Friday 12 April 2013

Occupy the Spirit (pre-ach).

Three days smoakless.                                                                                                      Up, Down.            Friday the 12th 

Surprising that dental surgeons don't advertise the no-smoking aspect - very easy to quit when threatened with a prospect of the dreaded dry-socket. Otherwise it's all very Toronto: soi-distant competence, greed & impatience. 
The word for this kind of weather really is 'unseasonable'? ... strange. Snow mid-April and later on a howling mid-nite storm on the beach. Wake elated, joyful into the noise of it.
  Hebrew:   רוח   ruach;     Greek:   πνεῦµα   pneuma;     Latin:   spiritus  
John 3:8 "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth ..."

Have a look at an Old Testament concordance and you will see that the language roots go deep and wide. Not quite so simple as breath/wind/spirit ... or ... yeah, just that simple! As a noun and as a verb.

The title of this post is an intentional nonsense - one can no more occupy the spirit than the wind. There is a notion among Christians (and other religious types no doubt, but among Christians I know more of it) that one's soul is sacrosanct, inviolable, proof against even, say, torture; and it is true sometimes I am sure, in specific cases. This little ditty:
                        It matters not how strait the gate,
                        How charged with punishments the scroll.
                        I am the master of my fate:
                        I am the captain of my soul.            
(William Ernest Henley, Invictus ~1875);
which I learned by memory at my mother's knee (incorrectly it turns out - she replaced 'punishments' with 'penalties') simply doesn't wash as a general principle. I (one?) could wish it did (or not).

So let's call the whole shebang 'Abandon the Spirit' instead; which is not so different.

A series then? Extending possibly to 'Occupy the Piffle', 'Occupy the Poffle & Pendicle' (unexpectedly related), Cafuffle? ... 'Occupy the Fuddle-Duddle'? ... and become a professional Buddhist? 
This is John Atkin. He is the Chief Operating Officer of Syngenta:
Syngenta John Atkin.Syngenta John Atkin.Syngenta John Atkin.Syngenta John Atkin.Syngenta John Atkin with Medvedev.
Here are three videos of him being interviewed (I presume you can distinguish between journalism & corporate propaganda - these are propaganda, straightforward 'tissue of lies' - so you can't see how he thinks but you can see how he pretends to think): 2010 (5 minutes); 2012 (8 minutes); and, 2013 (6 minutes), specifically on honeybees.

He goes on the record saying things about honeybee problems like, “nothing to do with chemicals,”
(Bloomberg). Ph.D. from University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a Geordie then; and a supersized Varroa destructor as well perhaps?

Peter Sale does a much better job on the bee science than I do. 
Big numbers (again again):

Somewhere it says world energy consumption in 2010 was 510.551 quadrillion (1015) BTUs. Unclear if that is a comma or a decimal point, looks like a decimal point so ... hours per year = 365 x 24 = 8,760 ... 0.0582820776255708 quadrillion BTU/hour, converts to 0.017080789025 quadrillion watts, divided by a quadrillion is 17 trillion watts; which is about what they say somewhere else, 18 terawatts.

Daily input from the sun is 1,366 watts per square metre, area of a circle (disc) with radius 6,350,000 m (πr2) is 126,727,857,142,857 m2, ... 1.73 x 1017 watts, or 173 petawatts (1015), or 173,000 terawatts, about half of which reaches the ground, so ... ~5,000 times greater than 2010 world energy consumption; which is about what they say somewhere else.

Now ... it seems to me that 1 in 5,000 efficiency isn't much to strive for, is it?

Pará state, from Itaituba to Mato Grosso state border.Pará state, from Itaituba to Mato Grosso state border.Pará state, from Itaituba to Mato Grosso state border.Pará state, from Itaituba to Mato Grosso state border.
And I am sorry to still be unclear distinguishing energy and power; watts and kilowatt hours ... so it's all a nonsense eh? Oh well. 
Castelo dos Sonhos / Castle of Dreams, Creporizinho (which figured as a link on the TransGarimpeiro highway a while ago here), the five (or seven?) plants of Complexo Tapajós ... some of that is on this map somewhere - and some is not, the village mentioned in the Munduruku letter, Sawré Muybú, is nowhere to be found (by me).

These State roadmaps in .pdf foprmat are freely downloadable - and considerably more up-to-date than Google Maps (even though they were published in the early oughts).

A story about Castelo dos Sonhos, and another about BR-163.

Imagine! Naming a place 'Castle of Dreams'. 
It's an annual thing in South Africa to remember Chris Hani's death around and about April 10th.

1990: Nelson Mandela is released from Robben Island;
1993: Chris Hani is murdered & a white neighbour, Retha Harmse, reports it to the police.

Bones of the story at Wikipedia; a bit more at the 15th anniversary in 2008 from Janet Smith & Beauregard Tromp (but beware, they wrote the book on it). No Coetzee novel on this one, or maybe I missed it.

It is Retha Harmse and her husband Daan who interest me. They were driven out of the neighbourhood apparently. 
"Tous pourris!" / they're all rotten, "sauf moi."

Slowly, by tiny steps and degrees of alienation I am turning my face to the wall gentle reader. There it is.

And then, just before the 'Publish' button turns up this: Fuck For Forest [dot] com; not quite Philip Glass but ... Marcin Masecki Plays Fuck For Forest; and the kickoff found in The Guardian.Will Fuck For Forest! Yeah! :-)


Be well. 
Coming up: Peter Sale in Huntsville (Ontario) on Earth Day:

Huntsville Earth Day 2013 Poster.Not exactly on Earth Day but on Saturday April 2oth from 9:30am till 3:00pm. Peter speaks at Noon for an hour or so.

Some info on his blog; more on the Town of Huntsville Earth Day Huntsville 2013 page; a poster; a schedule; the necessary Ontario Northland bus schedule (about a three hour trip from Toronto); a-and cheap ($50 a night) accomodation at the Huntsville Inn which is a short walk (a f-f-few blocks and a bridge) from the Algonquin Theatre which is where the event is being held.

Be there or be square!
 

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