It seems that I have appeared in intimidating company, wow. Mark shot the footage of me for me with my cell phone. Not much else to say about it. I hope it generates good ripples.
Friday, October 15, 2021
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
A good day
Met with my research assistant, Kyle, Wednesday. Did good work, been too long, he's always funny, We swapped Cat pics of our "torties". And showed him things Mark's found over the last year. Oh , man, its been such a looonnnng empty space in all our lives. It's good to make an afternoon of in person working together happen.
Showed him a couple of recipes I've developed this year. (1 below) He was delighted, passed along a GREAT source for exotic coffees, etc. Sent him home with a packet of "Belgian chocolate coffee". He ws even more delighted.
Chased around with Abbie too, later. taught her how to make the dragon app on my pc play at her command.
We finished 2017 version of "Murder on the Orient Express" -- much fun.
As I titled this, a good day, so weird to have such a mundane normal day. DANG, it's been miserable.
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BLUEBERRY CREAM
A can of Sweetened condensed Milk
1 Cup frozen blueberries
Puree in blender, Freeze. Enjoy.
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Tuesday, October 12, 2021
ONE LAST FAIRY TALE BEFORE I REALLY GET INTO THINGS IN DEPTH …
Okay, sorry, yes, I didn’t get around to saying what that first article that got this started was about yet. I should have explained that, just thought I had nattered on long enough for the day.
The gist of it all is that the article in a regional publication was indirectly on the subject of pre-Columbian maritime world exploration by the Ming Chinese treasure fleet…
So? How does an otherwise “sane” pair of outdoor journalists let themselves wander off on such a wild tangent??? It’s far simpler than it might seem, and I promise, I WILL get to it.
But one more digression first, and I do promise that I’ll try to keep it to just that one.
A fellow researcher chided me a few days ago about not taking into account that classical Chinese literature is brimming over with metaphors, parables, and idiom. He further chided me that I needed to understand that even scholars in China had difficulty with understanding all that.
I reply to his admonitions, “okay… fine ... understood … taken into account already …”
This morning, I woke up with a story running through my head … not one I could remember hearing before … just a story… And I told it to my youngest child, who understood immediately and laughed …. Here it is ...
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“The Certitude of Mankind & the Incredible Delicacy of the Daughter of the Sea King”
One day, a poor fisherman stepped out of his mean hovel and looked out across the great saltwater bay he had built his home beside. He thought to himself, “The mouth of this bay is narrow. If I only build a stone wall across it, I can then pump out all the water and my family will grow wealthy for generations to come farming the land we will steal from the hand of the King of the Sea.”
So, he did just that.
And life was good, and the former fisherman began to grow rich.
One day, he saw a young woman standing before the wall he had built, staring at it. When he approached her to ask her “why?” He realized that the beauty and delicacy of this young maiden was beyond that of humankind, and that she was obviously a daughter of the King of the Sea.
So, the former fisherman showed the Sea King’s daughter how well he had built his wall against the sea, and how strong it was, and explained to her how she might as well return to her father and comfort him for the land that the land which the fisherman had stolen could not ever possibly be regained. The beautiful young woman gazed at him serenely with her head cocked in silent thought. After a few moments, she knelt and scooped up a single small handful of sand and tossed it over the wall into the sea.
Then she finally spoke, saying, “So I see…” and then faded into mist and disappeared.
For years and eventually generations after that, the people farming the reclaimed lands would see the sea maiden each morning. Standing in the same spot, looking at the wall that held the sea at bay, always replying to any argument that she might as well give up her vigil with no more words than she answered with the first time she had been confronted, “So I see,” before disappearing again.
As the years passed, the descendents of the first fisherman became men of great wealth and power. Kings of many lands came to them to humbly ask for their advice and support. And where the first fisherman’s mean hovel had once stood, a succession of ever greater and more lavish palaces arose over time.
One day, the descendent of the fisherman who was now lord of the valley stepped out from his front door to survey his rich farm lands and congratulate himself on his successes.
To his horror, his feet were wet and the pounding surf surrounded him. The reclaimed valley and all his wealth with it had vanished once more beneath the waves, taken back by the King of the Sea.
In that moment, he understood what his ancestor had not.
The beautiful and delicate daughter of the sea king had NOT said, “So I see…”
She had really said, “So??? I SEA!”
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The moral of this tale being, I may not make my point immediately, but I am patient, and like the sea which wears down to nothing even the greatest stones with the paltry weapon of only a few grains of sand, I will grind away at this debate I have entered into grain by grain, and the truth will have its way in the end.
‘Nuf said for now, more next time …
I’ve lots more than just a small handful of sand to toss into the sea.
So, this is what passes for pro-life, pro-family, pro-kids, pro-cops today....
No certification or licensing for carrying &/or carrying a concealed gun....(hoo boy, am I glad I'm not a cop right now!)
Pushing for non-vaccination & non-masking, when pregnant women who get Covid DIE &/or lose their baby...
Putting a bounty on the heads of women who are suffering already & going to look into health care, & might not even really be wanting an abortion, but are stuck for one reason or another & have no other options because society has pushed them there & rejected them....
Shutting down clinics that don't just provide abortions but might be the only source of female health care options for poor women.
Forcing a class room to become a death trap by not putting in place protections through masking, vaccinations, & Covid prevention in general especially when grandparents are doing a lot of the parenting today, either as the primary care-giver or the daycare source for working parents
Being a health care worker who is not required to get the shots
Beating/killing cops who are standing between you & government officials you don't agree with.
Ditto for school boards
Ditto for picketing hospitals or attacking medical professionals who are pro-vax
It goes downhill (fast) from there...
Monday, October 11, 2021
NEW NEW NEW, sorry for the wait
Okay, yeah, been a VERY LONG while since last post. Forgot I even had this.
LOTS of updates ...
Now on the Experts' Panel of Silk Road Sustainable Development Institute, VIP status, nice...
Now, we have not one but TWO books on Amazon.com -- "Chasing Dragons, the True History of the Piasa", & "To the Gates of Fengtu" both on our research data, the 2nd is my translation of the last of Luo Mao Deng's Epic "An Account of the Western World Voyages of the San Ba Eunuch" (i.e. the last voyages of the Ming Treasure Fleet under Zheng He's command as admiral.)
I will be putting more into this in days to come & passing around word to my buds to advertise it for me.
Wish us luck!
Friday, October 14, 2011
DRAWING ON MY RESERVES?
Okay, yeah, another long silence … again …
Big sorry…again…
I started this thing to give myself a voice as I go along.
A chance to feel like something was finished more of the time...
To generate a window, instead of feeling walled in where nobody could hear or see what we are doing…
To generate a door to let you in on how we are doing all this…
I will argue that I am disciplined, more or less, most of the time...
Argh, obvious that it’s been a really looonnnngggg week or so isn’t it?
It always takes so ridiculously long to do ANYTHING in this work!
I know … ‘nuf whining, get on with the story of the day already …
A definitive case in point to prove that I AM disciplined at least part of the time is the picture I have been saying I would tell you about…
I know … off task again already … oh come on … Fine, I will try to behave …
I had to be disciplined to finish my first, though imperfect, attempt to create a reconstruction of the Piasa from the Lewis Lithograph.
Yeah, this same crazy picture I showed you before.
That first reconstruction took me months to complete.
And a lot of that was spent just staring at it…
I still missed details that I won’t catch till much, much later…
Not my fault, I guess…
I thought I would go crazy a lot of that time…
But I knew I couldn’t start on it until I really felt like I had gotten “into his head” when it came to Henry Lewis. I looked at the incredible level of attention to detail in other pieces of his work that we had taken pictures of at the university library…
I looked for Chinese depictions of dragons…
And of pairs of dragons…
And of more pairs of dragons…
And redrew the ones I found in that search in the colors that eye witnesses said the piasa creatures were drawn in …
I looked for elements that I could still find in the picture of what was already largely lost…
Those grooves scratched into the rocky outcropping (trust me they ARE there).
The disembodied head that I was sure belonged on the body of a dragon like those I had been examining elsewhere …
And that blasted second beastie…
With that utterly WRONG head …
…and those crazy feet!!!
What really troubled me was that I couldn’t fit “him” as a whole into any of my resource pictures. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out “why?”
I even looked again at that Alton monstrosity and sketched it…
And, I ate a LOT of Chinese food…
I know that the massive consumption of Chinese food was not entirely necessary, but this was as good an excuse as any to do that, and I do love doing that …
Mostly, I stared at the overall picture and tried to see what Henry Lewis had seen, and had so painstakingly tried to reproduce in a way that made sense to him, and I am sure, that he hoped would make sense to those who see his finished work and the shape of the flattened arch into which the original had once been placed…
I traced that original, and then overlaid that tracing with another piece of paper and tried to incorporate all that I had gleaned into one coherent image …
And after that six months of struggle that ended in two months of very, very, VERY focused tracing and sketching, I came up with this…
I was very proud of this finished piece, and there was no way at that point that I could notice the mistake that had so blatantly slipped by me… I have to show myself at least that much mercy and say that or I will go nuts because of what I have figured out since then …
And there was no way back then that we could know that the answers to my unanswerable questions about the winged beast that Lewis had put in the middle of his picture awaited me in Nanjing, including those we had about most of what Lewis left off the right-hand side of his lithograph …
Or, that we would not realize that those answers were hiding in plain sight in one of my photos form the trip until way more than a year after we returned home…
Still, I was ready to take what I had then on the road…
Nanjing lay dead ahead of us at that point, too much like Titanic’s iceberg I feared, so we packed our two kids off to my parents’ place down south, kissed them a tearful goodbye, and then went home to finish packing before we threw ourselves on the “not-so-tender” mercies of the airline industry …
That last bit was about to be singularly unpleasant…
But I think I’ll save explaining the depths that fiasco sank to for next time…
Suffice to say, we would survive what we were about to go through …
Enjoying being subjected to that degree of insanity is another matter entirely …
The real fun wouldn’t start until after the fireworks finished …
Trust me when I tell you that Mother Nature has a really EVIL sense of humor…
Okay, yeah, another long silence … again …
Big sorry…again…
I started this thing to give myself a voice as I go along.
A chance to feel like something was finished more of the time...
To generate a window, instead of feeling walled in where nobody could hear or see what we are doing…
To generate a door to let you in on how we are doing all this…
I will argue that I am disciplined, more or less, most of the time...
Argh, obvious that it’s been a really looonnnngggg week or so isn’t it?
It always takes so ridiculously long to do ANYTHING in this work!
I know … ‘nuf whining, get on with the story of the day already …
A definitive case in point to prove that I AM disciplined at least part of the time is the picture I have been saying I would tell you about…
I know … off task again already … oh come on … Fine, I will try to behave …
I had to be disciplined to finish my first, though imperfect, attempt to create a reconstruction of the Piasa from the Lewis Lithograph.
Yeah, this same crazy picture I showed you before.
That first reconstruction took me months to complete.
And a lot of that was spent just staring at it…
I still missed details that I won’t catch till much, much later…
Not my fault, I guess…
I thought I would go crazy a lot of that time…
But I knew I couldn’t start on it until I really felt like I had gotten “into his head” when it came to Henry Lewis. I looked at the incredible level of attention to detail in other pieces of his work that we had taken pictures of at the university library…
I looked for Chinese depictions of dragons…
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