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Writer's Block: Book review

What (if any) books would you ban from a high school library? Are there certain subjects that you feel are inappropriate for teenagers regardless of literary merit?

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If there are any books that encourage the banning of other books from a high school library, I would give serious thought to banning those.

It's inappropriate to teach teenagers that people should be afraid of printed words on a page.

Garuda's weight today
5.10 ounces = 144.582568 grams

Hmm, he's been quite active and getting in a lot of flight time. I hope this apparent weight gain is a good thing.

Retreat
Starting tomorrow I'm taking a week to do a ngondro retreat. I will need to break it briefly on Tuesday to fulfill civic obligations (vote and get a flu shot) but I'll be without phone or internet.

I hope you all had a happy Halloween and fed plenty of hungry little ghosts.

This picture is from last year, but this year wasn't too different:

Solanum priapus
One of my heirloom Roma tomato plants grew a tomato with a penis on it.

I am definitely saving the seeds from this one. It looks like it wants to reproduce pretty badly.

Does this mean that Guru Rinpoche or Drukpa Kunley is present? I have been thinking about Bhutan a lot lately.

Current Mood: awed

When real life imitates The Onion
Bruce Cockburn gets rocket launcher; no son of a bitch dies

For those who don't understand the reference, check out this song from 1984, one of his more well known numbers. (Thanks leswamp.)

At that time the U.S. government was really angry about civilians being strafed from helicopters, so long as it happened in Afghanistan and the helicopters were Russian. In El Salvador and Guatemala such behavior was much more acceptable.

Edit: It wasn't actually his "biggest hit" as I wrote earlier. Several of his other singles have charted higher. You can tell I don't live in Canada or listen to the radio a lot.

A friend of mine went to see him once in the early 90s. When he finished the first verse of that song, people started to cheer, and apparently Cockburn stopped playing and said "You shouldn't cheer for that!"

June, September

Current Music: Frank Sinatra, "It Was a Very Good Year"

Hooray
Laptop fixed. More frequent posting may follow.

Thank you, Universe, for reminding me that most inanimate objects other than percussion instruments don't really work better if you hit them.

Current Mood: ambivalent

It's all about making the connections
Just last weekend, D., S. & I were making plans to go see a movie. She looked at the City Pages movie listings and said, hmmm, the Trylon? At 3258 Minnehaha? I've never heard of that.

Neither had I, but now I have, thanks to the City Pages profile.

And sadly, we just missed a chance to see The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which I've been assured is a must-see for anyone in the transit business.

Oh well. Your next train will be along in about... ten minutes.

Pictures from near-space
Three MIT students equipped a helium balloon with a digital camera and GPS device, and sent it up into the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere. It flew for 5 hours, reached a height of 17.5 miles and took some awesome pictures, and the whole thing cost them just under $150.

Hi there, I'm not dead yet!

Garuda's weight today
4.95 ounces = 140.330139 grams

I think he is gaining muscle mass now that he is fully flighted and getting more exercise. He loves to chase me around the house.

Incense
An interesting website about incense, and an interesting blog entry about some of the ecological problems associated with incense making:

http://olfactoryrescueservice.wordpress.com/
http://tibetanaltar.blogspot.com/2009/05/incense-devotion-or-disaster.html

I've burned pure aloeswood chips before. I think the little chunk cost me about $20-30. There is really nothing like it, somewhere between musk and vetiver with a hint of shitaki mushroom and wormwood blossom. But I couldn't really use it regularly.

I found these links while searching for more information about Nado Poizokhang, the wonderful incense maker in Thimphu, Bhutan. They have renamed their top grade incense "Happiness" to celebrate Bhutan's commitment to producing Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product.

I also love the P'hul-Jung Men-Pö variety made in Nepal for Chagdud Gonpa.

I used to burn lots of incense. Then I started caring for birds. Now I burn smaller amounts of incense in a far room with the windows open and doors shut, and keep a high quality air purifier going in my living room near the bird cage. The air outside the shrine room stays very clean, and Garuda and I seem to be doing OK.

Tibetan incense is supposed to have all kinds of wonderful medicinal qualities, but I notice that I cough and sneeze less than I used to.

Happiness
The problem with leaving Public Radio on all day while you're trying to do other things is that random speakers keep reaching out and grabbing you.

"Nature doesn't care if we're happy. Nature cares if we survive long enough to reproduce." - Daniel Gilbert

He went on to say that happiness in many ways involves "getting around this three pound lump of meatloaf between our ears", which only cares about finding food, shelter and sex. Most of the tastes we have developed in human culture (good wine, hardwood floors, Persian rugs, ben-wa balls, Hitachi Magic Wands) are mere elaborations.

Things *not* to "take a little time" for...
George Carlin: Does time bother you?

Those of you who are at all concerned about self-improvement (especially if you've ever glanced inside a book from that section in the bookstore) have probably noticed this trend:

Every teacher, writer, speaker or random know-it-all in that general field has their little list of things that everybody ought to "take a little time" to do, and then we'd all be happy.

Take a little time to eat a good breakfast. Take a little time for morning exercise. Take a little time to be thankful. Take a little time for affirmations. Take a little time to massage your eyelids. Take a little time to chew your food properly. Take a little time for a warm bath and a cup of peppermint tea. Take a little time to relax fully before going to bed. Take a little time to make cold-press coffee, but not too much of it. Take a little time to grow your own herbs.

Take a little time to stretch before moving... slowly...

Take a little time to eat the flowers...

A lot of this is really good helpful advice, of course, but notice how lifestyle advice is always additive rather than subtractive. I would need a 36-hour day to do half of the things someone thinks I should "take a little time" to do. And I didn't even list the hard stuff, like learning a new musical instrument or a new language, breaking a substance habit or bad dietary habit, or finishing the preliminary practices in Vajrayana Buddhism.

Let's make a list of things not to take time for so that we can do all these other things, including the big hard life-changing ones.

Here are things I have given up, never took up in the first place, or am looking hard at giving up:

-Television. What more do I need to say?
-Random Internet searches. Lots of self-righteous dorks who don't own televisions waste time at this instead. It's probably my single biggest avoidable time sink.
-Shaving. Beards: Love them or leave them alone!
-Hanging around in bars or cafes. I have never been a "regular" anywhere, and I'm sure I've missed out on a lot because of it. But would it really have been worth all that time hanging around doing nothing?
-Fixing my own bike. I can patch a tube, change a tire and oil my chain. If I have a problem beyond that, I take it to the Hub Bike Co-op and let the cute bike kids fix it. I could probably save money if I studied bike repair, but I'd have to buy tools and spend time developing that skill set.
-Messing around with cars. See above. I have opted for the elegant solution of not owning one, but if I did, I'd take about the same approach with it as I do with my bike.
-Seeing most current movies.

Obviously this list will be different for different folks. If tinkering with bikes is your passion and you could care less about gardening, you might do the opposite of me and hire a landscaper instead of a bike mechanic.

What do you not do to save time?

Borage

Borage recipes

I was recently looking over my copy of Beyerl's Master Book Of Herbalism, one of the first herb books I bought and one which I still find useful on occasion, though 20+ years later I think it's much in need of revision.

Amidst plenty of basic useful information, there are a few clunkers. Beyerl says borage was "one of the Magickal Herbes of the Celts".

The most up-to-date sources indicate that borage is native to Syria and was naturalized to the other Mediterranean countries, and then to Europe and Asia. Since there were Continental Celtic populations as far as Asia Minor, some of the Celts could very well have known and used this herb, but at this point, to know what they used it for would require a time machine.

In fact, here is all we know about Continental Celtic herblore from native sources: "----". People who say otherwise have been talking to the fairies, and you need to be careful about that. What the fairies don't know, they'll make up. Or was that the Wiccans? I forget.

Using borage, Beyerl says, enables one to "feel happiness and joy, even during the most difficult of crises", and I can't argue with him there.

Another, perhaps even more tangible benefit of borage is attracting lots of happy bumblebees, which will then pollinate the other plants in your garden, especially your tomatoes.

Borage flowers are Blue Food, that rarest of rarities. Eat them and live forever.

Garuda's weight today
4.85 ounces = 137.495187 grams

With a full crop, after begging bits of my curry :)

Down by the old mainstream
A friend I hadn't seen in years had died suddenly, and I didn't feel like doing much yesterday, so it seemed like a good time to sit down with the parrot and watch The Big Chill, now a 26 year old movie. I could think about my friend and remember just how bad the Reagan years were.

Punk rock kept a lot of us alive, except of course for those of us it killed. Read Noah Levine's Dharma Punx for more about that.

I found a copy on Hi-Fi VHS at a neighbor's garage sale for 50 cents. This is a great way to see '80s and '90s movies that somehow slipped through the cracks of your life, so long as you have a functioning VHS player or know someone who does (thanks Don and Sharla). I also scored a copy of Labyrinth, which I've never seen; we should watch that sometime.

I had seen The Big Chill when I was 20-something and stoned, and I couldn't relate to it at all: a bunch of yuppies sitting around in a suburb and moaning, "What happened to us?" If you don't understand a book or movie and you're in your twenties, maybe it wasn't written for you. Wait a few years and try it again.

(to be continued)

Jordan Kagermeier
Jordan was an old friend from high school debate. He died suddenly last week.

Obituary

Even though he was someone with literally hundreds of friends and we hadn't really spoken since high school, he still remembered me and would ask my father about me.

Thinking of you, Jordan.