:: meanders ::

:: Rapture Index as of 24 Nov 2003: 155
On could call The Rapture Index an index of leading apocalyptic indicators. According to its creator, Todd Strandberg, "You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones industrial average of end time activity". Since its inception, the record high was 182 on 24 Sep 01 with the record low 57 in 1993. At its present upper end reading of 155, the Rapture Index indicates it's time to "Fasten Your Seatbelt". An absolutely original and fascinating study in sentiment!

:: Take a bit of cinnamon daily
New Scientist: Cinnamon produces healthier blood

Just half a teaspoon of cinnamon a day significantly reduces blood sugar levels in diabetics, a new study has found. The effect, which can be produced even by soaking a cinnamon stick your tea, could also benefit millions of non-diabetics who have blood sugar problem but are unaware of it.

The article goes on to state blood fat & "bad" cholesterol levels are also reduced. So simple! and very elegant too, a stick of cinnamon to stir your coffee or tea. As an aside, a cup of warm tea- herbal or regular- with your meal also aids digestion. Give it a try.

:: Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians
Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians

Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades - but is still in perfect health.

Modern medicine does not know what to look for (as I mention in the post below, regarding this obsession with the brain and electrodes). When one looks for miracles, one finds they abound. Some, like this one may be, admittedly, extraordinary. Look for the miraculous.

:: Meditate on this
Stunningly beautiful Flash presentation of Hubble images.

:: TIME Magazine: The Science of Meditation
TIME Magazine: The Science of Meditation From July 2003, but a decent mainstream summary of meditation in society. Why this obsessive fascination to put electrodes on meditators heads? Certainly researchers and many who come into meditation believe mediation revolves around the mind, with thinking, or not thinking. Certainly there are meditative states that transcend thinking, but even for lifelong meditators, thoughts persist in marching across the inner sky. However, to pursue meditation from a mental place is, in my opinion, misleading. I'd like to offer this: meditation is largely about matter, the matter of the external world, the matter of your body. The mind is where perception is processed, but the mind-- the perceiver and deceiver-- is third in line after the world (stimulus), your body (receptor). The brain, the part getting electroded is a part of that body, one that has an uncanny way of deceiving us. Reality transcends all three of these, but that is another matter. I don't want to complicate things because I also believe "it" is really far more simple than would be made from a tangle of electodes pasted on a scalp, measurements of heart rate and alpha-delta-theta waves, and wanna-be yogi arguments over what constitutes "blissing out", samadhi, and transcendence. Your body tells you all you need to know, and it is grand. Just check out these kids.
image by Robert A Davis for Time, Inc.

:: The Dust, Bric-a-brac, and Disorder of a Life Well Lived

I had carefully sorted the books so that every one could be put back on its shelf precisely where Churchill had left it. This had not been difficult to achieve. I simply adapted Churchill's own habits. Whenever he removed a book from a shelf he would stick one of his children's stuffed toys � piglets, bears, etc � into the gap to mark the spot. I put a piglet or a bear at each end of a shelf and wrote 'piglet' or 'bear' on slips of paper tucked into the first and last books in a stack. Thanks to Randolph the arrangement of the books today does not correspond to the way Churchill had very specifically set them out to be of most practical use to him for reference. And legions of piglets and bears would be needed to mark the places where his favourite and most annotated books are now missing.

excerpt from Sorting Out Sir Winston, Chartwell 1966, by Christopher Long, journalist, and written in 1998 but a jewel I only just today discovered.

:: It's About Time!!
Americans Demand Increased Governmental Protection From Selves NEW YORK�Alarmed by the unhealthy choices they make every day, more and more Americans are calling on the government to enact legislation that will protect them from their own behavior. nyuk nyuk

:: which biological molecule are you?

You are a neurotransmitter. You believe in the
good-naturedness of man's biology and soul.
You're happy, everyone's happy, and no one will
ever take that away from you. Or else you'll
make them go insane.

Which Biological Molecule Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla"

:: The Italian Job -- Mini Physics Disaster, but really good fun
I like these guys and went back for a second helping. Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics has a review of The Italian Job, which I just watched this past weekend. Like quite a few movies these days, it is a remake of previous release, in this case, the 1968 original in which Michael Caine starred. My own take on the movie, aside from the bad physics, is that it is, for once, a truly fun, funny, and classy action movie. That these brainiac hoods are good bad guys is established early in the story, allowing us to get past the moral dilemma of why I should be on the side of avaricious theives. But unlike those genuine creeps in movies like Pulp Fiction and the many clones it spawned, these fellows

• don't kill
• don't cuss
• don't fornicate

And guess what, you laugh yourself silly over the running jokes, there is warmth between Mark Wahlberg & Charlize Theron (you see her in PJs, lol). Yes, Edward Norton as the bad good guy does look stereotypically diabolical, but even HE doesn't get killed! The Italian Job is proof "Hollywood" can make good entertaining movies without larding them with mo'fo's, boobs, butts, and blood.

:: Stupid Movie Physics
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics takes fun, and accurate, potshots at BIG endings, loud explosions in space, and other cherished, but faux, very faux pas, effects in your favorite action flicks. Speaking of movies, this review of "The Matrix Revolutions" by Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard may not please fans of Keanu (sigh!) or the whole Matrix meme thing currently in vogue, but it is so well written, you gotta love it for the sheer pleasure of the prose.

:: How worried are we? It's off the charts
What, me Worry?

WHAT WE WORRY ABOUT Rank, Worry, (Rank Last Year), % increase 1. Education in public schools (1) 10.5% 2. Retirement security (2) 9.1% 3. Number of poor, homeless (3) 3.2% 4. Children's standard of living (4) 7.3% 5. Ability to pay bills (7) 6.9% 6. Drugs, dealers in community (6) 4.9% 7. Food safety (5) 2.6% 8. Getting cancer (9) 6.2% 9. Losing health insurance (13) 17.9%

:: Toilet farce causes rush hour chaos
Speaking of chaos...

BBC NEWS | Toilet farce causes rush hour chaos

:: A Horoscope for Sagittarius Meditators
You are forever hunting the truth that you already have burning like an oil lamp in the temple inside. To drop hunting is your work. Being a fire sign you have to exhaust yourself like a cattle dog, before such ideas move from the theoretic to the real. See the joke - and keep jumping.

"Seeking for something outside is entering into a house which is on fire. However much you try... You may even become comfortable in an uncomfortable situation, just by saying to yourself, 'This is what life is'. But this is not so. You may settle with your sadness, your misery -- everybody has settled with things believing that, what else can one do? Anger comes, love comes, hate comes, and they all possess you like demons. The only way to avoid this vicious circle -- from one prison to another prison, from one fire to another fire -- the only way is to seek nothing outside and turn inwards. There is no seeking inwards, you simply find. Outside you seek and you never find anything; inside you do not seek, it is already there." --
Osho, Zen: The Language of Existence

The outer world is a fire, a chaos, seething with vibrations. Our five senses are tuned to interpret the world immediately around us. We extend our senes through devices like TV, radio, internet, and print, immersing ourselves in that chaos, bringing into our consciousness. Fortunately, we can turn off the devices. But at the subtle level, all that we take in consciously or not, operates on our body on some level. Some of it digested and used to fuel our knowledge, and through right-action, our wisdom. Some passes right through as chaff. And some lodges within, becoming the stones blocking and clogging our way. For after all, we too are the world, of the world. Is there a difference between the inner and outer? What about the idea that all matter breaks down into the same basic particles? Is there a contradiction here? The science of reason cannot measure that binding force that for conveinence is called spirit, soul, sentience. Only within is that sentience experienced. All the rest is filtered through ouR senses, judged and weighed by our perception, and ultimately stored as a 1 or 0 -- pleasure or pain-- within the matter of our body. And the vicious cycle repeats itself in colorful variations at times but most often in a monotonous repetitiveness we only perceive as "different". Vipassana-- witnessing meditation-- brings one eye to eye with this chain of stimulus-perception/reaction-action/inaction. Being equanamous, that is, witnessing without judgement of what we find, without seeking to find a reason (ie, we lack self-esteem, we were beat up as a kid, we are greedy, we are fill in your issue, blah blah blah), the stillness beyond the chaos is experienced. We can then tap into this stillness when in the outer world, where we must necessarily carry on.
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