When things breakdown

Medical Mysteries
Tree Man from Indonesia makes us appreciate our functional immune system.
TMAU

Fair Day

Can a person who judges have mercy?

In a crystal ball

I should have written this long time ago, when it happened.
Have you ever felt like you are in a crystal ball?
A month ago, I went stargazing with friends. Four peaks ecen though very close to the freeway was far enough from th Phoenix city lights that only one side of the view had a hint of civilization. If you turn your back on the city, above and around you is a multitude of stars. There is the Milky Way. As shooting stars went, they became as common as dragonflies near a water source. We waited for the Orion to appear, not in the magical - whole of it at once, but in his imperfect, incomplete form with parts of his body showing up with patience on our part like a baby making its way from beneath the mountains. During my undergrad, I used the university telescope and the night I saw the ring around Saturn, I went home like Alice who is just back from her rabbit hole excursion. That was a time when I thought reading Antony and Cleopatra (keeping my engineering books aside during a college festival) would immerse me in their world and I will still be safe, back in time when my professors and the student world is ready to go over the lessons. The easiest to remember was Cassioepia. Easiest to spot too. When I looked at Pleides, the detail even through my binoculars got it alive for me. When I was showm Andromeda, the concept of light years picked from Carl Sagan's novel Contact still seems like a fairy tale. When I was told that it will take over a year to follow some points and see a good chunk of it, I started relating it to birdwatching. Seasons. I once had a very beautiful dream where I saw all the zodiac signs and clearly in their meant shapes.
I recall 'Two on a Tower' by Thomas Hardy, imagining as the person who looks to the sky.

Persona

Is persona free from fate?

Poem

When I read A Blessing, a poem by James Wright in poems about horses, I leapt at the last sentence. I recognise this reaction. The same one when I read it last time.

Recently Billy Collins against expectation did not consider rap as poetry. A friend considers unrhyming poetry as rap.

I like poems. I like songs. I like music. I like lyric.

One is not other.

What is Poetry? A posy that you want to add to your basket. A gadget that you know of it from its effect but not what it is. A Swiss army knife.

Throw back

Yesterday afternoon
I went on a walk
AC inside was too cool
Next to the bushes
breathing in
I was reminded of
white milk icecream
that we had on sticks
sold in blue cart on wheels
by a hawker
Was it the squeezing of self
to take in the melted juices?

Back inside I had momentary
cold and sneeze from the
pollen/milk icecream.

Proximate nature

Crow planet
If you tell me that you havent seen a young crow, I will believe you. But the author wont. She says " .. it is unlikely to be true... The problem is that we equate youngness with smallness, a mistake when it comes to most birds". Its through such breaking of our uninformed notions about crows, that the author makes us aware of the ubiquitous bird, its nesting behavior, its smartness.
Quoting Louis Pasteur that 'chance favors the prepared mind' she urges us to know more about our home ecosystems, get out walking and do the bird watching right outside our house instead of bringing our scopes out after driving hours to the other place called wilderness.
Bat box
Dec 22,2009

Aftermath

What happens to the passion
of artists like Jackson Pollock
when they die?

Next stop Getty center

By 1830s Victor Hugo was all Nostradamus about architecture being replaced by the products of printing press. But in 1420's, Cyriacus believed that ancient monuments were more crucial than texts. On travels as an accountant, Cyriacus was very fascinated by the ancient monuments in Venice, Alexandria, Constantinople. He set about travelling around and documenting all the sites of the ancient world. He turned the focus of the people from texts to the physical monuments.
To wake the dead

Dec 27,2009

When are you done appreciating art

When you cam move onto the next
when you are hungry or angry
when you are tailgated

Sociology

Global Sociology, Introducing Five Contemporary societies begins with Japan. Sadly, my book has only two societies, Japan and Egypt.
Reading about Japanese children blocks being big and involving teamwork, I want to knwo mroe about other societies.
Reading of deviant behavior, I want to know more about what holds the 'culture' in place. If there is a mechanism for preservation or flexibility is a part of it. Japan, small still has half of US population. In the beginning the author talk of its culture being open to influences, yet to know how it assimilates the deviances.

Morning tidings

Mocking bird just woke up at 5.50

An hour later, clouds rolled out like fish scales end with a thick edge.

Sky Harbor's heavy purse

As I got off the elevator at baggage claim, I couldnt help noticing the sparkles on the floor and the newness of a building about to be occupied while there were parts of the walls high above still wrapped in white plastic. Paul Goldberger, in Situation Terminal calling airports a logistical nightmare reasons that the last thing the cash-starved airlines and airport authorities want to think about is aesthetic appeal.

Wake up

The morning sunlight
turns eucalyptus
and every other tree
around into
a flowering acacia

A far neighbor has
a rooster

Starvation

I want to understand what does it mean to have people dying of starvation. 'Aid' if it does not work without production. Reading of The Great Starvation Experiment, I see why someone has to volunteer for this exam. A person in malnutrition state might seem like an ideal candidate for the study. But for moral reason, a starving person will have to be restored to health.