Posted inCurrent affairs

Good news (I guess)

Back on July 17, in my “yin and yang news stories” post, I noted a report that men were paying big bucks in Las Vegas to hunt naked women with paintball guns. Something about this story didn’t seem quite right, but I took it at face value. After all, can’t you believe everything the media tells you? I even saw mention of this on Fox News! (Actually, I guess this should been a tipoff right there. It kills me every time a Fox anchor says, “Fair. Balanced. Unafraid.” Fair, balanced, and Fox News are four words that don’t belong together).…
No Comments
Posted inBooks Home life Philosophy

Refrigerator friends, art, and Emerson

An eclectic collection of topics, but it’s been a week since my last post, making it difficult to focus on a single subject. Refrigerator friends…Laurel found a mention of such in an article she was reading a while back. This well describes Ron and Rita, from Seattle, whom we had the pleasure of hosting as weekend guests. A refrigerator friend is someone who unhesitatingly can walk into your house and open the refrigerator without asking, even saying, “What do you have to eat? I’m starving.” The author of the article said that everyone needs some refrigerator friends, because these are…
No Comments
Posted inBooks Philosophy

The substance of emptiness

I’ve got a Buddhist book called the “The Emptiness of Emptiness.” I bought it mainly because I liked the title. Unfortunately, the title continued to be the best thing I liked about the book, even after I read it. The idea that an idea of emptiness fills up, and thus negates, the emptiness is cool. Buddhism 101. But a whole book on the subject? The title suffices. So I’m running the danger of doing the same thing by even going on as long as I have. But without saying something about emptiness, we’d be stuck in our own isolated islands…
No Comments
Posted inBooks Current affairs

Yin and Yang news stories

Maybe “yin and yang” isn’t quite the right term to describe the relation between these stories. Maybe there isn’t any relation between them at all. Maybe they are just two stories, each being what each is. Still, somehow they seem to say something about the polar ends of the human condition, not that I know what the two ends consist of, nor what value should be attached to each end. The June 23 issue of Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Harry Potter rules,” all about J.K. Rowling and her fabulously successful series of five Harry Potter books. I’ve…
No Comments
Posted inHome life

Evidence suggesting ego-loss is incomplete

Notwithstanding my 30+ years of daily meditation, I still receive some subtle hints that I have not quite attained to the selfless, egoless, Buddha-like nature to which, theoretically, I aspire. Evidence along these lines was received today when I began thinking about the wonderful web site that pops up when you type “weapons of mass destruction” into the Google search engine, and click on “I’m feeling lucky”. Try it, you’ll like it (even if you’re a big Bush fan, this is still a great satire). What this click does, as explained by Google, is that you’re taken directly to the…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs

Savage still on the loose

These days it seems like there isn’t a whole lot of good news in the Oregonian and Statesman-Journal, but Tuesday, I believe, the O had a item in the TV section relating that Michael Savage’s weekend MSNBC “talk” (actually, rant) show had been cancelled. As described in this story, Savage told a caller that he was a sodomite who deserved to get AIDS and die. When I’m feeling masochistic I occasionally tune in to Savage’s late weekday afternoon slot on KXL, though it usually isn’t possible to listen to his hateful, misinformed, childish blather for more than a few minutes.…
No Comments
Posted inPhilosophy Recreation

Zen lesson-lite

In my never-ending quest to find a deep meaning in the most trivial of circumstances, so that I may believe that the trivialities which surround me, and in fact, are me, have their roots in some unseen depths of existence, I am trying to attach some sort of Zen significance to the welter of mosquito bites on my arms and legs. “When hiking in the mountains, of what use is mosquito repellant left in the cabin?” This is a koan-lite worthy of much pondering, and, in fact, I have done just that most of today, when I wasn’t busy scratching…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

So, who you gonna’ believe?

Right now, Laurel is out watering trees that we planted on our five-acre Hines Plantation one or two years ago. She shouldn’t have to be doing this. It’s only the first part of July, not the end of August. Normally, we would have gotten about twice as much rain as actually fell in May and June. But this wasn’t a normal spring. On three days in June, I believe, high temperature marks for the date were broken in Salem. Much less rain. Much higher heat. Doesn’t this strongly suggest that something is different with the weather? And not just here,…
No Comments