I know you've always wondered what Joe Camel dreams about. Well, finally you get to see for yourself!
Actually, this fine picture is the artistry of Amy Crehore.
Ok, so if you've never heard of Veronica Mars it's like this.... It's a tv show on the CW that is sort of a cross between The Rockford Files, Beverly Hills 90210, Nancy Drew with a light dusting of Twin Peaks and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
It's a mystery detective show where (If you start from the beginning of the series) Veronica Mars is a high school student (Kristen Bell) who's dad (Enrico Colontoni.) is a private investigator/former sheriff of the California coastal town of Neptune. Veronica gets mixed up in big-time criminal investigations and small-time high school ones. In a typical tv universe coincidence they often become the same cases.
Veronica is smart, cute and often brings poetic justice to the high school cases she solves. She has some very Buffy-esque girl power, help the helpless personality traits. But that's not the end of the Buffy mix. No sir! You also have regular guest stars such as Charisma Carpenter and Alyson Hannigan.
So anyway, I finally got caught up on Season 2 and was left somewhat breathless at the whirlwind wrap-up of all the mysterious loose ends. Then even though it was late I watched just the opening scene of the first episode of season 3. Hot Damn! It looks like the series quality continues.
Have you ever noticed that we often take technological things for granted?
This thought occurred to me when I was listening to The Red Hot Chili Peppers self titled album. (specifically 'Grand Pappy du Plenty') I was wearing a decent set of scavenged headphones and noticed the way the different instruments sounded as though they were coming from different directions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, stereo headphones are hardly new. Get over it. I can see how you could get the music to sound as though it was to the left, right or even somewhere in between. But what really struck me was the way they managed to make certain instruments sound as though they were behind me. Again, it's obviously mature technology that's been around for a while but still cool when you think about it.
It leads me to back to some well trodden mental paths questioning reality...
We perceive the world around us with our senses and everyone's senses are 'tuned' slightly differently. It's not just a matter of something like a "normal" person and someone who is colorblind. Too often that is simply viewed as black or white; One can see color and the other can't. (Don't you love puns?!?!) However, I think it's deeper than that. Ask any woman picking out clothes and they'll tell you that men are colorblind. Science tells us that some people can simply discriminate light waves more finely than others so that they will see color variations that many people cannot.
Moving outside the human race, animals can smell and hear more acutely than we can. So we naturally take it for granted that they can smell or hear things that "don't exist" to our senses. Again though, this difference is seen as a matter of degrees.
Science tries to come up with unbiased evidence of things. How do we know what the temperature is outside? Some poor sod had to take a flask of mercury in a bucket of water outside in the winter and freeze his butt off until the water froze and make a mark on the flask. Voila! The freezing point of water. We learned about light waves from prisms splitting white light into colored bands. Unfortunately even the much more sophisticated instruments of today tend to center around our own senses. What do we do with radio telescope data? Why, we convert it to pretty pictures of course!
What else is out there though? For that matter what else is right here around us that we just can't perceive? I'm reminded of the movie From Beyond adapted from an HP Lovecraft story. The gist of which is that a scientist creates a "Resonator" that stimulates the pineal gland and... blah, blah, blah. Anyway, this device causes those exposed to it to perceive things that we cannot normally see. Naturally those things don't like it and lots of people are killed. (It is an HP lovecraft story after all!)
Despite the silliness of this example I still wonder what is all around us that we cannot taste/touch/see/feel/hear? What is waiting to be discovered that no one has ever thought of a way to look for? God? Angels? Demons? Voices in people's heads? Sock eating monsters? Magic?
I'm not normally one to listen to country music but I'd rather listen to it than radio commercials. So this morning I happened to hear the song 'Save a horse, Ride a cowboy' I'd heard bits and pieces of the song before but never it's entirety. Rap hating Country music fans out there take note: This is a Country-RAP song. (Let's just call it CRAP, shall we?)
Actually, it's probably closer to what I understand to be Hip Hop rather than Rap. My understanding of the difference between the two is that Hip Hop often contains actual singing as well as Rap. CHH just doesn't have the ring that CRAP does! Besides, even though it was a fun song I'm really an old school (pre 1981) country music fan. The popular country music of today seems to hold little resemblance to what I think of as Country. Anyway, I digress.
While this song has no obvious sound similarities to a Rap song, the basic structure and subject matter qualify it as a rap song. It's got a fun catchy tune which correlates to a good beat in RAP. It's all about "gettin' some" which is one of the main subjects in Rap music and there is a long 'spoken' segment.
Ok, it's not a deep and meaningful observation but what do you expect?
I picked up Om Yoga Today just before Christmas and finally tried the five minute practice. (Yeah, yeah, It took me almost a month to try something that takes five minutes. Bite me!)
I enjoyed it with certain reservations which will take some explanation.
The mental and physical aspects of yoga interest me for different reasons.
Physical - I am not terribly flexible and judging by my family history when I get old I will look and walk like Bill Ding.
Mental - One of the biggest reasons I've been interested in yoga is mental benefits. I have ADD and my psychiatrist once mentioned a study on the effects of yoga and meditation on ADD in kids. He knew the person running the study and she claimed that it all but eliminated most of the symptoms of ADD.
So here is what happened. My daughter's school is doing health week and having all the kids chart their exercise activities for the week. She's in first grade now and her kindergarten teacher taught them some yoga poses last year. So she was really hyped to try yoga and of course, get a sticker on her chart. So my wife and daughter did the five minute practice first since I was putting the baby to bed. When I came out of the baby's room my daughter was all over me to have me start. I started trying to do the poses and was surprised to discover that balance was the greatest hurdle for me. However, an even greater hurdle was my six year old giggling hysterically and jumping around, on and under me while doing the poses. Talk about your meditational hurdles!
So, the physical aspect was fine. I was a bit stiff so some poses were a stretch. (Huh? Huh? Get the pun?) However the meditation was pretty much a total loss. It was fun though!
Not a complete loss either. Maybe in another month I'll try the five minute practice again!
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