. 

Over my seventy-plus years I have, rarely, but occasionally been in a situation where I had a flash insight that I had experienced a particular place, situation or group of people before – though I never had.    This feeling usually came out of the blue, lasted for a second and passed; and later was hard to remember or totally forgotten.  

If it were just me I would write it off as some synapse in my brain misfiring and giving me a visual presentation of a memory download.   But, my wife has experienced it - and almost everyone I know says they have had similar experiences.  

The most comfortable solution would be a brain fart; but, stick with me on this: when it comes to understanding reality, experience can be deceptive. 

Over the last three hundred years, despite continuous religious opposition, Science, and especially Physics, has demystified most of the natural occurrences of our earth and  our solar system.  Science has now moved to the realm of explaining the universe and the cosmos, relying heavily on Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.   Many of these theories require you to leave your comfort zone and accept strange concepts of reality. 

Physicists come from a wide discipline of studies: theoretical physics, relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, computational physics and unified physics.    The hope is, at some time in the future, a unification of all these different disciplines will result in one overall grand theory that will explain all phenomena.

The one thing that is curious about all the physics disciplines is that at some point they all converge to a theme of parallel-universes.   Theoretical Physics proposes the possible of parallel – mirror universes that are just beyond our reality: universes where we exist in a complimentary energy realm.  This would pose the question of which realm was the bona fied and which was the mirror image. 

Einstein’s Special Relativity depends on the assumption that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light: among other things, this theory continues on to say that as you approach the speed of light, time in your frame of existence slows down.   The thought is that if you could exceed the speed of light time travel into the past would be theoretically possible.

 Recently, in the super Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland a particle traveling faster than the speed of light was discovered: it popped into existence for a small fraction of a second and then vanished.   

Rather than traveling through time I might pose that this particle was transiting across parallel universes.

Making a big circle: could our experience of  Daja vu be an electronic flash from a parallel-mirror universe?     

I’m just asking. 

Maybe that's where all those extra socks come from in the drier.  

the Ol’Buzzard

Kinda makes the Republican convention seem more ridiculous doesn’t it.     

THE OLD BULL AND THE YOUNG BULL

ACCEPTING AGE

Yesterday I was moving wood from the woodshed behind my house to the storage rack I have built by my side door.   After the second trip of loading wood on my sled and hauling it and stacking it at the storage rack I was feeling twinges in my lower back.   I opened the side door (I couldn’t go in because I had cleats on my boots) and asked my wife to get my elastic back support. 

I was somewhat pissed off with myself remembering that I use to work in the woods all day and never had to wear a back support.   I knew better than to complain to my wife, however, because her answer would be ‘Get over it, you are not thirty any more,’ (no sympathy there.)

Back out at the wood pile – bitching to myself- I thought of an old ol’cowboy joke:

An old bull and a young bull are on top of a hill, looking down at a herd of cows.

The young bull taunts, “Hey old man, how about we run down this hill and fuck a couple of those cows.”

The old bull replies, “I have a better idea son; I’ll just walk down the hill and fuck um all.”

I think the moral of the joke is that you can’t let young bulls decide who you are.  And: I’m not thirty any more.

***********

For anyone who heats with fire wood I am enclosing a couple of pics of the storage unit I built by my side door.   The top to the wood frame box that is the roof of this unit is a piece of metal roofing I had left over.  The top (roof) is not attached to the sides and can be lifted up and turned over forming a metal bottom box that I fill with potting soil and use as a back door herb garden in the summer.   The base of the unit is 4x4’s and the side upright post that support the roof are 2x8’s.   In the winter I cover the storage unit with a small tarp – leaving the side of the tarp by the door unsecured and weighted at the bottom – for access.   The overall size of the unit is 2x8x4 - designed to hold 1/2 cord of wood. 

the Ol’Buzzard

Egypt and the Arab Spring

Egypt’s Revolution

or

Be Careful What You Wish For

Bill Maher is constantly reminding us of the blatant ignorance of the average American citizen.     We have just experienced an Arab Spring and the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt; but the American public, though encyclopedic of Dancing With The Stars, knows virtually nothing about this world altering movement, nor cares. 

Though the Arab Spring was a demonstration for freedom, the fall of the Mubarak government may have brought about undesirable consequences from an American point of view.  

On January 25th young, educated, liberal protestors took over Tahrir Square in a demonstration for social justice and equal rights for all.  Like most Liberal movements, theirs was a lofty desire to see Egypt move toward a more open and democracy society.  

However, the protesters actually represent only a minority faction in a fundamentalist Moslem majority.  

Although ‘free and fair’ elections have been held it was a forgone conclusion that the Islamist would have a dominant majority.

The Al-Nour Party would move Egypt toward a total Islamic theocracy, declaring women as chattel of their husbands, separating public spaces to segregate men and women and require women to wear the veil in public.   The Moslem Brotherhood Party is popular and seems to be the only moderating force against religious extremism.    

Already article 2 of the new constitution declares Islam as the religion of state and confirms Sharia Law.

Under Mubarak, Egypt was a stable dictatorship that supported Israel’s right to exist and was a cooperative player with the United States.   Now Egypt is in the hands of the military, and when power is turned over to the elected Islamic majority government we must hold our breath and hope for the best. 

the Ol'Buzzard

STATE SPONSORED RAPE OF WOMEN

STATE RAPE

The Republican Party of the state of Virginia is about to pass a law requiring all women applying for legal abortion service to undergo, even against their will, an invasive vaginal ultrasound probe, which is medically unnecessary.

Any woman who is coerced into vaginal penetration against her will is experiencing rape.  

The Republican Party of the state of Virginia is legislating state rape.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?  

the Ol'Buzzard 

GAY MARRIAGE - THE SOLUTION

THE RIGHT OF GAYS TO MARRY AND THEIR INTRENCHED OPPONENTS

The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, in a 2-1 decision, overturned Proposition-8: a California Constitutional Amendment declaring ‘marriage’ as a union only between one man and one woman; which effectively nullified California’s law allowing gay and lesbian couples to ‘marry’. 

This ‘marriage’ impasse has at its core the goal of Christian churches attempting to impose their moral doctrines on the population at large.   

The Mormon Church heavily funded, in a covert religious movement, California’s Proposition-8.   The Catholic Church has also been a prime mover in de facto-bigotry against the gay and lesbian community.   In Maine, the Catholic Church of Portland was a primary opponent (along with fundamentalist fanatics) in defeating the Equal ‘Marriage’ Amendment proposed by the Maine Legislature. 

I would like to propose my own amendment:

The Ol’Buzzard’s Get Rid of ‘Marriage’ Amendment.

1. The Federal Government should only recognize Domestic Partnership Licenses.

2.  Only Domestic Partnership Licenses can be issued by states, and these licenses have all the rights and legal protection now provided by a ‘Marriage’ License.

3.  After receiving a Domestic Partnership License couples are free to affirm a religious covenant in the faith of their choice where they may receive a Marriage Certificate of affirmation.   However, these religious certificates will have no legal or binding authority outside of the religious institution of their issue.

the Ol’Buzzdar

AXE GRINDING

I am sick and tired of the demeaning commercials that run constantly on TV displaying older people as stupid, demented cripples with false teeth, pissing their pants, needing catheters, unable to comprehend technology, riding in motorized chairs, needing Viagra and ready to buy into schemes like reverse mortgages. 

 I have no problem with advertising the prows and cons of a product for people with specific needs; but the present selection of actors and the way these ads are presented to the general public I find objectionable.   

I feel that these ad agencies are probably staffed by thirty-something young people that actually view older people as pabulum eating, incompetent, regressing relics sliding into dementia – and that’s the way they present them on TV. 

I despise the commercial with the older woman in her hover-chair riding around in circles in her kitchen, waving her hand in the air and appearing to holler ‘wee wee wee!’ like the pig on the GEICO commercial.

I am seventy-two.   I retired from the military at forty-two.  I received my Bachelor Degree at forty-six and my Masters at fifty.  I spent eleven years teaching in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska – retiring at sixty-seven.    I am married to a young woman and have great sex (without Viagra.)  I made my first solo parachute jump at seventy and plan to jump again this summer.  I ride a motorcycle in the summer, and in the winter I heat my house with firewood.  I work out at the gym twice a week and bowl twice a week – and, I am not unusual.

I hope that if the time comes that I require special products for age disability I can deal with a company that will approach me an intelligent adult. 

The Ol’Buzzard 

A BUZZARD OMELET #6

I just read Christopher Hitchen’s essay A Very, Very; Dirty Word, published in Slate Magazine of July 2004. 

In this essay Hitchen opines on the phrase Fuck Off, claiming it was a legacy of the British Empire; attributing Fuck You and Go Fuck Yourself as the American form.  His example for this proclamation was a statement made in 1967 by the British governor of South Yemen - Denis Healey; also expletives by Vice President Dick Cheney, John Kerry and Paul Wolfowitz.   

I am not saying that Hitchen was totally out of touch with the world outside of elite Washington and Britain, and I do not know how he dissected the roots and origin of Fuck Off; but I distinctly remember Fuck You and the bird as a part of the 60’s revolution in this country (remembering Easy Rider)  – and a young girl in San Francisco yelled Fuck You at me in the airport when I returned from Viet Nam (along with: how many babies have you killed?) and I replied Fuck Off. 

Now, I claim all the variations of the Fuck word as primarily American.  

Anyone my age can remember George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television:

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

‘The good churchgoing people’ were scandalized at Carlin’s proclamation that these words existed, much less that someone would dare to utter them in public; while the flower generation picked up on them and unpretentiously wielded them for the shock factor they knew they could effect.   

Actually this day and age I find the Fuck variations, along with bitch, cunt and bastard colorless and trite.   I actually think arcane Britain may have coined better, more colorful expressions of disgusts and contempt – Or at least the author Ariana Franklin did in her book Mistress of the Art of Death.   (If you have not read Ariana Franklin you have missed a great mystery read in the era of King Henry II - circa 12^th. century.)  

In her book the female doctor Adelia is being held captive by a necked man wearing deer antlers and sporting and erection – Adelia defused the situation by unleashing a series of insult (curses): calling him a stinking crap-hound; a turd-mouth; stench-sucking lummox; dressed like a dog’s beef; son of a pox-ridden sow, and a betty-buttered mother’s boy; a jelly bag; snot-faced; arse-licking; goat fucking; bum-bellied; farting; turd-breathed apology.  (She left out Shakespeare’s cream-faced loon.)

The book is a great mystery read, but like the dictionary when I was young, I couldn’t help but latch on the ‘rude words’ section.

I know I am not the first to express this, but there are few enough words in the English language to emphasize expression, and no word should be forbidden (censored.) ... and damnit - fuck off is ours.

Or in a more British vernacular:

Off we Fuck then,

the Ol’Buzzard