67 thoughts on “What’s Here?”

  4. Excellent Discussion going there Folks… I’ve been watching the world cup… Zombiefied by it… but certainly reminds me right away of a Mr SAGAN Quote that i Love –

    “I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures if we are to avoid them we must understand that they are possible. But where are the alternatives Where are the dreams that motivate and inspire We long for realistic maps of a world we can be proud to give to our children. Where are the cartographers of human purpose Where are the visions of hopeful futures of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads”

    And here is a beautiful Video… dedicated to all Mankind…AND the Earth of course –

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOOfK_heU4#t=51

  6. Ben

    Yir a wee Rascal

    But yes it was Amazing… Even got a wee video for ya…. This filmed at the foot of fujisan…. Well we can but try…. fluffed some moves… Cos of Fuckin DRAGON MIDGIES ..which one can see in Video…. brill music…and no one be telling the Fkn dictators

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gCMHW5NQOo

  7. Alcanon

    we sometimes forget oor own tiny status… and think Me , Me , we all at your joint, wish you well..and the family

  9. Mary

    There are indeed wee devil’s in that Video… Effin Piranhas…Native to Scotland wee ferocious Buggers …they Drove us off the beach that morning about 5 am…

    We used to go over the east side of Lomond, ( Ed from Melting Snow, and I ) and Beside oor Phoenix Tree – put up a Tarp, in case of rain, and sit fixing the world beside a wee fire… NOW it’s a £500 fine if one is caught collecting drift wood, another £500 if you appear set up for the night, even a tarp…A £ 500 fine for having opened Alcohol…. A £500 fine for having a wee fire…. total Oppression

    Thanks for those links to Hokusa Art …

    I came across the Great wave before, but Thanks for the Very interesting Wiki page…

    i Have some books on Japanese Art including one on Art of the Samurai –

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Samurai-Yamamoto-Tsunetomos-Hagakure/dp/1844835944/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403565828&sr=1-1&keywords=art+of+the+samurai

    Cheers Again 🙂

  10. Continuing the theme Brian, are/were you a filmgoer and have you seen any of Kurosawa’s films?

    I and my late husband could not get enough of his work in the 60s and 70s.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Kurosawa

    ~~~

    Speaking of nasty little stinging things as you were, a mozzie got me over the ulnar joint of my left wrist last night when I was watering the garden. The swelling and the extreme itchiness have transferred to my palm overnight so typing is difficult today!

    PS Nice reviews on the Amazon page for that book.

  11. Hi Mary

    Yes i am familiar with Kurosawa

    Just over a month ago The seven Samurai was on tv…. Stunning film… i had to give up watching it before cos of Time… but Virtually every scene is transferred to The Magnificent Seven Film… And all those timeless moments of just… silence, thoughts, looking on… long lingering moments… Time slowed down Eh, NOT these days, they would Never get away with that now.

    Thanks for reminding me of this stuff….

    i Know you Don’t hold much favour for vast riches as in £/$ ( Don’t get me wrong..a few million would come in just handy Lol ) but anyhooo, here’s a MASSIVE Diamond for ya –

    http://www.space.com/26335-coldest-white-dwarf-star-diamond.html?cmpid=514630_20140624_26596606

    And we all hate Violence…ESPECIALLY OF Hollyood types… but here is a wee Interlude …for a MAD Samurai Humor take on the Folly of wars….

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRq_YRngjx8

  12. That’s great Brian. I am sending it round. Amazing that a clever little film can put it so clearly and concisely. Send it to Obomber and all the other maniacal war mongers. Oh and one to Ban Ki-Moon too in case he doesn’t understand wars and their effect.

  13. Mary True..the wee Animation film should be rammed down very many cold souless Throat’s… very clever stuff eh.

    and it reminds me of a VERY stirring Carl Sagan Quote, from the Pale Blue Dot –

    ” The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

    ” Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. ”

    Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot.

    Sqounk/ Alcanon

    Thanks for placing the wee Samurai animation video up 🙂

  15. Brian Met a man in the park this morning who was teaching a small group Shinkaido. They were using staffs/staves?

    I sat and watched them. He told me the name of the art. He was 50. Looked 40! Not fair.

  17. Hullo Ben

    Hard luck at the World cup …. A bit of a hard Group yous were in…. but you lot are steadily getting better.. we are not even there…and to think how crap some of those who made it there are…cringe…..GOAL of the Finals so far to Colombia…Wow Wow What a Goal…

    Mary

    Get yirself oot there and Join in….Wont do you any Harm….

    i have herd of Shinkaido…. as the name would suggest its deriived from jui jitsu…. we use the staffs too… 4 foot Jo staff, and 6 foot Bo staff…

    i have a solid wood Bo staff that i somtimes practice with out my garden…it’s Amazing how speed adds to wieght of the thing…spin it faster and it gains so much weight it’s impossible to hold onto…much better with bamboo Lol…..

    Anyhoo…here is some neat Bo staff work..from the Shaolin Monks

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxucIZYyFrc

  18. Hard luck indeed Ben, but you are in the play offs. Aafter a few too hard tackles on Schweinsteiger the German team seemed to have put two fingers up[m to the idea of letting a draw occur. I would have been thouroughly disappointed if they had not licked the Ami’s.

    Is it just me or is soccer taking a much wider profile in the US now, more people watching it on TV?

  19. columbia deserved to win against Uruguay, what a goal by Jame’s Rodriguez, could be gtoal of the world cup that, what a mstonker from 18m.

  20. Just re-read your comment.
    “We used to go over the east side of Lomond, ( Ed from Melting Snow, and I ) and Beside oor Phoenix Tree – put up a Tarp, in case of rain, and sit fixing the world beside a wee fire… NOW it’s a £500 fine if one is caught collecting drift wood, another £500 if you appear set up for the night, even a tarp…A £ 500 fine for having opened Alcohol…. A £500 fine for having a wee fire…. total Oppression ”

    Oppression is a nice word for such bile. This should be a question to the yes campaign, ‘will these punitive charges relating to ancient times when tribes roamed the shores of our Lochs be recinded’…..
    Coming up in Sep when the midgies die down Brian, there’s a wee do on in Lochgoilhead and I will be there. Coming up on the 25th early could meet you round lunchtime if you like, anywhere of your choosing this time. We will find it.

  21. Muscle memory makes it difficult for Americans, newcomers to ‘football’, to compete with those having multiple generations of skillsets, nevermind and Brian.

    I think there’s only 10 resident Americans on the whole club. It’s good for us that we can pay big bucks to other countrymen with the chops to carry forward.

    We’ll keep getting better.

  22. I think you’ve got the muscle memory Ben, my understanding is that soccer is played a lot by children. The problem is that until very recently it has not been considered an adult game.

    In the UK we all play at school a game called rounders, which is an early version of baseball. It’s not treated as an adult game and everyone stops playing it around 11. As a result baseball just isn’t on the radar over here, though we’ve all got the muscle memory.

  23. MJ; When I was in school, there was no soccer team. Now I’m the Ancient of Days, so maybe that doesn’t illustrate effectively. Kids have been slowly picking up the game over the last 25-30 years but it was, in my day, akin to basketball in Italy or baseball in Japan.

    I have my own theories about muscle-memory wrt to genetic memory, or ‘instinct’ if you will, but I believe the US has been playing ‘catch-up’ because of that very thing. Not that it’s the only factor, but it’s a ‘biggie’.

  24. BTW; Sports, imo, should not be tainted with Nationalism. I don’t know how you translate it into national pride. What do you have pride in? Pride should be associated with personal accomplishments. The citizenry have little to do with winning the World Cup. Soccer thugs have pride.

  25. Press the Meat had Valerie Jarrett on this morn.

    Will Hillary run?

    No! —- ( the first definitive answer I’ve heard, why)

    Will you run?

    Not likely.

    Jeebus. That’s a probe. Gawd help us all.

  28. heh. Press the meat was the rejoinder of my 9 year-old linguist some years ago Mary.

    Jarrett sprung from the Chicago Bund and she is a close advisor whom Obama listens to at least as much as Michelle. I wouldn’t trust her to change the oil in my truck.

  29. Daley personally chastized his police for not being hard enough on demonstrators.

    Chicago politics are the worst representation of democratic, imo. Obama grew out of this permanently disfigured spine.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention

    “The Chicago police riot[edit]
    August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a “police riot” took place. The title of “police riot” came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago.[20] At approximately 3:30 pm, a young boy lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The demonstration was made up of 10,000 protesters.[10] The police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, and chunks of concrete.[23] Police fought with the protesters and vice versa. The chants of the protesters shifted from “Hell no, we won’t go” to “Pigs are whores.”[24] Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged protesters to move out of the park to ensure that if they were to be tear gassed, the whole city would be tear gassed, and made sure that if blood were spilled in Chicago it would happen throughout the city.[25] The amount of tear gas used to suppress the protesters was so great that it eventually made its way to the Hilton Hotel, where it disturbed Hubert Humphrey while in his shower.[24] The police were taunted by the protesters with chants of “Kill, kill, kill.” They sprayed demonstrators and bystanders indiscriminately with Mace.[26] The police assault in front of the Hilton Hotel the evening of August 28 became the most famous image of the Chicago demonstrations of 1968. The entire event took place live under the T.V. lights for seventeen minutes with the crowd shouting, “The whole world is watching.”[24]

    Meanwhile, in the convention hall, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech for George McGovern to tell of the violence going on outside the convention hall, saying that “with George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”[27] Mayor Daley responded to his remark with something that the T.V. sound was not able to pick up, but it was later revealed by lip-readers that Daley had cursed “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!”[28] That night, NBC News had been switching back and forth between the demonstrators being beaten by the police to the festivities over Humphrey’s victory in the convention hall.[29] It was under the cameras of the convention center, for all of America to see. It was clear that the Democratic party was sorely divided.

    After the Chicago protests, the demonstrators were confident that the majority of Americans would side with them over what had happened in Chicago, especially because of police behavior. They were shocked to learn that controversy over the war in Vietnam overshadowed their cause.[13] Daley shared he had received 135,000 letters supporting his actions and only 5000 condemning them. Public opinion polls demonstrated that the majority of Americans supported the Mayor’s tactics. It was often commented through the popular media that on that evening, America voted for Richard Nixon.”

  33. “there is a plasticized look to her”

    “It costs a lot to look this cheap”, she once said.

  34. Nice one MJ.

    ‘Speculation mounted on social media last night that Miss Parton had mimed her performance – but she insisted she had been singing live and blamed the rumours on poor sound and picture link-up on television.
    This year’s veteran performers included Debbie Harry, 68, who sang with her Blondie bandmates on Friday lunchtime.
    Former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, 65, entertained the crowds with a folk set on Saturday night, and Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry, 68, was well received on the more mellow West Holt stage.
    John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono was the oldest performer at the age of 81. She played at the smaller Park Stage in front of thousands with the Plastic Ono band last night.’
    D Mail

    The scene after it was all over.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2674781/Glastonbury-Festival-clean-begins-800-man-litter-team-magnetic-tractors-sweep-site.html

    Pity the dairy herd returning to it.

  35. Strangely I have always loved the music of Dolly Parton but she if she’s not miming I will eat her old wig.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwBNBcFAFso

    And I agree Mary, Glastonbury is a nightmare version of something long dead. The punters consume and consume. The musicians say “than you for the opportunity”.

  41. Been watching Wimbledon. Andy Murray through to the QF in straight sets.

    Djokovic and Tsonga just started on Centre Court under the roof.

  43. Bang on a pot or something. 🙂 just so we know you’re not laying on the kitchen floor.

  46. Ben.,

    Wikipedia opens with:

    “Red mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition purportedly used in the creation of nuclear bombs, as well as a variety of unrelated weapons systems. ”

    Yet there is no way to state that for a fact. All it can be stated is that no samples recovered on the black market claiming to be “red mercury” have turned out to be “interesting”.

    As far as I know nuclear bomb designers Sam Cohen and Frank Barnaby never reversed their positions that they believed Red Mercury to be the code name for something real. Non nuclear bomb designers editing Wikipedia however still can claim as a fact that it is a “hoax”.

  49. http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/voila-world-war-three/

    “Then there’s Jordan, and it’s youngish King Abdullah, another notorious USA ass-kisser. Those crucifixion photos coming out of Syria must be making him a little loose in the bowels. And, of course, Syria, where this whole thing started, is a smoldering rump-roast of a state. And finally, that bugbear in the bull’s-eye of the old Levant: Israel.

    It is miraculous that Israel has managed so far to stay out of the way of this juggernaut. Of course, among its chief enemies are Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s foster father, Iran, which happen to be the enemy of ISIS and, of course, in that part of the world the enemy of my enemy is my ally — though, I’m sorry, it’s rather impossible to imagine Israel getting all chummy with the psychopaths of ISIS. One thing is a fact: all other things being equal, Israel has the capability of turning any other state or kingdom in the region into an ashtray, if push came to shove. Voila: World War Three.”

    Oh. I thought he was reviewing World War ‘Z’. Guess we better build that Zombie Wall.

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