September 13, 2011
The following is a great and catchy tune that reflects my current state of mind.
Unfortunately it isn’t vegetarian so I beg your indulgence and please do the following: when he says “bacon” think “tofu” , when he says “gravy” think “cream cheese” and when he says eggs, maybe “bread” or … suggestions?
Any volunteers who would like to redo this in a vegetarian rendition? Please send me the link to the video when you do it. :-)
September 12, 2011
How a bicycle is the most poignant memory of that day for me.
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. 9/11 has about as much relevance to today’s kids in grade school as World War 11 had to my generation — something that happened before we were born that people were still talking about. Realizing that makes the WWII experience and how it affected my parent’s generation much more vivid to me.
I experienced the day like most Americans did — glued to the TV set watching it unfold. Although for someone in the world today will be the equivalent of their personal 9/11, what made this so profound was the shared enormity of it, watching a major building collapse live with 100s of millions of other people somehow made it much greater that having your door kicked in and your male family members disappear forever.
Over a ten year period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, I spent a total of about 3 years in New York City involved in various business ventures. Especially in the mid 80s, Advaita and I had seen that the over reliance of New Vrindaban on what passed for “sankirtan” was a huge potential problem, as was borne out by the FBI raid in 1987. So we were trying to come up with an alternative.
Prior to the raid we had spent time in New York city trying to make a business and preaching center happen. We started as street peddlers, expanded that operation, then got into wholesale to supply our own vendors and eventually other vendors as well.
As such I spent the latter part of 1985 and all of 1986 working in NYC. I still considered myself living in NV as my fanily was there but I was spending most of my time in NYC.
We would travel over the mountains as regularly as we could to visit the holy dhama and despite People’s Airline flights of $19 one way, most times we drove. We always knew when we were getting close to the end of the return journey as coming up through New Jersey we would see the Twin Towers looming over the Hudson, and it was like a beacon drawing us into the city.
Traveling around New York often took the form of taking the subway. Many times I would come up at a station I was unfamiliar with and routine procedure on hitting the streets was to get my bearings by looking around and seeing the Twin Towers as I then knew where South was.
I never went up in the Towers although there was a subway stop I used to get off of occasionally that was in the basement of one of them, so I had been inside on numerous occasions.
I used to run with a group of street skaters (real skates, before roller blades, not skate boards). If occasionally we would find ourselves in the neighborhood we would go into the Plaza at the base of the Towers and take a few turns around. We couldn’t hang out there because a security guard would invariably come out and chase us away and we weren’t looking for trouble but we could always get in a few minutes.
Point of the above was that I did have a personal relationship to the buildings so when they went down it was meaningful to me. Any visit to NYC after that the sky seemed empty.
My first visit to NYC after 9/11 was a few months later. I had been recently diagnosed with Hepatitis C and the then currently available treatment was nasty, being basically having the flu for one year with a 10% chance of going undetectable.
I didn’t care for that so I studied what novel medications were in the experimental pipeline and referred myself into a study that was being conducted in NYC so it required me to travel there. This meant a series of trips in later November/December into the city. (After going through all the preliminaries, the study got scrubbed because a monkey went blind so I never did take the medicine).
At that time no one knew but what another attack could happen at any time, so being in NYC as a resident or visitor did provide a heightened sense of of one’s mortality.
I made the obligatory trip to the Ground Zero and that was a whole experience. I was pretty numb through most of it as the vibe in the area was incredible and turning down receptors was the only way to make it through.
While that visit itself could be a whole chapter in the book I will never write, one thing did strike me pretty hard.
That was within a block of the viewing platform all the visitors took turns walking up to look down into the hole there was a bicycle U locked to a street sign. It was still grey with dust the rains hadn’t washed off yet.
Someone had locked up their bicycle and gone into a building, never to return to unlock it, becoming one of the casualties of that day.
To me that was the spirit of New Yorkers, that that bike had been allowed to stay there. Not stolen or removed as abandoned but a mute and understated memorial to the sheer personal tragedy of the day. All around the buildings and streets had been cleaned and washed up except for that bike, left to the rain.
That bike affected me more than anything else. I can still see it — waiting, waiting, waiting, for a rider who will never return.
September 10, 2011
Vidya is in her craft selling season with shows every weekend until the beginning of October. He just finished three weekends at Shaker Woods Festival near Columbiana, OH, just south of Youngstown.
She gets a discount off her show fee if she teaches a couple of kids classes plus she gets to keep the class fee which is modest and mainly covers materials cost for the craft project the kids do in the class.
While she was doing her class a video crew came around doing a promotional video for the show so she got another increment on her 15 minutes of fame.
If you pause the video at 1:08 look in the background and you will see a squared off looking grey facade of a booth. That is hers. Tulasi and Marken, our youngest sons, are here and they actually worked the show, though you won’t see them in the video. The festival is on private land so the booths are permanent and you have to buy one to get into the show, so we actually own it.
Vidya’s cameo is from 1:19 to 1:44.
Here is the video:
FYI, while getting the link for Shaker Woods I notice that this video is right on the first page with Vidya as the featured photo on it.
This weekend and for the next couple after this they will be at Yankee Peddler so stop by and check them out if you are in the Canton, OH area. Her booth is in The Glen and shes sells gourds crafted into various animals, bird houses, mushrooms, Halloween decorations etc.
September 9, 2011
September 8, 2011
We are out of the child raising business so I didn’t look too deeply into this site but it does seem to have a lot of good stuff to keep the rug rats busy.
Krishna Conscious Games For Kids
September 6, 2011
This year’s entering college class of 2015 was born just as the Internet took everyone onto the information highway and as Amazon began its relentless flow of books and everything else into their lives. Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word “online” for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives. They have come of age as women assumed command of U.S. Navy ships, altar girls served routinely at Catholic Mass, and when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly, have been accomplished on the Internet.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. Mindset List websites at Beloit College and at mindsetmoment.com, the media site webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million hits annually.
Nief and McBride recently applied their popular format to 10 generations of Americans over 150 years in their new book, The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal (Wiley and Sons.).
As for the class of 2015, without any memory whatever of George Herbert Walker Bush as president, they came into existence as Bill Clinton came into the presidency. Their parents, frequently older than one might expect because women have always been able to get pregnant almost regardless of age, have hovered over them with extra care and have agreed with those states that mandated the wearing of bike helmets. Ferris Bueller could be their overly cautious dad, and Jimmy Carter is an elderly smiling public man who appears occasionally on television doing good works. “Dial-up,” Woolworths and the Sears “Big Book” are as antique to them as “talking machines” might have been to their grandparents. Meanwhile, as they’ve wondered why O.J. Simpson has always been suspected of something, they have all “been there, done that, gotten the Tshirt,” shortened boring conversations with “yadda, yadda, yadda,” and recognized LBJ as LeBron James.
For those who cannot comprehend that it has been 18 years since this year’s class was born, they will quickly confirm that the next four years will go even faster and, like the rest of us, they will continue to grow older at increasing speed.
September 5, 2011
If you have $60,000 to spare and like to show off to your neighbors, ClearEdge Power may have the product for you: a giant fuel cell that can power up your house or business, and perhaps take you entirely off the grid.
Bloom Energy burst onto the clean energy scene last year with the Bloom Energy Server (you know it as the Bloom Box), a so-called fuel cell “power plant in a box” that can run on natural gas, hydrogen, or biogas. Bloom has cornered the big business fuel cell market, with installations at eBay’s headquarters, multiple AT&T sites, Adobe’s headquarters, and more. But thus far, the company has stuck with large installations. ClearEdge Power, an Oregon-based startup that just raised $73.5 million in funding, is aiming to corner the small fuel cell installation market. The company’s fuel cells might end up in a house near you.
Like Bloom, ClearEdge makes power cells. Users put natural gas into a fuel processing system, where it is converted to hydrogen, fed to a fuel cell, put through a chemical conversion, and turned into electrical power. But ClearEdge’s cells also generate heat, which goes into a heat exchanger, where it can be used to generate hot water. The system can also use hydrogen or biogas as an input.
While Bloom’s fuel cell systems cost between $700,000 and $800,000 and produce 500 to 700 KW of power, ClearEdge’s systems retail for $56,000 (before tax incentives and rebates) and offer five KW of power, though you can string multiple units together if you need more. Customers can expect to have the system pay for itself within five to eight years. “We consider Bloom to be complementary technology,” says Mike Upp, VP of Marketing at ClearEdge. Upp believes that ClearEdge doesn’t have any major competitors at the moment.
September 4, 2011
This is a story about old Rama das and old Tulasi das, two members of an ISKCON forum, who were always at odds with each other. They were constantly at each other’s throat on issues concerning ISKCON. When one of them said “yea,” you could be assured that the other would say “nay.”
So, one day old Rama das dies and arrives at the court of Yamaraja. He notices how Yamaraja asks everyone a question before they proceed. When it was his turn, Yamaraja said: “Hi, Rama das, to see if you qualify for Vaikuntha, I need to ask you to spell Krishna for me.”
“That’s easy,” says Rama das, and goes: “K-r-i-s-h-n-a.”
Yamaraja said: “Great; you’re in, but could you do me a small favor and take over here for a while? I just need to check on something. I’ll be back.”
Rama das didn’t mind doing some service, and asked everyone in line to spell Krishna. Just then, old Tulasi das was coming through the line. “What are you doing here?” asked old Tulasi das.
Said Rama das; “Oh, I am just filling in for Yamaraja, asking everybody to spell a word before they can pass through.”
“Oh yeah, what’s the word?” asked Tulasi das.
After thinking for a moment, Rama das said: “Spell Bodhipakkhiyadhamma!”
Reclaiming scripture from the empirical and dogmatic analyzers. Scripture is poetry, not a collection of essays.
"Use common sense and if you have none then consult with others." SP letter 10/25/76
The Yoga Of Ecology
