Just thought I'd check in to see what is happening.  Looks pretty quiet.

I like the idea of this blog, but I just don't seem to remember to look at it.

The only thing that has happened since I was coerced into getting an account (by Google) to use this blog is that I get more spam in my main email account.

An 86 year old friend and retired scientist and Jazz musician and I had a discussion of the song "Strange Fruit" the other day. There is NOTHING this guy doesn't know about Jazz and is one of the few people I've ever run into that knows it was written by a white Jewish school teacher and communist sympathizer named Abel Meeropol in the 30's. Billie Holiday made it famous and unless you've heard her sing it you haven't yet heard it.
 I was telling him how it makes me cry when Billie sings it, that it such a powerful song and it is the same with him. So a few days go I stopped in to work on my Mercury (he owns the garage I keep it in) and visited with him for a while. As I was getting ready to leave he stopped me and ran off and when he returned he gave me a copy of a book entitled Strange Fruit The Biography of a song by David Margolick printed in 2001. I can't wait to start it.

Here it is put to music,aval. on iTunes by Sarah Jarosz on her "Follow Me Down alb.

Hi everybody that's not here.

I love Edger Allen Poe. Growing up in Philly I was able to visit the flat where he lived for a while and where his wife died (or so I was told). He wrote a poem I've always loved. It's a bit dark like everything else associated with Poe but I love it anyway. It was put to music that was beautyfully haunting. I'll see if I can find it on my iPod and get back to you.

FOR THE LOVE OF ANNABEL LEE

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me
Yes! that was the reason
(as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we
Of many far wiser than we
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In the sepulcher there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Muriel and I are excited by the weather...it's almost CRUSEN TIME! YAAAAAA

Love that guy!

Hi all sitting with Candice and now I'm live!!!!!

 I have a book recommendation for the interested.

The Myth of Persecution by Candida Moss. How early Christians invented a story of martyrdom.

Picture in your head for a moment, the memories of your life. Now combine it with what you know about human history and estimate the vast number of things you do not not or could not be aware of here on earth.

Imagine the lives of every person. The stories of each of them combined as a whole through the void of space and time.

With this in mind, stop to comprehend the innumerable places among the billions of galaxies in the universe where this could be multiplied. Every planet a possibility for a unique history of its own. 

Look out and grasp that there is so much history rich and diverse in which our story is but a footnote. Imagine the stories...the countless stories of unimaginable numbers of sentient beings that have lived and died who may have never even considered the immensity of the stage upon which they played.

Now think of your religion. Think of all the religions on this planet that we know of and factor in the ones that we don't. Now consider the unimaginable amount of religions in the universe and tell me that yours is the one that got it right.

And you call atheists arrogant? We ain't got shit on you.

-Tim H.

 Nice to see you here.

Help you're self to some posta

Cliff

Made It!

It seems that I finally made it to the site.  I enjoyed our gathering last evening and look forward to more times together.  The future will bring challenging things from me.  Theologian.

Though I would share one of my favorite poems with you by Carel Sandberg.

TO A CONTEMPORARY BUNKSHOOTER

You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
     Jesus.
     Where do you get that stuff?
     What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
     bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
     everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
     he never made any fake passes and everything
     he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
     people hope.
 

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
     and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
     over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
     going to hell straight off and you know all about it.
 

I've read Jesus' words. I know what he said. You don't
     throw any scare into me. I've got your number. I
     know how much you know about Jesus.
He never came near clean people or dirty people but
     they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
     crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
     hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
     of the running.
 

I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
     the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
     up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
     now lined up with you paying your way.

This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
     good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
     from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
     wherever he passed along.
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
     blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
     about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
     lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
     emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
     crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
     Jesus--I put it to you again: Where do you get that
     stuff; what do you know about Jesus?
 

Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
     a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
     Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
     nutty head. If it wasn't for the way you scare the
     women and kids I'd feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
     he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
I like a man that's got nerve and can pull off a great
     original performance, but you--you're only a bug-
     house peddler of second-hand gospel--you're only
     shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this
     Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
     up all right with them by giving them mansions in
     the skies after they're dead and the worms have
     eaten 'em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
     is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
     having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
     age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
     and he'll be all right.
You tell poor people they don't need any more money
     on pay day and even if it's fierce to be out of a job,
     Jesus'll fix that up all right, all right--all they gotta
     do is take Jesus the way you say.
I'm telling you Jesus wouldn't stand for the stuff you're
     handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
     and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
     murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
     wouldn't play their game. He didn't sit in with
     the big thieves.

I don't want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
I won't take my religion from any man who never works
     except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
     except the face of the woman on the American
     silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you're
     pouring out the blood of your life.

I've been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
     where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
     straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
     the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
     drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
     in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

 As a child I HATED being made to go to Sunday School because I was always so full of questions about what I was being taught. My teachers would get so exasperated with me, my mother would scold me, my grand mother would cluck her tung and shake her head. Finely it happened, the worst of the worst, they asked my mother to please not send me to Sunday school again. Oh the HORROR, the embarrassment, getting thrown out of Sunday School of all places. My grand mother was scandalized and my mother was so disappointed in me, her only son. As for me, I was OVERJOYED until I had to go to adult church. It was a drag with a capital D. Finely I found my voice one day and said ENOUGH, I'm not going. I was left alone to go ride my bike while everyone else was in church.
 One Sunday I heard this great music coming from down this street I was riding by and so I followed the sound. It was The First Baptist Church of Germantown only they weren't Germans in there singing they where mostly black people. I sat under the window and rocked out. It was great stuff, a killer organ and a rock instruments and man was it loud. So every Sunday for a couple of months I went to sit under a window and listen.
 Then one Sunday as I sat there everything got very quiet. I looked up at the open window only to discover these black faces looking at me and smiling. Then I heard a man to my left clear his throat. It was the preacher standing there checking out this white boy under his window. Only one thought ran through my head "Oh SHIT" but the preacher smiled and put out his hand and said "why don't you come join us and so I did. Each sunday I would go and clap and dance and sing with them and I learned a very important difference between white religion and black religion and it had nothing to do with my believing or not, white folks morn while black folks celebrate. White folks are downers a=but black folks know how to enjoy their Sunday's.

Playing with my gene's

 In 2012 I had a gene study done that covered my general migration patterns out of Africa just to see how it might fit with my family's lore. We believed that the Tittermary side (mothers genes) where Irish and English and we know that my fathers (Rebmenn) side reaches back to the 1400's in the Black Forest area of Germany (yes, I'm a recovering German) and in fact was embroiled in the whole ugly Marten Luther, 95 feces thing. We know for sure because a relative began the genealogical research years ago and I eventually inherited it and, thanks to Ancestery.com (no plug intended), was able to tie a lot of loose ends together and take it farther.
 What the gene study told me was that yes, we where related to Africans (OMG Who knew) and we migrated up into the steps of Russia and that branch ended up in the British Isles while a second branch made a direct left into what later became Germany. I call this my Deep Gene Field study (DGF). So far so good.

 I just recently received the results of what I term my Shallow Gene Field study (SGF) which is a study of my genetic ethnicity. The results where even more interesting. Seems I'm 36% Scandinavian, 28% Eastern European, 28% Central European and 8% Uncertain. Seems to be a fascinating level of agreement but I was a little surprised by the 36% Scandinavian, how the hell am I to process THAT?

I got my DGF test through Genebase.com and my SGF study done through ancestery.com. I can't vouch for either one of these studies but they do seem to be consistent with my families hand-me-down stories.

 As for the 8% Uncertain? Hell, that's my best part!

Cliff

Hawking on the existence of God...a true skeptic!

Skating Grandpa....

Live, Love, Laugh!!!!

"The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists"

I have a book recommendation in the personality disorder category. 

We often talk in our classes about how people can have distorted perceptions of reality, and especially how the human brain works (or fails to work).  It is important for us to understand personality disorders as perhaps not a "flawed" normal human brain, but as a completely different category or type of human brain with an impaired ability to feel empathy.  This lack of empathy creates all sorts of problems for the rest of us who do experience empathy--and because we are constituted in an essentially different way--can be tricked and harmed by folks with personality disorders. 

 

Personality disorders are not mental illness.  They represent behaviors that deviate from expected societal norms and include such types as sociopathy/psychopathy, borderline personality disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.  I am currently interested in learning about narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists, by Eleanor Payson, describes the various characteristics and behaviors of the NPD in the context of fairy tales.  One of my favorites is her description of the typcal NPD mother using the Rapunzel story.  The NPD is distinguished from other personality types mostly by a single characteristic:  "It's all about me."  The NPD mother sees her children as an extension of herself and grooms her children (or a select child or children) to be just like her and/or to satisfy her goals and needs that she then experiences vicariously as though they were her own.   Another NPD characteristic, and the feature perhaps at the bottom of all the other issues, is a serious lack of self esteem, so that if the child fails to fulfill the NPD mother's expectations, she becomes enraged and destructive, and may even alienate herself from the child.  A typical pattern is complete absorption in the Other followed by complete rejection and/or rage.  

A "stage door mother" is often an NPD mother.  She needs the child to succeed as a virtuoso violinist not because it is in the best interest of the child, but because she is so empty inside that this is the only way she can feel whole.  She perceives the child as an extension of herself.  But if the child fails at the mother's goals and thereby does not satisfy her need to be filled up, then she may abandon the child emotionally.  The child is no longer of any use to her.  And the NPD mother can seriously damage her child.  Worst case scenario:  she succeeds, and produces a mirror image of herself--another narcissist.  

The witch in the Rapunzel story tricks the real parents into giving her their child.  She then locks Rapunzel away in a tower, and spends every night "grooming" the little girl by combing her long golden hair.  But we all know this finally backfires when Rapunzel breaks free of the witch's bonds.  The moral of this story seems to be that one can get free of the NPD mother and individuate.  One can become whole again.

This is a fascinating book.  Read it from the beginning so you don't miss the part that keeps you from believing you're the NPD yourself--a very enlightening and reassuring section of the book.  I am reading it on my Kindle.