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Yeah c’mon!
belly-flop in,
take a big mouthful,
of those ghosts,
which have been.

Squiggle the surface,
a tempting?
a pretty fishing ‘fly’?
see its reflection,
of past,
and have a good cry.

Triple hooks,
strong tropical fishing rig,
a doubling of chance?
for real insight,
or un-truth,
or another merry dance?

Big weights,
rough seas,
commune with the mermaids,
and other fantasies…

But don’t waste time…
trawling that bottom,
down there in those depths,
its not likely, big hooks,
will catch the sublime…

Trolling the fast line,
speeding boats,
big lures,
hunting fat fishes…
all on the run?
High speed hook-ups,
and dead fish,
all over the deck,
what guarantee of fun?

On a serene back-water…
hear the happy fish,
splish, splosh, splish…
splash…

Dive in too,
content with sharing,
swim about in,
the estuary,
with all of our kind…
all paddling together,
Loving, giving,
in the big pond,
the catchers and the caught,
we are all…

Basically the same.
this is this life,
not a big boat, or a big fish,
nor a big game.

Never e’nuff certainty,
although, of course,
‘constant change’ comes to mind,
oh, that cliche again…
possibly more accurate…
the constancy of history repeating?

Repealing 2008,
remembering 1928,
revealing 2008…
Ever feel like,
you wanted to get off?
The ever loud driving,
the ‘party’,
the bass-beat of greed…
‘get ahead’,
‘go ahead’,
too empty a mantra…
Left ringing in your ears?

Did you get a chance to stop and look…
at the beauty of the swirling snow?
or, read that book?

The big Ox might give a lead?
a bare shoulder, previously,
turned into the cold wind,
hard toil,
love & more persistence?
Ever present internal beauty,
learned to turn a blind eye to all whippings,
drudging honest hoofs through snow…
waiting for a ‘real’ day?
This is the real deal?
the real year?
It’s here my dear brother…
all that investment, well done,
time to make some withdrawals,
and invest where love calls you,
to that wide open door…

A mountain on fire,
doused in doubt,
and spewing forth in pain…
Thundering claps of cantering,
horses hoofs,
being over-taken by the trains…
But, constellation gemini,
will be in ascendant,
ever refusing to lie down.

It’s looked worse than this,
and we’ve pulled through…
One Oxen foot lead by another,
Gonna have to learn the easy stuff,
all over again,
one hard step at a time…

And to our mercurial master,
languishing in pause,
seeking peace,
truth,
in Love, a cause…
to you my brother,
all wishes beautiful…
for your own skill,
self-applied,
you gotta be on your own side…
You will root out your own truth,
of that I am sure…
Pigs can be a little aimless,
but moving mountains you have been set,
it’s a messy business mate,
but it’s in there,
keep looking,
don’t wait…

Have you heard the story?
A Pig, an Ox, and Horse walk into a bar…
Bar Keep says,
“You’re a weird lot”…

“You bettcha!
We’ve been rooting around for years,
for the truth…”
Pig says,
“With a steadfast eye out,
for honesty”
the thoughtfully resolute Ox adds,
“and… as always…”
the silly fat horse, in reflection, tips his head coyly to one side,
(get ready for the verbiage…)
“we are cantering off not quite together,
again,
having learnt lots from each other,
again,
and blessed with some understanding,
of…
love and compassion,
a sense of the absurd,
the wonderfulness of sillyness,
and sarcasm?
or beauty?
or a fundamental understanding that,
having survived as friends in any family is…
a major reason for celebration!”

Viva ‘Animal Signs’,
Viva la difference.
Celebrate…
tolerance,
patience,
Love,
forgiveness…

Truth…

Viva 2009!

Have you forgiven?
forgotten?
Remembered that awful moment…
Dwelled in anger on the cusp of…

Stomping about,
making a point,
talked…
more than you listened…
or,
remembered accurately.

You are beautiful,
you just keep getting,
the herd dust in your eye?…

Look again…
on another shelf?
on another self?
Bull… stomping…
in a China shop?
playing with meaningless cliches…
as a substitute for,
meaning?

Awesome experience,
this life,
hey?

Get to live and die,
if you choose…
in your heaven,
or your own hell.

Get a choice…
blessed with choice,
and what a choice…
Heaven lying at your feet,
contradictions, messages,
no mean feat…

How do I get outta here?
there’s no getting outta here,
‘A - Dead’ apparently…

You only get…
the ever inter-connected choice,
an elephant in the herd,
rubbing trunks with those you love…
but what a blessing.

Permission to write,
meaningless,
self-centred meanderings,
anywhere,
anytime,
cliches included,
in an out of date 60’s…
‘lack of poetry’ style…

Meaningless trash?
but fun?
An awkward baby elephant,
tripping over ones own,
now very old,
and circular,
heavy footsteps…

More fun is in order?
It should arrive,
from Amazon tomorrow?…

Credit crunch excluded…

With thanks to BBC TV listings,
the Eagles,
Bob… again,
and a de-ranged mind I borrowed…
from my Karma :)

Have you ever seen…

A bear on a rocky Alaskan mountain side hunting moths?

A glacier spreading its feet,
through a Himalayan valley…
from space?

Have you ever looked?
Will you look?
Before you die?

When will you die?
How long will you live?
Is your current delusion,
your only illusion?

Are you already dead?

Breathing yes,
Participating, no?

Truthful, yes?
Living amongst the lying, no?
Caring, yes?
Ego-less, yes?
Self generated drama?
Fully determined selfishness?

Boring yourself,
and others,
with your minor,
and petty,
innocuous uselessnesses?

The snow falls.
A snow leopard climbs.
A volcanic mountain rises,
A river eroded mountain canyon crumbles.

In a million to one chance…
you were conceived,
born,
and immediately began your…
inexorable journey to death.

A child of the Universe.
You are gifted with choice.
Your God.
Your Illusion.
Your Truth.
Your choice,
to test your truths.

Have you ever seen…
A world free of anger, delusion, illusion?
Have you ever looked?
Can you see the Snow Leopard feeding her cubs…

Another year, another partially cold day in Norfolk - a long way away from my desert roots in the South of Australia - a dry barren, and beautiful, landscape at this time of year.

Summertime in South Australia is pretty special - the Galahs and Sulpher Crested cockatoos en-masse looking for water, creating one hell of a ‘din, and doing their level best to re-arrange the gums trees into configurations that more suit their purposes…. Looking forward to 40 degree days when you can definitely drink as much as you like and pretty much sweat it out simultaneously as you put it in…

I broke my glasses this morning. What luck to do it on the 24th of December when you and I know there is very little chance of getting anything done… :)  I wear glasses always and the world goes into a vaguely impressionist state of ill-focus when I don’t have them on…

Strangely enough those glasses mean’t something to me too. I’ve had them since 2001 when my girlfriend at the time, quite helpfully, but unplanned, happened to be an an Optometrist.

In the Christmas spirit Eric’s local Optometrist’s were fantastically helpful and after the initial - ’sheesh! what can we do today?’ moment - they managed to find a pair of lenses matching my prescription which could be cut into a new pair of frames. So I am the proud new owner of a goovy pair of black framed ’secretaries glasses’ but without the body bumps in the right places to match :)

The Christmas spirit…

I’ve spent Christmas in some lovely and weird places, with some lovely and/or weird people :) Latterly its been quite family focussed. I actually spent Christmas with my parents in 2006 for the first time in I don’t know how long…

I also have memories of Christmas on the balcony in Canberra cooking prawns on the BBQ, a Christmas day spent literally on a Boeing 747 flying England to Australia, and a Christmas in Darwin a seemingly very long time ago…

A friend down the street dropped in a little package of goodies for Eric today - Apple juice, shortbread… And the nice man who cleans Eric’s windows and has been his ‘partner in crime’ on the Downham Market town sign for the last decade dropped a great ‘bell ringers’ Christmas card this afternoon.

It’s difficult to avoid memories at this time of year… how lucky we all are as human beings… the longer on the planet the more experience has passed…

Oh Ye, on Christmas Eve, synapses fire…

Merry Christmas!

and just in case you need to Track Santa on Google Earth :) (via Nigel)

It was contrived but beautiful. The vista from left to right was of the tallest, greenest, trees you have ever seen. I wonder if they are deciduous? Summer time, of course, is no time to ask such questions.

Because now with the sun full, and high overhead, all one could really see was an ocean of green dappled light in the under croft of a magnificent forest.

Twinkling lights seemed to be flitting about in the canopy as I wandered closer. I could hear conversation.

“I think it beastly how the goblins have behaved lately…”

“You do? In what regard?”

“In the matter of credit default swaps”

“Oh that… in the matter of risks involved with mortgage-backed security derivatives I’m afraid I am quite ignorant…”

With not another word, the two fairies alighted, and flew off, aglow, into the distance.

There was a little boy standing beside me.
He looked up at me and grinned.
And we walked off, hand in hand, into the forest.

I awoke.

Self absorbed fuck-wit,
among the 6 billion or so.
Burning mother-god’s resources…
like they are,
‘Burgers to go’.

Just another…
egoist,
on the rail-road to self-hell,
pretending ‘one’ matters,
in one’s own self-absorbed shell.

Just another…
loser.
Meaning looking for…
loss.
Missing the connection,
and, drowning in…
another days,
dreary dross.

Just another,
pretender.
Feymann you ain’t.
But you never had to be…
a contender,
a compulsive,
a repulsive.
Suicide boats to heaven…
never dock with integrity.

Just another…
‘you could have been’,
‘would have done’,
‘powdered up’, or
‘dusted down’…
Shame about,
the wasted time.

Just another,
passing through…
Temporary licence to humanity,
such extraordinariness, and
sadly missed hues.

Get to fuck yourself over,
time and again.
Prove you can’t make the grade,
or pull the cord.
And then kamikaze on…
your own guilt edged sword.

Oh, goody…
Just another…

a “doin’ the blues” day obviously…
just as easy to see the “flip-side” ala…
“Is already Awesome” or somebody else’s like “Leaf and Stream“

Talking is a little fraught really isn’t it?

Personally I’d be happy to admit that I could ‘talk for England’, as they say…

But I doubt this is a very positive personal trait and I’m fully aware it does little, to nothing, for developing ones listening skills. I’ll also admit I’ve never tested the alternative practice (silence) seriously…

John Francis on the other hand has. I recently saw a ‘BBC Hardtalk’ interview with John Francis as a guest - amazing. Of course that will disappear off IPlayer very soon…

But if you have 20 minutes to spare for inspiration I can heartily recommend an injection of John’s infectious positiveness and wisdom via this TED Talk.

Great news story on BBC today - 12 year old mare who apparently had, for the last couple of years, been having a pint of John Smith’s and a packet of pickled onion crisps (only in the UK :P) with her owner in a Jarrow pub has been ‘banned’ - well the bar has just been refurb’d with new carpets ‘n all…

Says owner Jackie: “People come into the pub and the first thing they say is ‘Where’s Peggy?’ - I tell them she’s kicked the habit and is teetotal now.”

Skipping sideways…

Watching “God and Buddha - a dialogue (1999) - Deepak Chopra & Robert Thurman” (video online) - which incidentally isn’t quite what I expected, or quite a dialogue either  - but still interesting, and I particularly liked Deepak Chopra’s explanation of the Vedanta tradition’s way of looking at ‘dream states’. Roughly, (please forgive any inaccuracies I might introduce through brevity or ignorance here) there are three states:

1) Rational mind - your concious day time mind, “the rational mind weaving stories around your ‘karmic software’”, what we all call everyday experience;

2) Dreams - at night, your rational mind is asleep, but your conciousness is still using your ‘karmic software’ to make stories out of your ‘thoughts’. The assertion is then that the ‘mechanics’ of these two states is the same. And we all know that you get really ‘caught up’, or ‘lose yourself’, in dreams - so much so that it isn’t until you wake up that you realise that that story was in a ‘dream state’…; and

3) Then a circular possibility is that if you “peel back the layers of your soul” - searching for truth and reality - the Vedantic path - seeking enlightenment - that you may ‘awaken’ from even the first state and realise that that was just another ‘dream state’ too…

Appeals to my intellectual ‘wetware’ - I think it’s a lovely concept :)

Acronyms are going to be your ’stock and trade’ if you want to understand the digital video space…

This is going to be my 3 (5?, 15? :-P) minute guide to various tasks I generally need and the software (some free) one needs to do them…

OK, rushing right along…

If you have:

• an original DVD you want to ’squish’ and backup to a DVD-R (4.7GB) you need DVDShrink
• an AVI (DivX, XviD etc usually sourced from Internet, a friend, or wherever) which you want convert onto a DVD to give to someone who only has a standard DVD player you need ConvertXtoDVD (ok, not free, this one will set you back £30 but is the simplest tool in its class)
• a DVB class recording (ala MPEG-2) which is full of ‘ads’ and needs ‘cleaning up’ take a look at VideoRedo (a rather clever, albeit not free, bit of software which can guess ad-cutting out of a MPEG-2 source)
• a DVB class recording you want to turn into an AVI (an hour of MPEG-2 is about 2GB, an hour of good quality AVI is about 700MB…) have a look at the AutoGK toolkit page
• a DVB class recording you want on a DVD-R for standard DVD players - ConvertXtoDVD again

Ah, and after you’ve done all that, have the video file(s) in a format you want, and want to ‘burn it’ to CD/DVD, try out CDBurnerXP. It’s not perfect, but it is free, and will manage most straight-forward CD/DVD burning jobs…

Last but not least - media players - over M$ media player ‘bloatware’ and ‘I’ll get back to you right after I’ve failed downloading yet another video codec’ messages yet? - try GOM Player or VLC Media Player instead. Both very good (and free) primary media players, each with their own strength.