Still Gravity

According to linguistic research, the Piraha people of the deep forests of Brazil can. These hunter-gatherers apparently live without a sense of time in the way we know it.  Linguist Daniel Everett worked with them for thirty years and found that their language only has present tense. There are no concepts to represent the past or the future, and even they lack a history before the living memory of the present tribe members. Neither they have words for colors and numbers.  Could it be that the Piraha found the "secret of happiness"? We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives.           Thich Nhat Hanh

The fake tree of Animal Kingdom. Theme Park art at its finest.  We went to "explore" the Animal Kingdom of Disney and found real animals - it's also a zoo - in a world of art and decoration and marketing and business. The human art of this kingdom is fun. It's an expensive mix of fantasy and imagination. But keep in mind the natural trees. They are the real ones, and we can enjoy them for free. 

Those frozen bits of time can be misleading. All because the context is missing. Photos don't show the before and after.  One example is the famous AP photo of a South Vietnamese General executing a Viet Cong fighter with a revolver - graphic image here .  Total horror. But if the story is true, the murdered guerrilla fighter killed a South Vietnamese officer and his family before capture.  Dead were the wife, dead were the children, dead was the grandma... the surviving kid moved later to the US and served in the military.  During the Tet Offensive of 1968, Nguyen's parents and six siblings were killed at their Saigon-area home by alleged Viet Cong guerrillas. Shot in the arm, thigh, and skull, nine-year-old Nguyen stayed in the house for two hours—while his mother bled to death—and then escaped after dark. News sources from the 2020s reported that one of the men who attacked Nguyen's family was Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém, whose execution by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was famo

"In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first, " said Mr. Taylor, the inventor of the "management consultant".  His statement suggests that the system is more important than the humans, isn't it?  Frederick Winslow Taylor is the god of the faithful followers of the sect created by Motorola’s Six-Sigma of the 1980s - yes, the one that copied the color belt rankings of the martial arts but mistakenly left the punches out. In a few words: just another top-down data-driven loop.  But back to Taylor. Some credit him as the inventor of the infamous "open office" in 1904.  You know the drill: all the workers together in a wide-open floor and the bosses in private offices on the second level. In the modern versions, some managers "working hard" buying stuff in Amazon or reserving their next vacation paid by annual bonuses. Good that many businesses are jumping out of the open office trend. I’ve seen a good dose of Taylor

Decaying in the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The trees are falling one by one in this sandbar under the patient beating of the sea. Photo taken at Caspersen Beach , Florida - License our images  here .  Pessimism is a bad word in our times. It carries a bad reputation. But pessimism is all around us. It survives in individuals, religions, and philosophies in a time where most humans are or pretend to be optimists - at least in the developed world. Goals, motivation, and growth - add your own list here -, point to an optimist perspective of life.  The problem with the common dislike for pessimist ideas is that this way of thinking leaves us like chickens without feathers. Pessimism removes all comfort and protection from our minds. It even can open the door to the dark world of depression.  Seen from another angle, pessimism can show realities that we don't want to see because of our voluntary exodus to a fictional mental world. Yes, it's always better "to live" in t

I read a quote attributed to the Austrian zoologist  Konrad Lorenz  that says:  The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing. For me it sounds true, because the more I know about something the more I know that I don't know enough.  Knowledge works like a branching tree; it keeps opening and opening new branches. The more one study a subject, the more questions appear and the less secure you are about your knowledge - call this experience.  I my own field, I realized that I knew everything about nothing. But who cares? We live in a universe beyond comprehension. A place where even stars are mere illusions. Ghosts of lights from a past lone gone.  Better to embrace the idea of our old friend Socrates:  I know that I know nothing.

Weird to wake up listening to lions in a campground of Texas, but later in the morning all was peacefully quiet - I guess the lions got their breakfast.  East Texas. Overnight stop at Whispering Pines RV Park. After a late-night arrival and a good time chilling out in the campground pool, we woke early next morning with the roars of lions. Lions in Texas? It felt like Africa. We learned later about the Tiger Creek Wildlife Refuge a mile away. Relief. Hungry guests claiming the breakfast. 

What shall we do?” said a young Sioux warrior to an American officer on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago. “What shall we do? the buffalo is our only friend. When he goes all is over with the Dacotahs. I speak thus to you because like me you are a Brave. Sir William Francis Butler  wrote this in his book  The Wild North Land.  The Indian was right. The buffalo was his only friend. Its skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its undressed hide a boat, its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its meat his daily food, its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a lariot for his horse, a saddle, bridle, rein, and bit. Its tail formed an ornament for his tent, its inner skin a book in which to sketch the brave deeds of his life, the “medicine robe” of his history. House, boat, food, bed, and covering, every want from infancy to age, and after life itself had passed, wrapt in his buffalo robe the red man waited for the dawn.

A big salt encounter in a place that has seen all. Thirst and hunger, heat and cold, water and dryness, speed records, and even Hollywood movies -  License our images here .                        Feels strange to walk on the bottom of an ancient lake. And stranger yet, to walk on salt more than 500 miles from the ocean.  We are in the Salt Flats of the Great Basin Desert, a dry emptiness that goes from Utah to California. These are the remains of Lake Bonneville, the largest Pleistocene paleolake in the Great Basin of western North America. C tasted a piece and her face said it all: potash salt. An overdose of potassium. Careful adventurous girl, nature also has poisons. The Bonneville Salt Flats were named after the hero of Washington Irving's The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.   Some say that the French born Benjamin Bonneville never set foot here. But his men did. The captain sent Joseph Walker with a party to e

There are still some "mundus subterraneous" on this planet - even if social media has destroyed a few through crowding, trash, and bad behaviors.  And no, I'm not using the words of Athanasius Kircher in a literal sense. I'm not talking here of going for the lost Greater Atria or underwater Zealandia. I mean places around us hidden behind the shadows of popular destinations, quiet grounds out of the spotlight that attract curious people that love the uncertain and the unfamiliar.  How can someone change Giza for the faraway Meroë?  Well, there are those travelers. Maybe it comes in the genes. The "mundus subterraneous" are their great attraction. They always hunt for "hidden destinations" and, when they find them, sometimes keep the "secret".  How long will these "mundus subterraneous" survive in our virtual age? 

Which is which? Should we know something for the sake of knowing something or should we know something to do something with that knowledge? - I wrote this entanglement on purpose.   The ancient Greeks saw the difference between knowing something ( episteme ) and knowing how to do something ( techne ). This is the distinction between theory and practice.  We need to balance both, otherwise, theoretical knowledge becomes useless for real life applications and that's bad, especially for men - LOL.  The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying. They can't put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt. They believe it's endearing and cute to be useless,           James May

One of the drawings of the book. The old women saving a fallen warrior from certain death.   Carl Lumholtz got what he wanted: 4 years living in the wilderness of the northern Australia of the 1880s.  This was a wild experience for the explorer and scientist of the Royal Society of Sciences of Norway, but he managed to live "in huts with natives of Australia who never come into contact with the white man." In Queensland, he saw hunts of kangaroos and wallabies with spears and nets and also skirmishes between native groups.  He wrote detailed descriptions of boomerangs - did you know that all were not curved? - and the warlike "nolla-nollas", the clubs used by hunter-warriors. Sometimes the drama gets high in the narrative: Suddenly an old man uttered a terrible war-cry, and swung his bundle of spears over his head. But Lumholtz says that there were few deaths because elder women rescued the fallen ones - the defeated warriors usually lost their wives.  On the part o

Are you a Libertarian?  Officially, I'm not. But some Libertarian ideas sound good to me. Starting with the name "Libertarian". What can we do without individual liberty? But one thing is important: never confuse liberty with libertinage. Some people do.   After individual liberty come other ideas that sometimes overlap such as:  Right to life. Freedom of speech, association, and worship. Right to own private property. Free market.  Equality under the law. Firm believes in individualism, peace, and the rule of law.  Limited small government - just in the amount needed to protect social order and legality.  The last one is controversial. Some people love big governments and others small ones. Like always, the extremes are bad. Where is the middle ground?  The point is that this needed "beast" called government must be under control or will get big and wild. It can even devour the people who it's supposed to serve. Yeah, power is always a problem. Addictive li

Cuban facing a Spanish shooting squad in 1897. Drawing from the book of Richard Harding Davis published in the same year.   Before Hemingway, there was Richard Harding Davis. He was another journalist fond of risks and adventures and, being a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, he couldn't miss going with the Rough Riders to cover the war in Cuba.  I read his book  Notes of a War Correspondent   - the link is affiliate . It covers his journalistic work in the Cuban-Spanish War, the Greek-Turkish War, the Spanish-American War, the South African War, and the Japanese-Russian War - war, war, and more war.  This book has a touchy tale about a young Cuban insurgent called Adolfo Rodríguez facing the Spanish shooting squad in January 1897. Richard saw in him the bravery of a well-known American patriot.   He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage and dignity, that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of Nathan Hale which stands in the City Hall Park, above the

No. We saw that when the web was born. Many of the first didn't survive for long.  Being the first doesn't guarantee being the most successful, popular, or remembered. That has happened in all our history. Think about Marco Polo. He is the most remembered European explorer of Asia but wasn't the first one - check his place in this list .  There is more than being the first in success. Think about timing. 

Looks like a crazy proposition, but someone did it. It was a lady and I guess was luck, because the exception doesn't make the rule. Here applies the saying of Teddy Roosevelt:  I once saw a man kill a lion with a 30-30 caliber rifle under certain conditions, but that doesn’t mean that a 30-30 rifle is a lion gun. Our lucky lady was Bella Twin, a Canadian Cree Indian already in her 60s. She killed a thousand pounds bear that set the world record for 1953. Not even Hemingway, who once defended the .22, believed that killing a bear with this ammo was possible.  Now standing in one corner of a boxing ring with a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, shooting a bullet weighing only 40 grains and with a striking energy of 51 foot pounds at 25 feet from the muzzle, I will guarantee to kill either Gene Tunney or Joe Louis before they get to me from the opposite corner. This is the smallest caliber pistol cartridge made; but it is also one of the most accurate and easy to hit with, since the

Lonely king in white space. Does him look sad, worried, scared, or the three emotions combined? Replica of a piece of the famous Lewis Chessmen - License our images  here .  It was just a replica, but the feelings were there. Casting long shadows under my modern lights, the old king whispered tales of forgotten battles. The weathered face covered by worries and sadness, pride and defiance, perhaps resignation. No doubt that the unknown carver of the walrus tusks did a good job capturing ancient vibes from Viking and Gaelic lore. If there is something foreign to the Lewis Chessmen, it's elegance. They don't play in the same league of the Staunton chess sets. Rough and simple, our pieces are more primeval. Their furrowed brows and clenched fists speak volumes about human nature. These carvings carry the weight of centuries of warfare and political intrigues; they carry the guilt of the rise and fall of c