Still Gravity

 Listen you, enjoy your time, you really don’t have very long.            Wang Fanzhi (7th century) These are 61 lines of wisdom from many sources. They are rewritten in my words. Enjoy them if you like lists.  Life is short - why waste it?  Lost time is lost forever.  Be in the present.  Enjoy what you choose to live.  See life from death.  We are here to live - be the world good or bad.  Keep all simple. Details fritter our lives.   Understand nature. Suffering is part of life.  There is no healthy aging - aging is destruction.  Happiness comes from actions.  Keep in sight what is important.  Get knowledge through reason. Learn doing.  Things become interesting if you look at them long enough.  Always question yourself.  Don’t allow thoughts to become the thinker.  A person thinking is always alone.  If you don’t know something, it doesn’t exist in your world.  Life is like a puzzle; the pieces can be rearranged for different outcomes.  Difficulties help to grow.  Be strong and self-

Cruises are weird cocktails of ship, hotel, shopping mall, amusement park, and travel agency. They are comfortable. No doubt about that. Cruises have evolved a lot since the first one was launched in 1900.  Prinzessin Victoria Luise  was a tiny boat compared to the modern mega ships. Then, why don't I like them? Here we go with some personal reasons - and I know that they will be awkward for most. Not interested in resting for days like a couch potato.  Not interested in gaining weight with "free" drinks and food.  Not interested in cheap copies of Broadway musicals. Not interested in dining with captains - except if they are called Drake, Cook, or Magallanes.  Not interested in brief stays at a port of call.  Said that, some places justify taking a cruise because they are hard to reach.  Next cruise trip… Antarctica! (We've been in only one cruise , so take my points from the angle of an unexperienced cruiser.)

The Germans "invented" the Christmas tree during the Renaissance. The cool trend got hot and by 1576 there were Christmas trees all around Europe - more or less.  The British waited to the 1800s to jump in. And the United States came on even later: the first "official" Christmas trees appeared in 1901 - caveat: German immigrants had been using the trees long before in America. The old Protestants didn't like the idea of celebrating with Christmas trees. They saw them as Catholic stuff and argued that the Bible didn't talk about such things - except if we see the cross as a tree, something mentioned in old translations because the Romans used trees for crucifixion.  It's said that Martin Luther was the inventor of the Christmas lighting. Apparently, he added candles to an evergreen tree - what a fire hazard!  The traditional "Merry Christmas" neither is ancient. Its first use was in 1699. But not like a loud and happy greeting for relatives and

Imagine a world where "I" and "me" are proscribed. Where everything is "we" and "us", even when talking in first person singular. A world where children are separated from their parents and raised by the state - read government. Where codes take the place of names and there is no individual thinking because,  What is not thought by all men cannot be true.  A society in which,  ...everything that is not permitted by law is forbidden. And the only escape is,  ...the Uncharted Forest, about which men must not think.  Russian born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum - better known as Ayn Rand and author of  Atlas Shrugged  - wrote this novella inspired on the communist regime of her country. Written in first person, this book reads like a diary.  Anthem  was published in 1938. A very interesting book that should be part of school's curriculums. It's available in Amazon  - this link is affiliate .

A city on sand and dryness  - License our images  here .                         In Las Vegas everything is possible. Even camping. Coming from Death Valley, we "camped" in the Oasis Las Vegas RV Resort, a glamping spot close to the Strip. How could the Mexican Rafael Rivera imagine the future of the torrid valley he saw in 1829. It went from oasis to Sin City in little over a century, starting with its first casino: Rancho Vegas. The rest was a matter of tourism and money and... a group of four gangsters.   Traveling the world in one place - the delusional magic of Las Vegas. 

Travel writing is a broad and always shifting genre. A journal and even the captivity literature - as dramatic as it is - are also forms of travel writing.   Now most of what we have is tourism related, but travel literature didn't begin with tourism. It began with pilgrims and immigrants. Many advice to differentiate the traveler from the tourist, because the second one is the  Flâneur of our times, a casual stroller.  Curious that many old travel stories were works of fiction based on real stuff. And sometimes the tales were not written by the protagonists. For example, the writer of romances Rustichello da Pisa wrote the travel stories of Marco Polo.  Some interesting cases: The travels of the Galician Egeria to the Holy Land in the 4th century. The Basque Catalina de Erauso. Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. Mandeville's  The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Thomas More's  Utopia. There is no foreign land; it is only the traveler that is foreign.           Robert Lou

No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.    Native American proverb. The underwater observatory of the Homosassa Springs State Park, Florida -  License our images here . Here we found a mix of state park and zoo. A zoo only for Florida wildlife. The name: "Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park". I always ask who creates these long names. Politicians? We found another seven-words-long name in a state park of the Florida Keys - " Windley Key Fossil Reef Geological State Park ". Don't make me count the number of characters. Ugly names.  The park is on the headwaters of the Homosassa River and close to the Gulf of Mexico. The floating platform of the previous photo is a relic from the past. But before I share historic photos from Homosassa Springs State Park, check  this video with some of our pictures.  Mea

Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence  by Rory Miller is a book I recommend to anyone starting in martial arts and self-defense - it's available in Amazon (the link is affiliate ). This text shakes the traditional world of martial arts on the base of its effectivity versus real life violence. It explores the differences between martial arts practice and actual violence.   These excerpts illustrate why you should read it.   Self-defense is clearly my focus in this book. What is it? It is recovery from stupidity or bad luck, from finding yourself in a position you would have given almost anything to prevent. It is difficult to train for because of the surprise element and because you may be injured before you are aware of the conflict. The critical element is to overcome the shock and surprise so that you can act. Self-defense is largely about dealing with surprise and fear and pain. Know this: Watching every martial arts movie ever

Everyone was afraid of the monster of the other side of the river. All except her. And not because she was braver than her sisters. They were all alike. Even dressed in the same colors! Her "bravery" came from a lifetime watching the monster. But no way to convince her siblings that the beast was not a threat to them. True that the strange being was scary, always busy across the wide river. Roaring and huffing from dawn to dusk, moving through clouds of dust and always followed by a flock of birds that didn’t miss a day.  The visceral fear of the monster was born from scary tales of long-gone grandmothers. Delusions of countryside ladies. One day, all changed. She was drying her delicate hair with the first rays of the sun when… the monster was there!  The hideous face with the deep wrinkles. The big round eyes with devilish glares. Closer than ever. Right across her on the other bank of the river.  She doubted in fear. Could the old tales be true? A thing dropped from the mo

We often don't see violence as a thing of women, but history if full of cases. Nazi Germany and the Rwandan genocide saw the worse of women in social violence.  Ancient history also has examples of violent acts committed by women - justified or not.  In the famous side, we got Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes and Jael killing Sisera, the commander of the Canaanite army - check the paintings of  Artemisia Gentileschi ,  Caravaggio ,  Lambert Lombard , and  Jacopo Amigoni .  Two centuries ago, we got the violent Amazons of the Kingdom of Dahomey.  The point is that both genres are equally capable of violence.  A common problem is when criminal women try to escape justice by playing the victim's role to secure leniency. They often switch from oppressor to oppressed and their lawyers can mount a gendered defense in court.  The last decades have seen an increase in women's crimes -  check these stats . Concerning trend.