POPMAP

Countries sized by population. Asia is so way bigger than Texas!

Legibly full-sized (unlinkable) + orderable map at odt.org (via wholelottanothing)

WEBSTATS4U = POPUPS4U

Been getting complaints from here and there for a couple of months about popups from visits to PLM, though I never got any myself - that's part of the scam - but after getting some info I figured out a simple way to find out what addition was causing the popups: I began googling the names of the most recent sidebar additions "+popups." The second search, "webstats4u+popups" got 83,500 responses. And I remembered they'd changed to a new and improved version in October or so, about when the popup complaints began. PLM should now be free of popups. Please let me know if it isn't: the cyberguillotine is waiting.

COLD BLUE AIR

Out today in the cold blue air down from the white mountains, shifting armfuls of chunks of oak firewood from here to there in aged stages closer to the house, raking chestnut leaves in a pile that covers the garden hose, dipping into my vast stone inventory for multi-kilo rocks with which to really pin down the netting over the greens so as to stop even mighty winter winds from blowing the netting off and letting snow crunch everything down, or more immediately making the greens available to crow beaks - even though the local crows have no taste for spinach, they are irritated by my patent and repeated refusal to let them have any whatsoever: this type of refusal from pale beakless beings does not go down a fat black beak very well at all, gets stuck in the craw.

Thus, as I was rocking everything down, the Crow Committee caucus in the garden cedars and on poles nearby, harrumphing Look! What! He's! Doing!, black silhouettes against the ice-colored wind even then beginning its heavy horizontal rehearsals, building up the strength required to carry all that snow up there further down the mountain. But now the firewood is a lot closer at hand and I've worked up a good sweat. No need for a stove till the sun goes down. I stand at the big window, watching the crows tilt their heads this way and that in the wind, analyzing those new rocks.

JOURNEY IN PEACE, BOB

I've just heard that Robert Sheckley has passed away. He and I had many an interesting talk during my time in Ibiza. Out of wine at the moment, I toasted him on the deck at sunset with some Glenlivet. He was a good friend and a genuine person.

SOMEHOW YOU CAN TELL HE NEVER FOUGHT FOR IT.

"'GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

'I don't give a goddamn,' Bush retorted. 'I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.'

'Mr. President,' one aide in the meeting said. 'There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.'

'Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,' Bush screamed back. 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper!'"

Source

DAWN OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD

"Ten years later, he has come out with 'The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.' The 480-page illustrated book was published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in October. It has a lengthy foreword by the band's principal lyricist, Robert Hunter, who came out of seclusion long enough to pay Dodd the ultimate compliment: He said the researcher got it right.

'It's a lovely book,' Hunter remarked from his home in Northern California. 'I thumb through it and find it actually of interest.... I had no idea that all of these things he found had affected my songs.'"

L.A. Librarian Deciphers Grateful Dead Lyrics

INCOMPETENT DESIGN

"So is there intelligence in the design?

...No, no there isn't. The thing that perhaps is closest to all of us is our own skeleton, and there are certainly all kinds of stupidity in our design. No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us. All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution's way of modifying something or else it's just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student."

The Other ID

And what could be more ridiculously designed than the gall bladder?

EXCELLENT ARTICLE ON SHIITAKE

with gourmet and medicinal recipes.

For more detailed advice on growing your own...[warning: popups!]

INTERESTING ARTICLE ON YASUKUNI SHRINE HISTORY

Though the writer's credibility takes a hit when he calls Soka Gakkai "the Buddhist church in Japan."

Article

ONCE UPON A FUTON

I see these ads on western websites for thick, heavy and expensive bioengineered mattresses atop thick, heavy and expensive bioengineered boxsprings and my mind does the same thing it does when I think of central heating: Waitaminute! You've got it backwards! You don't want to heat the house, you want to heat the occupant! But in the case of mattress/boxspring (and frame to support them) it's: You don't want to coddle the body, you want to strengthen the body! To say nothing of the pocketbook.

I suppose it's because of my lifelong hiking, camping and lengthier travels that I came to prefer a couple of blankets on the floor to a western style bed. Now that I'm older, although I do have a bed to keep me off the floor so I can be warmer, the bed is more like a hard wood pallet topped with only a thin cotton futon, just thick enough to afford a shallow "hip-hole." Then on sunny days I just lay the futon over the deck railing to air out.

When I visit the States, I always wind up sinking variously into the mattresses and have to re-establish my posture each morning, a process that gets creakier and takes longer as time goes by. For me, at least, time goes by much more naturally on a futon.

THINK GALACTICALLY, ACT GLOBALLY

When I go out on the deck at night to look at the stars and remember how small yet a part of them I am, I always butt heads with the stellar realization that these mythic constellations are just the momentary arrangement of galaxies here in the neighborhood. The countless galaxies I cannot see are the big picture, as corollaried in my own life. There are always bigger pictures.

In comparison to even the local stars, our earthly polities are smaller than eyebrow mites. I stand there appropriately humbled as always, which is the point of my entering the dark after all; untended and overilluminated, one can get too big for whatever clothing may pertain. Gazing upward we are like the stars themselves, cradled in the hands of space.

IMPERIAL LEADERS 'IMMORAL'
Pearl Harbor was mistake: attack vet, 89

"To Zenji Abe, 89, a former dive-bomber pilot, Pearl Harbor was a place where he headed to risk his life to defend his country. But more than 60 years later, it has turned into a place where he can nurture ties with American friends who had once been his foes.

During the war, we Japanese did not know about Americans, and they also did not know about us. We just conducted our mission as soldiers and there was no hatred there, though the government tried to teach us to have such feelings."

More...

SOUL STROLL Part 2:
Gio's House and Omamori

From Mukai’s persimmon place we followed the narrow road beneath the long nave, lit now and then by distant gleams of scarlet and yellow flashing through the tall gold, green and silver bamboo that creaked and crackled overhead, swaying high in the autumn wind that whispered all the way to Gio’s house. At right is a picture of Gio’s house, with Gio and her mother inside, taken from this ancient story of Gio.

At left below is the way Gio's house looked on a Wednesday afternoon about 900 years later.

Along the winding way back, we visited a moss-famed shrine that long ago was the sanctum (the Sagano Hills seem to be rife with sanctums of one kind or another) where young virgin women of Heian times were prepared for sacred service at Ise shrine. Now the place is a little shrine where young folk come to pray for good fortune in finding the ideal spouse, for traffic safety, success in the arts and related matters, not necessarily in that order of importance, and buy the respective omamori (talisman). I’m already married and have had no auto accidents, so I bought an omamori for the Arts…

50 HISTORIANS NAIL IT, 338 ARE CLOSE, 77 SHOULD GET ANOTHER JOB

Unofficial, but interesting...

SOUL STROLL
part 1: Bright Leaves, Falling Persimmons

Last Wednesday we went into Kyoto - for the first time in a surprisingly long time - to see the brilliant tapestry of autumn leaves at Arashiyama. Specifically, Tenryuji (with its famed dragon ceiling), which because of the brilliant leaves in its precincts and gardens was thronged even on a Wednesday so we didn't throng around, but went to have a splendid lunch of stone-ground soba noodles at a fine riverside restaurant (that had purses in the shop below for $500) where the view was fine upstairs as we ate overlooking the famous bridge, the boats and the passing throngs.

After lunch we went on a soul stroll north along the river and thence through the park of golden and scarlet leaves to the thatch-roofed House of the Falling Persimmons, the residence of Basho's disciple Mukai Kyorai, where on one famed night during Basho's brief visit in 1691 - when reality was still everywhere, day and night - a remarkable 40 persimmons fell to the ground. There Basho wrote the Saga Diary and worked on The Monkey's Raincoat anthology, which was published in the same year.

We then strolled on through the arches of Basho's beloved tall bamboo, with hot-sweet-potato and roasted chestnut sellers here and there in the high green tunnels, steam issuing from the cookers in the dim light, amid the long streams of people heading to where I'll write about next.

ELDER BLOGGER HITS THE BIG TIME

Well, yours truly and this humble blog have made the Older Bloggers List on the AARP Bulletin, as kindly communicated to me by Ronni Bennett, who calls herself Crabby Old Lady even though she's a Silver Fox. She's also on the list.

SEQUIN-LINED FIREWOOD BAG

Fired up the woodstove for the first time today, enjoyed anew how wonderfully it takes that edge off the mountain cold, right from the first flicker. Then when it warms up and fills the house with the scent of camphor (I put a slab of camphor wood on top this time, to warm up), if you stand near the stove the heat is like slipping into a hot bath, for woodstove heat has body and power, warms right through you, unlike the drifty-wafty derivative kind of heat from something that wimps out of a vent somewhere and dries out your eyes, doesn't even know you're there.

There are other delights involved. When I went out to get the old canvas firewood bag and fill it up with golden chunks of last year's oak to bring inside (good muscle work all round), I opened the bag and found that it had been unanimously chosen as venue for what looked like the ladybug Woodstock. The entire bag was lined with red-dotted black sequins all huddled together, shimmering with news of summer experiences.

I've never seen so fashionable a firewood bag. But no way I could fill a bag of ladybugs with a bag of firewood, and it was that time. So I gently redirected all the sequins onto a nice fernbed we have beside the deck, where they can party on, under, in and beneath the curling leaves. Pretty interesting the sound, a large steady stream of ladybugs on a dried-up bed of ferns. According to the local folkery, so many ladybugs means it will be a warm winter. Especially likely now that the stove is warm.

ONE ROCK TIED WITH ROPE

The first time I ever saw one of these was when I was wandering through the gardens of Katsura Rikyu and was about to turn down an inviting path when I noticed, perked in the center of the first walkstone off the path I was on, a small, well-shaped rock tied with black hemp rope. I stood staring at it, wondering what the... why was it there, this rock, it was out of place, irrational, just put there, right where I would place my foot, who ties a rope around a rock and puts it in the way, but it was there. The act is pointless, to bind something to nothing: but there it was.

Then a gate opened in what is I guess the universal part of my mind, the part we too seldom inhabit but that is the general habitat of gardeners and other grand communicators. It was clear that, through this rope-wrapped stone, someone was requesting as gently and respectfully as the garden itself had been created - with the same minimal intrusion, both upon garden and visitor - that you not pass this point, please.

I hadn't known what the rock meant, but it stopped me cold, as it was meant to do. A tacit knowledge I hadn't known I shared. There is so much that understands us.

The stone is called a tome-ishi (stop stone).

[ SHIBUYA ] Nov. 09, 10, 11, 2005

PLIERS AND THE ARK OF THE COVENANT

I can’t tell you what a relief it was to read that the US Transportation Security Administration will announce later this week that passengers will again be able to carry small tools and scissors aboard commercial airplanes. It was always very frustrating to me not to be able to carry my pliers, wrench sets, ball peen hammer and what not when I flew overseas.

At the last minute, I'd always find those everyday tools in my bag in the taxi on the way to the airport and have to just give them to the driver or maybe some homeless guy along the road (Hey, buddy, need some socket wrenches? A set of hacksaw blades?) rather than have the government confiscate them and put them in that big warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenenant.

And the money adds up you know, buying new tools every time I fly wherever, lose my tools, then come back newly toolless. And how boring those flights, without a hex wrench! But that's all over, now that terrorism's nearly fixed, and anyway terrorists no longer have to bolt things together on board, or cut things out of newspapers. So now on commercial flights I can take my scissors too! So long as I don't run with them.

WHAT IF YOU'RE 74 AND BROKE?

Letter from a 74-year-old woman named Kerry who is the epitome of spunk and grit: the real kind, not the virtual kind. Hope they're still making them like they used to...

Read this issue of Bartcop to see what came of this. Scroll down 4/5 to "Bart's Bono Impression" (not linkable). I'd like to get in touch with Kerry myself, but Bart gives no address or link...

Later update