Seamus Heaney April 13, 1939- August 30, 2013

Doubletake 

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

The World´s Largest Cave

Sơn Đoòng cave (hang Sơn Đoòng, "Mountain River cave" in Vietnamese)[1] is a cave in Vietnam and the biggest known cave in the world.  It has a large fast-flowing underground river inside.

Sơn Đoòng Cave was discovered by a local man in 1991. The local jungle men were afraid of the cave for the whistling sound it makes. It was not until 2009 that it became public after a group of British cave scientists conducted a survey.

the spoon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCFN32_nqT8

“Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.”

Buddha

Proof - Western Civilization Doomed! Miley "Degrades" Foam Finger.

'She degraded an icon!' Foam finger inventor Steve Chmelar is angry as Miley Cyrus 'misrepresents' his creation.

OMG! What has she done!!
(Miley used the icon hand in a lewd way at VMA awards.   So the inventor is thinking " I created this absurd thing and you misused it "). 

Gotta give her credit.  Who would've thought that someone could make the hand more absurd? Takes some kind of talent.  And I can't imagine that drunken college students and sports fans would ever misuse the "finger"  Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2406472/Miley-Cyrus-degraded-icon--Foam-finger-inventor-Steve-Chmelars-fury.html#ixzz2dUto7VCD

reflections

The salt flats in Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia have mineral deposits which  create the world's biggest natural mirror that stretches 6,500 miles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2MOXksZ2UE

"I always have a full-length mirror next to the camera when I'm doing publicity stills. That way, I know how I look." Marilyn Monroe 

largest sunflower stats

Tallest plant: 
25 ft. 5 ½ in. (7.76m) tall grown by M Heijms in Oirschot, Netherlands in 1986.

Largest head: 
32 ¼ in. (82 cm) diameter grown by Emily Martin in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada in 1983.

Most flowers: 
837 flowers on a single plant grown by Melvin Hemker in Saint Charles, Michigan, USA in 2001.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMOec6tK8ps

Helen Keller  "Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do."

the atheist and the bear

An atheist was taking a walk through the woods, admiring all that evolution had created.

"What majestic trees! What powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!", he said to himself. As he was walking along the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. When he turned to see what the cause was, he saw a 7-foot grizzly charging right towards him. He ran as fast as he could. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was closing, He ran even faster, crying in fear. He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. His heart was pounding and he tried to run even faster. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up, but saw the bear right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him.

At that moment, the Atheist cried out "Oh my God!...." Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky, "You deny my existence for all of these years; teach others I don''''t exist; and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?"

The atheist looked directly into the light "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask You to treat me as Christian now, but perhaps could you make the bear a Christian?" "Very well," said the voice.

The light went out. The river ran again. And the sounds of the forest resumed. And then the bear dropped on his right knee ..... brought both paws together...bowed his head and spoke: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful."

Pastafarian wins battle to wear strainer headgear for ID photo (no commentary needed)

freedom of religion

G.K. Chesterton: Bishop of Northampton probes sainthood claims

This week the Bishop of Northampton (UK) is to appoint a priest to look at whether author G.K. Chesterton should be made a saint (the first step to sainthood) after a campaign was launched by the American Chesterton Society (ACS).  His Holiness, Pope Francis, expressed support for Chesterton's Cause when he was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.

Mr Chesterton, who found fame through his Father Brown novels, converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1920s. He also wrote the religious works Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man and books on St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas.The Orthodoxy looked at the meaning of life and Chesterton's spiritual journey to Christianity.  The Everlasting Man is a spiritual history of western civilization which has been credited with helping to convert the author CS Lewis from atheism to Christianity.  His writings have converted many to Catholicism, according to the ACS.

Oldest Man Who Ever Lived

Bolivian indigenous farmer Carmelo Flores has lived to the grand old age of 123, celebrating his most recent birthday on July 16 (1890).  And his baptismal certificate bears him out  (birth certificates were not issued in those days).  He lives high in the Andes in a straw roofed hut, and eats the local ‘potato’ center diet.  The previous  record holder was a Frenchman who died at 122.

burial place of the maccabees

The Tombs of the Maccabees are located west of Jerusalem in the Ben-Shemen Forest near the modern city of Modi’in. Maccabees were Jewish rebels against the empire left by the death of Alexander in the 2nd Century BC

10 things you need to know before you decide to retire

1. Lots of perks.  I get to watch all the television I want until I get so sick and tired of it that I cancel my cable.  Instead I spend 4 hours a day watching what the neighbors are doing.

2. I don't have to hurry anywhere; I feel relaxed.  However everyone else is still in a hurry so they flip me off whenever I'm a little late at a traffic light or slow to order at the drive thru or try to find the exact change or a hundred other minor rat race missteps.  

3. And since I've got all day to cook I can eat all the great things I've done without - filet mignon, fine wine, patie de fois gras, chateau briand, crab cakes, hot dogs with sauce and slaw, etc. - that is, when I can afford it and if my BP is good and my lipids are in order and my stomach is doing ok (irritable bowel).  Sometimes I suffer from irascible bowel but that's a whole other story.

4.  I still got my swag.  I notice young women looking at me and smiling.  I stare at them and their womanly ways and feel that ol' machismo again. And then one of the %^$#s tells me I remind them of their Grandpa. 

I hope they legalize mj soon.  I'm gonna fill the place with weed smoke for a month.

I said 10 things but I need to take a nap. I'm not in a hurry.  

plumbing mess

 If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber....Albert Einstein


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP14OLdvUyM

The Phaistos Disc

The Phaistos Disc, discovered  in 1908 in Crete, remains one of the world’s great archaeological mysteries.  About 6 inches in diameter, the unique fired clay disc dates to the second millennium BC. Covered on both sides with a total of 243 stamped symbols consisting of 45 repeating characters, its purpose and meaning remain a mystery.  Scholars generally accept its age, and assume it is an as yet unknown language,  

Never give up, never give up, never give up, it's ok - have a beer, a bm, and a nap, then never give up again.

In my youth the fastest mile I could run was about 6 minutes.  not very good.  In my thirties i became a runner and commonly ran for more than an hour at a time.  I once went for performance and ran 5 miles in 35 minutes, which for me was very good.  I miss the old days when running/jogging was fun so I'm trying to get back into it, gradually.  I recently "ran" a third of a mile in 6.5 minutes.  For comparison, i walked the same distance in 8 minutes.  I see where this is going as I age.  10 years from now I will be closer to coming to a full stop!.

Today I ran the third mile track in 5.5 minutes so I guess improvement is still coming.  Actually I ran 2/3rds of a mile in 10 minutes.

So True

From the great Gales of Ireland Are the men that God made mad, for all their wars are merry And all their songs are sad. 

         G.K. CHESTERTON

Homeland Security and the FBI make big Bust of Notorious Gang Members!

263 MS-13 gang members were arrested, including more than 150 "ranking" gang members. and nearly 800 grams of heroin. Other drugs were also confiscated. Members of this national and transnational MS-13 gang were also found carrying at least 28 illegal firearms, 10 kilos of marijuana, over $22,000, and 123 grams of cocaine.

Tell me, someone with savvy, when you scrutinize these numbers do they seem right? $22000 - hell, if I arrested 263 attorneys or physicians or teachers or plumbers, I'd likely come up with $22000 or more. 28 illegal firearms for hundreds of gang members!  Puh-leease!  You'd find more guns than that at a gathering of church deacons in Pikeville, Ky.

My hope is to make sense of the world.  Does this news report make sense?

More W.C. Fields

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.

A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

I like children - fried.

Shyness

"For Charles Darwin, this ‘odd state of mind’ was one of the great puzzles in his theory of evolution, for it appeared to offer no benefit to our species. ... in research begun in the 1970s, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan suggested that about 10-15 per cent of infants are ‘born shy*’. Being easily fearful and less socially responsive, they reacted to mildly stressful situations with a quicker heartbeat and higher blood cortisol levels." - from "The Crystalline Wall" by Joe Moran, AEON, July 17, 2013.
I remember once taking a physical taste and smell sensitivity test to various flavors and sensations, such as sweet, sour, salty, spicy, overwhelming, etc.  Can't remember exactly but the test included physical measuring techniques, kind of like litmus, that corroborated the subjective sensations.  My shy-like-me son also took the test, which was administered by and compared with a non-shy person.  Results clearly indicated strong differences between the shy, who measured more sensitive, and the non-shy.  Not a scientific proof but interesting.  Over the years I've also noticed a different sensitivity to sounds, pain tolerance, and etc.

If you don't believe that Liberty and Freedom have been totally $%X%Z%33-ED by the Patriot Act, read the story at this link.

Lavabit, an encrypted email service used by Ed Snowden, shut down without notice.  The CEO, under the threat of imprisonment, chose closing rather than turning over data to NSA.  He is not allowed to discuss the case, the laws being applied to him, and is not allowed to provide his lawyer with all the information relating to his case.  Lavabit is not a surreptitious enterprise,  It provides a legitimate service to those who do not want their personal info shopped around to 3rd parties by such providers as GMail, Yahoo, etc. They sell your data and profiles, including websites that you frequent, to numerous vendors.  That's a price you pay for free email and storage.  Some choose to run their own email server or pay for privacy to a company like LavaBit.
We are under threat by the Police State.
Lavabit closes its doors rather than punk out to Fascists!

a little poetry

A Frisky Lamb

A frisky lamb And a frisky child
Playing their pranks
In a cowslip meadow:
The sky all blue
And the air all mild
And the fields all sun
And the lanes half shadow. 

Christina Georgina Rossetti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsXLYq5WcoI

Pope's recruiting new members..atheists, lgbt's...

hey what about us REPROBATES???

large English breakfast

Mario’s Cafe Bar in Westhoughton, UK, serves the biggest full English breakfast in the world, according to Guinness World Records. The Ultimate Breakfast costs £10.95 ($18.05) and consists of 10 eggs, 10 sausages, 10 rashers of bacon, 10 slices of toast, five black pudding slices, tomatoes, mushrooms, and baked beans for a total of about 5,000 calories.

Ymmmmm!!!

Frigatebirds

Frigatebirds  obtain most of their food on the wing. A small amount of their diet is obtained by robbing other seabirds, a behavior that has given the family its name, and by snatching seabird chicks.

The frigatebird has the largest wingspan (2 m) in comparison to it's body of any bird species in the world, so the frigatebird is naturally an adept pilot. Frigatebirds have been known to stay in the air for nearly a whole week and only land on the rocky cliffs to breed or to rest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkodJznsNMI

King Saul and his sons die in battle

Mt Gilboa

Mount Gilboa is on the southeastern side of the Jezreel Valley.  King Saul felt forced to commit suicide on these slopes when facing certain defeat by the Philistines.

Mystery priest appears to pray over crash victim, then vanishes

The notion of guardian angels is often explained away as coincidence, but count the crew that freed Katie Lentz after a car crash as true believers. Struck head-on by a driver now charged with DWI, Lentz had been pinned in her Mercedes for an hour on a Missouri highway when she asked responders to pray aloud with her. That's when a Catholic priest appeared, though there were no other bystanders nearby, to offer not only a prayer but a calming voice to the rescuers whose equipment had been unable to free her. Soon additional gear arrived to finish the job, but when crew members turned to thank the priest, he was gone. Said New London fire chief Raymond Reed, "It was nothing more than sheer faith and nothing short of a miracle."

details  http://now.msn.com/mysterious-priest-performs-miracle-to-help-katie-lentz-from-car-crash

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

Few intellects have captured the Irish wit 

as well as the much forgotten words of Oscar Wilde

To make the point, here find a few of my favorite of his quotes.

True friends stab you in the front.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

I can resist everything but temptation.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

painted bears

The bear is the symbol of Berlin   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeXpADRdoqE

Man saves dog from drowning first, returns for wife second

It's fairly obvious where Graham Anley's loyalties lie. Anley, his wife,
Cheryl, and their 9-year-old Jack Russell terrier Rosie were sailing
 from East London to Madagascar on their yacht, The Boundless, 
when they hit a reef off the East London coast early Sunday morning.
 Fortunately, Rosie was wearing a specially tailored dog life jacket. 
Less fortunately, Cheryl's own safety line was snagged on the yacht's 
steering gear. Graham, clearly Husband of the Year material, saved the 
dog first, swimming to shore with Rosie before returning for Cheryl. 
The couple is fine, though the yacht sustained damage, and the same 
could probably be said for the pair's marriage.  

acting cont'

“What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world!
The paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” 


― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxCaOzmV0LE&list=PL2C545DA49554973C

The Scottish Complaints Choir

The 30 member Scottish Complaints Choir, formed in 2005, presents common citizen complaints set to

music by two professional composers at various venues around Edinburgh.  Topics include 'tourists, dog poop, a stalled railway construction project' and similar topics.   The web site below features the

full chorus singing their complaint about dog poop in public places.   The 'complaints choir' idea originated in Finland but the idea has become extremely popular in Scotland with more than 40 such groups. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23574229

amy adams in "leap year"

The Irish film ,"leap year" is made exceptional by the grand views of the Irish country side and the  marvelous acting of Lady Adams.

jpr: seen the movie thrice and will view it again this winter!!

burial place of the prophet Nahum

The national Antiquities Department in Iraq has announced plans for the renovation and restoration of an ancient synagogue in al-Qoush, a short drive north of Mosul and the location of the purported tomb of the biblical prophet Nahum.

For The Burren: To Death's Door

The Irish Tug Of War season has begun with teams from around the country competing for the 

All Ireland Final to be held later this year.  The Burren tug of war team is the odds on favorite. 

more on acting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzR9__N1pQ

The Next Generation

Uncle Kaelan  and Mary Grace work out a problem on the I Pad.

Mainstream Journalism Sux Again!!! Promotes Fiction as News!

Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail + Skittles + Robitussin DM = homemade form of Codeine.  Side effects include Liver Damage as well as Psychological changes including becoming physically aggressive and paranoid.  Trayvon Martin's autopsy found liver damage consistent with the use of this form of Codeine.  A can of Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice, not Ice Tea, was found at the scene.  The victim was a student of Mixed-Martial Arts-style fighting.  There are other easily discoverable facts (trouble at school; rude and obscene texting; online search for Codeine; etc) that relate to the character of this young man and lead one to believe that he was not angelic but much more like the typical young adult male in terms of mischief, bravado, and questionable judgement.  The mainstream media completely ignored this side of the story, portraying him as a sweet little cherub and his killer as a prejudiced redneck (even though there is ample but un-reported evidence to the contrary). Still a Tragedy?  Yes, completely, and the Press made it exponentially worse with lies and malfeasance. The mainstream media create a story that eliminates facts that do anything but promote their fiction.  (Another item virtually overlooked in the reporting is that according to the delayed timing of his walk back to his abode, it may be that Trayvon was laying in wait for Zimmerman, hoping to confront him.  His friend testified that they suspected Zim was a homosexual predator.)