living in a powder-keg and giving off sparks

Though not quite as infrequent as a total solar eclipse, it is a rare occurence to find out new facts about the same musician back to back.  We learned earlier in the week—but still not in time to book passage on the sold-out cruise—Miss Bonnie Tyler will be performing her signature 1983 power ballad on deck to guests (and surely with guests) as the ship passes in the path of totality and the sun is blotted out.
Total Eclipse of the Heart lasts slightly longer that the two minutes and forty seconds of civil twilight that cruiser-goers will experience, but there’s no word if there’s a special abbreviated performance might be given. Incredibly this is not the only news regarding the song from this past week—as Miss Cellania points out, the piece was originally written for Meat Loaf and was to appear on his next release but as his own 1977 landmark  Bat out of Hell album was such a run-away success and a tough act to follow, he dismissed his lyricist to rethink his next project. A few years later, the songwriter realised that the number would be the perfect way to showcase Tyler’s operatic talents. While I appreciate that perhaps in the grand scheme of things, pop songs may not be of the greatest pith and moment, but it’s a bit rough to imagine how karaoke nights, the development of the music video and the eighties genre might be radically different had things turned out otherwise.  What do you think?  Turn around Bright Eyes.

import/export

On display at the corporate headquarters based in Memphis, Tennessee is by good fortune and foresight the overnight shipping and cargo airline firm Federal Express’ first delivery van, a second generation Ford Econoline van from 1973. Founded in the same year by Fred Smith, confident that time’s value was on an upward trajectory, the company now has the rather redundant title of FedEx Express and more competition from courier services have come on to the scene but the corporation still remains the leader in overnight deliveries—plus had the wherewithal to conserve its humble beginnings. Be sure to visit Just a Car guy at the link above for more automotive wonders.

disbanded

When sixteen out of seventeen members of Dear Leader’s Committee of the Arts and Humanities, whose duties include overseeing the doomed National Endowment for the Arts, resigned en masse (the one public official—the honorary chairman found her hands tied), the signed a collective thoughtful and urgent letter expressing their disgust towards the White House’s response to last week’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. If one takes the first letter of each paragraph after the salutation and puts them together, the acrostic reveals a hidden message. Additionally note the opening line, “Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms.”

black jack

Though always eager to be the centre of attention be it through palace intrigues or disgraceful provocation and the news that Trump dismissed his chief propagandist to return to the managing the media properties that helped create the landscape that made it possible for this regime to seize power became the dominant headline, Trump’s doltish antics ought not to cause us to be distracted from his awful reaction to the violence in Barcelona with an appeal to a patent and self-plagiarised falsehood.
Ironically, the public figure who just the day prior berated the press for speaking before they knew all the facts (unlike himself) related a crass story that he was already told was untrue. Instead of condolences and statements of solidarity, Trump offered that Europe should study Pershing, most likely—although restricted to one hundred and forty characters, one has to fill in the blanks sometimes, to the military commander’s nation-building exercise in the Philippines and his tough stance on terrorism with an apocryphal account of executing Islamic terrorist in a defiling manner and how the example set ended insurgency in the region. Who is feeding this troll?  Do not make this tragic moment and movement about you.  While this libellous, revisionist and frankly criminal fable is unlikely to do anything other than cause more inflammatory feelings, the injunction to study General “Black Jack” Pershing might be illuminating in terms of understanding what America’s foreign “policy” might become going forward with a return to imperial aspirations and what sort of messenging (through a restored Bannon) that might entail.

an army marches on its stomach

Though the idea has spread far and wide at least on informal terms, the French were the first in the seventeen-hundreds to acknowledge and commission the commissariat corps styled vivandièred or cantinières. These women were for the most part affiliated with those on the battlefield and could provide far better fare and refreshment than what the military was capable of providing. These women at the front also experienced quite a lot of mission-creep—often omitted in histories, figured quite large in the outcomes on the battlefield.

strumming on the old banjo

Rising above the ranks of unabashed, unapologetic romancing of statues of Confederate military leaders, Damon Young shares his encounter with a surpassingly offensive monument that he’d managed to overlook his whole life, despite being in the same city. The bronze of US songwriter Stephen Collin Foster was cast and dedicated in 1900 in the city of Pittsburgh near the campuses of the Carnegie Institutes (not that the provenance is any excuse for the portrayal) and depicts Foster elevated over an African America ostensibly performing some of the minstrel tunes that either inspired Foster or rather that Foster just committed to sheet-music and took the credit for.  Standards of decency and propriety had advanced, at least one could be forgiven for thinking, that is until one reads an excerpt from a city newspaper article written one hundred and ten years after its dedication (which directed the author to the statue’s existence in the first place) that is couched in dated, racist terms.  You’ll do a double-take too.

beyond the long now

Acclaim for Kottke for directing our attention to the well-curated Wikipedia property that concerns itself with distant future scenarios for the known Cosmos as we presently understand it, beginning with events postulated to take place beyond ten thousand years from now.
As illustrated in this timeline, due to the gradual shift of the lunisolar calendar, in AD 20 874 Gregorian and Islamic calendars will share the same year number, just a few hundred years after Chernobyl becomes once again safely habitable for humans, and still five thousand years until the earliest possible receipt of the Arecibo message by an alien intelligence. Assuming the same limitations still apply, a reply would take another twenty-five thousand years—coinciding with the planned return and unsealing of an orbiting space time capsule to be launched in 2019. There’s a lot of fascinating facts to wade through and I’m sure everyone will find something resounding to stand in awe of. Off this scale by many orders of magnitude and of course a gradual and on-going occurrence, astronomers poignantly believe that by one hundred billion years in the future the Universe will have expanded to the point that no civilization would see starry night skies and look up to wonder about their neighbours.

jai guru deva om

Against the advice of his gurus and meditative-betters, philosopher and author Robert Wright not only took notes to be later adapted into a book during his silent retreats, he also shared his feelings of inadequacies and failing when it comes to practicing mindfulness.  
Why Buddhism is True does not privilege it above other religious traditions and articles of faith are not addressed but is rather true in the sense that its core teachings and methods of coping—suffering comes from misunderstanding and meditation leads to liberation—work on a physical and psychological level because they allow us to transcend the inscrutables of billions of generations of evolution. The great chain of being that has led to you and your condition is miraculous but also has brought the hitchhikers of history which may have conferred advantage (Fear is the mind-killer.) at one point when our lives were more precarious but are now nuisances and sources of unbidden bias and anxiety. Perhaps not to be edited away could we identify the offending gene, the willingness to be still and confront and embrace the distressing renders it less powerful. The take-away is—by the way—that there is no wrong way of being attentive (Do or do not. There is no try.) and that daily practice yields daily reward.