To thine own self be true

be an essential service and activity instead of universities and post-secondary education. Yup, keep the masses dumb while they’re being entertained by more dead horses. Reminiscent of Klein’s financial support of horse-racing at the expense of education.

Never know what you’ll find.

Bird’s nest once hidden in raspberry bush last year.

south of the border. The U.S. has a lo-n-g way to go to get back to the ’60s and ’70s progress it initially made on civil rights then. It remains a long walk to true equality and freedom for non-Caucasians in America.

Common sense and facts say this crime spree was racially hate-motivated. No-brainer despite all the folks south of the border in denial or trying to ‘figure it out.’

How you spell ‘Relief’ in 2021.

………………………………….

Nice to be walking the neighborhood on dry streets and sidewalks again.

Nice to be cycling outdoors again, too. First ride yesterday.

Light at the end of the tunnel. Turned on outdoor taps to fill water can for birdbaths. Duly noted by my feathered friends and squirrels. Time to take down backyard illuminated winter deer couple.

Yeah, spring, for sure, multiply so.

with the purchase of two classic books: an 1869 illustrated “Locksley Hall” by Tennyson and a Folio version of Browning’s Dramatic Monologues with “My Last Duchess”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” and others.

These were poems that introduced me to human psychology and memorable characters who revealed their whole lives in poems. Poems which gave me a larger, deeper perspective–often with ironic humor–about human nature, human motives, human psychology, and major conflicts in life.

In the case of Tennyson’s long rhyming couplet poem–an olde favorite, now considered sexist and racist–one encounters a powerful narrative about youthful dreams, romantic love, betrayal, escapism, science and technology, and an optimistic view of the world coupled with personal life-experience pessimism.

In the illustration above, the artist W.J. Hennessy captures the following lines:

“Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”

When I read those lines and the ones that followed,

“When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see:/Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.–”

those sentiments deeply struck home in 1967, for a 17-year-old boy about to embark on a long literary journey and future voyages of the imagination.

Yeah, starting out, inspired by Shakespeare, Keats, Frost, Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth. Marked for education, career, and life overall at/by 17.

The Road Taken: Hooked by poetry, literature, and books at 17.

“Intergenerational emotional magic”.

Spontaneous subliminal creativity.

Have to remember to record on these on the fly in the night…

Jennifer Doudna, Nobel-Prize co-winner, co-discoverer of Crispr gene-editing technique; the idea that molecules can be coded or reprogrammed and told what to do. Her work on RNA has huge implications for our biological future.

Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker is about her life and the biotech revolution that she’s ushered in.

But with biotech will come bioethics, again. Anyone remember Aldous Huxley’s prophetic Brave New World? Gene editing and inheritable edits can have their negative consequences too, if not monitored. Huxley shows us a future, passive, collective world sans compassion, empathy, beauty, the Arts, spirituality, and greatness.

Wilson Bryan Key’s popular book about how advertising embeds seductive images in tv commercials. Something being revived by Pepsi’s latest commercial with faces and the like in the ice cubes. Vintage manipulation, indeed. Advertisers denied it was happening back then; will they now?

Jason Kenney’s $82 thou/day War Room going after a popular Netflix Sasquatch cartoon movie. Which is the bigger, more inane cartoon? The Sasquatch one or Jason Kenney and his War Room?