I’m going to ramble this evening. Prices are falling for oil. That sucking sound you hear is the refilling of the fuel tanks of SUVs abandoned a few months ago. Gasoline in the double digits rather than triple digits is a steal to most people. So while petro reserves are up, due to lower demand…I think as the economy causes a pinch on the wallets, people are going to take up driving again as a means of entertainment. So I do think demand will remain high for the product that makes Alberta rich and Canada go.
Aldrous Huxley wrote Brave New World origionally as his concept of a utopia. It wasn’t until much later, that he realized that the destruction of human freedom through interference with biological function was a dystopian nightmare. At least that’s what a poli-sci student working with me this summer on a construction site told me. Brave New World is a book about a dystopia in the future, I can’t remember but I think Adelle Nyberg taught me this book in grade twelve, but whatever. Brave New World (BNW from now on) is similar book to George Orwell’s 1984. Both involve protagonists who are subversives in the world order. Both involve societies where freedom does not exist. And in both stories our protagonists lose, sorry to spoil it, but, I haven’t. Because these books are much more about the mechanisms of enslavement. 1984 is an imagining that has come to pass. His fiction has become reality. In those nations previous to emerging from behind the iron curtain and currently in North Korea. The use of violence by brutal regimes against the populace is not something we have to imagine. We can read about it in the news. And we have also seen that the populations of nations like East Germany, and Hungary and Latvia and Lithuania and Russia have overcome the kind of monsters that haunt the pages of . Huxley’s dystopia hasn’t happened, at least not yet. Science can’t accomplish it, yet. But the mechanisms of enslavement are much more sinister in BNW, The mechanism of enslavement is the destruction of the very core potential of some individuals to render them unable to appreciate what they are and l
eave them utterly content in whatever menial task they have been assigned. The right to have children is removed from the population, all children are “born” in factories. The fetuses are assigned to categories of humans. Alphas, Betas, Deltas and Epsilons. Alpha fetuses receive little tampering and are allowed to develop normally. They become the leaders of civilization. Epsilons are the bottom. Chemicals inhibit their physical development and alcohol destroys their mental potential. They fill jobs most would not want. Betas and Deltas are engineered to fill the gap between the Alphas and The Epsilons. And the society is in a constant state of excitement. Drugs are distributed to dull the people, and orgies are encouraged. So while most are designed to be happy with their possition, any who aren’t are lulled by constant debauchery. The control as I said is far more sinister since the slavery mostly goes unnoticed. I’d have a read of this book if I were you. Huxley, Brave New World. Borrow it from your library.
These are difficult times. The world is in a time of upheaval. I don’t want to use words like unprecedented, or unseen, because such gross hyperbole is an overstatement. This isn’t an influenza pandemic, or a genocide or a world war. This isn’t even remotely on the scale of tragedy like that. This is financial loss, and we will all recover from it, and we will all forget about it. These are times when old, bad ideas get discarded and new innovations will be discovered. These are exciting times to be around. Sure, their will be pain but remember pain is weakness leaving the body!
Two of the best books I have ever read that are reasonably short are Generals Die in Bed by Charles Harrison and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Neither book takes very long to read and both will change you. My dear friend, Frank Chen, read Generals while we were living in Taiwan. I got him to read it since, him being a Canadian, this was a good book to read about Canada. To give you a quick understanding of the tone and mood of Generals I would suggest you follow this link to the Wilfred Owen poem Dulce Et Decorum Est.
Generals is a very realistic fictional account of trench warfare during World War I. It follows the protagonist throughout his engagement with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Europe. The brutality of the war and it’s effect on the characters are simply told and have tremendous impact on the reader. It is at once compelling and revolting.
The other fiction book is Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness. I first read H of D in grade eleven under the instruction of Mr. Finni. H of D is a classic, narrated by Marlow. Having read everything published by Conrad, Marlow is now as real or perhaps more real than many people I know. Marlow is a sage, a strong man, made wise by his years travelling the world. And he tells, dare I say, his stories in Conrads books! This was my first introduction to Marlow as he told the story of his journey on the Congo river into deep Africa, the unmapped area. The heart of darkness of the continent. He was to go up to get Kurtz and bring him back. The journey for the reader and Marlow though is less spacial along the river and more psychological as he endures the loss of restraint among men when they are separated from civilization. Similar themes are also encountered in Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and a much more brief “version” of H of D can be read in less than an hour in Conrads short story Outpost of Progress. The movie Apocalypse Now is a modern retelling of Heart of Darkness.
I like reading. Always have. Ever since I was little. I didn’t have many friends growing up; and I was mostly deaf from the time I was 6 until I was nearly 8. So as a result reading became my thing. My grandpa had a subscription to National Geographic and whenever we’d visit I’d spend nearly the entire trip devouring each and every article. That and books on just about anything. When I was seven I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As a child I liked the former better. Particularly the story about Tom and Huck finding the treasure. So early on I was a fan of early turn of the century authors. I also read anything technical related to aviation; I received a lot fo gift books about airplanes and theory books on aerodynamics. My science projects usually focused on principles of flight. I still have one of my favourite aviation books and hope to pass it on to my son. So I’ll give you, my reader a list of the books I feel are most important to read. This is going to take a little while. It isn’t going to be a list following any specific order of importance or chronology. I’ve read so many, text books, novels, personal development, comics. As they come to me I’ll tell you about them.
- The Bible. If ever there was a book that did more to shape the course of human history I don’t know it. You’d also be hard pressed to argue it. Being of two parts, the Jewish Torah and the New Testament (Gospels, Acts and Letters from the Saints) this book formed the basis for modern law and forms the framework upon which western society is based. It is also something I believe. I believe in the Jewish God Jehova and also in the divinity of His Son, Jesus of Nazareth. This belief forms the basis for my morality; I’m just not a good Christian. I fail at it all the time. But as John Chow says, success is the result of a long string of failures!
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This book has special meaning to me because my father gave me his copy and this was where I developed my love of reading. As I said before, I was deaf, for a long time undiagnosed. Since I couldn’t hear the spoken word, and no one I knew used sign language, my affliction seems to have strengthened my ability to read and at an early age I read this and other classics. I also developed a love for Sam Clemens aka Mark Twain that has lasted to this day. I ahve many of his books on my shelf. The two origionals given to me by my father and others including The Prince and the Pauper (also received from my father) and a collection of his works called The Unabridged Mark Twain. My affection for the books of Twain would lead to Huxley, Golding, Knowles, Forester, Steinbeck, Conrad and so many others. He was a gateway to worlds I never knew.
- Aviation: The Story of Flight. By Bill Gunston. This was given to me as a Christmas gift by my grandparents Royle in the year 1986. I spent hours reading every detail in this book. I was eleven when I received it and it still sits on my shelf. I still open it and look at the details, the diagrams, and the read the articles within. It is history and science at once. It traces the myths of early man as to how to attain flight including the story of Daedalus and Icharus, to early experiments, photographs of experimental aircraft that never reached production to the science behind the internal combustion engine, the propeller, lift, fluid dynamics involving jet engines, the forces of lift, thrust, gravity and drag. It is an amazing book that stimulated my desire to get a pilots license. I attained that in 1999.
I had my first physiotherapy treatment today at ten forty-five in the morning. And I had no idea how bad it was. Meghen was my physiotherapist and we started in earnest. I filled out some forms, and then went into a curtained off section where she started asking me what hurt. What doesn’t hurt is the better question. So we started there. My feet only hurt after standing on concrete for long periods of time but have never really been a huge problem. My knees have only ever had accute inflammations twice and have never been a chronicn problem. But my hips, they don’t work. I have lower mid and upper back pain, all the time. My right arm will go numb, as will my left fingers but they don’t lose any strength or cooridination, just more of a tingly feeling. So we began our treatment. She moved my neck this way, got me to use my arms, manipulated my back and then came up with a diagnosis. I have really bad posture, but I blog, I use a computer all the time. That bad posture is putting a lot of pressure on my nerves around my last cervical vertabrate and my first thoracic vertabrate. What that means she said is that it is completely correctable. So today I got a heat treatment with a little zapper to fatigue my neck muscles and then some manipulation. I felt like a million bucks. So next she is going to give me a few more treatments and some exercises to do and we are hoping that in a month or two I’m going to have this pain licked. I can’t wait. And get this, Alberta health care will cover it! I love being Albertan!
Writing anything takes time. Writing well takes more time and the development of the ability to blog meaningfully takes a great deal of time. Between my job, my family and the requirement of sleep I don’t have much to spare. John Chow said he had developed his blog in about 2 hours a day over 2 years. That is I hope possible but I realize there is very little traffic to a blog like mine now since I have nothing to say. I need to develop a voice, I need to develop content and I need to figure out how to also make websites look fantastic. I never pay attention to the wordcount on the sidebar of this typing tool and I think it is about time that I started to. Two hundred words minimum. I’ll talk about family, about what I know. I work in Alberta. I live in Alberta. I serve in a militia regiment. I go to church and believe in Jesus. I like music and I like writing. I like cutting up steel with a torch and nailing wood to other wood. I like watching my infant son double kick with his strong legs and I like how he smiles for the camera all the time. I think I would like to write a series of books on my mistakes. And what I learned from them. There is a lot to think about. But I want to leave something behind. I don’t care to live life to survive because that is a losing game. No one survives, and surviving a little longer doesn’t mean anything. I will work to living a fulfilling life of service. And if the worse should happen, there is always the army.
I don’t know what to think right now except that a lot of people are going bankrupt right now. I don’t know what the future holds but recently Paul Newman died and I thought I would post two things he said that make a lot of sense in uncertain times:
“It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.”
“Just when things look darkest, they go black.”
Well things look like they are about to go black. See you on the flip-side.
Make Poverty History
One thing that bothers me about my Optio w30 is that the videos it shoots play back in Quick Time. And I’m not a fan of Quick Time. The reason is because Quick Time takes a long time to open as a program on my PC and everytime I open a new video a new Quick Time box opens. Actually sometimes I like that, but not always. I like it when I am going through various shots and want to compare. That isn’t possible with anyother programs. But it sucks when you are trying to view several films and each time you click a new one Quick Time reloads another window. Now as for being on the blog I am really unsatisfied with how my video of fish at Azul Beach Resort in Peurto Morelis turned out. I was hoping for a thumbnail that was maybe the first frame followed by it playing on the page. Not a name link called img#### that sends you to a new window! That sucked and wasn’t interesting at all. Unfortunately I’m out of time but I am going to attempt to post a new video to the site using ohter formats and see how that works out.
