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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 4:48 pm on August 18, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Clickbait and a Better Mousetrap: Internet as Swiss Cheese 

    Facebook is a carnival midway, if you’re an oldster, or maybe a hippie fair, if you’re a boomer, everybody trying to sell something, mostly crap, but you never know, gotta’ get you off the pavement and into a cool room to discuss matters, like an Oriental rug merchant, sip some mint tea, and finesse that bulge in your pocket, the one that holds the money, not the one that wears the genes…

    The Internet is Swiss cheese, Emmentaler, hardened and full of holes, going off in to other dimensions. FB is a 3-D medium, a surface like People magazine, all smiles and light, and an infinite number of worm-holes that you’re supposed to crawl down for a better view of the Matrix, the ads, the commercials, the dark hidden world of desire unrequited…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:04 am on August 16, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Love’s ‘Crush’ as the Basis for Religion? Or maybe shamanism or ‘life-coaching’ or … wha’d’ya got? 

    Image result for God pics

    We all know that ‘crush’ of falling in love, if not for the first time, then at least the first time in a long time, or with any one particular person, something that can go on for days, weeks, months, even years, while you try to get sorted and either get it or forget it. That’s the problem, of course, that ‘crushes’ can consume you, multiple times, and then just go away like nothing ever happened: “now you’re just somebody that I used to know”…

    I don’t think I’m being too ‘anal’ (pardon the cliché) by suggesting that this is not always the optimal basis for a relationship—sometimes maybe, but not always. The opposite extreme, of course, would be to have marriages that are not only planned, but planned by someone else! Yeow! That goes directly against modern Western thinking, obviously, though still quite popular in traditional cultures of the Asian sub-continent and elsewhere. (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 3:35 pm on August 14, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , meteors, Perseids, stars   

    Stars and Meteor Showers, Hollywood and High Lands… 

    Image result for perseids meteor shower picsI miss the old days, when we’d sit around and watch the stars every evening, up in the sky, not Hollywood Boulevard, up in Griffith Park, not Highland or Vine, imagining that those celestial bodies were items familiar to us and picking our favorites from the crowd: the dog star, the dipper and the crab, just like old friends, there every night waiting, like Bogart and Bacall, Taylor and Burton, Jolie and Pitt, de Havilland and Flynn…

    But sometimes there would be something different, something truly exciting, an eclipse or a comet or a supernova’s Greatest Show on Earth, like the Oscars, or the latest scandal from Babylon, or the Screen Actors Guild picnic. Of course there were also seasonal changes, Sun marking off its calendar along the horizon, or the moon having its period with the rising of tides and occasionally veiling its face, coy and toying with the audience and the suitors, like Marilyn mugging for the camera or Clint squinting in the sun or Cagney reading the riot act or Jimmy Stewart taking it on the chin…

    Those were the good ol’ days, the popcorn and the ice cream and the snow cones and the corn dogs, the gangsters and the good guys and the heroes and the vamps, frozen boiled fried breaded sprinkled dipped waffled and dripped, coiffed draped waved eye-lined lipsticked cinched up and driven, just for us: every day every night every summer every winter every year every decade for the rest of our lives, rest in peace when they close the cinema doors to Heaven…

    This is the time of year for the Perseid showers and I still haven’t seen it (them) yet. Maybe I’ll try again tonight—one last chance I hope. They say a new moon is the perfect time, after midnight. But you need to be in a place of few artificial lights. I like that idea. I like it here in the Arizona desert, the higher the better…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 3:18 pm on August 13, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Antonio Banderas, Automata, DVD, Melanie Griffith, , scienc fiction   

    DVD Review: Automata—Clunker with a Heart of Gold 

    I missed this movie when it came out a year ago, but that’s nothing new. I miss a lot. And foreign-made films don’t always rate first response from the American press. I suspect that’s why the reviews were not so good, either. Hollywood loves nothing so much as itself, even with Antonio Banderas in the lead role and Dylan McDermott and Melanie Griffith backing up. It’s just not a Hollywood flick and that speaks volumes. Even Robert Rodriguez rates better press than this from his Texas stronghold, but then he follows the bang-bang playbook to a ‘T’.

    Okay, so ‘Automata’ might not be ‘Birdman’ or even ‘Matrix’, but it’s not bad, not bad at all. It’s not easy making a good sci-fi film. It has to be ‘scientific’ enough for that crowd, yet realistic enough to be believable, and still satisfy the human need for narrative and sympathy—not easy. Apparently the main beef seems to be that it doesn’t live up to its promise. Geez! Give it credit for even having a promise! Most sci-fi flicks don’t, and action films don’t even pretend to..

    ‘The Matrix’ was great, but totally unbelievable. ‘Star Wars’ doesn’t even count. That’s just live-action animation based on the ‘Hero with a 1000 Faces’ mono-myth like 1000 other stories. And space-based tales like it and ‘Star Trek’ are largely a failed paradigm now—too bad—though ‘2001’ will never be surpassed in that genre. Space is dead—for now. Wait for the Mars space program—if we’re lucky. So we’re left with robots for our science fix, still relevant if kept up-to-date. (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:08 am on August 12, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    FaceBook 101 for Beginners, the HK version: Friends Please Read Carefully… 

    Like Me, Baby...

    Like Me, Baby…

    Likes: if you like a FaceBook post, or just want to piss on the tree to indicate you’ve been there, then firmly but gently click the ‘like’ button, indicated with a ‘thumbs up’ sign. That’s all you have to do. Like away, like all day, forget your house your spouse and your job, just sit there liking things to your heart’s content. We content providers will love you…

    Share: now that is different. True, there’s a button there, very similar to the ‘like’ button, but it is in the form of an arrow, not a thumb. But there’s a bigger difference than that: it takes up space on my page, typically a large space, since most FB manipulators are much more ostentatious–and greedy with space–than I with my humble little blog here. This is especially important now, since the ‘share now’ option allows you one-click convenience, and FB’s own ads now take up half the available space… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:57 am on August 9, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: gay, homosexual, ,   

    Religio-Politics: Queer, Questioning, and the Quid Pro Quo (No, I’m not gay)… 

    L-G-B-T… wait for it… Q! That’s the single letter that strikes fear in the hearts of many conservatives, tea-partiers, ‘publicans, and other assorted sinners, but not same-sexers, for whom that ‘Q’, for questioning—or queer—speaks volumes louder than any SCOTUS or any scrotum ever could. Genetic ‘questioning’ does not fill volumes in the field of microbiology….

    No, this is the Golden Age of Homosexuality, by any measure, as now the facade of genetic responsibility and/or deniability can be dropped, and we can continue our sexual experimentation forthwith, limited only by our imaginations—whoopee! Order me a case of KY Jelly tout de suite… ‘Gender-fluid’ is the hottest buzzword in sexuality today, and basically indicate that many of us could go either way—depending, presumably, on mood, fashion, or followings… (More …)

     
    • Kc's avatar

      Kc 4:32 pm on August 9, 2015 Permalink | Reply

      Ha, R and I went to do a STORYCORPS interview for NPR. they gave us papers to sign and asked for our gender, r chose bi, i chose queer. what does it matter. yes, plenty of people are still getting laid. Why, I laid myself, just yesterday morning, does that count? as for PDAs, you must’ve forgotten our own, at JSU, decades ago, we PDAed around every corner…….

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:33 pm on August 6, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , cuisine, fruit   

    The Avocado Problem, Crisis of Cuisine… 

    M-Tu-W-Th-F

    M-Tu-W-Th-F

    This is a problem that won’t go away, getting worse and worse by the day, it seems, with solutions hard to find. Please write your Congressman and demand action. No, this is not about David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe, though he may have a dog in the hunt, so to speak (if you’re a Southerner by birth, or a recent convert, not likely, since the jobs are few). David himself seems to be laughing all the way to the bank. But I digress…

    We all know what an avocado’s like when it goes bad, too soft, especially when you didn’t even know that it was yet quite ripe, you a victim of that ‘bad avocado smell’. Words can hardly describe it, as if they could describe any smell, synaesthesia best left to its own devices and the testimony of sense organs themselves. Suffice it to say that you’ll know it when you smell it, God forbid that you should taste it, that dark acrid smell of decay, bad timing and nutrient misuse. It seems to occur on the inner surface of the skin, so that’s one possible way to salvage the fruit, carefully avoiding the skin and removing any pulp in its contact, though if you’ve already smelt the fetid meat first, then good luck, as that smell pervades… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:28 am on August 5, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Gael Garcia Bernal, , Jon Stewart, Maziar Bahari, Persian   

    Rosewater and Julep, Movies and Reality, USA and Aryan Iran… 

    Imagine a place out on the steppes of Asia, the stepping stones to Europe, maybe the Caucasus, or somewhere farther east, out on the outskirts of the civvies and the cities, say maybe 5-6000 years ago, with the climes warming up and paths leading north, where a group of people probably only a few thousand strong, not so urban, but not so stupid, playing around with wheels and ales and axles and weapons, found a will and a way in this world, spreading outward until they gradually lost contact with each other and their languages became harder to understand, eventually to become the Celts of Europe and the Persians of Asia and the Greeks of the Mediterranean, and the Hittites who never really left, now North Europeans, South Europeans, Indians, Iranians, and… Armenians, who never really left…

    …speaking related Indo-Aryan-European languages, Aryan the same word as Iran, long before it meant ‘Nordic’, swastika a Hindu symbol, Persian sharing words with English and Spanish, “Swas Ti Ka” meaning “hello” in Thai via Sanskrit, long before Hitler crapped on us all, long before Muslims felt like they had to fight for their lives to survive Western colonization, long before Jews decided they weren’t really Middle Easterners at all, more like Europeans in fact, with all that represents…

    Chaos theory: but for a few butterflies fluttering by at random times places and faces altering time-lines and wait times, we might still be one tribe today, speaking mutually intelligible dialects of the same language and fighting over politics, not—wait a minute—threatening the future of the world. After all, are we really that much different? Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, French, English and others all have proud histories, major snafus, and a common background. Is their death wish really that much different from our death wish? Are we really any more reliable with a Bomb than they are? (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 9:20 am on August 2, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Which is More Important in Life: Meaning or Experience? Living for the Present, or the Future… 

    ‘‘Living in the Moment’ is the big mantra of our modern age—and it shows. Almost nothing is being left for the future, certainly not responsibility and sustainability. With all due respect to those visionaries of bygone times who honestly felt that we needed to loosen our butt-screws and learn to boogie, fretting our guitars rather than fretting over the future, I respectfully suggest that maybe that train of thought long ago left the station, and maybe needs to backtrack a bit…

    I’d respect my hero Joseph Campbell less if he hadn’t himself backtracked on his own famous dictum to “follow your bliss,” which he later amended off-the-cuff to “blisters”—sounds less hedonistic. Still the die is cast. We are a nation and world society that follows its whims like no other before, all the while marching off the cliff of non-sustainability, the capitalist foundations of this society heavily based on oil and other fossil fuels that will one day run out, and destroy the planet, long before its people will give it up, most likely…

    To put it bluntly, we’re committing societal suicide, or let’s call it “civilicide”. And that’s the global level. On a personal level we’re doing no better, sacrificing all for the moment, rather than plan for a future that may or may not come. Sounds like self-defeating prophecy to me. I think I realized this while myself writing an article for inclusion in a book about ‘following your passion.” But most of my friends—artists, musicians, writers and such—don’t need to follow their passions. They need jobs!  I don’t need 150 more countries; I need focus!  Nevertheless, in the course of that project I came up with a concept that I like even better–highest common denominators.  More on that later…
    (More …)

     
    • Kc's avatar

      Kc 11:31 am on August 2, 2015 Permalink | Reply

      speak for yourself on the sustainability thing, we’ve been working for years to be that way, it is a bit more difficult (or not) in a mean small southern town, but by god, we have food, at least within hitching distance or walking if needed. Home grown food, and finally the farmers’ are disliking chemicals. it is high time. still i dream of a farm, pigs, goats, chicken, a mule and 5 acres, plus a well, an outhouse wd be nice but it really matters not where you poop as long as you poop. the self sustainability dream is alive and well in MS, ya just gotta know some people. and Barter, barter, and more barter. peace to you Karges.

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 11:54 am on August 2, 2015 Permalink | Reply

        I was referring to society, yes, self-sustainability is achievable with land and seeds…

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 9:26 am on July 31, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Aztec, , military, police,   

    Military Madness and the American Police State… 

    Do cops have to undergo background checks before they’re issued guns? Do they get any training? In what?Don’t we kill enough people overseas that people here back at home get to live and breathe and have their being? Isn’t that the deal? We’re no better than ISIS: not much, anyway. Modern American culture is a thinly-concealed death cult, murder by proxy, similar to the ‘guerras floridas’/flowery wars/Xōchiyaoyōtl of the Aztecs, in which wars were fought largely as sport, and the taking of prisoners, the better to placate major public gods, of course. When do we get to vote on this issue?

     

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