Witchcraft and Sorcery

NEWS ITEM, WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 14, 2011: 

A Saudi woman was beheaded after being convicted of practicing "witchcraft and sorcery," according to the Saudi Interior Ministry, at least the second such execution for sorcery this year.
The woman, Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar, was executed in the northern Saudi province of al-Jawf on Monday.
A source close to the Saudi religious police told Arab newspaper al Hayat that authorities who searched Nassar's home found a book about witchcraft, 35 veils and glass bottles full of "an unknown liquid used for sorcery" among her possessions. According to reports, authorities said Nassar claimed to be a healer and would sell a veil and three bottles for 1500 riyals, or about $400.

A story and script idea, Saturday December 17, 2011.


A young American couple breaks up.  The man is distraught, heartbroken, the woman, as usual, doesn't care.  He travels to Saudi Arabia, and practices there what the Saudis consider "witchcraft and sourcery".  He is arrested and tried, sentenced to death by beheading.  The case gets wide coverage all over the world. The American ambassador issues a formal protest, Amnesty International protests, the case drags on.  The young man, in Saudi prison is unreachable, by his own choice.  He wants to die, and does not respond to the pleas of his family or his former fiancee.   In the end, the international brouhaha, the posturing by politicians and celebrities, comes to naught,  he is executed.

Good

"I'd rather be lucky than good", said the legendary New York Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez. So would anyone, come to think of it. Being good and unlucky can be a curse, can it not? Luck trumps goodness every time.  Luck trumps ungoodness as well.  Who's ever good and lucky at the same time?

Fatal Production

At the end of film Fatal Attraction, the character played by Glen Close commits suicide.  Well, no (I haven't seen the film), she actually gets shot.   She gets shot because the preview audiences felt that the character must be punished. So, the ending scene was reworked and re-shot.

And that change was suggested by a powerful man in Hollywood, who recently passed away, named Joseph Farrell.  There were many other films that have been altered following tests using preview audiences.

"Joe Farrell has ruined more films than anybody in Hollywood," writer-director John Milius told the Los Angeles Times in 2006.

New Olympic Sport

They are called 'Chuckits', after the company that manufactures them and probably holds a patent.  They are ball launchers for dogs. Made of flexible plastic they can throw a ball from what I have seen as far as 200 feet.  You hold it above your head, swing it, and the ball, usually a tennis ball, flies.  The dog runs after it to fetch it.  (Not my dog!)

How about a new Olympic sport?  Without the dog, needless to say.  The launcher and the ball would have to be standardized, some reasonable rules invented, and off we go. Sportsmen of all ages, I imagine, could participate.

HOT!

"What are you up to these hot days before Christmas, I'll ask incorrectly?" asked a friend lately.  Why 'incorrectly'?  Is it because I never ask him or anybody personal questions, until they voluntarily reveal themselves?  He knows about my personal matters more than anyone else, and we've known each other for ages.  I hate when people you meet on the street or in line at a store, suddenly ask a personal question, after a brief conversation about vegetables or cranes across the avenue.   I cut them off (and later regret it, but that's who I are.)

And why 'hot'?  It's not hot where I sit, and it's certainly not hot where he hangs his hat.  Hot politically? Hot, as in Iran? Or in the Euro zone?  Hot Republican presidential campaign? It brought to mind Yogi Berra, when New York mayor John Lindsay's wife congratulated him on his outfit saying "You look cool, Yogi!", to which he responded "You don't look too hot yourself!" (Mrs Lindsay's reaction was not recorded by historians.) Anyway, my friend didn't explain, and I didn't ask, as we were discussing much more weighty matters.

I replied, quoting some forgotten piece of film dialogue: "As little as possible."

The Stockdale Paradox

Stolen from lifehacker.com (who stole it from  Deliberate living blog Disrupting the Rabblement):

 :

 Admiral James Stockdale  was held as a prisoner of war for eight years during the Vietnam War and was tortured in excess of twenty times by his captors. He was able to withstand all of this without losing his mind by employing two seemingly contradictory views: faith that he would prevail in the end no matter the difficulty and facing that he must confront the worst aspects of his current reality.

Then comes the paradox: While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prisonmates who failed to make it out of there alive. "They were the ones who said, ‘We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, ‘We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."

What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn't handle it.

Then comes the paradox: While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prisonmates who failed to make it out of there alive. "They were the ones who said, ‘We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, ‘We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."

What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn't handle it.

Rubbish on the shore

Tuesday night someone dumped his household garbage on the miniscule rocky beach of the shoreline park where I walk the dog, one of only three spots there in between the large boulders and slabs of demolition concrete where water is approachable. Mostly dried leaves, but plenty of household refuse, plastic and paper junk food wrappers, bags  and cups, a spent gay looking disposable fag lighter, an airline bottle of E&J VSOP Brandy  (Ernest and Julio Gallo, known primarily as the makers of such fine skidrow libations as Thunderbird, and Night Train), an empty container of a dietary  supplement called Chromium Polynicotinate, blue and red crushed aluminum can of some energy drink. The leaves floated in the water along the shore 100 yards in each direction. Quick inventory of the refuse easily identified the social position in this classless society of the culprit - most likely, I figured, one of those evil, greedy, corrupt bankers that the saintly Wall Street protesters are sacrificing their squeaky clean lives against this week. By Friday, the misguided communards still occupying Wall Street, and here, the sea digested all the magnolia tree leaves in the water, and the next high tide will perhaps swallow  the rest of them, but the rubbish remains. I thought of bringing a large plastic trash bag (manufactured by one of those evil profit seeking corporations) that I would actually have to purchase in a pack of twelve, to pick up the mess, before remembering my and my mates' life experiences and the admonishments of wise men that: (1) No good deed goes unpunished, and (2) Doing good for no credit and no personal gain is nowadays a fool's errand. On Saturday morning, today, I snapped a few photos and I pocketed the empty container of the Chromium Whatchamacallit tabs to decipher its peeling label at home. I'll return it to the place where I found it tomorrow.  Let it rot.

My Artificial Tears

So, I do have glaucoma in my left eye? Ear? No, eye! EYE!  Kept in control by a laser. Shoot, shoot, shoot, a dozen, two dozen times into the socket, on the second floor of a clinic surrounded by the crime ridden Richmond ghetto,  and glaucoma is kept in check. For a while.  If only my father had heard it. He was the one who first let me know about the power of lasers. A half a century ago, man!  What did daddy know?

I went to see the ophtalmologist Oriental doctor ('Oriental' solely to provoke your kneejerk 'racist' reaction against my political incorrectness, but aren't the Israelis, among others,  'Asian', as residents of that continent?!  You should of learned your geography, teacher!)  following that painless laser surgery a month earlier.  The nurse, who, as is the custom, prepared me for the doctor's visit, checked my vision,  asked the required questions, including if I took any prescription eye drops,  or over the counter eye drops like 'artificial tears'.  No and no. Artificial tears?  Before I could ask, she was gone, and I was sitting there waiting and wondering what artificial tears were. Something women apply to their faces to pretend they are crying?  A long wait, and I should have brought with me from the waiting room the issue of the New Yorker with a story by Alexander Hemon about borscht.

My 'Asian' doctor, she not from Israel, and not from East of the Ural mountains, finally arrived, measured the pressure in my eyes,  told me that the pressure, still a bit high,  did indeed decrease by 30%, as they expected, hoped for.  Come back to see her in a month.

What are artificial tears the naive me asked?  "Oh, it's a huge industry", she answered.  Some people, predominantly women, suffer from dry eyes, and you are lucky in that respect.  Then I was wrong and  half right - women suffering from dry eyes, as well as those pretending to suffer,  do have to use artificial tears when wishing to pretend they're crying.

Walking

On some days I feel like putting on my blue jeans, my parka and walking out, walking and walking until I die of hunger and exhaustion miles and miles from here, from this cursed place,  miles and miles away  from human hatred, perfidy, self-satisfaction and evil.  One man did just that recently in this geographical area - he walked in the western direction, that is toward the Far East, if that could ever make sense, and he drowned in the waters of the Bay while firefighters and police stood there on the beach and looked on, because it wasn't in their union contracts to try to save him and wet their shiny uniforms while doing it.

The struggle

Writers struggle with words.  Photographers struggle with images. I know,  I have been one and the other.  Let me tell you a word about photography.  I struggle with images, not in the darkroom or as is the practice today in front of a computer screen with the Photoshop program running, but much earlier than that, before and while the photographs are taken.  I drive around, the dog in the back seat, the camera in the front passenger seat, see interesting sights, stop, park, get out, try to capture the image I've just spotted, and fail, sometimes succeed, struggling to repeat the initial impression.

There is a sight, a short walk from my house that has fascinated me for months that I have tried to capture in all its beauty as I have seen it.   I have failed.   See it above.  A shack, perhaps a garage, with patterns of peeling paint, that I have found interesting, but how do you show it, how do you communicate it?  It is a flat space, after all, and photography is about three dimensional space, isn't it?

This photograph was taken at 1pm today, not a good  hour for the light, but then, with such flat space would a  different position of the sun have made a difference?  It is, by the way, the best photograph of this shack that I have managed to take.

What would have made it better?  Perhaps a pedestrian on the left or right dressed in a pattern complimenting or contrasting with the patterns of peeling paint.

Heaven and hell

You may be a few miles from me or a few thousand.  Living your life, such as it is today, you may think you're in heaven, or in hell, just as I,  a few or a few thousand miles from you, may think of being in heaven or hell.

Wherever you may be, I find myself  in hell's deepest pit.

“Maybe this world is another planet's Hell”, famously said Aldous Huxley.

I walked the streets of the city yesterday afternoon, a warm and sunny summer day, looking into people's faces and trying to judge their happiness level from 0 to 10, zero being my own level and ten being the level of, I don't know, the recently married British royal couple perhaps.  I saw many happy people, most of them young and a few unhappy ones, all of them old. I saw many eights, nines and tens, and maybe not any zeroes, but a lot of ones and twos.

All along the watchtower

"I was nothing but a pawn in a game between two queens, who had played each other for forty seven years," said the joker to the thief.  "The black queen won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, as she, the white queen and I lost everything  that was on the table between us.  There is no game any more. "

"The white queen could not go with the brother of the black queen, who betrayed her and  demonstrated contempt for her.  After 47 years!"

The thief couldn't steal the white queen's heart, and the joker failed to amuse and distract the black queen.

"There must be some kind of way out of here," 
Said the joker to the thief, 
"There's too much confusion, 
I can't get no relief." 

(All  along  the  watchtower - Bob Dylan)

No. 8, $3 & 4.85

At the john in the dog park two men talking at the pissoir while I was exiting the cabin:

"It is now four point eighty five!"
"Four point eighty five?"
"Yeah, four point eighty five?"

That is all I heard. What is four point eighty five?

I stepped towards the car, the dog behind me and I spotted a cellphone lying on the pavement of the unoccupied  spot next to my car.  I picked it up and carried it to the dog stuff and bath shop, my dog following me all the time.  I returned to the car and decided to arrange the dollar bills stuffed in my pocket, transfer some to the wallet, some out of the wallet into the pocket, three singles on the passenger seat of the car.  It took a minute, and by the time I was done, a man came with his German shepherds. He loaded them into his SUV (my guy was already in the back seat) parked next to the empty spot.  When he turned around I asked if he by any chance had lost a phone. Yes, he checked, he did, I sent him back to the dog shop, and I drove off.

No good deed goes unpunished, I have long found.  I was thinking of what disaster awaits me.  We drove to Ba Le Vietnamese Sandwich (and soup) shop and ordered No. 8 on the menu Bánh_mì_thịt_nướng, BBQ Pork Sandwich, my usual order, for $3.00.  Where else can you buy a sandwich for three dollars?  (It used to cost $2.25 a couple of years ago.)  

Then we drove home by the main thoroughfare.  We'll eat the sandwich there.  I was still thinking of the punishment for the good dead, and it came.   Whereas most of the time we cover the couple of miles getting stopped at one traffic light (out of almost a dozen), this time five lights stopped us, while the one light that usually stops us let us through.

Today's music sucks? Bear with me, dawg!

Every couple of years I would scour the Al Gore's most famous invention after climate for interesting music, sites like artistsdirect.com, garageband.com and others that don't exist anymore and where unsigned bands, or signed and little known artists uploaded their music, oftentimes quite good, occasionally brilliant. I'd listen to hundreds, thousands of cuts to find a few diamonds in the rough.  I had a method, which probably missed a few rarities, but which served me well. I'd listen to a few seconds to decide, 5, 15, 30.  Certain guitar chords alerted me to the worth of the rest of a recording.  And I had my taste - hard rock was usually out, plaintive folk music as well,  electronic sounds - foggetteaboutit.  Americana,  country, soul, blues yes.   I was looking for authenticity. (Doesn't everyone?) I'd gather the diamonds and burn them onto CDs, which I'd take on trips to Europe where I'd hand them to my friends there, DJs and artists, all of them in awe of American pop music, and who I thought were too influenced by the limited range of the most popular artists played on commercial radio, as bad there as it is here.   I liked to share my discoveries, and I had a reputation to maintain, oh, yes.  

Then my life had changed, and I stopped listening, stopped searching.  Until this year.  Last month, actually.   The Internet sites have changed, but the buried, largely unheard music is still to be found.   I have found some amazing artists, whom I would like to present to you.  Rock and roll, or whatever it is called these days, is not dead.   There are people out there with the skills and the ideas, who may not sell many CDs or tracks on iTunes, but who all deserve our support,  and speaking for myself, my enthusiasm.  (Some or all of them may be familiar to some of you, especially if you live in their hometowns, but as a group, I suspect they are largely unknown.)

Here they are:

Deadman,

Malcolm Holcombe 

Pokey LaFarge

The Deep Dark Woods

New Country Rehab

David Jacobs-Strain

Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain

Lastly, the two incredibles. The future of music:

Phat Bollard

Fitz and the Tantrums

The links are just samples of the artists' music, not always their best recordings, but ones that are easily linkable. You can find more music of these artists through MySpace, YouTube, Google, the artists own sites, and so on.   Enjoy!

P. S. Goodness, how could I have forgotten. Here is the band that started me out on this trip this year:

The David Wax Museum

Murder

Some stories I think up and write, or think up and never actually write, have in them a murder or two.   If I don't write them down it is when I become uncomfortable and anxious that it is my subconscious desires that speak through them, desires to slaughter my real or imagined enemies.  I'm never certain that this is true, the stories are not that transparent.   They are told (or planned out) in first person singular relating a tale he has heard or observed, or else in the authorial third person.  They are not typical detective stories, there are usually no detectives in them, or else there are police detectives who fail to solve the mystery, while the suspect gets away from them.  And we are never sure if the suspect really did it, or contracted out to have it done.

And I wonder if the crime stories by more or less known writers are not sometimes tales of revenge against the writers' enemies.  It happens that writers put their friends, ex husbands and wifes and foes in their stories, and occasionally even get sued for it.  Besides, certain writers are known to be misogynist, misanthropist, or misandrist.

Here's a story idea I've thought up a few days ago, and haven't written.

Several prominent men, celebrities, movie stars die under mysterious circumstances.  There are few leads.  A letter surfaces from a man who admits to the murders and warns that they will continue until his unnamed lady friend agrees to marry him. Analyses of the letter lead nowhere.   The narrator of the story tells us he suspects a friend of his, who is in an up and down love affair.   Women in the naked city who have been asked to marry their beaus, and refused or else haven't made up their minds all begin to suspect the men.  The girlfriend of the narrator's friend finally accepts his proposal and the murdering spree stops.  She will live uncertain if she had married a murderer.

Day 4

This morning, day 4, remnants of the heart were there, even though nature, nighttime moisture, dogs, kids, damaged the heart to a large degree.  I decided to rebuild it again, just to spite fate, dogs, kids, and whatever evil forces conspire against my heart.   There were some kids around, with their mothers and dogs while I was at it.  The kids thought it was lovely, the dogs walk over it, and the mothers eyed me suspiciously.  I took photographs and kept on improving my design.  It is different every day, only a few of the pebbles appear in different versions of it, and I intend to keep doing it.

On the shore

I took a photo of a triangular moss covered rock, a couple of people said they liked it, and I went on to search for a rock more in the shape of heart. I didn't find one, so I collected some pebbles and made a heart shape on the rocky beach where I take my dog for walks.   I snapped a few photos of it, went home and uploaded them to the computer.  I didn't like any of them, and decided to return the next day to take more pictures.   The heart was gone.  I couldn't even find the place where I had built it, even though it is a short, maybe 25 yard beach.   I finally located traces of it, recognizing some rocks that had been part of the structure.

Who could have destroyed it and why, I wondered.  Maybe some kids picked up the rocks and threw them in the ocean, or dogs messed it up. Or a park ranger happened on it and decided to bring the beach back  to its "natural state". Or a fanatic of the same mind, as there are plenty of those, even though the park and the beach are on a landfill, formerly a garbage dump, later covered with two feet of dirt, while the beach was built out of randomly dumped concrete blocks from old buildings, freeways and god knows what else.

I rebuilt the heart on the second day, took photographs while the dog stood by patiently watching me from above.   On the third morning the heart was gone again.  I built it again, just for the heck of it, to see what happens.

Rejuvenation

You'd laugh and think that I had lost my remaining marbles if you heard me talking to my dog in the privacy of our home or automobile.   But then, having heard other dog owners speak to their animals in public, often in baby voice which, incidentally, I don't use, I think I am not alone.

One time in the dog park, I saw an elegant lady standing about 15 feet from the water fountain, her dog 15 feet away from her in the same direction, that is 30 feet from the water,  inviting him to approach the water bowl: "Come Rocky, rejuvenate yourself!"

"Rejuvenate"?   What kind of dog was it to understand a four syllable word?  Did he understand, say, "reprehensible", or "anthropomorphic"?   In any case, while I was there, Rocky didn't come, preferring instead to continue his current activities.   Who knows, some people train their dogs to understand more than other dogs.  My dog understands plenty, probably more than I give him credit for.

In general, I believe than dogs know more about us than we'll ever know about them, even if they cannot express their knowledge in a language understandable to us.   Yet, there may be something more there.  Sometimes I suspect that dogs have a direct line to heaven, being innocent and sinless creatures.

Brit Slang

Some of Britain's obscure words compiled by the library:

Baffies -- slippers (east coast of Scotland)
Bishybarnabee -- ladybird (Norfolk)
Bobowler -- large moth (Birmingham)
Deff -- to ignore, split up, pack in, avoid (Birmingham)
Dodderman -- snail (Norfolk/Suffolk)
Gopping -- unattractive ( Manchester)
Guddle -- to rummage about (Northumberland and parts of Scotland)
Gurtlush -- the best ( Bristol)
On the box -- off sick from work (Black Country)
Ronking -- smelly, disgusting (Black Country)
Tittermatorter -- see-saw (Norfolk)
Tranklements -- ornaments (Black Country)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/mad-mad-world/Now-a-database-of-Brits-weirdest-words/articleshow/9100005.cms