making a list, checking it twice

Brilliant artist Ape Lad imagines that the next cable dump would be the ultimate disclosure of Santa's exhaustive annual performance appraisals, and shares his vision with Boing Boing, which is hosting a lot of excellent, on-going discussions on the topic and reporting from fresh angles.

gitty up, jingle horse, pick up your feet

The weather, save for all the daily headaches and tension that it is creating for commuters and travelers, is really remarkable and feels like a good and proper winter, as compared to years' past when the cold and annoyance came late. Routines are more chaotic and treacherous and spoiled plans can take on the taste of sour grapes, but for all that, an over-abundance of snow and ice should not give people license to humbug global warming and environmental initiatives.

Global warming is an unfortunate misnomer, pars pro toto, that has stuck, but broader climate change can embrace both hot and parched and frozen. The expected milder and rainy weather in the British Isles and Central Europe are sustained by the Atlantic Gulf Stream's or any other body of water's alternating current, which exchanges warm equatorial waters for colder arctic ones. Some tinkering with this global machinery has equally global results: altering the salinity of bodies of water, like from fresh water formerly locked up in glaciers and icebergs, effects how well heat can be transported. Extending the idea of greenhouse gases to ideas as venerable and basic as the theory of colour, the gleaming whiteness of snow and ice reflect back some 90% of heat and light projected on their surfaces. Whereas, open ocean water, instead of iced-over or peopled with icebergs, a craggy, bald mountain, as opposed to a snow-capped summit, absorb up to 90% of the light and heat falling on them, warming up all their surroundings and making more surfaces to capture the heat. All this seems to cascade down, but it seems to suggest that a little influence in the opposite direction could also have a big effect--that's what can cause white snow to dazzle one's eyes, makes piles of it in parking lots linger and can enchant snowmen. It's what makes the season certainly memorable, these challenges, and scenic, and for all the cursing and frustrations, shivers and sickness, it should be nothing to put people in the spirit to question or long for ecological collapse.

thrones & dominions or santa claus conquers the martians

My mother was sharing with me a documentary she watched recently that posited that Jesus was of extraterrestrial origin.  Imaginative and an idea to throw out there--it reminded me of the researchers who have suggested that those unaccounted-for years in the life of Jesus during his adolescence were spent on a pilgrimage to India (where the Wise Men were from) where he learnt the ways of the swamis and sages of the Far East and brought them back to Judea--I had no idea that there was such scholarship, speculation and a following attached to it.

My mother recommended that I write a gospel on the subject, which in actuality does not seem so far removed from the penchant of humans to model allegory and reinterpret meanings to fit what we are familiar with and what is needful--and not saying that the feats and miracles of Jesus were not enough or are no longer interesting and relevant with out some alien angle--but it seems that there's already an exhaustive amount out there: in addition to cleansing the sins of all of mankind, forever, it seems Jesus intervened to ensure that the Earth remained the domain of the Earthlings.  Comsic overloads seeded the primordial Earth with the genetic material that would eventual evolve in their image and cultivate a planet that would be one day suitable for their return.  Alien Jesus, however, fought for human liberation, and this historic enlightenment could be portrayed in several ways, depening on the sensibilities of the audience. 

Humans have not yet perfectly intergrated universal love and charity nor have they successfully displaced mortality, so it is not as if those Christian attributes and virtues are old hat, and though interesting and demonstrates that religious scholarship is a living entity, maybe it is a bit premature to reading the New Testament as a survival guide for preventing alien enslavement, though do not dismiss that possibility since it has always been a versatile and elastic document thus far.  Talking with my mother also made me remember visiting a Jesuit church that seems rather unassuming and conventional from the outside, but on the inside has this most fantastic and benign altar and adornments to Space Jesus and his Apostles.

through the rude wind's wild lament and the bitter weather

Precipitation in the form of snow can be quite the contrarian for the weatherman. I suppose it seems to buck the forecast in part because it lingers and the upbuilding of the flurries, not like rain that's an event, welcome or unwelcome, that is mostly obligingly soaked up or siphoned off. Snow transfigures the landscape and the view from one's windows like quite nothing else, dark of night nor lushness of Spring in full bloom.

 It is quieting, calming with its insistence, mounting and enduring, that invites one to consider all the millions, billions of particles of it, flakes buffeted and flocked or bullet-like projectiles something more cardinal than a cloud suspended or the water of rain drops, and something that seems just a bit outside of nature's cycle.

Torquemada oder keiner erwartet die spanische Inquisition

It is remarkable how the disclosure of a few uncomfortable realities, suspending plausible deniability, can spark even more surrounding an unlikely target of vitriol and sympathy. Though this lowest form of McCarthyism is left in the public’s eye to judge but certainly not to prosecute regardless of opinion and colourfastness of the case, the current theatre is by far mild compared to the private, invisible punishment that the known informants are enduring, and considering all the wrath and ire it seems that this taunt, venture, duty would have been undertaken with more contingencies.

It might be preferable to remain an inmate in some Tower of London, or suspended in some legal limbo on a warrant with the force of the very same deficiencies and unscrupulous dealings and poor taste of statecraft revealed, rather than being extradited, disappeared to face all the dirty loopholes of law and sore egos. That there is little remaining, in terms of financial institutions, jurisprudence, that cannot be easily converted into extensions of US foreign policy is disturbing. At least one is more or less guaranteed a pulpit in certain venues. Maybe the threat or bluff to release more embarrassing dispatches was sufficient, though I bet a good portion of zealots, one way or another, would like to see those revelations cascade down for the opportunity to use their full quivers of weapons.

what can you do with a vuvuzela, what can you do with a vuvuzela, what can you do with a vuvuzela

Early in the morning?  It is not so remarkable how fads come and go but I think it is seldom that a musical instrument, the shofar, the octarimba, the orcana endears itself to international language only to be quickly forgotten and neglected.  I could never quite master the embouchure to get a good, steady sound, but it was fun to try.  Repeatedly.  Since this summer's World Cup, I am sure that they are all hidden away in cupboards, but maybe the vuvuzela could make a come-back--for New Year's, for instance. 

antediluvian

Archeological researchers in the UK and the Czech Republic, and most archeological digging is done in the library or the mind, theorize that a large flood plain near the Fertile Crescent, now submerged in the shallows of the Persian Gulf since about eight thousand years, could have once supported an advanced Dreamtime civilization, whose ancient and half-remembered existence could be the stuff of legends, like Atlantis, and time before the biblical floods. Conventional wisdom holds that human progress is pretty much a closed-account, a straight trajectory from the Egyptians, to the Greeks, Romans through European enlightenment with the details still be worked out, but a lot of new discoveries, which were always there waiting to be noticed, suggests that the human world is much, much older and development has sometimes been retrograde.

The tribes of the remote Andaman Islands have been living in virtual isolation for the past sixty thousand years and probably represent one of the first migrations out of the African continent, and recent excavations in South Africa reveal a sophisticated coastal society using tools and agriculture possibly for some eighty thousand years, working metal tens of thousands of years before the process was supposedly invented in Europe. The lost civilization of the Persian Gulf could have also been highly advanced. Much can happen, unrecorded and with no recoverable trace, during these intervening ages and in the billions of unpeopled years before. Just coming to terms with the shrinking of the unexplored world and the implications of the scientifically-accepted age of the Earth and the universe, science-fiction writers of the Cthulhu mythos cycle invite readers to reconsider the prevailing arrogance that nothing much was happening in the meantime, except mechanical evolution. The world’s unimaginable age could accommodate the rise and fall of countless societies, in addition to the Sea Monkey Kingdom and the Utopia of the Dinosaurs. Not all the hidden places have been tilled and there may yet be a renaissance in exploration that is not led by how far or deep or close we can look.

advents calendar

Mentally preparing myself for the challenge of the snowy roads crunchy with ice--they are even colour-coded apparently but are not red or amber but decidedly white, I took the time to collect some of the infinite wonderful vignettes associated with Christmas--the Nativity scenes, suites of Nutcrackers, Santa Clauses and Snowmen without end, moose, reindeer, and the trees. 
Sometimes I feel that capturing the moment is not quite within photographic prowess, but decorating and the general background festoonery are great things, and the detail on mantle tops, showcased or otherwised shoe-horned into every free space is fantastic and brings the holidays into a brighter, sharper focus, like concerted dioramas every where one looks.