PBS TV on SL

PBS Religion and Ethics Sept 18

not to suggest anyone try second life, but many of my friends are merely curious about it, and this is the best report on it I have seen yet. Usually reports focus on the sensational stories, not the everyday experience of creativity and community.

It's from a PBS tv show about religion. Too bad they didn't show some of the amazingly beautiful buddhist builds, where i have gone for meditation, to watch videos of buddhist teachers, and discussions with real buddhist teachers who have avatars in second life.

what's your favorite color? WRONG!!!!

i'm heading out to seattle to meet 5 old friends. someone had the idea we should do a group thing of asking each other questions, or drawing questions from a hat, or something to do with questions. i asked for suggestions (i did used to have a job as a recreation director, so maybe that's why i am 'it' for this), and put together the questions my friends sent with some i swiped from a wonderful poem, and some from a book, etc. here's the list:
What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?
What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?
What’s the worst thing that you’ve ever done?
What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?
What is the worst job you ever had?/What is the best job you ever had? what were you really doing there?
Who is the person you most admire and why?
where did you live?
what was your wedding like?
Who are you and why are you here?
did you like being pregnant?
do you think there is a future for sex?
what do you collect?
What do you still long for?
When did you laugh the hardest in your life?
What would surprise us to know about you?
What was your best vacation ever?
How are you different from your mother?
What is your favorite color?
if you lived in LA or NCY would you think twice about reshaping your body more to the current popular ideal?
Knowing what I now know would I have consented to be born?
When it comes time to go will I go forlorn or contented?
Has the loathing settled down?
If you could snow, would you?
Do you know what makes bipeds wild with joy?Could you be specific?
has our gathering changed you? Esp being with people who knew you when you were much younger?
Are you a talk friend or a doing stuff friend?
Did your interest in female friends increase after age 40?
By what are you most defined - what says the most about who you are? your house, friends, hobbies, job, car, boat, pet?
are we meant to have many loves in our life, young, family or middle age, old, or one lifetime partner ?
did you ever have a time when you thought a child was lost?
AND all the questions from "i get by with a little help from my friends"

losing one's head

found a great animation that lets you carry your head tucked underneath your arm, or even dance with it! the best part is that you add a copy of whatever hair you are wearing, so you can make as many heads as you want to go with your current look.

attachment

suffering from attachment
to what is impermanent
i touch your soft paw

~mudpie

run on sentience

monday's post has disappeared! and so has my followers list.
it's not on TSMGO blog -- once i accidentally posted mine on there.
All i said on monday was that i am more interested in the question "is the roomba a sentient being?"
and not so much if we should wish it well.
who would not wish well to a roomba?

may all beings be free from suffering and the root of suffering

Liz and i tell each other stories about our cats sometimes, and she also tells roomba stories.
machines are made smarter and more responsive and independent, until slowly, slowly, at some point they become robots, and then at some further point, robots are everywhere and no one noticed!
each generation accepts the level of them it finds itself born into, just as we now have 'cyberspace' immigrants (me) and natives (Liz).
rather than preparing me for this, my life of reading sci-fi only makes me alarmed.
and my life in buddhism adds this dimension: when i chant the aspiration that all sentient beings, or simply all beings, may they be happy and free from suffering, does that include Liz's roomba?
Wikepedia tells me: Sentient beings is a technical term in Buddhist discourse. Broadly speaking, it denotes beings with consciousness or sentience or, in some contexts, life itself.
another site says: Especially emphasized in Mahayana Buddhism, all sentient beings have Buddha Nature/ Essence. One can become a Buddha (a supreme enlightened being) in due course if one practises diligently and attains purity of mind (ie absolutely no delusions or afflictions).
does her roomba have delusions? will her roomba, that remembers the shape of her room and where her furniture is, and where it's docking station is, and when it hits an obstacle doesn't randomly bang against it, but uses its memory, and seeks it's docking station when its task is done...will it be reborn as a buddha?

carpe diem

One of my favorite quotes

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

the ox driver's question

Ernie's dad trains oxen and enters them in pulling contests at the fairs. i love to see him in the fields putting them through their paces, big as elephants but so docile-seeming.
do they even know they are not the same animal, having been together all their lives, and knowing him i suppose as their god.
the contests, i don't much like, with the whipping and straining. like ferdinand, they just want to stand in the meadow in the flowers. i could be wrong about that, perhaps they love the excitement and competition as much as ernie's dad does!
once i was in my garden and heard him putting them through their paces on the back street. the beautiful dirty backstreet child with long blonde hair was asking him questions and he was explaining about the oxen in his loud voice that all old tractor-drivers seem to have.
then i heard ernie's dad conversationally ask the question i had been wishing all summer that someone would ask,
"are you a boy or a girl?"

i can haz big butt

with a wink for willy

lucy feeling rather lax
let her sliders slip to max
felt so fat, looked so hot
didn't dare to leave her plot

lucy feeling rather frisky
drank a jug of moonshine whiskey
then the silly little brat
moved her sliders all to FAT

lucy, who we know is bratty
moved her sliders all to fatty
then she wondered, hand on chins
are righties fats and lefties thins?

lucy sleepwalking one night
moved her sliders too far right
walked right off the cliffs at Skye
bounced 2 kilometers high!

after frost

maple leaves fall flash
yellow on now brown garden.
nature will have color.

better search on xstreet for 'cloaca'

Saturday's two performances were great! this time i made a special effort to get a snapshot, probably threw off my comic timing, but with chat lag, who could tell anyway. so here is Dr. Lucy advising her pregnant patient Karuna (he is such a good sport!)
i regret i did not include the 3rd member of this skit, Osprey, who is a medical skeleton hanging up on the desk just out of the picture.
the audience loves this skit and i love to write skits that could only take place in Second Life!
we will keep performing this wonderful flea circus variety show through the fall!

still in recovery, rebounding

Ernie drives his red antique tractor down the main street to turn into the fields to get the hay. I watch sitting on my front porch, on the silt and scree and boulders and soil the glacier left -- you can tell this was a deep wide river during the meltdown -- looking across the street between the church cars and the neighbor's junky yard i see the field, flat to the eastern line of hills, which, made of some harder stuff, didn't wash away. The tractor's so well tuned I can barely hear it from here. They must miss him at the county jail, now looks like he has a job working for Andrew Hall, British collector of old farms. Ernie's grown his hair and beard wild, long & Jesus styled, with a Hell's Angels bandanna round his head, and LOL his cell phone held to one ear.

Songs that get stuck in your brain

ever since my post this morning i've had this song stuck in my head, a song i had forgotten since it is from before i can even really remember! i think we had it on a record and i listened to it until i had it memorized and could sing it; it was the most beautiful, saddest song i had ever heard. just now i found it by googling and it's from a poem written by davy crockett, king of the wild frontier!

Farewell to the mountains, whose mazes to me
Are more beautiful far than Eden could be.
The home I redeemed from the savage and wild.
The home I have loved as a father his child.
The wife of my bosom, Farewell to ye all.
In the land of the stranger, I rise or I fall.

farewell to my secret garden

my garden in Higgins is no more! such a peaceful place of beauty with one disruptive raven (made by barney). you could get a ride if you could catch on to its feet. and two chirping birds, a radio (a show & tell giveaway that actually got a dozen stations), and one of pandora's magic doors that wormholed you up up to my gypsy caravan on the hill. i've moved my caravan to a barren bluff in Skye overlooking a lovely tropical beach with a coral reef beneath turqouise water. one of the prettiest spots in second life, thanks to my friend and neighbor karuna who has beautified it from the bleak coast it was originally. i couldn't resist putting up a cannon on my bluff to shoot myself out into the bay. i've met 4 or 5 of the neighbors and ridden my horse around some of the Skye sims where alex continues to bring forth exciting landscapes and flora and his specialty, castles. i do fear this is no place to bring my cat, as he is the sort who will fall off the cliff or wander into the ocean, being programmed to behave very much like a cat and randomly ignore the limits you have set him at. maybe one of my friends will take him on. i hate to confine him to a house.

The Sun Magazine

if i had to give one up, The Sun Magazine or The New Yorker, which would it be?
it's as hard as the pizza vs ice-cream question.
i love The Sun Mag -- all these years with no advertising, excellent b&w photography, stories real and made up but always true that if nothing else always have heart and soul and sex drugs and rock n roll, and best of all, the interviews!
once laredo saw me reading The Sun at work and looked at me oddly "You read Sun Magazine?" (emphasis on the YOU) -- like it was a secret cult he smugly belonged to.
what's with that? you mean everyone doesn't like their morning cheerios sometimes seasoned with tears?
the sept interview is with Janine Benyus, a surprising person changing the world.
anyone who ever asked "what would mother nature do to make plywood stick together better?" should read about it in the Sept issue of The Sun.

The Medicated Bodhisattva

when my left thumb hurts
i take all hurting thumbs - and -
also an aspirin

when my throat is sore
give me all painful throats - and
some ibuprophen

~mudpie

zzzzzzzz

I slept all afternoon.
Was the baby born yet?
Did the old woman die?

~mudpie

TSMGO

what could be more fun than The Show Must Go On! - i seldom get pictures of my acts -- i get so intensely involved, which i love!
i once loved my tangly marionettes - still in a box somewhere - and the stage my daddy made for me. and hand puppets when i was librarian, i made my own from papier-mache. now even better, The Show Must Go On! thank goodness Osprey took me off the sordid streets of Second Life and trained me for her Unicyle and Knitting Drill Team before i got lured into who knows what...real estate, or scripting!
now writing acts, rehearsing and performing, getting the animations clicked on time, fighting lag, not falling off the stage, wagging my tail and or leaping at just the right moment in the Yak Ballet...best puppetry ever! and such great audiences, often they are funnier than the show itself! performers come together at 2 pm saturday west coast time, from the west coast, texas, europe, uk, and australia (where it is strangely sunday morning!) the rowdy audience is from all over the planet. the best time to gather from all over the world is 2 pm west coast time on saturday! soon we will wind up the 2009 show and begin filming the 2008 show. don't miss out if you haven't seen it!

It was a sci fi movie btw, we did a storyboard and everything and some 'special effects' too! No tinfoil was harmed.

Two guys came across the grass - it was Tony the librarian and a tall sturdy fellow. "Guess who this is!"
It's Tim, from a hundred years ago when 5 had a name and I was the local librarian and volunteered to make movies with the 'gifted and talented' kids at the 3 room grade school.
And now, OMG, I am that librarian you know the one "There was this librarian when I was a kid and if it hadn't been for the library..."
So here's Tim grown up and visiting from out of state and they have a dusty metal flat canister Tony found for him in the library attic. Tim holds it out hopefully...
"is this the movie we made? remember?"

the sound of one can opening

"I think this cat gets sick every 3 or 4 days 'cause he's constipated."
"Makes sense...he's pretty old."
"Why don't you ask Zinnia to ask Lily about it?"
"OK"
next day...
"Zinnia thought right off it would be pumpkin."
"Pumpkin?"
"And Lily confirmed, yes pumpkin. Best thing for it for an old cat."
"Cats don't eat pumpkin."
"If there's a can opener involved, I'll bet he will!"

they had the wings to go

last night i was reading by lamplight on the porch when a corner of my mind caught a distant sound.
soon closer and louder.
i looked up -- it was dark.
Louder!
i turned off the light and oh, it wasn't dark at all.
a round orange moon sat above the hills brightening the sky.
LOUDER! oh NOOOO it's only SEPT 3 you CAN'T GO!
i ran outside to the grass.
30
40
50
strung out across the sky LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER!
joyful eager and ready to go, exulting as only they can - they flew above the house!
i looked up and down the street - no one else ran out to stand witness on the grass.
gone -- now out of sight over the roof.
i listened them out of hearing and waited.
gone.
only the crickets sounded in the clear chilly moonlight.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

At the pharmacy buying vitamins. The pharmacist hears my voice comes out from behind his shelves of pills saying "this is a really great book! you have to get John to read it!" and lots more about the book and the author. Ringing up my sale, Chris agrees enthusiastically. Two doors down, at the shiretownbooks.com book shoppe , Kelley moves the cat and pulls the trade paperback off the shelf for me ("the next one is out now, too" she shows me a hardcover - 2nd in the series of 3). I take book one to John who says "oh but you know i am in the middle of a couple of books" reads cover and then "i'll take a look at the first page."Since then i have not seen him without The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in front of him! and going on about how great it is. It's like when he discovered The Emperor of Ocean Park and couldn't put it down or stop raving about it. But he says this one inspires him to write, where as The Emperor made him feel he should give it up.

Orange Moon Rising

Who writes poems about summer while it is? would you write a poem about love when with your lover? blue-sky-bright eyes sunny smile showers of laughter warm embrace but now glancing aside, distracted by cricket song, a shiver as coolness of autumn arises orange and round on the horizon and i write a poem.


blinding green, sun slant,
shadows long , crickets chant
goodbye to summer

Lucy as Ophelia

sometimes i live in the city
sometimes in a pixel town
there aint no place like a virtual world
if you get a notion to drown

Irene goodnight Irene goodnight
Goodnight Irene
Goodnight Irene
I'll see you in my dreams

drowning assisted by my friend Enjah