motto up for grabs

This may not be your idea of a fun motto for burners, but it 's certainly mine!

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Which translates to

We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire

A nice phrase, even suitable for t-shirting. But it's also a palindrome!

Found in the NYTimes: "The French writer, theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord's 1978 film, "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" will be featured as part of the annual Views From the Avant-Garde program."

In this spirit, and recognizing that titles are not copyrightable, I'm thinking of changing my "Fire Safety for Jugglers" to "What to Do When You Are Consumed By Fire," which is a NYT best selling book at the moment.

Fire Safety for Jugglers & Spinners

The 4th edition is available as a downloadable pdf.

www.foreworks.com

While you're there, get some wick.

Why do you love fire?

I don't.

I'm somewhat indifferent to fire, though I enjoy a good camp or stove fire.

I grew up with a coal/wood kitchen stove and a wood fire heater. (The house had one electric outlet, three oil lamps, a hand pump in the kitchen for water, an outhouse, and a crank telephone and party line). I'm of the last generation for whom fire was commonplace.

I suppose I think of fire much the same as I think of religion: I'm not personally fascinated with it, but I am fascinated with why other people are so fascinated with it.

Why is fire so fascinating?

Fire is a technology that we've largely abandoned, having replaced it with electricity and central heating. But it's still a technology, and the rule still holds: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Even if the technology is archaic.

So it's not surprising that people today feel spiritually charged by fireplay. It's an adrenaline-high version of steam punk. A dangerous form of retro. It's dragons' breath on your skin. It affirms your relationship with the elements, with the natural.

It's kitsch with pain.

And while fire is dangerous, it looks vastly more dangerous than it actually is (or there'd be many more crispy critters among us), which makes it an easy entre to personal coolness.

Fireplay is also like in the early days of computers, where the nerdy kids found that, unlike their teachers and parents, computers (and fire) never lie to you.

If you don't respect it, it will hurt you, and then scar you. But if you do respect it, and if you inquire deeply enough into its needs and demands, others will recognize your mastery, your special relationship with this ancient and fearsome element, and its embers will seem to glow deep from within your eyes, and they will forget your years of work in theatre arts, literature, political science, and social history, and call you "the fire guy."
.

Signs

I got my ducts cleaned today.

Not a medical procedure, it was the heating/AC ducts; and therein, of course, lies a story.

It seems a small woodland creature crept into our house, probably by burrowing under it, up into the understory, and thence through the moisture barrier and next to a duct joint where it got all warm and cozy, and immediately died.

We eventually figured this out with the help of Eddie, the Angies List Recommended Duct Cleaning Guy. Eddie is extremely knowledgeable and very good at what he does. If duct cleaning were a religion, he would be its Pope.

According to Eddie (TALRDCG), the first Sign was the appearance of flys in the house. Not many, but some. And it wasn't fly season and we don't leave the doors open. Surely this was a Sign. Spontaneous generation? Immaculate conception? Virgin birth? (How does one tell if a fly is a virgin [and why would one want to know?]) Eddie did not speculate or comment, but I'm sure he knew.

The second Sign was the smell of a deceased woodland creature. An unmistakable a Sign and the first such that indicated a new and unexpected presence. According to Eddie (TALRDCG), if the smell goes away within a week or two, its a mouse. If it takes a month, its a rat. If it takes longer it may well be the possum who lives (lived?) in our back yard. But more likely it is simply a mole, a mouse-sized woodland creature, who somehow lost his way and found our home and made it his crypt. We'll see.

Eddie (TALRDCG) knows that whatever it is or was, it didn't get into the ducts themselves because there were no other Signs (bits of fur left on projecting sheet metal corners, feumets, nesting materials, etc.) Eddie knows because he said he could see all the way through our ducts, from end to end. Eddie has powers allowing him to do this and many other things, which is why Angie recommends him.

It is good to rest one's faith in the powers of Eddie because the ducts needed vacuuming anyway, having never been cleaned in their eleven-year history, though Eddie (T . . . etc.) recommends ritual cleaning at least every five years.

Our ducts are cleansed now and Eddie is gone, leaving almost no trace of his own passage other than our good wishes for him, a modest entry in our checkbook, and (as soon as I finish this) another recommendation in Angies List.

Signs of our small woodland creature are still present, hanging softly in the air. But such Signs are fading and there are no further flys, so there is hope.

Perhaps we have been blessed.

What's Really Wrong With America.

First see www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/arti...s.php for a refutation of the myths of Social Security Insolvency , the Fundamentalist Take-over, and American Racial Polarization. Myths, all. But some snarks are boojums.

There's an old New Yorker magazine cartoon showing an alien humanoid crossing the desert on hands and knees, pleading to aloud to the baren landscape: "Amonia! Amonia!"

It's time for a similar cartoon, this time showing a "typical American family," crossing the desert on hands and knees, with the father begging for "Insurance! Insurance!"

Health care is not the problem. Insurance is the problem. In the sixties, Kaiser Hospitals discovered that merely by managing the Medicare program for its own current health-care members, it would increase profits by 20%. No new services or medical care, just shuffle the paper and increase your profit margin. Blue Cross and all the other HMOs had the same epiphany.

This established health care as a commodity rather than a service, and the search for the bottom line was shielded from ethical scrutiny by layers of insurance accountants. For them, the more that is spent on health care, the better -- so long as they get their cut.

Doctors, who are now free to advertise their services and incorporate themselves (to escape liability), are quite happy to be shielded from responsibility of managing costs as well, and eager to point helpless fingers at everyone else, beginning with patient demand.

Other factors are the direction of patent law, the subversion of the university research system, and the failure of government to support (and regulate!) science and industry sufficiently to protect citizens from predation and abuse. Isn't that what the citizens created government to do?

The mythical monsters of Political Correctness, Predation by Lawsuit, and Liberal Social Coddling are supposedly responsible for the ills of health-care management gone wild. The true monsters, as with the myth of Social Security insolvency, are those who benefit from things as they are. Follow the money.

The problem here is the same problem of all unchecked and unregulated capital-intensive entities: they know no limits to greed and have no decency.

As for plutocracy, a real American problem and not a myth, let's give the estate tax and the truly progressive income tax another chance. We already have a flat tax in effect, and it's given us none of the benefits advertised for it. The great divide in America is most clearly shown by the distribution of wealth among citizens and families, not of income. The Chicago School of Economics followed up on the work of Walker and Puller in taming Central and South America for American interests, and robbed them blind. The payback is that we have believed our own propaganda and are now robbing our own citizens blind. (Meanwhile our southern neighbors are busy ignoring us and creating their own economic and political realities.)

The US money machine is fixed in favor of the most wealthy, the oldest money. A redistribution of opportunity is in order, and that only happens through taxation that promotes wealth accumulation at the bottom before hording at the top.

It's that or revolution. Take your pick.

in the parking lot

In the parking lot,
I wonder what she sees
when she looks at me and stiffles
a smile and looks down.

Her kids call me V. I hate that movie:
bloody revolution, abuse of trust,
betrayal as love. (They don't know
they know, but they do.)

Her husband and almost-grown children
standing there. My wife and her chair
already packed, now watching
her watching me.

I hug her, and then each of them
(the daughter, surely, knows!)
except my wife, and get in and drive away.
V couldn't have played it better.

We both know that some day, probably
when we're both too old for it to matter,
we will have each other, too old to hold
illusions but trying anyway, after.

The sushi was very good, too.

Sexual Ambiguity Solidarity

Some years ago a friend was describing his college-age daughter's progressive ambivalence in her modes of relationship. During her second year at San Diego State University she declared that she was a lesbian.

In her third year she decided that while she still enjoyed sexual relations with women there was a definite place for men in her sex life, as well.

In her final year at SDSU she announced that she was more experienced and aware of the larger world so that her identity now was primarily Goth.

My friend said he and his wife were concerned and asked me for my thoughts. I told him that they had to take a longer view of these things. That sometimes one had to let bi-goths be bi-goths.

An Open Footer

ABOUT THIS POST: This is version 1.0.1 of the product you are now reading. You are hereby licensed to read, reproduce, and distribute this product for non-commercial purposes, at no cost to the recipient, if and only if this notice and the attribution of any change to it or to the product is appended hereto. Contributors of significant revisions or responses are encouraged to forward them to the author for possible future builds or releases. In reading this product I understand and accept that no literary purpose, use, or function is warranted, that no rights are transfered, and that all implications, interpretations, and liabilities for consequent behavior are solely the responsibility of the reader.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

> news.independent.co.uk/fisk/a...860.ece <

Shame on Fisk for even bringing up the matter! Within a week he'll be misquoted and abused beyond his worst fears, and no refutations or disclaimers will stop it.

It should be apparent to everyone by now that this issue cannot be resolved. Believe what you wish, but understand that the purpose of conspiracy theories is to keep people intellectually and emotionally distracted, wasting time and energy that they might use to actually do something.

The newspapers should start to print box scores on conspiracy theories, just like they do baseball statistics, and with about the same effect on the game (or reality) itself.

Fans of conspiracy theories are just that: fans. They are not players, nor are they theorists, they are second-hand fabulists, picking which of the hundreds of opinions to adopt and mouth as their own, and carefully choosing which little hill of sand to build their castles on. They are consumers, not producers, and they do not particpate in democracy. They are politically irrelevent, morally bankrupt, and physically impotent to affect or confront power. The lesson they teach is that nothing really matters because the truth is not findable; and even if you found it there is nothing you could do about it because it's bigger than you are.

Dictators, fascists, unitary executivists, they all love the fans of conspiracy theories.

Do not listen to them, the conspiracy fans. Do not argue with them. Do not respond to them. Do something real instead: picket a recruiting station, speak to students, march, vigil, write editorials, raise funds and knock on doors for local candidates. Be active in, and be a meaningful part of the world; not just a "fan."

slapstick and black humor

Slapstick elicits two kinds of laughter: "at" and "with." Laughing at someone else's misfortune is simply cruel. We expect this in children too young to recognize that others feel pain just as they do. We expect adults to have learned empathy, and consider them sociopaths when they don't.

How then can an adult with a fully developed sense of empathy enjoy a portrayal of the suffering of others? This requires the temporary suspension of our social judgement, and the temporary suspension of our self-judgement. Just as suspension of disbelief is necessary to enjoy fiction of any kind, suspension of judgement is necessary to enjoy physical comedy and satire.

We acccept the meta-reality of the "play" by suspending social and moral judgement of the behavior of the players, and at the same time accept our own behavior in laughing at them. We put ourselves a "pretend" state so that we don't leap onto the stage and punch the villain and rescue the maiden.

We step into their shoes and out of our own shoes, for the sake of enjoying the story. This is one of the functions of childrens' play: to learn to take the part of another, and to learn to make a heirarchy of realities.

We do much the same thing in expressing "black" humor about unfortunate situations over which we have no real control.

When your friend slips and falls in the kitchen, splattering cookie batter all over the walls and bloodying her nose, you help her staunch the bleeding with ice and paper towels. Then you both sit on the floor, eating cookie dough off the walls, holding each other and laughing hysterically.

In this instance, since the age of 5, my friend has had to choose between walking around on her knees or using a power chair. The knee-walking freaks out the civilians. But at home, mine or hers, it's just easier to be the geek that each of us, in our own way, very much is.