Remember the reported UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base and other sites associated with nuclear missiles? One way of understanding that phenomenon is as some kind of manifestation of our collective fear. How long until we start getting UFO sightings at data centers?
The gods have become symptoms
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, muscle-bound with technology, bulldozing the sacred places, hunting the daimonic animals with high-velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren’t.
Meet Fred and Ethel (named by my adorable wife). You should get one of these feeders that sticks to your window. It’s wonderful to be able to see birds within two feet of my chair. The marking you see on the window are flowers drawn by Rachel to make sure the birds don’t bonk their noggins.
Ridiculous dog raised to a new level of ridiculousness.
Memory is an Otherworld
Listen to this post: Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability. This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is a place, an Otherworld, which we visit. Like Imagination, Faery, and Dreaming, it exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.
Awesome: Ten year old boy from Santa Claus, Indiana, catches a huge catfish with his bare hands. Are you more surprised by a ten year old noodler with the active support of his mom or that we have a town named Santa Claus?
A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them.
I love this video on shillelagh making by Eoin Reardon. Also, from another of his videos, I learned the wonderfully symmetrical rule about renewing the finish on a handle (and maybe a walking stick?): re-oil once a day for a week; once a week for a month; once a month for a year; then twice yearly.
Stove-mas continues! The interior work is done. Tomorrow they’ll finish the chimney outside. There’s a practical reason for the 45 in the stovepipe but I love the character it gives it.
“The work by which a man becomes trustworthy”
Greg Cello: Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection.