Things that make you go Tekiya October 6, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Never underestimate the power of stretching. I woke up all stiff and sore, then spent about five minutes giving my spine a nice twist in various positions and now I feel like I’ve just had a barium enema. All fresh and ready for the world.

I just spent the last few days at my parents house which (mostly) accounts for my sparse updates to this blog. My family is rather conservative when it comes to the Jewish holidays, so we spent a good 2-3 hours each day at synagogue. My nephew came the first day (he’s under a year) and he started to sing along with the shofar (ram’s horn) blast. He was in key too. That kid’s going to do something with music.

All this hubub about Bush’s new pick for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, has got me thinking. There are a few key things which make me think this President has lost the support of his party. a) The conservatives are attacking this candidate (although this might be a ploy to lend her legitimacy). b) The President has dropped his agressive pursuit of the social security overhaul saying that the “public just doesn’t have the stomach for it now” or something similar. And c) the Senate passed 90 to 9 a bill which protects the rights of prisoners of war, even though it is expected the President will veto. These aren’t good times to be a die hard Republican. Even attack ads against Doug Forrester here in New Jersey are accusing him of being “Bush’s candidate.” Have the tides turned? Only if the Democrats step up now with some real leadership.

Global warming skeptics may have to retire. A new study has disproved their claim that Global Warming may merely be an effect of more incident solar energy. Not so says this Australian study, which studied trees in bogs over thousands of years. From the article, “The peaks in solar activity do not coincide with peaks in warmer conditions.” Take that Michael Crichton.

Another interesting article in New Scientist states that particles, (and hence reality), “has no independent existence but are defined by how an observer’s motion relates to the geometry of the universe.” That’s incredibly fascinating, because it means that we cannot separate observer from observed, which really means that that the observer and the observed are two aspects of the same thing, which is what many esoteric and mystical traditions have been saying for millenia. There’s too much to list here, but if you’re curious I’ll send you some links.

Finally, I got my ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for Sybil’s Garage yesterday. This enables the magazine to be catalogued easily in stores and elsewhere, and is a nice little number to have for a magazine that started out merely as a twinkle of an idea.