Recorded the day after my bi-lateral inguinal hernia repair on 24-11-2018
Category: Musings
This morning I had a dream in which we go to investigate the martial arts classes in our village. In our last village they did Ki-Aikido in the village hall, here they perhaps do Iaido. In France things are not often exactly as advertised, there is a lot of improvisation, so things could be different.
The video previous showing a Kyokushin kata is something that I have done. Few of my former colleagues would imagine me so attired. Yet even in my decrepit state my body remembers some of the upper body motions.
For a couple of years, two decades ago, I trained at a dojo in London where the sensei had had first hand Japanese tuition, in Japan. This includes Musho Shinden Ryu Iaido. He is something of a master, “royalty” even. I never learned this from him. We did hoshinjutsu a variant of the Kodokan self-defence Goshin-jutsu.
I think is fair to say that some measure of budo has rubbed off on me over the years.
Joining a new dojo there would be possibly a few faux pas from the other students. They may be unaware of what I know. We could get a brown belt syndrome. This when people who are nearly dan grade imagine themselves to be better and more knowledgeable than they are.
I don’t know what I may or may not have picked up from Finn sensei by association. I “touched” the lineages, so to speak.
It seems to me that Iaido is probably something that I could have a crack at. I suspect that mentally I am fine, the slab of meat which I inhabit, may have other ideas.
The courses may not be on. People put flyers out, classes do not always materialise.
When we joined the Ki-Aikido classes they were a bit in the doldrums, we brough some fresh wind for the sails.
I shall look for any follow-up dreams / omens.
Hmmn…
Yo Ren
Whassup?
Tell em where you from!
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Straight outta Compton, another crazy ass nigga
More punks I smoke, yo, my rep gets bigger
I’m a bad motherfucker and you know this
But the pussy ass niggaz don’t show this
But I don’t give a fuck, I’ma make my snaps
If not from the records, from jackin or craps
Just like burglary, the definition is ‘jackin’
And when illegally armed it’s called ‘packin’
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Damn that shit was dope!
O’shea Jackson / Lorenzo Jerald Patterson / Andre Romell Young / Eric Wright
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Today I learned that “packing”, in our weird and wonderful times, can have another meaning for those claiming to be trans male. You can even “pack and play”. I wonder what do the woke brigade and the purveyors of vagina scented candles make of N.W.A. or Niggaz Wit Attitudes?
Are they taboo?
People can get easily offended. I have a t-shirt like this and it does from time to time attract attention usually from black people.
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People can be very concerned about where people come from and what is their background. I can say with accuracy that I have not been employed by a recognised organisation for more than six weeks in the last seventeen years. My background is as an unemployed person who did some private teaching of “A” level physics and chemistry for about five years. I have been retired for a few years now and live in rural Brittany.
If I were to apply for a job, this is what a prospective employer would see first listed chronologically on my CV or application form. Anything else is “ancient” history.
In academia it is customary to say who your Ph.D. supervisor was, as depending, this can give an aura of kudos.
We did a course “Ph.D. to Professional” at Cambridge University when asked to introduce themselves they all said, “I am in the Bloggs group” and then some extremely jargon laden title about their Ph.D. subject. Their identity seemed to be tied to the research group supervisor. I had never heard of any of their supervisors as I am not a biologist, so it meant nothing to me.
But just like for the guys from Compton, it seems important to have a “rep” in modern society.
Because I lead an itinerant childhood when people ask me where I am from. I tend to pause. “Nowhere” is a tricky answer. They don’t really want chapter and verse, so I say Cardiff, even though I only lived there for my first two years.
One cannot say. “I am an individuating identity cleaved off from and out of the source of all life. I am incarnate here on the physical plane to learn. Thence to follow the journey of the prodigal, home to my father’s house from whence I came.”
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If somebody asked you, what is your background and where are you from, how would you answer them?
Would you give a short off pat socially-conditioned answer?
Or would you endeavour to answer what, in truth, is a very probing question?
On of the advantages of the warriors’ path is that it sets you up for the unexpected. One cannot expect the unexpected, one can be fluid and not rigid in thinking. Your never know when you might get a surprise.
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When the wife was ill and had a cancer diagnosis, I said to her that you never know what is going to happen it is the warriors’ path. All kinds of weird shit might happen.
The four postulates of stalking suggest that we do not have life “sussed” and any “solution” to the mystery we might have, is but a temporary construct.
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Fate has quirks, the universe throws curve balls and God chucks a spanner into the works of our most carefully laid cunning plans.
If we self-diagnose as omniscient, we know best, we are at best arrogant fools.
I am aware of the most likely life trajectory from here, from this point in space-time. But fate may have a sack full of quirks yet…
We shall see…
The only major change to diet I have had recently is switching to 0% ethanol beer…
I have gout in my big toe.
I read today that apparently these “beers” contain purines too…bummer.
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The long term preventative treatment for gout is usually a Xanthine oxidase inhibitor….
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This should stop the uric acid precipitating out as sodium urate should the concentration of uric acid stray from equilibrium… too many sodium ions could be bad too…
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Seems like a good justification to open a bottle of wine…and stop drinking the 0% beer as an experiment.
This morning I had a very highly detailed dream, perhaps from another world.
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In that dream I was talking to an important Japanese dude and his two sempai. I was explaining to him about interpersonal interactions and he bought me an Asahi beer. Later this conversation became formal and I was making a presentation to him in a plush office in Mayfair at the behest of a boutique UK skills firm. It was similar to the room at Fleming Family and Partners where we discussed million pound investment in Powerlase, I being the last founder on the board. The boutique firm were trying to recruit me. I said that we could rent out the Royal Institution for future events for the Japanese company. The Japanese dude liked the idea and was very receptive to whatever it was that I was saying.
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When I got back to my small house {in the dream} on the floor outside the house was a posh envelope from the boutique. In that was a job offer for a guaranteed £60 k. p.a. plus substantial perks and share capital.
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We woke up and could hear Bowie the cat crying downstairs for attention. She is in two minds now that it is warm. She is showing us less attention and is often out in the garden hunting. My suspicion is that as it gets cold and the log fire burns, she will spend more time cwtched up on the sofa. I am the chief tick remover so we have a love hate relationship from time to time.
As I did my morning constitutional circumambulation of the pond, the coypu fled off into Le Jaudy and our resident heron flew off up into one of the pines on the “football pitch”. The wife tried to contact the log supplier and is now out watering. Later on, I will use the Kawasaki pump to fill the pond from the river, I will repair coypu damage and then do some strimming frenzy.
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Yesterday, I had my application for patent approved. It contains things like photonic circuits and optical fibres, non-linear optics and lasers. It seems to me that this is by way of a “wild card” and could be the only thing with even the slightest risk of coupling these worlds.
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It is like two uncoupled worlds which fail to intersect. They pass like ships in the night unaware of each other. There being only a febrile glancing dream to leave little more than a shadow hint of a passing.
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Odd…
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“In Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey Book IX, Odysseus tells how adverse north winds blew him and his men off course as they were rounding Cape Malea, the southernmost tip of the Peloponnesus, headed westwards for Ithaca:
I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.”
If you do a Google search on Ascended Masters, you will come across various articles and pictures of unknown provenance together with romantic colourful sketches of ideal and usually attractive faces. There are no ugly buggers. {Why not?} These images are nearly always stuck in a time warp and none of them are wearing jeans and a t-shirt or a baseball cap. They are not dressed in business suits or modern day ecclesiastical robes of whatever denomination.
It stands to reason that any image can only be of the apparent physical form or mayavi-rupa body {māyāvi-rūpa}. If you are obsessed by what someone’s meat looks like, then you are in effect missing the point. Yet people like icons, statues and the like. They like pictures of meat. There are terabytes of pictures of meat on the internet, some even have clothes on.
I will speculate that were these initiates to take on a form today, it would not be so old-fashioned as to belong in a museum. They would probably do their best not to stand out like a sore thumb or an idealised halo-wearing dude.
It’s astounding
Time is fleeting
Madness takes its toll
But listen closely
Not for very much longer
I’ve got to keep control
There have been claims by people “channelling” these masters. I have no idea what that entails.
I will speculate that any master would be entirely coherent, often terse and would rarely waffle in an overly flowery manner. They probably would not repeat themselves over and over.
This kind of organised intellect ought to be present in their thoughts and words, perhaps as the hallmark.
In the blue books opus and following on from the foundation of the Theosophical society, there is the notion of an ongoing and continued externalisation of the, for want of a better word, hierarchy. In this an increasing number of “evolved” or “trained” beings are entering humanity in a semi coincident manner. The discursive thrust is that these are to start to usher in a New Age. The emphasis is very deliberate.
The idea is that this process is currently early doors.
What kind of forms would these pioneers take on? One could speculate that education would be one arena, as would some kind of politics and agents for change. Some might be charismatic, others not, more behind the scenes in their approach.
I doubt very much they would be all shiny and glow radiantly.
The Mahatma letters suggest that over a century ago they were moving about in Tibet / Bhutan. They were trying to get through to the very arrogant and “we know best” English. Back then Britain was “top dog”.
Archaic language can also be stuck in a time warp and in need of modernisation. My own cultural references as a 58 year old already will/do not speak to young adults. People who cannot imagine TV screens taking time to warm up and telephones as big as shoe boxes are on a different wavelength.
In my view that externalisation and its rhetoric needs to be updated and sadly perhaps simplified for modern audiences. Attention spans may not be as long and as deep as perhaps they once were.
The way for magic and superpowers has already been cleared. Hogwarts for ever!
Perhaps an entirely new verbalisation is due.
I will speculate that were I to say to some of my former colleagues, irrespective of any quantum optics patents, that I have had “telepathic” contact with an “ascended master”, they would deem me mad as a box of frogs or as wildly-crazy as a sack of ferrets. I would be deemed bat-shit crazy, a whacko and a nut-job.
It takes all sorts…
Prejudice can come in many forms…
I have just received a letter from the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, South Wales.
They have decide to grant me a patent for my “cyfarpar i gynhyrchu parau ffoton” patent application!!
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This patent application I wrote myself; no expensive patent attorney used or required.
So, this is probably the only quantum optics patent granted without any lawyer input and almost certainly the only one written in our rural commune of ~1800 souls in Côtes d’Armor.
This means that I will have three granted patents in a few weeks’ time… two US and one UK.
So maybe there is a tiny bit of boffin juice left…
« Ettore Majorana (Catane, Sicile, 5 août 1906 – présumé mort après 1959) est un physicien italien. Il est surtout connu pour ses travaux en physique des particules, avec des applications particulières de la théorie des neutrinos. Sa disparition soudaine et mystérieuse, au printemps de 1938, a suscité de nombreuses spéculations sur un possible suicide en mer Tyrrhénienne, ou sur une disparition volontaire. »
This morning I had a blood test as a follow up to my GP visit yesterday. I have been suffering from what appears to be an attack of gout for the last month. It has not gone away so I saw the GP. I am now dosed up and awaiting an X-ray appointment. It took longer than usual at Eurofins as there were seven people ahead of me in the queue. I was the least “grey” there. There we sat / stood, the grey-hairs, waiting patiently for the phlebotomist to take her samples. They are very fond of medical biology in France and it makes sense to have evidence based medicine. If in doubt do some more tests, seems to be the motto.
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I have also been experiencing tingling in the fingers of my left hand. This could be a recurrence of the problems in my c5, c6, and c7 cervical spine. I once lost all the strength in my left hand around 15 years ago. The doc. is having this x-rayed too.
Nobody theorised that Majorana was abducted by aliens. It is possible that I too have been abducted and then sent back to earth. “Where else have I been all these years?”
I have been to Sicily three times to conferences under the umbrella of “Epioptics”. This aimed at using linear and non-linear optical methods to look at the surfaces of semiconductors either during growth or static. Each time I went I got given a better room as I climbed the “food chain” of people giving presentations. The last time I had a small “prof” villa all to myself. These conferences were held at Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture {link}.
This is an ace venue and we were given food vouchers to use at the hilltop restaurants in Erice. Because I was a vegan / vegetarian and regularly ate lunch on my own at the same restaurant, they joked that I must therefore be homosexual. We had a good craic the waiters and I. They recognised me when I returned to restaurant Edelweiss in subsequent years.
The lecture theatres had “shabby” views…
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The last time I went I was initially at a European Materials Research Society conference looking into high K dielectrics and the switch to 450mm Silicon wafers. We had not long been funded by Tokyo Electron to make an instrument and I had a number of provisional meetings in the bar between sessions. I had lap-top and tri-band ‘phone. I caught the train from Strasbourg to Zürich and the plane to Palermo. I was in a suit when I boarded the plane. Swissair confiscated my pen-knife / corkscrew. I changed into desert combat trousers, a singlet and vegan Converse all stars on the plane. I had to get my penknife back off the police in Palermo airport. They were mightily suspicious until I showed them my conference invite.
When I got to Erice, I walked through the door and the ladies on the welcome desk were also suspicious. This scruffy oik could not be a “prof”. There were rude initially and then apologetic and mildly flirty.
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I always felt completely at home in Sicily. I nearly went to visit Corleone. 😉
My lifetime immediately before this one was probably Sicilian…
Many of the flowers in the garden are around a fortnight late this year. This possibly due to lack of water. During the winter Le Jaudy failed to breech his banks and there has been a lack of rain. This is the first time in four years, with no breech.
Here in Brittany, it does rain quite a bit, usually. We normally have to work around the weather.
This afternoon I have been continuing my repairs on the pond. The cat litter bentonite has a large internal surface area and absorbs a lot of water. It also becomes a bit like potter’s clay when wet enough. It expands and clumps. I rammed a biodegradable bag or two of it down the coypu hole and punctured the bags to let water in. Where I repaired the hole before there has been a bit of subsidence. A few wheelbarrows of dirt later and that has been filled. On the news several French departments are already worried about water.
I am reminded of Jean de Florette. It is a good job I am not trying to raise bunnies…
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Tomorrow after buying some petrol. I will completely fill the pond to test my repairs. Fingers crossed there will be less leakage.
Last year it got very low and I started to worry about the fish. Mr Heron however was very happy.
If it is a long hot summer, there could again be restrictions. At the moment there is enough to drink.
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I have broken the wood palette up into kindling size pieces and it looks as though we have six to eight weeks of kindling. Next while it is warm, we shall try to source a big batch of firewood ready for winter. I already have one shed full of home grown. In principle wood is cheaper to buy in summer.
We shall see how the year pans out…
The former owner told us we could take 5% of the flow of the river. But the prefecture can ban this, so we will stick to what they advise. Maybe we should wash the cars just in case even though it is not their birthday…
First pass guess is that it is going to be on the dry side this summer.
Traou an Dour 
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