Category: Fun With Mercury Retrograde –

Thursday, Searching for images of Ganesh —

Thursday, September 22, 2016 — 19˚C / 66˚F with bright sunshine @ 12:42 pm in Atlantic Canada —

Ganesh - with a black background
A friend wanted an image of Ganesh – Apparently September 5th was a special day dedicated to Ganesh in India, There were many images that could have fit the bill. I liked quite a few, including this one.

I am hesitant to call Ganesh a ‘god’. Cultural differences are too easy to misunderstand. My take on a ‘Western view’ of Ganesh would be that He is regarded the way Roman Catholics regard Saints. They ask Ganesh for help overcoming obstacles, removing obstacles from their lives, blessing them with ‘good luck’.

"Happy Ganesh Chaturthi'
I should have looked this up, but it looks like ‘Ganesh Chaturthi’ is a Holiday / Celebration Day dedicated to Ganesh.

My friend, Jim W., told me a story related to Ganesh. While he was working part time as a cleaner when he first became a permanent resident in Canada and could legally find work- one of the places he worked was an old textile mill that was in the process of being converted into a ‘Corporate Centre’ / Office Building. The building had some creepy areas, other people who were there at night reported seeing ghosts, experienced being touched and/or pinched when nobody else was in the building.

Jim began chanting “Shri Ram” – a chant he picked up from a recording of music popular with Sufis – which was attributed to Mahatma Gandhi- He said he could feel his own voice vibrating in his chest and then all around him (after several minutes) in an unusually relaxing manner and then received a ‘spontaeneous visualization’ in which Ganesh was dancing, walking along beside him as he dusted, mopped and wet-mopped the floors. A few minutes later his visualization had expanded to include a whole traveling group of Hindu Indian musicians, playing drums and other instruments as they walked along with Ganesh and Jim, clearing the creepy vibrations away with happy smiling feelings and light.

He said he’d never thought of Ganesh as a Dancer- but apparently most Hindu Indians know Ganesh as quite the accomplished dancer.

🙂

— H.J. d’A —

Yesterday Was Rasputin’s Birthday –

Committee Breakfast May 11th,2016
Photo of deer munching on oats in Atlantic Canada at 7:07 am this morning.

Tuesday, May 11th, 2016 — 6˚C / 42˚F & very bright and sunny @ 7:56 am in Atlantic Canada & Yesterday was Rasputin’s Birthday { & by the way, he was neither ‘mad’ nor a monk. } — {{ P.S. My friend Jim W. told me May 10th was also Swami Yukteswar’s Birthday and his (Jim’s) late Uncle Bruce’s – and three young women who were like 7 years old when Jim was helping his Cousin Glenn get Glenn’s daughter, Sarah, to school in the mornings – and meeting her at the bus when she came home after school, when Glenn’s job dictated that he had to be in work at 6 am and the school bus picked the grammar school kids up at something like 8:30 am – 3 young girls in Sarah’s circle of friends plus the mother of another one of Sarah’s friends — all celebrated the same birthday. May 10th. }}

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Must Read? :

Heat & Light book cover
Cover of the Novel “Heat & Light” by Jennifer Haigh

“Heat & Light” by Jennifer Haigh

Heat & Light is a novel about the lives of Pennsylvanians – Farmers and Rural land owners – struggling to make ends meet and being seduced by oil and gas companies’ fast talking salesmen, convinced to opt-in to contracts with Frackers whose promises of lots of ‘free money’ for allowing the Gas Companies to Frack their property – poisons their water, ruins their property values, ruins the landscape around them and leaves them in much worse economic condition than they were when they were merely desperate.

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CBC News Links:

The top headline in each article is linked to the original article on the CBC.ca/news/ site.

Liberals hope to move forward with electoral reform committee —

Proposed motion suggests committee to report on alternatives to first-past-the-post system by Dec. 1

— While it looks to a lot of us that political slight-of-hand is alive and well in Canadian politics – Justin Trudeau – who’s been the Prime Minister up here for a little more than 6 months – appears to be keeping a campaign promise to come up with an alternative to the current ‘First Past The Post’ electorial system — by having a committee investigate the feasibility of weighted voting and other possibilities to make Canadian elections a bit more democratic and have the elected officials in the Federal Parliament reflect the over all vote and not just the winners from each ‘riding’.

— For instance: If – in a hypothetical Federal Election: the Liberal party received 35% of the vote, the New Democrats received 25%, the Conservatives received 22%, The Parti Quebecois received 10%, the Green party received 6%, and several smaller parties received the remaining 2% – Then – Sitting members of Parliament should more closely resemble those percentages. — Where the current ‘first past the post’ system might have populated the Parliament with something more like 52% Liberal, 20% Conservative, 18% NDP, 9% PQ, & 1% Green (depending on where the votes were cast and what the local races looked like). { I intentionally had one party get fewer votes than another while winning more seats than that party did in the above fictional results from a fictional election. }

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Maple Match links Canadians looking for love with single Americans fleeing Trump —

Fear of a Trump presidency has spawned a dating site that hooks up Yankees and Canucks
ad
ad for “Maple Match”

“Maple Match” is a dating service advertizing that they can find Canadian mates for people who might want to escape from a nightmarish Trump Presidency.

— Earlier news items up here – reports from a couple months back – indicated that officials ( or residents? or somebody — ) in several provinces announced that they would be happy to welcome refugees from the U.S. into their communittees if they wanted to escape from the USA if and when DJ Trump became their President.

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Gallant says government can’t afford more money for student aid

New $25M package only half of what’s been cut from student programs

university-classroom-students— New Brunswick’s (Liberal) Premier Brian Gallant announced a new programme to give low income New Brunswick students free tuition at New Brunswick Universities. It was later revealed that this program would benefit about 7,100 students while it took away current tax rebates from between 35,000 to 40,000 students. The new program would reportedly cost $25 Million while cutting the earlier program would save more than $50 Million. -I’m not sure those dollar figures would reflect yearly costs – but that’s my best guess here.

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Aboriginal

— Zondra ‘Pricelys’ Roy, who also goes by Zoey, is an activist, spoken word poet, hip hop artist and social entrepreneur. She will be presenting at The Walrus Talks The Indigenous City in Winnipeg, May 11, 2016.

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Other News Items:

Winnipeg Free Press:

Mounties say they are not conducting mass seizure of firearms in Fort McMurray

FORT MCMURRAY, Alta. – RCMP have seized some guns following the fire in Fort McMurray, but won’t be a conducting a mass seizure of firearms like they did after the flood in southern Alberta.

Sgt. John Spaans said Tuesday that officers have taken one or two guns found in public places, but are not going into homes looking for more.

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& Internet outages have been reported in parts of Atlantic Canada. — Luckily, that hasn’t effected me (yet?)

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—jda—

Ack ~ Things Are Crazier Than Usual

Wednesday, May 04, 2016 – Kent State Massacre Anniversary Day — // +9˚C / +48˚F @ 7:47 pm on a cool and mostly clear Day / Evening in Atlantic Canada —

Colourful Cloud Formation
Somebody thought they saw the 4 Horsemen in this photo? All I see is a nice, inspiring sunrise or sunset.
Michener Quote
Friends of mine were hitch-hiking in the Boston area — I think that was in the 1970’s — They were picked up by a woman who turned out to be an editor ( I think she was an editor ) working with James A Michener. He was having some health problems back then, but I thought that was an interesting bit of extraordinarily good luck.
Brilliant Sunrise somewhere in a northern clime.
This was a March retweet from a friend, but it still is cool / interesting —

— It’s been too long since I checked in on Twitter and with my blogging friends – & today there was a lot of stuff about Bernie Sanders.

Tweet: Unexpected Bernie win in Indiana
I like the pixelated old school image of Bernie on the left. & Yes, an unexpected win is nice to read about.
Don't worry - Charlie Brown Cartoon.
& It’s nice to see Charlie Brown is still handing out good advice.
Material Objects Don't Love You.
I suppose the closest to making you feel loved that any material object can get is if it is wrapped in warm memories of the person who gave it to you — Ya think?
Hillary Vx Independent Voters.
Hillary Clinton isn’t doing so well when it comes to winning the approval of independent, free thinking voters.
Best Teachers Quote
The best teachers encourage you to think for yourself –

— Hopefully more later —

—jda—

“Well – Duh! -“

Welcome (Back?) To the Age of Superficiality

Duhhhh
– “You can’t call this ‘Education’-“
Duh!
– Wiki Leaks: “How to Surrender All Your Rights and Priveleges: – Begins when you believe everything your government tells you.”

— Maybe we never left the Age of Superficiality. Maybe it’s always been with us. But was it always so glamorized? Never mind ‘Glamorized’ – it suddenly seems canonized.

— Maybe I didn’t pay attention to a lot of things in the last few years. Maybe I dismissed mindless ‘entertainment’ and ‘infotainment’ as if was totally insignificant. But wait – Somebody is paying attention to this stuff. There are way too many programs celebrating celebrity. Reality TV shows look too much like they were designed to convince us that housewives in every city in this world, especially housewives who believe they are rich and powerful – are complete idiots – and not just idiots, but mean spiteful egotistical bitches who believe they should be able to kill and eat their neighbours as long as some good conservative party member makes a profit in terms of votes for their candidates – or better yet, gold and silver in their untraceable emergency escape fund.

— Remember the song “Dirty Laundry” bu Don Henley? I thought it was brilliant. I thought I could laugh about dumbed down television news and walk away from that and never be bothered by its mindlessness again.

— But now the ‘Bubble headed bleached blondes’ are everywhere – and they’re not necessarily blonde any more – sometimes they are wearing grey hair like badges as they try to get you to spend your hard earned money to buy more life insurance (that the insurance companies welcome as ‘free money’ – maximum input with minimum output for them). – Buy more life insurance than you’d ever need so you can die with a smile on your face, safe in the illusion that your grandchildren will have hundreds of thousands of dollars to deposit as a down-payment toward a multi-million dollar education as the universities of this world become more and more greedy and less and less effective? Remember when we thought that a university education would teach us how to think effectively? Did they ever teach us how to see through shuck?

— Maybe I was able to tolerate the superficiality of many things because I thought they had no impact on the vast majority of the human race. Maybe I believed that average humans were much more intelligent and much more wise than the ‘pundits’ of Madison Avenue gave anybody credit for being. Was I wrong?

— And why, all of a sudden, with the beginning of this New Year – has it become so painful for me to sit in front of a television monitor and see smiling faces of attractive people as they try to appear completely guile-less while they attempt to deceive anybody stupid enough to believe they might be telling the truth as they read their news or sell the garbage we never wanted and never believed we needed until some hyper-attractive young member of the opposite sex smiled at us with his or her eyes dilating at the prospect of engaging in possible sexual fulfillment with the proud owner of whatever it is that they’re trying to sell you at the moment?

— Or am I completely insane to believe that, if for instance, you want to do something for the good of humanity, like feeding starving children in third world countries – or smuggling innocent followers of non-sanctioned religions out from under the military dictatorships in countries where the ‘leadership’ believes they have every right to vivisect anyone who doesn’t follow their proclamations to the letter and then sell their precious bodily organs to the highest bidder –– you should do that anonymously – and you should do it because you know that it pleases God and strengthens everything that makes life on this planet worth living? The fact that you would be doing something selfless and good for the benefit of all life on this planet is one thing. Handing somebody a huge cheque on television, more concerned about how you look while you’re doing it and ‘who you are wearing’ at the time the cameras are rolling is not what charity is all about. Is it?

— And like I hinted at a couple paragraphs up. Why has knowing that this kind of activity is going on become so much more painful in the last two weeks? Have I given up believing in the sanctity and sovereignty of each and every human being on planet Earth?

— Or have I just watched too many television commercials lately and taken them much too seriously?

 – jda –

Yes, Mercury Certainly Is Retrograde –

Sunday, January 10th, 2016 -( I began this @ 8:58 am in Atlantic Canada — where it still seemed to be -4˚C / +25˚F — but now grey and damp and chilly out there beyond my windows )-

fupped up invitations
— “Interesting -: Don’t-cha think?

— I sent invitations to two blogging buddies. The wrong people got those invitations.

— At Least — That’s the way it looks now.

John Lennon Peace Tower
This is a photo of the “Peace Tower” — Yoko Ono’s tribute to John Lennon. Long may it shine.

— You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to upload the Peace Tower photo above. Pages bled into one another. The buttons went invisible. I managed to click where I thought the invisible “Insert into Blog” button was and everything cleared up – but then I went to type this here paragraph in and blew up firefox. Ka boom. It is now 9:23 am.

— And, like I said above, Mercury sure as bleep IS Retrograde. But I now have two more authors/contributors that I know and trust signed in and ready to rock and roll.

— So things are not all bad –, even if the weird set  backs and browser crashes have kept me trying to get this done for, duh? two hours? it is now about eleven minutes after eleven am. okay with you if I lean back and scream?

Do not believe they have an improved posting scheme.
Just don’t even think about believing the above message – The part that says, “Switch to the improved posting experience.” ??? That will in no way contribute to any kind of happy experience,

— jda —

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