After enjoying the feats of Olympic proportions in and around Beijing, after watching the ripple effect of a little fist fight between Russia and Georgia, and after giving my wandering eyes a moment to look over the financial futures, I decided to give my investment portfolio a vacation down in Brazil to see what's heating up south of the equator.
A lot, it turns out. For instance, it doesn't take a science whiz to figure out that lifting the veil on the mining and construction business reveals COMPANHIA VALE DO RIO DOCE (RIO), a mining company scratching around in the dirt at the moment, is ready to raise a little ore for those looking to diversify. Even better, Vale counterbalances my high tech and domestic acquisitions. I missed Vale's recent stock price peak, but again I'm not always looking for a quick buck. I want to strengthen my holdings for the future. Besides, who wouldn't enjoy a train trip to the Amazon basin and who better to supply the track then the local miner/engineer?
Some of you will tell me that the Amazon forest, a big carbon dioxide sink, continues to diminish in size thanks to the expansion plans of energy and mining companies like Vale, thus putting our families' futures at risk due to uncertain environmental impacts. I agree that the future is uncertain, risk is inevitable and human progress means more roads, housing estates and industrial parks will sprout up in so-called pristine or virgin wilderness. I'm an optimist and believe our destiny is to completely transform the planet, including the creation of no-development zones called national parks. In the process, some species will go extinct through human actions. However, keep in mind that ultimately all species on this planet will go extinct.
So, for all the whale and spotted owl preservers out there, I commend you for showing concern for some species not essential to survival of the human species. I hope you'd pay more attention to the contribution of bacteria to the human food chain, especially ones that feed our sources of protein like fish or soybean. The planet we live on constantly changes and if we really care about ourselves, we'll provide a living space for the generations to come by paving roads, plowing fields, digging mines and building schools up to the fence lines surrounding national parks built to protect buffer zones like forests, coral reefs, arctic tundra, open prairie and the headwaters of major rivers and creeks, which in turn create the feeding beds for bacteria.
In other words, chaining yourself to trees or crashing into whaling vessels does not solve world hunger. Far better to invest in or work for companies where you can make a direct impact on their effects. I feel completely comfortable investing in Vale knowing that their sustainability efforts mesh with my own.
28 August 2008
18 August 2008
Windmills and windfalls
I fight, or at least if fighting's too strong an action, struggle to get inspiration from my Muse to continue quality writing on my novel. My novel sits in an incomplete, incompetent state. Forthwith, I survey the state of the world economy, instead, and ponder placing a worthy investment in the information traders residing in the land of the Upanishads. Infosys, anyone? How 'bout an amateur like me investing in Wipro, also? After all, an increase in one's wealth often turns the head of an inattentive Muse.
15 August 2008
A Remembrance of Things Past
After watching the movie, "Seed," today, I thought I'd repeat a journal entry about the day my brother in-law died two years ago that led me to seek the meaning of personal freedom...
3 July 2006. The fact that I’m sitting here is a positive thing. My command of the English language, slightly better than average on the best of days, is less than that today. Although my wife’s brother was not a close friend, we still shared the desire to do well, to give our families what they needed to survive into the future. Unfortunately, my brother in-law is no longer here, no longer living, that is. He died on the 28th of June at 2:14 p.m., after what appeared to be cardiac arrest. Blood clots in his lungs that had traveled from other parts of his body prevented him from being able to pump enough oxygen-carrying blood through him. When I saw him Tuesday night, he was taking very shallow breaths. His wife, Pat, thought he was doing better on Wednesday morning, having been able to sit up. Then sometime after lunch he started coughing, couldn’t catch his breath, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. Pat screamed for a nurse. The staff came in and revived him. They rushed him from the regular hospital room to CCU. On the way, Allan squeezed Pat’s arm and told her he was okay.
Pat called Janeil at some point during this time, probably after Allan was placed in CCU. According to my cell phone log, Janeil called me at 13:37. I was just finishing up a late lunch at a Sonic drive-in. She told me that Allan had been placed in CCU, that Pat was very upset, and Janeil was on her way to the hospital. I asked if I should join her and she told she’d let me know if I needed to come.
At 14:24, Janeil called me to tell me that Allan hadn’t made it. I told her I was on my way to the hospital. She asked me to call David Hale, Mom Berry’s minister in Rogersville, to get his assistance in telling Mrs. Berry about the death of her son. I finished up a couple of tasks at work that would allow me to take the rest of the week off. I then tried calling Dr. Hale’s house and got the answering machine. On the way to the hospital, I called the Rogersville Presbyterian Church office and reached Mrs. Hale (Sarah), telling her that Allan had died and that we wanted Dr. Hale’s assistance to help. I gave Sarah my cell phone number and asked him to call me back after he’d finished a consultation with someone in his office.
I can think of a lot of little details right now, and as usual, do not feel like writing them down, knowing that I’ll forget them in the future; despite their insignificance (like driving with one hand, changing gears with the other that was holding a cell phone and hoping I didn't miss what the caller was saying as I changed gears, especially while driving through the Governor's Drive/Memorial Parkway underpass; telling Sarah that my cell phone battery was running out), they would contribute to my remembrance and full understanding of the day’s events. The only important thing that matters is that Allan died. All else truly pales in comparison.
At the hospital, I wasn't sure where to find my wife -- luckily, Janeil was in the lobby talking with a couple of women from Pat’s church. We went back up to the “Consultation Room” where Pat and her son (my nephew) Jonathan were. I still recall lots of WBC (Whitesburg Baptist Church) folks hanging around, all of them part of Pat’s church family, but giving myself a feeling of being crowded in. Neither Janeil nor I are used to being around a lot of people, especially strangers, when we need time to soak in the emotions of loss.
I wasn’t at the hospital when Pat, Jonathan and Janeil got the news of Allan’s death so I did not see their first reactions. So what I remember most is when my niece, Jana, came to the hospital, looked at her mother asking, “What’s the matter?” and then bursting out loud, crying, "No!," when she found out about her father’s death. Since I’m writing this for myself, I can selfishly tell myself that I didn’t feel like I deserved to be in the room with them. They are such a loving family and I am such a cynical, sarcastic clownish guy, I realized just how little a comforting person I am. I couldn’t look any of them in the eye during that time. I was frozen in place, looking down at a piece of paper with Dr. Hale’s and Ben Cunningham’s (a Rogersville friend of the family) home phone numbers.
“Brother Dick” and “Brother Jimmy” (senior ministers at WBC) came into the room at some point to comfort them and have prayers. So did other folks, Jerry Spain, a close friend of Pat, being the one I remember the most.
The whole afternoon at the hospital was beyond surreal. In fact, I don’t even know what surreal means anymore. I’m sure that it includes the adjective “unfair”. Eventually, we went back up to the CCU room where Allan’s body still lay dead in bed. His 51-year old face was amazingly smooth, devoid of wrinkles. His jaw lay askew, off to one side. He had a several-day old beard. Just as I had noticed the day before when he was alive, he had much less hair on his head than I had seen a few months before (I am more aware of men losing hair, now that it has been shown that hair loss is attributable to heart and blood circulation problems). I thought about touching him but decided I didn’t deserve to.
Later, after Pat had signed release forms (including an organ donor form), I stood in the hallway with the nurse while the rest of the family – Janeil, Pat, Jonathan and Jana – saw Allan’s body in the room one more time. The nurse explained to me that even though Pat had signed an organ donor form, about the only thing they could take were the bones and maybe some ligaments or tendons.
I sit here writing about the day Allan died when I had hoped to be able to sit down and write about the day I spent in Munich with Ann and Jonas – a wonderful memory of walking through the streets the day of the 2006 World Cup match between Germany and Sweden. Alas, death has overshadowed that warm, summer day in Bavaria. I’ll always have dim memories of Swedish wood creatures, American coffee shops (Starbucks and San Francisco Coffee Company), Johannes berries, funny costumes, a phone conversation between Ann and my father in broken German, chasing down a couple of bicyclists in the English Garden in an attempt to return a dropped overshirt, watching surfers in the middle of the city, looking out over the city from the towers of the Frauerenkirche (sp?) by myself while waiting for Ann and Jonas (with an elderly lady telling me her memories of the city, all in German, with me only being able to say “Ja, ja”, and wishing I could say something more comforting), eating ice cream next to polizei cyclists, then cracking a joke in bad taste, seeing the look of alarm/disgust on Ann’s face, sensing something wrong and then hours later having a conversation at the end of the day in the courtyard outside a San Fran ‘Offee House where Ann laid it on the line about integrity, flirting, sex and everything else that that dirty joke seemed to embody (certainly including some of my writing, no doubt).
The rest of this week has been a blur, more so for Pat I’m sure. We spent time on Thursday and early Friday planning for the funeral, visiting Maple Hill Cemetery to pick out plots, going to the funeral home to pick out a coffin and plan the memorial service, visiting Dr. Jackson (Brother Jimmy) at WBC to plan the funeral service and have a “heart to heart” talk about the days/weeks/months ahead. Friday evening, family gathered at the Laughlin Funeral Home to receive friends and family (including Janeil and my favorite couple from Covenant Presbyterian Church, Leon and Flora Trotter; some of Janeil’s coworkers; my former employee, Donald Gaither and his wife Jenny; others who I should remember but can’t). Saturday was the funeral service at WBC and subsequent burial at the cemetery. Saturday night, Janeil and I took my parents and sister on a tour of Big Cove and then had a late snack at Nikko Restaurant – Robert and Anna were such gracious hosts to spend time with us, feeding the fish in the atrium.
Yesterday, Janeil and I sat with her mother at Pat’s house while Pat and the kids went to church. We also visited with Pat’s family. Last night, Janeil and I went to see the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada”. Today, Janeil has been resting in bed watching TV while I have been doing very little else. Watched the movie, “Before Sunset”, which triggered this writing session out in the warm sunroom with the cats sleeping in the sofa across the room from me, all of us listening to the gurgle of the waterfall outside and the music playing from a nearby wireless speaker.
After listening to the accolades that Allan received for his dedication to what he loved – God, family, work – I have pondered my life’s record and what I would be remembered for. I’m not a big participant in any part of north Alabama society so I expect low participation in my funeral, and thus, little public record to go over.
Right now, a small hawk sits in the branches of the fig tree that grows over the waterfall next to our house. The hawk was here yesterday, also. Does it sit waiting to pounce on a bird sipping water from the base of the waterfall? There was a turtle that lived in the upper part of the waterfall – I wonder if it has fallen prey to the hawk. I hope not but if it has, such is the way of life.
Oh wait, there are at least two hawks in the tree. They’re both small so it’s possible they are juveniles. I take it back. There are three. The third one is bigger – brown with a white chest, while the other two are mottled brown and white birds.
The wooded hill behind our house is slowly being divided up into housing areas for humans. We live on the northeast end, in a subdivision built in the early 1960s along the edge of a farm (basically, in unplowable land). A subdivision at the southern end of the hill was built a year ago and now roads from the subdivision are being extended into the woods. Perhaps the construction/destruction is pushing the animals this way.
So what do I want to remember of my life in the days/weeks/years ahead? I have spent the majority of my life since high school performing functions that were not my desires. In other words, my adulthood has been more compromise than personal promise. When Ann spoke to Jonas and me about integrity, she knew very little about my life. In my brother in-law (and in many of my fellow Eagle Scouts), I have seen the example of a person who led a life full of integrity. In the newspapers and TV news channels, in my worklife, and in most other places, I have seen more than my share of people who have exhibited a central guiding set of moral values or desire for integrity different than my own. What I have figured out is that we are born with an internal set of rules that changes very little. I am the same person I remember being when I was four or five years old. I remember looking at kids beside me in kindergarten and Sunday school, being able to pick out those who cared for and enhanced a personal belief system tied to the church. I have no way of knowing how much was nurture or nature. A mixture of both, to be sure. At an early age and even to this day, I fascinate myself with the ability to think thoughts incongruous with a way of life that ensures the best path for a lengthy, safe passage to the end of a long life.
3 July 2006. The fact that I’m sitting here is a positive thing. My command of the English language, slightly better than average on the best of days, is less than that today. Although my wife’s brother was not a close friend, we still shared the desire to do well, to give our families what they needed to survive into the future. Unfortunately, my brother in-law is no longer here, no longer living, that is. He died on the 28th of June at 2:14 p.m., after what appeared to be cardiac arrest. Blood clots in his lungs that had traveled from other parts of his body prevented him from being able to pump enough oxygen-carrying blood through him. When I saw him Tuesday night, he was taking very shallow breaths. His wife, Pat, thought he was doing better on Wednesday morning, having been able to sit up. Then sometime after lunch he started coughing, couldn’t catch his breath, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. Pat screamed for a nurse. The staff came in and revived him. They rushed him from the regular hospital room to CCU. On the way, Allan squeezed Pat’s arm and told her he was okay.
Pat called Janeil at some point during this time, probably after Allan was placed in CCU. According to my cell phone log, Janeil called me at 13:37. I was just finishing up a late lunch at a Sonic drive-in. She told me that Allan had been placed in CCU, that Pat was very upset, and Janeil was on her way to the hospital. I asked if I should join her and she told she’d let me know if I needed to come.
At 14:24, Janeil called me to tell me that Allan hadn’t made it. I told her I was on my way to the hospital. She asked me to call David Hale, Mom Berry’s minister in Rogersville, to get his assistance in telling Mrs. Berry about the death of her son. I finished up a couple of tasks at work that would allow me to take the rest of the week off. I then tried calling Dr. Hale’s house and got the answering machine. On the way to the hospital, I called the Rogersville Presbyterian Church office and reached Mrs. Hale (Sarah), telling her that Allan had died and that we wanted Dr. Hale’s assistance to help. I gave Sarah my cell phone number and asked him to call me back after he’d finished a consultation with someone in his office.
I can think of a lot of little details right now, and as usual, do not feel like writing them down, knowing that I’ll forget them in the future; despite their insignificance (like driving with one hand, changing gears with the other that was holding a cell phone and hoping I didn't miss what the caller was saying as I changed gears, especially while driving through the Governor's Drive/Memorial Parkway underpass; telling Sarah that my cell phone battery was running out), they would contribute to my remembrance and full understanding of the day’s events. The only important thing that matters is that Allan died. All else truly pales in comparison.
At the hospital, I wasn't sure where to find my wife -- luckily, Janeil was in the lobby talking with a couple of women from Pat’s church. We went back up to the “Consultation Room” where Pat and her son (my nephew) Jonathan were. I still recall lots of WBC (Whitesburg Baptist Church) folks hanging around, all of them part of Pat’s church family, but giving myself a feeling of being crowded in. Neither Janeil nor I are used to being around a lot of people, especially strangers, when we need time to soak in the emotions of loss.
I wasn’t at the hospital when Pat, Jonathan and Janeil got the news of Allan’s death so I did not see their first reactions. So what I remember most is when my niece, Jana, came to the hospital, looked at her mother asking, “What’s the matter?” and then bursting out loud, crying, "No!," when she found out about her father’s death. Since I’m writing this for myself, I can selfishly tell myself that I didn’t feel like I deserved to be in the room with them. They are such a loving family and I am such a cynical, sarcastic clownish guy, I realized just how little a comforting person I am. I couldn’t look any of them in the eye during that time. I was frozen in place, looking down at a piece of paper with Dr. Hale’s and Ben Cunningham’s (a Rogersville friend of the family) home phone numbers.
“Brother Dick” and “Brother Jimmy” (senior ministers at WBC) came into the room at some point to comfort them and have prayers. So did other folks, Jerry Spain, a close friend of Pat, being the one I remember the most.
The whole afternoon at the hospital was beyond surreal. In fact, I don’t even know what surreal means anymore. I’m sure that it includes the adjective “unfair”. Eventually, we went back up to the CCU room where Allan’s body still lay dead in bed. His 51-year old face was amazingly smooth, devoid of wrinkles. His jaw lay askew, off to one side. He had a several-day old beard. Just as I had noticed the day before when he was alive, he had much less hair on his head than I had seen a few months before (I am more aware of men losing hair, now that it has been shown that hair loss is attributable to heart and blood circulation problems). I thought about touching him but decided I didn’t deserve to.
Later, after Pat had signed release forms (including an organ donor form), I stood in the hallway with the nurse while the rest of the family – Janeil, Pat, Jonathan and Jana – saw Allan’s body in the room one more time. The nurse explained to me that even though Pat had signed an organ donor form, about the only thing they could take were the bones and maybe some ligaments or tendons.
I sit here writing about the day Allan died when I had hoped to be able to sit down and write about the day I spent in Munich with Ann and Jonas – a wonderful memory of walking through the streets the day of the 2006 World Cup match between Germany and Sweden. Alas, death has overshadowed that warm, summer day in Bavaria. I’ll always have dim memories of Swedish wood creatures, American coffee shops (Starbucks and San Francisco Coffee Company), Johannes berries, funny costumes, a phone conversation between Ann and my father in broken German, chasing down a couple of bicyclists in the English Garden in an attempt to return a dropped overshirt, watching surfers in the middle of the city, looking out over the city from the towers of the Frauerenkirche (sp?) by myself while waiting for Ann and Jonas (with an elderly lady telling me her memories of the city, all in German, with me only being able to say “Ja, ja”, and wishing I could say something more comforting), eating ice cream next to polizei cyclists, then cracking a joke in bad taste, seeing the look of alarm/disgust on Ann’s face, sensing something wrong and then hours later having a conversation at the end of the day in the courtyard outside a San Fran ‘Offee House where Ann laid it on the line about integrity, flirting, sex and everything else that that dirty joke seemed to embody (certainly including some of my writing, no doubt).
The rest of this week has been a blur, more so for Pat I’m sure. We spent time on Thursday and early Friday planning for the funeral, visiting Maple Hill Cemetery to pick out plots, going to the funeral home to pick out a coffin and plan the memorial service, visiting Dr. Jackson (Brother Jimmy) at WBC to plan the funeral service and have a “heart to heart” talk about the days/weeks/months ahead. Friday evening, family gathered at the Laughlin Funeral Home to receive friends and family (including Janeil and my favorite couple from Covenant Presbyterian Church, Leon and Flora Trotter; some of Janeil’s coworkers; my former employee, Donald Gaither and his wife Jenny; others who I should remember but can’t). Saturday was the funeral service at WBC and subsequent burial at the cemetery. Saturday night, Janeil and I took my parents and sister on a tour of Big Cove and then had a late snack at Nikko Restaurant – Robert and Anna were such gracious hosts to spend time with us, feeding the fish in the atrium.
Yesterday, Janeil and I sat with her mother at Pat’s house while Pat and the kids went to church. We also visited with Pat’s family. Last night, Janeil and I went to see the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada”. Today, Janeil has been resting in bed watching TV while I have been doing very little else. Watched the movie, “Before Sunset”, which triggered this writing session out in the warm sunroom with the cats sleeping in the sofa across the room from me, all of us listening to the gurgle of the waterfall outside and the music playing from a nearby wireless speaker.
After listening to the accolades that Allan received for his dedication to what he loved – God, family, work – I have pondered my life’s record and what I would be remembered for. I’m not a big participant in any part of north Alabama society so I expect low participation in my funeral, and thus, little public record to go over.
Right now, a small hawk sits in the branches of the fig tree that grows over the waterfall next to our house. The hawk was here yesterday, also. Does it sit waiting to pounce on a bird sipping water from the base of the waterfall? There was a turtle that lived in the upper part of the waterfall – I wonder if it has fallen prey to the hawk. I hope not but if it has, such is the way of life.
Oh wait, there are at least two hawks in the tree. They’re both small so it’s possible they are juveniles. I take it back. There are three. The third one is bigger – brown with a white chest, while the other two are mottled brown and white birds.
The wooded hill behind our house is slowly being divided up into housing areas for humans. We live on the northeast end, in a subdivision built in the early 1960s along the edge of a farm (basically, in unplowable land). A subdivision at the southern end of the hill was built a year ago and now roads from the subdivision are being extended into the woods. Perhaps the construction/destruction is pushing the animals this way.
So what do I want to remember of my life in the days/weeks/years ahead? I have spent the majority of my life since high school performing functions that were not my desires. In other words, my adulthood has been more compromise than personal promise. When Ann spoke to Jonas and me about integrity, she knew very little about my life. In my brother in-law (and in many of my fellow Eagle Scouts), I have seen the example of a person who led a life full of integrity. In the newspapers and TV news channels, in my worklife, and in most other places, I have seen more than my share of people who have exhibited a central guiding set of moral values or desire for integrity different than my own. What I have figured out is that we are born with an internal set of rules that changes very little. I am the same person I remember being when I was four or five years old. I remember looking at kids beside me in kindergarten and Sunday school, being able to pick out those who cared for and enhanced a personal belief system tied to the church. I have no way of knowing how much was nurture or nature. A mixture of both, to be sure. At an early age and even to this day, I fascinate myself with the ability to think thoughts incongruous with a way of life that ensures the best path for a lengthy, safe passage to the end of a long life.
13 August 2008
Speeding fines doubled when workers present
As some of you know, I have written many words over the past few months toward the makings of a novel that I call, "The Mind's Aye." Over 98 thousand words at current count. I have wandered through a few plots while building up the novel and figured out that I needed to write an outline to keep me focused on the main plots, leaving subplots to make themselves known as I write. Here 'tis:
Plots of “The Mind’s Aye” [Overall, a satire about horror / murder mysteries]:
· The novel opens with the description of a 62-year old woman, Semina, holding a poem in her dead hand.
· Two murderers, Bruce and Lee, seek victims based on the hated stereotypes they project through body language (their first victims we see are two preppy, retired yuppies idiotically playing golf in the midst of a bad thunderstorm). Later in the novel, some of their dead victims unexpectedly get revenge on Bruce and Lee.
· Two email friends, Archie and Belle, carry on an extended email conversation. One of the email friends, Archie, will be killed by the murderers.
· A blogger posts entries every so often. No connection to any other plots or subplots until near the end of the novel. The blog entries just show evidence of the blogging world.
· Ghosts appear in the novel first to habitually tell their stories to the reader and then to gather at a summer festival on the border between Russian and Mongolia (near the trans-Mongolian rail line) on the night of a new moon in order to figure out how to end their days wandering among the memories of the living. The story of the summer festival gathering of the dead is told by Anne – daughter of Belle’s husband, Colin – who has an uncanny way of seeing the world in ways others cannot, e.g.:
· The author is both a living and dead character in the novel (revealed why during the course of the novel). The author tells the full story of the crazy woman attack mentioned in the epilogue of “Are You With The Program?” The crazy woman’s husband is one of the two murderers (Lee), a former Army sniper/scout [based on a real person] who married the crazy woman [a cross between two real people] when they were both in high school; he received several years of special training but flipped out after he was deployed overseas to kill alleged enemy combatants (we, along with Lee, find out the “enemy combatants” were low-level civic leaders opposed to expansion of U.S. business interests in their parts of the world); his mother in-law is named Semina. Lee kills Semina because she keeps blaming him for ruining her daughter’s life years after her divorce from Lee. After escaping from Bruce and stalking the author for weeks, Lee kills the author in a fit of jealousy, seeing that the author still has strong feelings for both Semina and her daughter (i.e., his ex-wife).
· After the author dies, he becomes acquainted with Belle's email friend, Archie. Both of them know the plots of this novel and meet up with the dead people at the summer festival, including some of the people that Bruce and Lee killed, as well as a few recently dead famous people (Aldous Huxley, Michael Jordan’s father, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, …), who aren't ready to be forgotten but attend the festival out of curiosity. Most of the dead find release from the world of the living during the summer festival (using tricks from the book, “Consciousness Explained”*). Turns out some of the American dead, because they never learned how to connect with their past (their ancestors from Europe and Asia), with no real sense of history or geography, have to return to the United States in the fall and attend an American-style football game at a secondary school in a suburban community called Colonial Heights. As a reward, the winners get to have their memories taken away from the living so those dead ones can live in forgotten peace. The losers will continue on as fond, almost heroic, memories to the living – fathers, mothers, football players, cheerleaders, etc. – roles the dead played but did not believe in when they were alive. A young woman, Ellen, who passes by the football field on the cool night of the full moon will stop and sit in the metal bleachers to record the ghosts’ football game as a fictional short story she’s writing, not realizing that she’s telling an actual story.
· The two murderers, Bruce and Lee, reconnect with each other at the end of the ghosts’ football game. They had separately been tracking Ellen and each planned to individually kill her because she is a niece of the author. They greet and agree to kill Ellen together. Some of the dead see the pending attack of the murderers on Ellen. Through the force of their will, through the energy they possess as memories recorded in Ellen’s Livescribe Pulse pen, they trip the two murderers and cause them to kill each other instead of Ellen, thus becoming entries in a policeman’s logbook and a reporter’s notebook, then a lead story in the local newspaper, a wire story for “News of the Weird” and spreading out to international blogs commenting about the strange, mysterious story of two people accidentally killing each other in the middle of the night instead of their intended victim. Bruce and Lee end up wandering the memories of the living for decades as they go from blog entries to ghost story anthologies to storylines for multiplayer games to 3D characters in an immersive mental illness reenactment training suit/mind implant for police psychiatrists. Although they had acted the part of killers during their lives, they had unfulfilled dreams that now haunt them every time their killer stories are relived. Bruce wanted to be a famous author who traveled on speaking circuits and met a lot of interesting people. Lee wanted to spend his days mountain biking around the world and working for the preservation of wild spaces where bikers and hikers could see untamed plants and animals in their native environments.
· As the author wraps up the novel, posthumously, so to speak, he meets Semina at a party for the winners of the ghosts’ football game. Even though they’re dead and have no emotional capabilities (just the desire for new experiences), they decide they don’t mind being held to this planet by memories of the living because they led the lives they wanted to live – she because she talked the talk and walked the walk of the life of a loving Christian woman (having no enemies because she loved and embraced all races, genders, and religious practitioners), and he because he fulfilled all his dreams, not the dreams and wishes of others – and thus will wander the world of the living with gladness as long as the living want to keep memories of them alive. After all, isn’t that the true meaning of reaching heaven or nirvana? Being remembered for what we did for ourselves, and by extension for others, not for what we didn’t do, could have done or should have done.
===================================================
* It's an interesting book. I like the fact that the book sets the stage for the understanding that the classic "stream of consciousness" does not exist. A brain is constantly sorting through inputs from parts of the body and sending signals back to various body parts (muscles, glands, organs, etc.) to be ready to respond to anticipated external stimuli. Consciousness is our way of thinking that the back-and-forth signal-sending is one deliberate act after another, an ordered pattern, when in fact the brain often goes through multiple, simultaneous arbitrary decisions and automatic responses, tossing aside a lot of meaningless and/or important body part responses before our "consciousness" becomes aware of it. Thus the so-called "Eureka!" moment, the joining together of seemingly incoherent patterns into one meaningful one all of a sudden. If a ballerina has to coordinate many muscle movements at once in order to perform an effortless "pas de deux" with someone else, then a thought is similar, the coordination of many brain synapse firings to perform an effortless calculation and subsequent conclusion. Therefore, "consciousness" or "thinking" is only a concept for the practice and exercise of our brain muscles (i.e., synapse firings). When you let go of the concept and tell yourself that you have neither consciousness nor unconsciousness nor subconsciousness, then you open yourself up to a whole other level of brain usage. You can give your brain the opportunity to solve many problems at once, multitasking, as they say in today's jargon. The dead people in the novel fully understand this because they no longer have body parts. They only exist as synapse firings (stored and recalled memories) in people's brains.
Plots of “The Mind’s Aye” [Overall, a satire about horror / murder mysteries]:
· The novel opens with the description of a 62-year old woman, Semina, holding a poem in her dead hand.
· Two murderers, Bruce and Lee, seek victims based on the hated stereotypes they project through body language (their first victims we see are two preppy, retired yuppies idiotically playing golf in the midst of a bad thunderstorm). Later in the novel, some of their dead victims unexpectedly get revenge on Bruce and Lee.
· Two email friends, Archie and Belle, carry on an extended email conversation. One of the email friends, Archie, will be killed by the murderers.
· A blogger posts entries every so often. No connection to any other plots or subplots until near the end of the novel. The blog entries just show evidence of the blogging world.
· Ghosts appear in the novel first to habitually tell their stories to the reader and then to gather at a summer festival on the border between Russian and Mongolia (near the trans-Mongolian rail line) on the night of a new moon in order to figure out how to end their days wandering among the memories of the living. The story of the summer festival gathering of the dead is told by Anne – daughter of Belle’s husband, Colin – who has an uncanny way of seeing the world in ways others cannot, e.g.:
Colin's oldest daughter, Anne, just returned from the Trans Siberian Rail "experience". She and her Mother, (Colin’s ex) were on a 6-day trip through Russia and to China when they were taken off the train in Mongolia because her Mother (who is a world traveler and has lived as an expatriate in Berlin for 18 years) failed to get a visa for 14 days (instead she got one for 4 days).· Vague references are made to characters from my novels, “Helen of Kosciusko,” “Milk Chocolate,” “Sticks to Lying,” and “Are You With The Program?” The characters, after their vague re-introductions, interact with characters in this novel, including the living and the dead. Turns out that Bruce and Lee come from the other novels.
They were taken off the train! Nobody spoke the language and I would have had a nervous breakdown; Anne is very smart and somehow managed to get them out of there, sooner than later, in a few days, and on the way to China.
Anne lives by Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong it will go wrong). She took Colin to see an opera in NYC, the opening act a guy dropped dead, had a heart attack and fell off a ladder (opera canceled to say the least). At La Scala in Italy, the lead singer lost his voice so a man in the audience volunteered to sing (under the stage) and the lead singer mouthed the performance. There is always something with her...
· The author is both a living and dead character in the novel (revealed why during the course of the novel). The author tells the full story of the crazy woman attack mentioned in the epilogue of “Are You With The Program?” The crazy woman’s husband is one of the two murderers (Lee), a former Army sniper/scout [based on a real person] who married the crazy woman [a cross between two real people] when they were both in high school; he received several years of special training but flipped out after he was deployed overseas to kill alleged enemy combatants (we, along with Lee, find out the “enemy combatants” were low-level civic leaders opposed to expansion of U.S. business interests in their parts of the world); his mother in-law is named Semina. Lee kills Semina because she keeps blaming him for ruining her daughter’s life years after her divorce from Lee. After escaping from Bruce and stalking the author for weeks, Lee kills the author in a fit of jealousy, seeing that the author still has strong feelings for both Semina and her daughter (i.e., his ex-wife).
· After the author dies, he becomes acquainted with Belle's email friend, Archie. Both of them know the plots of this novel and meet up with the dead people at the summer festival, including some of the people that Bruce and Lee killed, as well as a few recently dead famous people (Aldous Huxley, Michael Jordan’s father, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, …), who aren't ready to be forgotten but attend the festival out of curiosity. Most of the dead find release from the world of the living during the summer festival (using tricks from the book, “Consciousness Explained”*). Turns out some of the American dead, because they never learned how to connect with their past (their ancestors from Europe and Asia), with no real sense of history or geography, have to return to the United States in the fall and attend an American-style football game at a secondary school in a suburban community called Colonial Heights. As a reward, the winners get to have their memories taken away from the living so those dead ones can live in forgotten peace. The losers will continue on as fond, almost heroic, memories to the living – fathers, mothers, football players, cheerleaders, etc. – roles the dead played but did not believe in when they were alive. A young woman, Ellen, who passes by the football field on the cool night of the full moon will stop and sit in the metal bleachers to record the ghosts’ football game as a fictional short story she’s writing, not realizing that she’s telling an actual story.
· The two murderers, Bruce and Lee, reconnect with each other at the end of the ghosts’ football game. They had separately been tracking Ellen and each planned to individually kill her because she is a niece of the author. They greet and agree to kill Ellen together. Some of the dead see the pending attack of the murderers on Ellen. Through the force of their will, through the energy they possess as memories recorded in Ellen’s Livescribe Pulse pen, they trip the two murderers and cause them to kill each other instead of Ellen, thus becoming entries in a policeman’s logbook and a reporter’s notebook, then a lead story in the local newspaper, a wire story for “News of the Weird” and spreading out to international blogs commenting about the strange, mysterious story of two people accidentally killing each other in the middle of the night instead of their intended victim. Bruce and Lee end up wandering the memories of the living for decades as they go from blog entries to ghost story anthologies to storylines for multiplayer games to 3D characters in an immersive mental illness reenactment training suit/mind implant for police psychiatrists. Although they had acted the part of killers during their lives, they had unfulfilled dreams that now haunt them every time their killer stories are relived. Bruce wanted to be a famous author who traveled on speaking circuits and met a lot of interesting people. Lee wanted to spend his days mountain biking around the world and working for the preservation of wild spaces where bikers and hikers could see untamed plants and animals in their native environments.
· As the author wraps up the novel, posthumously, so to speak, he meets Semina at a party for the winners of the ghosts’ football game. Even though they’re dead and have no emotional capabilities (just the desire for new experiences), they decide they don’t mind being held to this planet by memories of the living because they led the lives they wanted to live – she because she talked the talk and walked the walk of the life of a loving Christian woman (having no enemies because she loved and embraced all races, genders, and religious practitioners), and he because he fulfilled all his dreams, not the dreams and wishes of others – and thus will wander the world of the living with gladness as long as the living want to keep memories of them alive. After all, isn’t that the true meaning of reaching heaven or nirvana? Being remembered for what we did for ourselves, and by extension for others, not for what we didn’t do, could have done or should have done.
===================================================
* It's an interesting book. I like the fact that the book sets the stage for the understanding that the classic "stream of consciousness" does not exist. A brain is constantly sorting through inputs from parts of the body and sending signals back to various body parts (muscles, glands, organs, etc.) to be ready to respond to anticipated external stimuli. Consciousness is our way of thinking that the back-and-forth signal-sending is one deliberate act after another, an ordered pattern, when in fact the brain often goes through multiple, simultaneous arbitrary decisions and automatic responses, tossing aside a lot of meaningless and/or important body part responses before our "consciousness" becomes aware of it. Thus the so-called "Eureka!" moment, the joining together of seemingly incoherent patterns into one meaningful one all of a sudden. If a ballerina has to coordinate many muscle movements at once in order to perform an effortless "pas de deux" with someone else, then a thought is similar, the coordination of many brain synapse firings to perform an effortless calculation and subsequent conclusion. Therefore, "consciousness" or "thinking" is only a concept for the practice and exercise of our brain muscles (i.e., synapse firings). When you let go of the concept and tell yourself that you have neither consciousness nor unconsciousness nor subconsciousness, then you open yourself up to a whole other level of brain usage. You can give your brain the opportunity to solve many problems at once, multitasking, as they say in today's jargon. The dead people in the novel fully understand this because they no longer have body parts. They only exist as synapse firings (stored and recalled memories) in people's brains.
09 August 2008
A Trail of Two Cities
With a large portion of the world's population focused on the Olympic events in the political entity called China, I have remembered a bit of research I performed, comparing two companies named SAIC and their respective headquarters, one near San Diego, California, USA, (a little jewel called La Jolla) and one in Shanghai [上海市], China.
When one looks to invest in companies, what is the interest? Personal? Economic? Strategic? When I examined the two SAICs, Science Applications International Corporation and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, I wanted to see what these Pacific Coast bodies did to promote a stronger, more prosperous, conscientious society.
Stock price history...well, you can get that just about anywhere. In any case, if you look, you'll see the two companies have quite a different stock history over the past two years. The one in America has maintained a rather steady price, giving one the impression this is a company that can survive a recession well but won't create instant millionaires in times of economic booms -- very easily a company I'd consider should these recessionary times carry on. The one based near the Yangtze River Delta has demonstrated that good economic times mean a good ride on a Chinese automotive manufacturer -- now that the fun two-year ride has coasted to the bottom of a hill, one can wonder, "Should I jump back on and follow the trail back to the thrill hill of higher stock prices as the economy kicks into gear in the near future?"
Can you predict the future? I shy away from predictions, myself. Instead, I close my eyes (putting on imaginary blinders, if you will), hold out my two hands, with a record of the recent past in one hand (going back only to the late 1950s because the major world wars and their causes/aftermath are irregular, misleading economic indicators in my assessment) and a semi-scientific projection of the next 50 years in the other hand. If the two feel balanced, then I can comfortably agree with the saying, "Those who study history know that the price of eggs in China does have something to do with it." [Whatever "it" is is up to interpretation, as any student of American presidential testimony about two-letter words can attest.]
Therefore, my reenactment of blind justice in determining the fate of my investment in stocks can only tell me what the future price of stocks will hold. In other words, if I was a bear, I'd sell some worthless stock, buy SAI and hold it for a year or so to shelter myself from the turbulent market of the coming months. If I was bullish, I'd buy 600104.SS and hold it for two years, when the economy will have boomed a bit again.
But I have my wits about me. I have the future of my extended family to consider. These companies, although both involved in the design and manufacture of goods and services, have more going on than just bolts, screws and sheet metal.
On a personal note, last year I interviewed for a job with Microsoft to run their Microsoft Home Server test lab in Shanghai (thank you, thank you -- okay, that's enough applause; oh, that was the toilet flushing, my dear, not applause? Sorry, my mistake). As I made my way through the various interviews, violence in China was rising. Bad snow storms were blocking millions of Chinese from taking a holiday and hostilities toward foreigners rose up in Shanghai. I had worked with many expats who spent half the year working in Shanghai and they agreed that Shanghai's status as one of the world's largest cities, if not the largest, did mean that crowded conditions forced one to spend time in the parts of the city where you worked. But hey, don't most of us spend the majority of our waking hours near our workplace? My Shanghai worker friends also noted that hostility could be an issue, if you made too big of a deal about your foreigner status. Then again, have you ever attended a rugby or football game wearing the opponent's jersey? As a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail noted, "Now we see the violence inherent in the system." Mob mentality has not changed -- you can get the same reading of large groups of people in Gustave Le Bon's 1896 treatise, "The Crowd." Also, many years ago I interviewed for a job with the U.S.-based SAIC and have visited its headquarters. I tell you all this so you understand my interest in comparing the two SAICs.
Bottom line: what can I tell you to help you decide which stock is worth making your life better in the long run? Look at the smog in Beijing during the Olympian broadcasts for the next couple of weeks. Shanghai Automotive, a member of the Fortune Global 500, helped create that smog putting a lot of cars and trucks on the road while giving gainful employment to bright, enthusiastic workers. Meanwhile, Science Applications, a Fortune 500 company, serves the interest of a lot of government agencies while giving gainful employment to bright, enthusiastic workers. Which do you think is better (or worse)? There is no right answer. Admittedly, it's a tough decision. As some wikipedia author stated, this is an antilogy. Now you can see why I prefer to make my decisions in the dark. My nieces and nephews will have to decide if the world is a better place as they divide up my stacks of money amongst themselves. I'm guessing they won't really care where the money came from, even if I leave these crumbs of blog entries that mark the trail. But for those of you who I bump into on this trail, you may like to know where I found the bags of gold slung over the back of my mule. Good luck prospecting!
When one looks to invest in companies, what is the interest? Personal? Economic? Strategic? When I examined the two SAICs, Science Applications International Corporation and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, I wanted to see what these Pacific Coast bodies did to promote a stronger, more prosperous, conscientious society.
Stock price history...well, you can get that just about anywhere. In any case, if you look, you'll see the two companies have quite a different stock history over the past two years. The one in America has maintained a rather steady price, giving one the impression this is a company that can survive a recession well but won't create instant millionaires in times of economic booms -- very easily a company I'd consider should these recessionary times carry on. The one based near the Yangtze River Delta has demonstrated that good economic times mean a good ride on a Chinese automotive manufacturer -- now that the fun two-year ride has coasted to the bottom of a hill, one can wonder, "Should I jump back on and follow the trail back to the thrill hill of higher stock prices as the economy kicks into gear in the near future?"
Can you predict the future? I shy away from predictions, myself. Instead, I close my eyes (putting on imaginary blinders, if you will), hold out my two hands, with a record of the recent past in one hand (going back only to the late 1950s because the major world wars and their causes/aftermath are irregular, misleading economic indicators in my assessment) and a semi-scientific projection of the next 50 years in the other hand. If the two feel balanced, then I can comfortably agree with the saying, "Those who study history know that the price of eggs in China does have something to do with it." [Whatever "it" is is up to interpretation, as any student of American presidential testimony about two-letter words can attest.]
Therefore, my reenactment of blind justice in determining the fate of my investment in stocks can only tell me what the future price of stocks will hold. In other words, if I was a bear, I'd sell some worthless stock, buy SAI and hold it for a year or so to shelter myself from the turbulent market of the coming months. If I was bullish, I'd buy 600104.SS and hold it for two years, when the economy will have boomed a bit again.
But I have my wits about me. I have the future of my extended family to consider. These companies, although both involved in the design and manufacture of goods and services, have more going on than just bolts, screws and sheet metal.
On a personal note, last year I interviewed for a job with Microsoft to run their Microsoft Home Server test lab in Shanghai (thank you, thank you -- okay, that's enough applause; oh, that was the toilet flushing, my dear, not applause? Sorry, my mistake). As I made my way through the various interviews, violence in China was rising. Bad snow storms were blocking millions of Chinese from taking a holiday and hostilities toward foreigners rose up in Shanghai. I had worked with many expats who spent half the year working in Shanghai and they agreed that Shanghai's status as one of the world's largest cities, if not the largest, did mean that crowded conditions forced one to spend time in the parts of the city where you worked. But hey, don't most of us spend the majority of our waking hours near our workplace? My Shanghai worker friends also noted that hostility could be an issue, if you made too big of a deal about your foreigner status. Then again, have you ever attended a rugby or football game wearing the opponent's jersey? As a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail noted, "Now we see the violence inherent in the system." Mob mentality has not changed -- you can get the same reading of large groups of people in Gustave Le Bon's 1896 treatise, "The Crowd." Also, many years ago I interviewed for a job with the U.S.-based SAIC and have visited its headquarters. I tell you all this so you understand my interest in comparing the two SAICs.
Bottom line: what can I tell you to help you decide which stock is worth making your life better in the long run? Look at the smog in Beijing during the Olympian broadcasts for the next couple of weeks. Shanghai Automotive, a member of the Fortune Global 500, helped create that smog putting a lot of cars and trucks on the road while giving gainful employment to bright, enthusiastic workers. Meanwhile, Science Applications, a Fortune 500 company, serves the interest of a lot of government agencies while giving gainful employment to bright, enthusiastic workers. Which do you think is better (or worse)? There is no right answer. Admittedly, it's a tough decision. As some wikipedia author stated, this is an antilogy. Now you can see why I prefer to make my decisions in the dark. My nieces and nephews will have to decide if the world is a better place as they divide up my stacks of money amongst themselves. I'm guessing they won't really care where the money came from, even if I leave these crumbs of blog entries that mark the trail. But for those of you who I bump into on this trail, you may like to know where I found the bags of gold slung over the back of my mule. Good luck prospecting!
06 August 2008
Carbon Copies
In understanding the underlying causes for my belief in a concept called “freedom,” I have re-read the books of my youth that adults had taught me would help me know the definition of freedom in literary terms, including “Brave New World,” “1984,” and “Don Quixote.” While reading these books, my thought patterns resembled many of those who had read the books before me. So, instead of individuality, I experienced sameness. No one forced me to read these books at this time although assuredly many people read the books when I did this past week. So I simultaneously held thoughts at the same time as other people. Yet, I felt I reached a personal, singular understanding of the world around me, about the consequence of mass media writing history on the fly (giving out labels to groups of people, both the written about and the written for), about the effects of those labels on my thinking, and about the amount of time I have to spend to separate fact from entertainment after being exposed to “news.” Reinventing the wheel in my mind like many others while at the same time mentally seeing myself in a snowstorm but not caring that every one of us snowflakes is different than other snowflakes cause our effect is generally the same. In other words, what I think of as freedom. Free to feel unique when at any moment I am not. Accepting the unreality of reality. Knowing that when I speak of my freedom to casually trade on the stock market, some people somewhere are reluctantly working 12- to 15-hour days, giving up personal dreams of their own while they build their company’s value, which helps make the stock price go up for free carbon copies like me.
04 August 2008
A Nobel Effort
How driven are you to make your voice be heard? How about biting your tongue, figuratively speaking, while the threat of death hangs over everyone's head for making harmless, satirical comments about your country's leaders? Such a life few of us could live. Yet, thanks to his perseverance, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who died yesterday, kept writing in secret until he felt the time was right to go public with his oceanic output, driven on like waves on a rocky shore.
When I was a teenager growing up in the suburban foothills of east Tennessee, I read “The Gulag Archipelago,” and felt I'd never know the opposite of freedom in the way Russians and others under centralized, totalitarian, collectivist, communist or similar type governmental authority experienced. When all belongs to all, what belongs to the individual?
That's when I understood who I was to be -- free to think and act for myself, free to place a value on my mind, free to learn about ideas and practices not taught in my hometown, free to climb the social and corporate ladder if I chose, and free to love others with no fear.
I wonder if General Electric, as an individual corporate body, follows a true free trade path of its own. It seems to. I'll make sure my investment portfolio grabs up some GE stock as it continues to rise to new heights after shucking off the likes of light bulbs.
When I was a teenager growing up in the suburban foothills of east Tennessee, I read “The Gulag Archipelago,” and felt I'd never know the opposite of freedom in the way Russians and others under centralized, totalitarian, collectivist, communist or similar type governmental authority experienced. When all belongs to all, what belongs to the individual?
That's when I understood who I was to be -- free to think and act for myself, free to place a value on my mind, free to learn about ideas and practices not taught in my hometown, free to climb the social and corporate ladder if I chose, and free to love others with no fear.
I wonder if General Electric, as an individual corporate body, follows a true free trade path of its own. It seems to. I'll make sure my investment portfolio grabs up some GE stock as it continues to rise to new heights after shucking off the likes of light bulbs.
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