The Moola Mantra

Look it up if you're interested what this is all about, the moola mantra.

I've had a recording of it by Ananda Giri for some time, well over a year. I was listening to it about everyday for quite a while, mostly last year, but also earlier this year.

Then there was a kind of shift in my life, and a lot of the things that made up my "normal" at that time had to go by the wayside.

Now, finally, months later, I put the Ananda Giri recording on against tonight, for the first time in a long time, and it was great.

I can't remember the whole thing, what it's all about, but there are good explanations of it on the internet. And Ananda Giri's is the best I've heard (I haven't heard that many, but a few).

Good-Looking Women Are Never At Rest

When you see a good-looking woman downtown, she's always moving. They come from you're not sure where. But they appear and they move quickly by. They don't stop and look around or say anything on their way past.

On they go, with a quick motion, up the sidewalk, but usually around the corner. How great-looking they are, too! Where they go, though, no one knows.

It looks like being in one place, a particular place, and staying there for any length of time, is up to the rest of us. We mill around. We gather and sometimes look uncomfortable. Very often we look bad. Not so good-looking.

Each of us has our advantages and disadvantages. Our disadvantages: we're not that good looking. But we have the advantage of being able to stay in one place long enough to do what we want. A big disadvantage in that the longer we stay there, not being good-looking in the first place, the more everyone around us can see how bad we look. But if they looked any good, they wouldn't be standing there looking at us. They'd be on their way.

The advantage for the good-looking woman, ever on the move, is that just a glimpse of her on her way lets us know how special she is. Her disadvantage, at least from my non-good-looking perspective, is that she has to hurry and go to that place that really is no place except a place for hurrying on to somewhere else, yet never being able to arrive.

It seems like that would be a disadvantage, because my thought is that every body in motion would prefer occasionally to be at rest. But there is no rest for this good-looking woman.

Right now, I'm sitting in a chair, coming up with this study on the movement or lack of movement that good-looking and non-good-looking people engage in. I'm so ugly that I can sit here at leisure, even taking my time. But somewhere out there, there's someone with many advantages over me. But one disadvantage, apparently, is that she has no rest whatsoever.

Government Doesn't Believe You

Celebrate with me my one-week anniversary of getting my new driver's license. It was last Friday, and by now common this time of day, it was already accomplished.

I'm making a point of saying it because it wasn't that easy to do. I didn't have to take a driving test or a written test, so of course I'm thankful for that.

But they do require you to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are who you say you are. Because, I guess, we don't want a lot of people driving cars who may be someone else.

Anyway, I was just by the turn that goes to the driver's license place and I got to thinking about it. We have "government by the people" with the odd twist being that the government doesn't believe that the people are who they say they are. Another way to look at it is, we have government by the people but we the people have decided that we don't trust one another to say their proper name.

Anyway you look at it, it's unnecessarily complicated.

Mouth Full Of Mush -- Voice Recognition Software Fun

This post is going to be me playing with my voice recognition software and pretending that I have a mouthful of mush:

1) Bill is gone now by the ponderous, and now it's crazy dog with you and scare the lightning or require while.

2) When I was a kid is Donald Trump and shoot rats with a ball in our area. Babies started towards her whole whether arrow sticking out of, a bunch of blogs everywhere.

3) One of our same error my morals when we lived wrote ketchup bottle to run old TV or throw aerosol can and will fire a watchable. Doctrinal studies of five.

OK, that's it. It did a terrible job.

Here's what I actually said:

1) It's really stormy outside. The thunder's coming down like, it's crazy. The dog was even scared of lightning there for quite a while.

2) When I was a kid I used to go down to the dump and shoot rats with a bow and arrow. They'd be staggering toward their hole with an arrow sticking out of their back, a bunch of blood everywhere.

3) One of the funnest things I remember was when we would throw a ketchup bottle through an old TV or throw aerosol cans into a fire and watch 'em blow up. Back in those days we had a lot of fun.

Kafka Vodka

Here's a good piece of graffiti I saw: "I love Kaiden Blake & Kafka Vodka."

I don't know if there really is a vodka called Kafka, but it'd be a good idea.

Listening To An Oldies Channel

I have been doing a lot of driving as a part of my job, and so I have been passing some of the time by listening to a radio station that plays oldies.

I have not done this over the years consistently. But I used to live in the same area 20 some years ago and heard the same channel at that time. Now that I am back and listening to it again I can really tell that the oldies format has changed. I knew it would, and remember saying a number of years ago that as time went on, the songs from the 50s would drop out and songs from the 70s and 80s would be in. And that is exactly what has happened.

20 years ago and a little more, of course some of those songs weren't considered oldies, at least in the same sense. Now that I am listening to it again, I like the newer songs but I wish that they would put in some of the oldies from the early 60s and the 50s. Still, those teenybopper songs from the early 60s, along with Herman's Hermit's, the Dave Clark Five, etc., as good as they were and actually still are, they get tedious when they are on heavy rotation. So I am kind of glad those ones are out.

If I am still around in 20 years I will make the same observation!

Baggage

For some reason, a very good reason, I've been watching the GSN channel quite a bit, which you may know is aka the Game Show Network.

Where I lived before we didn't even get this channel (we did years ago). But now that I've moved, we not only have it but it's on a few hours a day. That doesn't mean that I personally am watching it all that time, because I'm not. It's sort of hard to watch really, because it gets tedious.

Anyway, they have lots of old shows, like with Dick Clark and other old hosts. "The Match Game" is on sometime, which I watched in the '70s. And it seems like, among the new ones, "Deal or No Deal" is on several times a day. It's an interesting show ... the first time. If you've seen one episode, you've seen 'em all. Still, it's fairly compelling to see someone turn numbers at random and suffer the odds. There's absolutely no skill involved in turning the numbers. It's just guessing.

One of the other shows is a lascivious piece of crap, that also is fun to watch a few times, "Baggage," hosted by Jerry Springer. Today I saw part of it, where an individual looking for a date discovers the baggage of three suitors. Today there was someone who 'has 2 tigers and 10 pit bulls at home,' someone who 'needs his nipples bitten during sex,' and someone who 'wants to get married and have children now.' Out of these three, the woman was most offended by the guy who wants to get married! Wow, how times have changed!

Her own baggage was that she 'wears adult diapers,' which the man in advance said was most offensive to him. Then she revealed that's what it was and he changed his tune, allowing that if she only urinated in them it wouldn't be so bad. This is the state of game shows in 2010.

I would've liked to have heard them pitching this show to Jerry Springer. "Listen, you're associated with human scum and crap anyway, who'd be a better host for it than you?"

Wheelchair Skid Marks

I was in the bathroom at McDonald's and looked down and saw wheelchair tire tracks on the floor, someone who had come in or exited the stall in a circular route apparently at 40 mph.

I've never seen wheelchairs laying rubber on the floor, so that was a new one!

The Partridge Family Shopping Bag

On one of my little excursions today I got a CD of the old album, "The Partridge Family Shopping Bag." It wasn't even open and was only a dollar. So that was good.

I'm currently enjoying it. I've never heard it before. But David Cassidy has a nice voice and the music is all pleasant enough.

In the past I've had the LP of this, which, as the notes note, had a plastic shopping bag that came with it. But I don't have that LP anymore, for whatever reason. I might've sold it ... or gotten rid of it some other way.

At The Arboretum

I was at the arboretum a little bit ago.

Since when did arboretums become all the rage?

There were some very convincing bird sound effects and some great animatronic birds sitting in the trees.

People Walking Big Dogs Downtown

I was downtown and saw some people walking their big dogs.

It seems like people who walk their big dogs downtown always do so with the same apparent confidence level, very high. They're strutting their stuff and their dogs.

They might have a dozen different dogs. And it's always the same. They might have a dozen, but of course they never do. It's two or three at the most. But I can well imagine that if they had a dozen they'd walk with the same confidence (and obliviousness) that they do with two.

As for me, I don't know. I'd be nervous my dog would be going messy all over the place. Then I'd have a patio table full of people getting grossed out and pointing at me. So I keep my dog away from downtown. It's never been a temptation for me to take my dog downtown.

It's May Day!

We have two competing worlds on May Day.

We have the Soviet Union -- who want us to think they're defunct -- parading their finest Brezhnev missiles.

Then we have little American girls and boys in yellow dresses and blue shirts delivering May baskets.

The Soviets goosestep down Kremlin Boulevard next to tanks and pointed vessels of war.

The American children set May baskets on the broad front porches of homes, knock at the door and run.

The Soviets smack at nuclear warheads with hammers, seeking to detonate the next World War and obliterate us.

We American children look at our May baskets, carefully made from construction paper and flower petals, finding the candy in the little nook.