Old Furniture Scifi

Astro Physicist Stephen Hawking, the
splendid Nobel Laureate, the scientist who
occupies the Math seat at Cambridge once
occupied by Sir Isaac Newton, had a role in Roddenbury's
(Rotten and Buried?) Star Trek. In his book
The Universe in a Nutshell there's a photo of him, in his
wheelchair, sitting next to 'Marilyn Monroe'
aboard the Enterprise. I'll have to look up his
exact words about his little acting job for fun
and science popularizing. He didn't think much of
the ship, or the science it was telling tales about.
He thought it stodgy, old hat. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha !

Barry


                 http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

Do You Want To Be God?

Whatever social/cultural behavior and thinking that began on the West Coast apparently ripples East over the rest of the country, propelled in part by the movies and television, and consumed by those hungry for the latest. Not, mind you, that lunacy doesn't possibly also originate from the most Eastern part of the USA, which might be in Maine.

Behold, The Whole Person, an expensively printed, 114 page veritable encyclopedia of spiritual quest advertising out of Santa Barbara, CA. This booklet leaped into my hand from a stack of them outside a closed bookstore in 'with it' Silverlake, near the heart of Los Angeles (precise location never determined). There must be a very big market for Spiritual Quest persons seeking guidance, preferably new guidance. The 8 1/2 by 11 booklet cost $1.50, but a black stamp had cancelled that with the good news, "Complimentary Copy." So I brought it home.

On the cover there's a lovely photo of a young beautiful, coifed mother with her two toddler daughters knee deep in gentle surf at the beach.  But the mother is dressed! and even has a scarf around her neck on a sunny day. (Perhaps she's self conscious about the first signs of age showing up even though she's still in her 30s?) The gentle surf is frothing and the two girls are apparently screaming with joy and communion. It is an image, I suppose, depicting nurture. On the back cover there's a formal picture of an impeccably done up, rich young socialite smiling with every tooth. Across from, beside, her most inviting face is her racket, BECOME CLAIRVOYANT.

Let's wander through this feast of fulfillment offers. On page three there's OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES? ("Would you like to have them?") At Crystal Cave there's "Working with the Angels," "Channeling." On page 7 there's an offer that seriously makes one wonder what on Earth (or elsewhere) could the remaining 90 odd pages be about? Already my imagination is besotted, drunk, wobbly, and wow am I feeling peasant-like, a rube, shoeless in a sea of persons who surf fully clothed. But I anticipate; here's the killer diller: WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE GOD? This can be granted you through "Reincarnated Vedic Astrology."

Nap time. Really, I must rest.

Okay, back to the grind. How about - really noone has said you don't have free will in all this heavenly offers of new powers - "Angelic Alchemy."  Dross into Gold. Color me drossy.

Learn to Hypnotize, Intuitive Healing, DNA Intuitive Healing, Regenesis (Be young again), Avoid Surgery, "Kick depression in the Butt," Touch Healing," "PMS? Hot Flashes? Menopausal Symptoms? Cramps, Night Sweats, Hormonal Mood Swings"?

"Soul Transcendence."

"God is as Close as Your Next Breath." (Full page)

"Past Life Regression Therapy."

I'll skip the rest. Years ago I learned that an excellent seminar titled ABOUT MONEY when given in Santa Barbara drew huge audiences. It was, for example, much more popular than a seminar given by the same organization, reputable, popular elsewhere, called simply ABOUT SEX.  For a town where beautiful women go in the surf fully clothed I can believe that.

Barry

 

 

 

 

 

Vulnerability

Arriving in the country on holiday from boarding school when still a child, thrilled to be with my cousins, I let on that a water pump operated so successfully because it was aided by atmospheric pressure. No, no, no, said my formidable Uncle Hugh, it was "Suction." I was crushed because I didn't know how to argue from physics, oh so new to me from class. I must have been aware, even then, that Uncle Hugh was not going to be seen possibly bested in front of his sons.

What was really going on, but unprovable, was that he was in a fury that his mother's money, my Grandmother's money, was being used to put me in an expensive boarding school, The King's School Paramatta, which would be a drain on the inheritance he hungered for, the money he had to have to be redeemed, he hoped, in his wealthy wife's eyes, and thus rid him of the imagined stigma of having married for money. His wife's family owned the town's huge department store.

I had to take elementary school physics twice because the first year out of public school I flunked in private school, and had to repeat. That's one of the reasons, of several, that years later, in America, I was twenty before I entered college. Even today I love to read physics even though I lack higher math with which to understand.  In school I was required to memorize Archemedes' "When a body is wholly or partly immersed in a fluid without dissolving, there is a resultant upthrust equal to the weight of the fluid displaced." An elephant can be weighed by leading it onto a barge and then calculating the weight of the fluid displaced.

My Uncle, the same Hugh, was incensed that I told my cousins I'd read and found fascinating  Middlemarch the novel by George Eliot (actually Marianne Evans) an opinion I was to pay dearly for. I can't think of any reason he was so hot on the subject. Had he not read it? Perhaps he knew the story was about a brilliant woman married to a pedant who dragged her down?

Such family biography is fuel for my novel. Many of the facts will be altered to serve fiction. For example, 'Hugh' will definitely not be a blood relative. Well, for example, my mother, and Hugh look as if they couldn't possibly be from the same parents. So, I'll make him adopted, heh, the rejected child of one of my dear Grandmother's maids.  

"Writing is aggression," quoth Academic, Jaqueline Rose.

Barry

 

 

 

 

Magic Smoke

Magic Smoke;

Please turn back on my counter. You have nullified 3,512 plus visits. Also, why does it take 59, FIFTY NINE characters in a link to get a message to you?  You're like a landlord one can never find, and when you do find him it costs money.

FIFTY NINE CHARACTERS. Apparently my computer can't handle 59 characters all in an unbroken line. I strongly suspect fifty nine characters is an affectation. Gimme, please, the short name, or your telephone number.

Thanks.

Please turn my counter back on. Thanks again.

Barry R Bartle

http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

God God, even mine has 42 characters or so. Ridiculous.

On Strike

Ssomething is always fishy at AOL. I can't get a credible answer to why my visit counter keeps changing up or down. So I shut it off till I get an explanation. Do I make someone at AOL, possibly Journals Editor JohnMScalzi, nervous? What with his lecture about "Sarcasm." He says some of us are "Sarcastic." Well, that beats his being Little Mary Sunshine. He reads like the AOL News And Advertising opening window that's an insult to any adult sentient being.

I'm on strike. Please comment or email me. Thanks.

Barry

 

WWW.SPMA.NET

I checked the Website for So. Cal. Masters Swimmers to make sure it was official, and on record, that I'd qualified for the 1,500 meters event for the USMS National Championships to be held this August in Mission Viejo, CA. And yes, there it was in black and white. My plan at the moment is to swim just that one event, with the goal of at least being in the top ten in my age group. The events are spread over four days, with the 1,500 meters being on the final day. One event provides as much incentive to swim for good health as would competing in events every day of the meet. And, there are other meets. Besides, the prospect of driving back and forth from LA to Mission Viejo on the freeway is daunting.

Old men competing can be just as mean, and prone to act and think in terms of 'psyching' the competition, as young competitors, maybe even more so. Pretty comical really. I make an effort to avoid that. The idea of getting into a lather, and thrashing around in the water just to win has zero appeal. Getting there with a minimum of effort, and in so doing avoiding injury, that's my goal. (I have to clamp my mouth shut here; I have a proclivity to gossip.)

It's early Sunday, the Lord's Day. Good morning.

Barry

Infidelity

Infidelity, says the media, is rampant, way beyond the guesses of folk wisdom. One wouldn't be too far off to simply throw up one's hands and moan that everyone is unfaithful. Even within the confines of my strict, formal, educated, religious greater family on three Continents, everyone was unfaithful: mother, father, uncle, brothers, children, all three wives, and very likely one or another of my grown children. That's the truth; if you're clucking in horror I dare you to take a really, truly close look at your own greater family. Not in my family, but in some families there is an agreement to permit discreet infidelity, perhaps tacit, as well as understood. 'For the children's sake,' a decision is made to not end the marriage, or the 'violent' alternative, divorce. Oh, some say divorce is good for the children, while others, me included, know it is immeasurably destructive.  

Yet, that's definitely not what we all want. What we want is a soulmate. "Ever since I can remember I've longed for a soulmate," writes Linda Schierse Leonard in the preface to her challenging and fascinating book On The Way To The Wedding, (1986). This book has been on my mind for many years; I bought at least five copies, shipped them off to friends, then lost my copy, and just got it back via Daedalus Catalogue. Not one of those friends had anything to offer about the contents of the book. I bought my initial copy, by the way, at The Sisterhood book store in Westwood very close to the UCLA campus. Most of their books were Feminist.  Most men, most men ready to be frank, are fascinated by Feminist books, especially if they contain anything about sex. Men, for example, are endlessly fascinated by the Lesbian connection.

Here's a taste of the book from the table of contents.

Part One: The wandering

1. Through the woods

2. Prince Charming and the Special Princess

3. The Ghostly Lover

4. The Bewitchment

5. The Demon Lover

6. The Ring of Power

Successful lovers teach each other their subjective methods of pleasure, something that usually leads to prolonged sessions when time and place allows. What that can lead to are specific connections not available in snatched infidelities, which fact, I guess, accounts for those faithful marriages that are accomplished; many a tryst must have come a cropper when one or another of the lovers suggested techniques was anathema to the new thrill-of-the-moment.  

(I think I've reached the end of my 25,000 character entry limit. No, just kidding. But this stuff sure is tough to talk about, even though we do live in a much more open society than almost anywhere else in the world. Yet, if that's so, why do our marriages shipwreck so often?)

Barry