h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

what????????



erm ... right ... well, thankyou Hyp my luv .. erm ... yuh .. I'll be there ... with my new friend Jaxxi .. a pierced preying mantis ...from the underworld alleys where no daisies grow ..

what???

yes .. Leo .. close your ears, childe ..

so .. erm .. this is what happens near sixty .. right ..

heads off to trade something feathery for something leathery ..

...

oh! Billy the Kid territory!

heads off to immerse in Dylan album .. (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid of course) ... and to think about it all again ...

The party is quite a ways off, so the theme could change several times between now and them. I really hope it isn't a proper, dignified party. I'm tired of proper and dignified.

Jaxxi sounds cool. Nothing says hip quite like a pierced insect.

Goodness...I wander off where there is no internet coverage for a couple of days and come out of the wilderness to Steamboat Springs to find 22 new posts on this tired old thread.

Lincoln in October is lovely. The drive to get there over a series of mountain ranges (that nobody ever heard of) cloaked in fall colors is glorious.

Nothing will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck like walking up the creaky stairwell in the Lincoln County Courthouse.

Right now we're moving away from Lincoln. Sort of expect to be back on the East Coast for the New England fall, but who knows.

What a coincidence, it's my birthday too.

yuh



Yes .. proper dignified parties ... I attempted maybe two .. in the 70s .. but on both occasions I forgot how to speak, and ended up lurking in the larder, whispering into the cheesecake ... and creating ritualistic sculptures out of cocktail sticks and green apples ..



I've never been to a theme party ... I always declined any invites ..I always told people I could only ever dress as a junkie chameleon in the skin of a fallen, yet hopeful, saint , and the theme somehow just never seemed to fit ...

..... and then the invites just stopped coming .. hah! time yet time yet ...



we had some crazy parties in our flat in London in the 70s ... me and a few uncertain faithful friends ... listening to Cockney Rebel and Queen and making plans to meet up in exotic hotels in a time far far from here ... when we weren't so lost or young ... one of them is still lost .. I look for him everywhere .. me? nah .. I'm not lost .. heheheheheheh

(heads out to find junkie chameleon saint costume)

hey Phredster! you just arrived ... while I was on about junkie chameleons ..

gotta go ...

speek soon

Steamboat Springs...

The river is 50 feet away. I notice that the sandbags piled along the riverbank are underwater and that the water is now only 25 feet from our home. A record snowfall, combined with a cold April has the upper and midlevel snowbanks all melting at the same time. The constant rain is adding to the high water condition.

Mrs. Phred wants to drive south 100 miles to meet an online friend. She's beome very active chatting and posting pictures on the "Women's RV forum"

These ladies are so interesting as they discuss how to sqeeze out more storage for shoes or more even esoteric topics like battery charging, winter-proofing and holding tank dumpimng. (Stop it Phred...you sound like a sexist curmudgeon...)

So anyway, I'm relectant to leave the RV parked in a flood zone and go visiting...but trust to luck...it's always there...

Forget about a campfire tonight...evertything is too wet..Time to turn on the heater and settle in with a big bottle of shiraz and watch all the French Opens and South Parks we have recorded on the TIVO....

Stop it, Phred. You sound likea sexist curmudgeon.

So, are the springs really large enough for a steamboat?

We spent a couple of days at a lake in the mountains at 8,000 feet.

A couple of pictures of turkey vultures and hummingbirds are here.
http://thefirecloudreport.blogspot.com/2008/06/hummingbirds-can-fly-at-8000-feet.html

I've always admired the grace of turkey vultures. They'd get as much respect as bald eagles if they didn't stick their whole heads in rotten carrion all the time.

Wow! That's quite a wingspan.

Are you having fun? That's the important thing.

I need advise. Which rim of the Grand Canyon should I visit?

I'm not sure that we're still having that much fun all the time...It's an existential crisis a day for me...The alternatives don't look that great, however...it varies...

We never got to the North Rim...it was closed due to snow until May 15...The North Rim is really inconveniently located so it is not frequented by nearly as many people...

My favorite thing on the South Rim is to take the shuttle out to Hermit's Point and walk back east along the rim trail...as far as you can stand it..then hop back on the shuttle for the rest of the return...

ah .. yes .. the Grand Canyon ...

sitting in my Granny's house .. in the early 60s .. looking at sepia tinted pics of the Bright Angel Trail through her old stereoscope ..

thought about the Bright Angel Trail all my life since then .. till 1991 ... when we finally saw the Canyon for real ....

...incredible .... looked over the edge and just went ****!!!! ... well Chris did 'cos he's like reeeely poetic ... what else can you say, when confronted with such enormity .. could bring on an existential crisis I'd say ... .. heheheheh



I remember eating tomato soup in a little cafe in Flagstaff ...we were shivering from our encounter with the awesome .. the lady who ran the cafe nodded wisely and knowlingly and just said 'folks can get weird up there' ...



now I think about the Bright Angel Trail most days again ... perhaps its the name .. in my Granny's stereoscope sepia pic there were people riding mules and packhorses along this trail ... wonder if you can still ride mules and packhorses into the Canyon? I know you can take a 'copter whirlybird ride ..

(must check Phredsters canyon pix again ...)



love the turkey vulture and the hummingbird pix ... only seen a hummingbird once .. in Canada .. amazing ... I thought it was a giant coloured moth type thing and I started to run away till I realised it was an h'bird ...



never seen a turkey vulture for real .. ...never seen any kind of vulture .. I don't think ... except in geeky cartoons with a kind of trance/metal soundtrack, that I run in my head ...




memory flash ..... ...whirlybirds .. remember that TV show .. The Whirlybirds?? must have been black and white .. must have been late 50s early 60s ...



existential crises can be scary .. I drink a lot of Horlicks during existential crises ...kind of soothing and malty ... think I had my first when I was about two minutes old ...crisis that is, not Horlicks ... stared around me ... went 'you're kidding right?' and then went waaaaargh ... ..



I keep going into this alternative type bookshop in town right now .. standing there ..needing to absorb and surrender to some kind of strange energy ... keep getting lead to the energy healing books ... or the quantum physics/science section .. I am currently reading Science and the Akashic Field ... don't understand a word, but I like the magic and mystery ... .. heheheheheheh ...

(heads off for a Horlicks ... pursued by a turkey vulture)

<

do you have Horlicks in the States?

*opens ears and eyes*

What's the alternative to an existential crisis?

PS: I so don't follow the leap from "Quality is an experience" to "Quality creates everything".

I recall the long narrative about quality. I thought it was self-evident that quality leads to all significant human advances...but I was more tuned in to the mechanic not paying attention and stripping the motorcycle headbolts (not quality) since I had been frequently doing that kind of thing...no more..the yellow bulldozer of the scientific method was the real highpoint for me in the book...and the distinction between making "good time" and "good time" on the highway...the best roads are between nowhere and nowhere and run parallel to another major road...these roads are populated by silos and cornfeilds and little restauants where farmers in overalls meet for breakfast and stare at you like you were a Martian...and then talk to you out of simple curiousity...I spent a year grading exams for a graduate level finance classes that I was teaching...I made the students separate each test answer with a new page and only identify the top of each page with the last four digits of their SS number...I graded the answers and stacked them from best to worst...then I passed each set of answers around for the graduate students to read...I believed...I believed that quality is self-evident...I thought that seeing the difference would help my students...

Alternatives to existential crisis:
a. Apathy
b. Beatitude
c. Alzheimer's
d. Gelato

Existential crisis is a side effect of perceptive intelligence. Those who don't suffer from it will never fully appreciate the absolute wonder of being alive and just being anywhere. Life, the universe and everything is pretty amazing. And for the blink of an eye, we are part of it.

Whether all of this came about by accident or by intelligent design, everything in the entire universe is connected and ultimately goes back to the same source. That original creative energy resides somewhere inside everything that exists. We are star stuff. Granted, it is rather more diluted in the case of hillbillies.

Star stuff...

Yes, star-stuff we are, spinning about on a ball of stellar ejecta, excreta, the exploded corpse-stuff of the first generation of cosmic life. Billions of fleshy nodes of a larger awareness, we all lurk and twitch and jump, seething like colonies of --*



*Please stand by, we are making adjustments.*




*-- numinous moment which elicits both humility and exhiliration...and a strange chill all over, as if from a cloudburst....

hah! yes yes yes !

yes ... splendid splendid ! splendid scribes one and all ...... ... this is as good as standing in the bookshop .. .....wrapped in ectoplasmic strands of quantum questionings ... heheheheheh ...



AKA AKAshic .... ... heheheheheheh ... aka blue butterfly hovering on the pulsating edges of hospital holograms ...

and somewhere between ... psychic energy in the sonic calligraphic curve of E minor ...

and this ant on the edge of my fingernail .. somewhere between echoes in the thundercloud hot hot hot atmospherics ...and the frequency of love ..

somewhere between centipedes breathing through spiracles in the sides of their bodies ...and radiowaves and joy and the tiny holes in lace design ... and absurdity and criss cross cruelty scars ...

yes yes yes ....fine word ... numinous ... aka

sort of ..

or not ..



heheheheheheh

what?

hmmm ...





(heads off, whistling Woodstock) .... ....



<<<>>>>>

from Woodstock Crosby Stills Nash and Young ...

of course of course of course but have to credit quotes ... somewhere between the carpet pattern and the bluebell wood are quotation marks trembling on the brink of order ... and copyright regulatins .. and ....

gotta go ... ....

.. and not just .. oh no .. ... regulations are in there somewhere ... heheheheheheh .. along with grasshoppers quivering to a psytrance soundtrack ..

or a daisychain or my mother's haunted diamond eyes or .... the future ... or .....

heads off for gelato ... or strawberries and cream .. or raspberries and cream ... or ....

Remember the little caution signs, "Baby on Board"?

That gradually degenerated until you baegan to see variants like "Carbon-based Life Form on Board.

It should come as no surprise that gelato, a dairy product, relies for most of its complex constituent components for carbon, a molecular bonding whiz-kid of an atom.

http://www.ilri.org/InfoServ/Webpub/Fulldocs/ILCA_Manual4/Milkchemistry.htm#P28_518

Yah!...it tastes like star-stuff....