Category Archives: Ideas

The Camera

Capturing a moment and freezing time has always been fascinating for mankind. It always required a skill to turn a moment into a lasting image. Cave drawings are the first known attempts to do just that. Over the millennia many great, and not so great, artist practiced this skill.

With the invention of the camera and film the game changed. It was suddenly much easier to trap the moment and make it last. The first photographers still had to be very skilled because you could not go to a store and buy a role of film – the first photographers made their own plates for their box cameras.

But by the 50s and 60s photography had become so easy that every American tourist traveling the world took his or her camera along. And in the recent years the prevalence of digital cameras has brought picture-taking everywhere.

The main areas in which photography is used today are snapping memory shots, documenting events and facts, and artistic expression.

Probably the most pictures take are from the first category – capturing memories. Here is the camera, especially the latest very small models, which can go everywhere and that fit into your shirt pocket. As there is, beside the initial cost for the camera, no cost involved in photo-taking, many, many photos are taken, many of which might only be looked at once before they are forgotten on a hard drive or deleted.

The second use of the camera for the documentation of events, facts and objects requires a much bigger skill level of the photographer if he really wants to create an image that tells a story or shows a situation. Point and click does not work any more. The photographer has to have the ability to isolate something specific from a sea of distraction. A wide-angle shot where, way in the background, you see the dog biting the kid while there are more prevalent objects in the foreground will not document the dog attack.

Artistic use of the camera requires a total synergy of camera and photographer. Just like the painter knows exactly how the brush will apply the paint to the canvas, so does the artistic photographer know every nuance of his tool of the trade – the camera. But just as a great painter will paint a great picture with an expensive brush or a cheap pencil, so is the great photographer able to even use a cheap camera to take great pictures.

The camera, in all three fields of application, has opened up the entry into the respective area to nearly everybody. But it still remains true that to create great pictures, great skills are required. Today’s advertisement tries to make it appear that if you spend bundles of money to purchase the latest and greatest camera, you will automatically take perfect pictures. This is certainly not the case as the photographer and not the camera takes the pictures. Lowering the bar to enter the field allows many more people to get started but only the person who sticks with it and trains himself in the art will obtain stunning results.

Independence Day and the Belief in Authority

I grew up in Germany after a time in history when the German people had had a very bad experience with patriotism.

The love for the Fatherland (not Homeland as it’s called in the US today) had been used to rally most of the German people to commit mass-murder and be mass-murdered. I was born when that experience was still very fresh and that means that I did not soak up any patriotism with my mother’s milk – just the opposite, patriotism was something to be despised. Especially when I was little, this was more a feeling than an intellectual understanding.

I never lost that gut-understanding and, coming to America, one of the most patriotic countries on this planet, did not change that a bit. This must be the reason that at this time of the year, with the independence day looming, my toenails start to curl up a bit in anticipation of all the flag waving and land-of-the-free singing.

Though it appears that I am not alone with this uneasy feeling confronted with the love for the fatherland.

Leo Tolstoy defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

That actually, I have to admit, is a bit stronger that just the feeling of toenails curling up.

Gustave Herve, another anti-patriot, calls patriotism a superstition – one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion.

So, what is the problem here? A bigger part of the world’s population is patriotic, and what is wrong with loving one’s country? Don’t we all have fond memories of the house we grew up in, the neighborhood, the city? And should that not extend to the country? But why stop at the country border, should we not expand that out to the whole world, or, in a short time, after somebody finally invents the warp drive, the whole galaxy, the universe?

Maybe we will have to look a bit closer what this ‘country’ that many are so patriotic about, really is.

What happens at the border between two different countries?

One of the most guarded borders I know of is the one that, for so many years, existed between East and West Germany. I have crossed it several times and it was indeed the feeling of entering a different world. But the difference was not the language – German of one kind or the other on both sided. The land itself? No, because now, that this border is gone, you can cross that line without even noticing it any more. And it’s not culture either because these two Germanies had been one culture before they became two countries.

The only thing I can see, that was really different, was the group of rulers. On the Western side it was Konrad Adenauer and on the Eastern side it was Walter Ulbricht, each with his gang.

It now appears to me that the only difference between somebody named Franz in East Germany and somebody named Hans in West Germany was the ruler they considered themselves be a subject of.

Very similar to Jack in Oklahoma who claims to be a subject of Mr. Obama and Jim in Calgary who thinks he has to answer to M. Harper.

The display of patriotism here in the US of A, once the 4th of July roles in, if we really go down to the very basics, just means the pride to which dude that patriot is willing to give his money, life and children.

Let us look briefly at the ‘land of the free.’ That turns out to be a dud very quickly. If it were the land of the free, and I had decided that it is good and fair to give half of my money to somebody to do with it whatever he pleases and on top of that allow this person to take my children and train them into potential soldier for his cause, then I should be able to choose who what person would be, right? Could you just send your 50% taxes over to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (that’s the dude over in Iran, in case you don’t have the  current political scene at your direct disposal)? Or, to be a little bit less radical, send if over to Steven Harper?

See, the idea of the ‘land of the free’ is right out the window – we are subjects! – Just so well trained and indoctrinated that the very idea of being able to select the ruler to receive one’s contribution appears idiotic.

Now the question comes to bear if there is anything we can do to change this situation. First we have to investigate the idea of ‘being proud of’ something.

Can I really be proud of an accomplishment that is not mine? I had considered this question before when sitting in traffic. Unfailingly, once in a while you wait behind a ‘Proud Parent of Something or Another.’ Honor student, cheer-leader, etc. I had wondered on occasion what reason these parents have to be proud. I can understand that they are happy – but proud? Why? It’s something their children  have accomplished. Then again, maybe not, perhaps there was a father sitting in the car in front of me who had always, dutifully, done the homework for his son. But I actually don’t think that was the case, I don’t believe they would have advertised that on the back of their car. Same for being a proud American – proud of what accomplishment? Making lots of money so that it can be collected by the tax man to build bombs with, which are then thrown on people the proud American has never met and who he has no quarrel with?

Would that really be something to be proud of – if it was actually true?

Can you be proud of making somebody so jealous, I mean so badly jealous, that he starts to fly airplanes into some bankers buildings? Wouldn’t it be something to be much prouder of, that, after you really created so much wealth, you would reach out and help those in need to get to where you are, as well? Wouldn’t that be something to be proud of, to do deeds that other will actually love you for?

Acting like that would require clear and logical thinking, something that cannot be expected in the presence of emotionally charged propaganda. One of the most emotionally charged areas in our lives are our children – we do anything to protect them and give them a better life.

Thus the easiest way to get somebody blindly lined up behind a cause is the statement “it’s for the children!” And how do we protect our children best? Sending them to war to fight for freedom – that is the true spirit of patriotism.

Yes, I am well aware that this does not make any sense. How about you?

Now we might make the mistake to blame those people who spread this propaganda and who manipulate in order to gain power. That would be the wrong target for our indignation. The correct target is the one looking at you back from the mirror when you brush your teeth.

There are always people around that want to cheat, who want to get something without actually creating a value that can be traded. They are easy to handle. You might fall for their schemes once or twice, but then you understand and you just don’t deal with them. If they don’t find new victims they will just wither ways and the gene pool got a little bit better. The problem is our conviction that there is any legitimacy to their action, even if their random rules are called ‘law’.

That these ‘laws’ are utterly random, without any basis in logic, becomes clear when you ask yourself why it is OK to smoke one kind of leaves, while you go to jail if you smoke another kind. I know, it is all there to ‘protect our children.’ But we already know where that comes from.

Breaking any of these so-called laws will expose you to a possible punishment, and following those laws to avoid the penalty makes sense.

But there is a different, much more sinister, element to our obedience to the ‘law’ beside the avoidance of punishment.

Imagine you are driving out in the countryside at three in the morning. Full moon, you can see far and wide and there really is not a soul around. Suddenly, totally out of place, there is a traffic light, and, as most, if not all, traffic lights do, it shows you a red light for you to stop.

Now, imagine further that you stop at that light and it is one of those lights that never seem to turn green. Finally, as there really is nobody within miles, neither a civilian, nor a cop, you decide to go and break the ‘law.’

How do you feel about that?

If you don’t have the slightest murmur of guilt, then there is hope for you. But, chances are, you feel that you have done something bad because you broke the ‘law.’ What you feel there is the conditioning of submitting to authorities. The mysterious quality that transforms mere mortals to god-like creatures.

I know, I exaggerate a bit here, but I want to make the point, that many of us carry the grain of belief in authority itself. The conviction that something like authority does exist, that there is something that makes it OK for one person to tell another what to do.

But this belief is total and utter superstition.

Let us, for the moment, take that good old document, this country was based upon, even though we are not using it any more. One of the premises of that parchment is that ‘all men are created equal.’

Unlike many other cultures that evolved from monarchies, this country was built on the foundation that there are no different classes that would privilege some of the members. That was the theory, but unfortunately reality sometimes does not ‘get’ it. There were just too many immigrants that had such a deeply ingrained belief that there are people better than them, that this parchment did nothing in preventing those people to create their superiors  again.

They were totally free not to do this, but they did it anyways. Fighting an authority is not the same as a complete conviction that it does not exist. The opposite actually – you can only fight something that you believe exist.

Once we succeed in a basic change of mind about this, there will be no need any more to fight city hall – city hall will just wither away. In the process there will be some collateral damage, but this will be so minor in comparison to the continued permission to city hall to do with us what it wants.

So, your homework for this glorious Forth-of-July weekend is to understand – and I mean a gut-understanding – that authority itself as a phenomenon, does not exist. Except in our mind!

If you give somebody the permission to tell you what you have to do and think, he will certainly take that offer. Many might not, but there are plenty of the politician/lawyer type of people around that will take your offer with a grateful nod of their head and then get out the whip and whip you into shape.

Just be aware that you can withdraw that permission at any time. It will be a bit harder than had you never given it in the first place, but it is definitely possible.

Making yourself a slave

I went to college in Germany (there called Universität) and the semester fees were about 23 Marks – maybe 10 Dollars. I lived with my parents but was registered at a friends house so that I could draw state funded study support, part of which was a loan. (I still owe some of that today, by the way.)

So, I have to say, my college education was pretty – – inexpensive. At least for me personally, maybe not so for the rest of the population. But my justification was always that later in my professional life I will earn well and pay lots of taxes.

OK, the latter did not really happen. First, I was self employed most of the time and I first saw my money in my account and then had to write a check (instead of it being collected before the wage earner even sees it), and that created a rather intense resistance, so I did everything possible to avoid writing big numbers on those checks.

And second, I left Germany after just about six or seven years.

At one point it becomes acute to think about those things for my son. He is still a few years away from any college thoughts, but eventually it will be something to consider.

Now I ran into this video that paints a bleak picture of the current college situation here in the old US of A…

There is not that much to add in terms of the facts, that it really does not seem to be worth to go to college any more, but what I do want to add is the following from my very own experiences.

I studied physics and got up to the equivalent of a masters degree – 6 years. It was fun to a bigger degree, especially my little stints down at CERN, to mingle with world class scientists – for example the internet was born down there (no, it was not Al Gore!)

But I did not go into a career in science, but moved into the computer field which was just then starting to be something to be reckoned with. What later became computer science was, in the beginning, manned by physicists and mathematicians.

So, after college I never did anything much of physics. I did practice forcing my will onto computers during my college days, but this was more or less a side effect because the experiments I conducted produced lots of data and we happened to have PDP 11 at the physics chair where I did my work. My first contacts with computers, a little bit before that, I had in my spare time when I taught myself to program a big IBM mainframe (I think it was an IBM 360) through the use of punch cards. I did this just because I was fascinated by these machines not because of any career goal.

All this happened during a time when in most cases you could still do the job you trained for, for the rest of your life. With the accelerated development in technology and science that is definitely not true any more. Sure, programming the PDP 11 in assembler gave me some basis but certainly did not prepare me for optimizing web sites and writing that occasional php application. All what I do now is self-taught and did not require me to sit in some auditorium and listen to a professor who has given the same lecture for the last 20 year, who can not be replaces by something younger and more up-to-date because he has tenure.

This is why I have to wholeheartedly agree with the implied conclusions in the above video that going to college at this time is a waste of time and money, and at these costs would just make you a slave for the rest of your life. It was scary for me to learn that not even a bankruptcy can get you out of these student loans – do I see debtor’s prisons on the horizon?

Maybe my son is really smart that at his young age he is really embracing the digital world, because that might be the area that we will be living in in 10 – 15 years. You better learn how to become an entrepreneur in Second Life.

Cynicism and Reservation towards Authority

There are now two-thirds in the family that more or less tell me I should not bitch so much about cops, politicians and consorts.

I could not help wonder if I am really that cynical towards authority. Looking at it from the point of view of somebody who is afraid of what authorities can do if you don’t honor and cherish them, I do see that I might appear rather cynical.

The example I have in mind is a remark that I have made probably more than once when I see some cops pulling over an old lady for some little traffic violation: feeling much safer now that those cops handled another hardened criminal and rid the streets of her!

Lately my son pipes in, in instances like this, with the (true) statement that not all cops are bad. Obviously I want him to be critical of authority – what else would you expect from an anarchistic father? – but do I cause the opposite to occur by making authority a victim of  my cynicism?

I actually don’t want to by cynical – it’s supposed to be funny! I know just too well that fighting again somebody or something will make that target only stronger, anywhere from actually winning against me to succumbing but becoming a martyr and thus gaining sympathy from well-meaning people.

I also know that the only way to rid us of these little tyrants is to ignore them. Just withholding any energy from them – good or bad – because this is what they live on. I believe it was Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio who predicted  that the current system will go out with a just whimper. It makes total sense to me that somebody or something parasitic will just whither away once the food source is withheld.

Everybody who understands this only has to do one thing – spread the word without falling into the trap of preaching. Say what you have to say and back off. No defending of the statement if it is attached, no arguing for it and not even cynical remarks of laughter. Just see, say and move on.

Here is a story, that appeared as a “letter the editor” in the Jackson, MS news paper on August 29, 2009, to practice that on…

Dear  Sirs:

During my last night’s  shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer  status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has  money to buy beer.

And  our Congress expects me to pay for this woman’s health care? Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality  hospitals, doctors or nurses.  It is a crisis of culture — a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices  while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks “I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of  me”. Life is really not that  hard. Most of us reap what we sow.

Don’t  you  agree?

Starner Jones,  MD
Jackson, MS

We can look at this situation with fury and get all worked up about it or we could just look at it from the far future as an interesting historical deviation from sanity.

And it’s definitely nothing to get cynical about it – so, no more cynicism for me!

Creating my World

Spiral galaxy(Republished with permission from a post Oct. 2004)

Do you remember this great post from Flemming? I ran into this a few days ago looking for something completely unrelated but I had to chuckle again.

I have meditated. I’ve done Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Kung Fu, DahnHak, Pranic Healing, Tensegrity and Access. I’ve been healed, acupuncturized, massaged, rebirthed, exorcised and hypnotized. I’ve done the Scientology advanced levels. I’m an NLP master. A Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist. I’m an energetic healer. I’ve seen hundreds of past lives. I have had out-of-body experiences, I’ve done astral traveling.

I’ve been abducted by little grey aliens. I’ve talked with dead people. I’ve met my future selves. I’ve channeled, done automatic writing and psychic readings. I’ve seen the beginning of the universe, and the end. I’ve bent spoons and walked on burning coals. I’ve watched UFOs over Area 51. I’ve seen shamans and psychics and channelers. I’ve gotten all my questions answered. I came from Arcturus and I spent some time in the Orion Empire. I’ve talked to crystals, gotten aromatherapy, ayurvedics, color therapy. I only use holistic health care: naturopatics, homeopathy, herbs, oriental medicine. My DNA is supposedly evolving to 12 strands and I’m well on my way into the 5th dimension. I’ve gone to hundreds of rituals and danced, chanted, drummed and prayed. I’ve gone to sacred sites, feng shuied my house. I’ve gotten my horoscope analyzed many times, my numerology has been done, my palms read. The tarot has given me valuable insights, and I know what shape my chakras are in. And there’s probably a lot more I’m forgetting. (Read the full post here.)

And again this got me thinking. Why do we do all those things? We hear about something that is supposed to be the great break-through and we want to have it or do it. But after so many different things – at least this is what it feels to me – I still have not reached what I wanted to reach with my first spiritual endeavor.

For me, if I remember right, this was, after reading the book Dianetics, to become clear. Officially I have reached this state many years ago, but if I compare my highly advanced state now with what I imagined it to be then – no, I am not there yet.

Looking at another area where I am also enticed to try the latest and greatest: miracle cures for your body. Here I really don’t remember what I tried first, but lets assume that it was the super blue-green algae. Reading the advertisement for it I imagined my body all clean and powerful, needing only a few hours of sleep, alert all the time, and all the things the copy-writer put into his copy.

Did not turn out that way, but I kept on buying into all this convincing copy that sold me human growth hormone, bowl cleaner and parasite eliminators, multi-vitamins of the third kind and so on.

None of those did what it promised. Now I can assume that the copy writer just lied, that he invented all these benefits just so that he could sell the product, but I don’t want to make this assumption, I believe these witnesses are telling the truth.

So what is wrong with me?

I know I come close to sounding like Douglas Adams’ robot Marvin (or so) “I’m not getting you down, do I?”

So better get out of any possible gloom and see what is this really all about. You didn’t think I would just write about gloom and doom, do you?

But before I dive into what I am finding out, here one more piece of the puzzle that explained something to me. My first real and long-term girl friend was a really well read person. While I had devoured mostly my science fiction, she had read many of the great masters like good old Nietsche et al.

Made me feel a little bit behind, until I found out later that I did not really need to read all that, because I never had a problem seeing their points myself, maybe not quite as eloquent, but – yeah – I got it, dude.

OK, OK, I’m getting there, just bear with me a little bit longer. One of the most prevalent ideas in all schools of spiritual development is that we create our world ourselves. Misunderstanding this, supported by all my scientology training and processing, I tried to use power to create my world by changing the one that I observed.

We all know how hard it is to change something with quite a bit of inertia, something that is supported by so many agreeing minds. Obviously I could not believe that I was able to change this world by myself, and so, naturally it did not change. Sometimes things did change though and did change to the better. And always there was the element of letting go before I experienced these successes. In scientologese I would then call this “making a postulate”.

And then I sat down and concentrated on making another postulate – yeah, right, concentrate!

Now, I think, I will finally get to the good stuff. Let’s see what were all those things that failed? Looking at others and trying to get what worked for them. Going against a flow. Holding on to something. Putting effort into something.

And what worked? Letting go. Independence of other’s opinions and ideas. Effortlessness.

There still seem to be too many symptoms that cause a course of action to be de-railed, but I am always after this single one that makes all the difference. For me the one item that appears to crystallize is ‘others.’ As long as I give somebody outside of me more importance than me, I will have all the elements that cause endeavors to fail. If I want to be the one who creates my world then I can not look for others to do it for me or not even help me with it. It wouldn’t be my creation, I would have to deal with others’ intentions and thus all the elements that cause failure to enter the equation.

As a side note, it appears that our Mr. George W. Bush is a very spiritual person. With an obvious lack of mental capacity and total disregard of facts and the opinion of others he has managed to change the world significantly and additionally pull plenty of people into his camp to strengthen his reality. Creating a new world has obviously nothing to do with good or bad, that just does not have any weight in the consideration.

Back to my main point. I have to develop this completely ego-centric idea of the world in order to change it. That means that I am the sole creator of everything I can observe. So, if there is this annoying prez in my universe who want to get re-elected, then obviously I put him there.

But did I create him also – maybe out of thin air?

That does not matter, really. He is there and I have to remove him. Do I? Oops, there is the effort again. No, my understanding, which I am still working on, is that this is really a uni-verse. Something that has everything already in it, anything possible, any possible past and any possible future – if there is something like that. That means that there is no need to un-create anything.

There should be no effort required to change my path through all these possibilities. I just take a different yellow brick road. There are clues spread around this universe on how to deal with it. All the ideas and teachers we meet throw us gems of wisdom – or put in a different way, I look at these pieces of information when I want to see them – and it is my choice to understand them.

With this in mind all these clues are starting to make sense. Their cryptic-ness falls away and they become simple to understand.

Like “Letting Go” – stepping back and letting go of fixed viewpoints often induced by others.

Or “Making a postulate” becomes the choice to look someplace else and go towards it.

“Seeing the glass half full” becomes having a glass that is half full, there just is no half empty glass.

As I write this I notice that I still have a way to go to really live these ideas. Here is why. The thought crossed my mind that this way of thinking, seeing oneself as the sole center of the universe, is probably considered a serious mental disorder. A movie that depicted the importance of these considerations very nicely is Brazil. I watched it as one of my first movies after coming to LA and I thought long about it if I liked it or not and finally decided it was a good movie.

In the final scene the main character just leaves while the antagonist still tries to hold him. His leaving is effortless, there is no consideration for the antagonist and he is just happy.

As long as we do something solely for somebody else’s benefit we can not create our own world in which we can be free. There always has to be the governing element of “what’s in for me”.

The clue for this piece of wisdom I put into my universe in a form of a Heinlein quote: “Generosity is inborn, altruism is a learned perversion”.

Accumulated Comments for This Post

6 comments

16 Oct 2004 @ 13:31 by shawa : “Thanks for Sharing”!
I like it very much when people speak about their personal journey. Thanks. 🙂

16 Oct 2004 @ 17:17 by ming : Creating your world
I used to have a more firm belief in how I think this works. I’m probably more open minded now, but I still believe that, yes, we’re essentially creating our world. Or *choosing* it might be a better way of saying it. It is all already there. It is just a matter of which path we take, and what part of the spectrum our glasses focus on.

For that matter, I think we more than ever have the power to choose which world we’re living in. Which is exactly why a George Bush can happen, however unlikely he seems. He invites people to choose the reality he’s proposing, and they do. But most don’t notice that they do, thinking instead that it has somehow been proven to them that it is the correct reality. Clever. The reality one chooses doesn’t even have to particularly make sense.

It seems in one way like it has gotten more complicated how one creates or chooses the reality one wants. In another, it might really have gotten more simple. And maybe it simply is letting go and walking down the path we prefer, without worrying about it. Nothing to it, just start walking. I’m working on that too.

18 Oct 2004 @ 22:00 by Ge Zi @24.127.146.67 : this nasty trap
Hi Ming,
reading your post I noticed that I had gotten in this ‘other people trap’ again. We look at what others do and how they do it and what happens when they do that and how the people they do this to are effected.

But the real point is that I chose THIS Bush – by the laws of attraction I ‘created’ him into my world. So I guess he is only there because I wanted him there.

I am just reminded of a very good thought of one ‘Arnold’, the ‘good friend’ of Bill Robertson, I once had the pleasure to meet and hear talk. He considered things that happen in our world as reads, so if you get hit over the head, you should be glad about it because it’s a read and you know there is something to follow-up and handle, which when done will improve you.
I guess we can see Bush the same way. The fact that he is in my world is a read and I should just follow that up and find out what’s behind the whole thing.

18 Oct 2004 @ 23:02 by ming : Ah, it was you
.. who created Bush!

Yeah, I think that was a good way that Arnold was looking at it. Everything that happens is a message, a pointer to some underlying current. Shows that stuff is happening, and if one looks a little deeper one might discover something more interesting. One could say that the more true meaning of things is not our immediate reaction, but rather what they make us do, and the change they set in place. So, Bush might be just such a beep on the radar, which might make us change course, so as not to run into the iceberg maybe, and in the long run it might look like a very good thing.

26 Oct 2004 @ 15:55 by Helô @200.155.205.107 : Co-creating
Nice seen you’re coming back (again,) GeZi.
Your quote has come at a right time, just because it is timeless or it always was, and I had just forgot for a while. I have experiencing the experience of just experiencing the experience of letting go, by ‘traying to “create” a new piece in my world” or just becoming more aware of it. As I start bring back the love of mine, more true caring myself abilities and the increasing feeling and sensation of been co-creating my life/world it just starts working better for me. It seems quite simple afterwards that is uncreating, creates (the very first law in this Universe). Ah,Yes, generosity, altruism, a sort of attatchments and… some kind of something called love, become in danger fallen apart within mind domain. A really new Love and Care and whatever could come again since new elements out are taken. I can look foreward it will be obvously good (appropriate) for every body/one/thing utterly. Tank you!! Ah! be aware of Brasilian movies, some are plenty of very good stuff, though 🙂

27 Oct 2004 @ 04:56 by Ge Zi @24.127.146.67 : Hello Helô
so nice of you to come by here in my little world.
Thank you so much for your comments.
About Brasil – there is one guy from my professional family (the family of physicists), his name is Richard Feynman – big guy, Nobel prize and all, he was down there in Brasil playing samba and all that wild stuff. A very unusual guy for a dry scientist 😉

The Right Pitch

About a week ago I could not avoid it any more – I had to repair our toilet because it was just filling too slowly. A visitor was expected and we were not sure if he might perhaps need two flushes and then he would have to spend an extra 15 minutes in the bathroom just to wait for the tank to fill up again.

While changing the fill-valve, kneeling in front of the bowl in reverence of this miracle of modern technology and regulation, I could not help my imagination wandering off and taking a look into the future …

… There I was – sounding off well above the permitted sound levels! I had learned very early that I could, sitting on that bowl – its cavernous inside acting as a resonance-body – create crashing thunders rolling throughout the bathroom – and probably turning heads on the other side of the street.

Why do I do this – am I an anarchist?

Beside exceeding the regulated sound limits, I also remove flow reducers in the shower heads.

Again – am I an anarchist?

I even hold down the lever on the toilet tank until the whole tank is empty instead of using only my federally mandated 1.6 gallons per flush by only briefly tapping the lever.

Maybe also because I am an anarchist?

Or am I merely a misfit? Whatever it is, I am sure that in ten years I will be much more than just a misfit – I will be a criminal.

Let’s fast forward to 2017…

It’s now only three years ago that the first man was put to death by humane drowning for tweaking his toilet to 1.9 gallons of water per flush. He had been very smart by even faking the federal markings on the water tank, trying to fool the flush inspector. But with the inspector’s highly accurate flush-meter – that only costs the tax-payer a measly $13,998.99 – he was quickly caught, and the fact that he had gone through all this effort of hiding his acts, gave the jury proof beyond reasonable doubt that his intentions were bad – real bad and that he had not been willing to give his share to make this world a better world.

Unfortunately for all the many souls that came after him during these last three years the sample he set was not scary enough and we, the tax-payers, had to pay for all the water to drown these poor souls that objected or ignored these sensible regulations.

I personally had learned my lesson from all these criminals’ fate and today I’m in no danger any longer – I am neither a misfit nor an anarchist and certainly not a criminal. I reinstalled all the flow limiters and got all new and federally approved toilets – I went all the way. Not only did I get rid of the tank with my tweaked markings (yes, I was guilty of that as well), I also got new bowls to be sure that they don’t exceed the federally mandated maximum sound amplification.

No more than 10dB – NO SIRE!

But how will I ever get the pitch right? This is the last thing I have to work on to become a well adjusted citizen.

It makes so much sense, 498 to 511 Hertz for men and 617 to 691 for women. Shivering I remember a time about ten years ago when I blew off winds without any pitch control whatsoever, sounding like thundering white noise. How much could I have hurt the development of children playing on the other side of the street. Remorse still fills my heart.

Again, then I was a misfit – maybe even an anarchist – today I don’t want to be a criminal. So maybe I really have to go to one of the federally approved wind-breaker schools to get the control required to finally not hurt our children’s development any more.

Please wish me luck that I get the pitch under control when blowing off – it’s for our children!