SUN 24 DEC 2000

Something for Everyone

Pick your favorite Christmas hero with the Jesus and Santa Shotglass Set,
based on the very first South Park cartoon!

Thought for the Day
"He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake."
-- Santa Claus is Tapping Your Phone

Getting on Santa's Good Side

Christmas is Pagan!
At least that's what this guy thinks. Goes to show you what happens to the minds of children whose parents won't let them celebrate Christmas. Truly twisted. Please send up prayers to the gods for this man when you celebrate Saturnalia with your neighbors this year.

Thought for the Day
"The entire web of culture and 'progress', everything on earth that is manmade and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of someone's refusal to bow to Authority."
-- Hagbard Celine, Never Whistle While You're Pissing

But Mr. Ranger, the Sign Said...

Photo contributed by Tom D.

Personal Observation
I just realized that in a dream I had this week, there were bulldozers and cleared land. In the dream map I made when I was ten years old, there are also bulldozers and cleared land. I suppose it's because ever since I can remember, I've seen the countryside here in North Carolina get bulldozed over and scraped down to red clay to make room for strip malls and car dealerships and housing subdivisions and other structures much less attractive than what was there to begin with. The natural landscape is rapidly disappearing, or at least being irrevocably transformed. Maybe this is why people don't live forever... things would change too much to handle.

Odd News
A Texas prisoner tried to sue Penthouse because he claimed the December photo spread of Paula Jones wasn't revealing enough, but the judge dismissed the case -- with a poem. (Personally, we have no idea why anyone would want to see any more of Paula Jones than they absolutely had to.) Also in the news: butt-baring hot dog vendors and phosphorescent spuds. (Thanks to f00Dave for that last one.)

Unsettling Scene
As I drove into work this morning in sub-freezing temperatures, the sunrise pink in the eastern sky, I passed a small farm where they raise pigs and cattle. Near the house, two or three men heavily bundled against the chill were building a fire in a large metal cooker, their breath clouding in the icy morning air. Past the house, in the cold brown field where the animals are kept, a large pig was flopping around on its back, throat cut, neck bloody. The rest of the pigs watched from a fair distance. It was a profoundly eerie and disconcerting tableau. Although I'm sure the farmers didn't intend it as such, I couldn't help thinking of it as some kind of solstice sacrifice. Barbeque, anyone?

Merry Yule!
Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year -- thus the inspiration for today's quote. The event was highly significant for primitive agricultural societies, because it signaled the beginning of the slow seasonal return to warmer weather and longer periods of daylight. As a result, many cultures celebrate holidays around this time of year involving the theme of light being born out of darkness. So light a candle, lift a glass, and break on through....

Thought for the Day
"Break on through to the other side."
-- Jim Morrison

Illiterate Fundies These folks have obviously taken great pains to avoid the "sin" of education, to the point of apparently being unable to distinguish between the two simple English words "you're" and "your", and basing an entire domain name on this misconception. Read what they have to say at "Your Going to Hell!" (I never even knew it was my going to hell. I thought it was someone else's going to hell.)

An Opposing Viewpoint (with lots of run-on sentences)

Childhood Dreams
I just found an old book I got when I was nine or ten years old. It's a paperback called What Your Dreams Mean by Alan Davis, published by Bantam Books in June 1969 (cover price 75¢). It's a typical example of the sensationalistic paperback books once available at the checkout counters of grocery stores (which is probably where I begged my mother to buy it for me) -- the cover hype screams, "Wake up now to astonishing revelations about your past, present and future! Learn what messages your dreams have about love, success and money!" -- but in the back of the book, there's a dream log. And in that dream log, I wrote down some dreams that I had during the last week of August 1969, right after I turned ten and was just starting the fifth grade. An example (transcribed exactly as written, errors and all):

August 25, 1969
Dream A. I am riding in a car with a teacher. Every time I blink my eyes I disapper into another dimention where everything is upside-down and airplanes are alive.
Dream B. I can fly but I have to be holding a coconut. I fly out of the top of the roofless building. Then I wake up.

But wait: there's more. In the very back of the book, on a folded-up piece of notebook paper between the back cover and the last page, was a dream map that I made at roughly the same time. The roofless building I mentioned in the dream summary above is on it, with a coconut tree beside it. There are a number of other places, too, from dreams I never wrote down. I vaguely remember making other maps, too, but I don't know what happened to them. And the leaves that are green turn to brown....

Thought for the Day
"The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances."
-- Martha Washington

Snow!
Snow has come home for the holidays. We got off early from work, and I went walking through drifting white flakes with Mojo sitting on my shoulder under my big green army coat, his little black head sticking out from the collar beside mine. We were a regular two-headed monster.
Here's a picture of the snow covering the remains of our garden.

Dead Garden in the Snow

Arrive without Traveling
See all without looking. Do all without doing. I'm not sure exactly what George Harrison had in mind when he wrote those words back in 1967, but he could easily have been talking about dreams.
The other night I dreamed I was sitting on a balcony overlooking a river. Ships were going by at regular intervals, with people waving and shouting from the decks. On the other side of the river was cleared land with piles of dirt being pushed around by bulldozers and other earthmoving equipment. The balcony I was sitting on was part of a huge metal building. The balcony held a number of tables like mine, but I was the only person out there. Behind me, a level floor with square supporting columns stretched into the distant darkness like an enormous parking garage. Except unlike in a parking garage, there were staircases, escalators, and ladders everywhere, slanting off at different angles, going to various places that required various levels of security clearance. I realized that I was supposed to try to get into some area where I technically wasn't supposed to be.
I lifted up the chain blocking the entrance to a nearby escalator and took the moving staircase down into what looked like a subway. There was some kind of checkpoint booth, but it looked like it had been abandoned for quite some time. Someone stepped out of a doorway behind me, and as I turned I saw him coming toward me, and behind him a huge wall of water crashing toward both of us from the subway tunnel beyond. We both began yelling excitedly.
At this point, Ruthie shook me awake. It was maybe three in the morning. She said I'd been talking in my sleep in what sounded like some strange language, or was I just babbling? I was barely conscious, unable to stay awake, and I wanted to tell her that no, what I was saying made perfect sense, I was just talking about... hmmmmmm... zzzzzzzzzzzzz........ And I really was talking about something that really did perfect sense at the time, but I can't quite remember what it was anymore. Something to do with waffles and mistywisps, or something. You know, just regular language. At least, regular language for dreams.
The experience reminded me of a dream I had a few years ago where I really wanted to wake up. I was walking beside the railing looking over a retro-modern hydroelectric dam, talking to someone I was trying to get away from, and as I tried to wake myself up and the dream began to fade, I could hear the voice fading too as I pushed my mind's self upward through the layers of sleep. And I heard it slip in seamless stages from being ordinary, understandable language to an indecipherable flow of strange syllables and sounds....

Thought for the Day
"I think I think, therefore I think I am."
-- Descartes' failed attempt to discard the notion of objective reality

Unfortunate Names Department

Fog
A couple of nights ago, when the fog was thick, I ventured into the woods. The only thing darker than the woods at night is the woods at night in the fog. Trails that are obvious in the daytime vanish, and even though I know the area well I found myself stumbling off the path from time to time, small trees blocking my way, the ground uneven underfoot. The birds and insects are silent now, the only sound the steady drip of water from the high leaves. Everything was bathed in a gray curtain of thick mist, the air heavy with a smell like the dampness under logs. If it had been in a sci-fi story, it would have been the perfect venue for slipping into another time, another dimension. If I'd suddenly seen a troop of Civil War soldiers tramping through the haze, I would have been less surprised than usual.

Update
Added a couple of guest editorials to Etc.: A Layman's Guide to the Supreme Court Decision in Bush v. Gore, and A Modest Proposal for Revising U.S. Voting Practices. Also added a link in this section to a previous guest editorial (Eyewitness Account of WTO Protests) formerly accessible only through a link in an explosition.

Thought for the Day
"Rules are the things made up to justify all that has been done."
-- Edison Denisov