CatchAway

2009-01-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

For the First of the New Year:

Thoughts about Hell!

Who has described Hell the best? Dante's Inferno? Poe? The Bible? Horror writer Lovecraft? Some modern-day film makers? Nightmare on Elm Street is actually the first film I caught glimpses of hell itself. Genuine evil was not only being depicted, but was authentically alive.

But what is hell? Hell, scripturally speaking, is a place where God pulls away His love. The longer I live the more I realize the importance of "thoughts". Everyday thoughts. Every minute, every detail of every split second of thinking, is like you being moved on an immense galactic map of unknown proportions. The moment you stop to think, you are capturing distances and positions on that map. Hell, is where you somehow move about both a known and unknown world. Where every microscopic slice of thought pulls you, moves you, sets you traveling, carving a niche for the next thought.

Without God's love, you 'bang' into everything on this 'map'. You stumble everywhere in constant, perpetual motion with each turning of each thought, because God is no longer there. Tumble over the vast and the small. The outsider looking in would observe a fool at his genius best, fully corrupted man in his finest hour, traveling to better and better moments of foolish and corrupted slices of time.

This is Hell...where God pulls away His love and man is returned to his far fall from perfect love.

2008-09-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

SuperLight

It's no longer fascinating that many hard held beliefs fall to new discoveries. Take the speed of light for instance: one hundred and eighty some thousand miles per second, or close to 8 times around the world in...one second flat.

Ol' Albert Einstein claimed light cannot go faster than...light itself. Imagine a day when discovered are things moving faster than light. About ten years ago observations from astronomers concerning an exploding star or galaxy in some remote part of the sky had a jet of 'something' moving away from the explosion at a rate faster than light. Never read a follow up to that, but think of a discovery someday of..... superlight. What is it? Well, it's there, but you can't see the darned thing because traveling faster than what we may call 'Einsteinien light', superlight becomes instantly dark.

The high-velocity superlight travels veeerrry faaarrr distances in a veeeerrry short period of time. It can replay the universe like someone replays a CD. And may even have a faster 'friend'. Now I read that CD's are on their way out to be replaced by something called Slots. Not Casino style, but a little fancy item that holds hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands of songs. Oh well, I was beginning to look at my CDs as getting a bit antiquated and wondering when the heck they were going to come up with something new anyway. Now there's Blue-Ray...and...how about that DVD that could hold a dozen full length movies and was no more than 3 inch in diameter...?

2008-09-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

What's Out in Space?

More than you may want to Imagine!

Thinking that we are alone in the universe is ...well, silly? Or downright stupid?

Think about this: many of the billions of stars we see up in the night sky are the part of a wheel we live in space called the Milky Way. Each of the billions of stars has a whole lot of planets revolving around them. And there are billions and billions of "wheels". And "disks". And "hat-like" clusters. You say there is no intelligent life somewheres out there? Well...

...first... look up at a starry night sky...and as you do, think about those billions of suns and trillions of worlds out there and numbers beyond numbers. As you get a good picture in your mind at what you are looking at, the vast immense stars and planets, then slowly ...slowly let your eyes move down until they look upon the landscape of this little earth that we are all standing on. And think this: Here is what just one of those worlds look like. Look around.

If you catch the reality of this glance at your earthly-homestead after the stare out into the deep realms of space and all its wonder, that jolt of what it all means may hit you with at least a few sparks to create a little light. That may be all you need to appreciate the heavens a little more, and be amazed!

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2008-08-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on President

Abraham Lincoln,

and Democrat Presidential

Nominee

Barack Obama~

If it was possible, that someone, somewhere, somehow, got to go back into time and whisper in President Abraham Lincoln's ear the name Barack Obama, and showed him a photograph of the first black Presidential nominee, would Abraham Lincoln have wept? Likely he would have stared at that photo for a long, long while, recalling the anguish he saw in his lifetime, the anger of the civil war, the history of slavery in America and the men who fought to abolish it. It would have struck Abraham in the heart with a sense of promise like he may have never known before.

But then, perhaps like in the movie Men in Black, a flash of a hand held object erased ol' Abe's memory of the event, and all that was left was the reality of a divided America in turmoil over the issue of slavery.

Of course, in the year of 2008, there are things I cannot agree with Barack Obama. Abortion takes center stage. I cannot understand how a Christian, as he says he is, cannot read the pertinent passages in scripture and understand the sanctity of unborn life. It seems to fall upon the deaf ears of Speaker Pelosi as well. What vital enzyme are they missing in their logic? Even the Roman Catholic archbishop came out and told Pelosi she was wrong.

I would certainly hope for the best for Barack Obama. God has a way of engulfing seemingly simple men with a seemingly superior passion of strong principals and drive, tho broken human that man in general may be. Certainly Barack Obama exudes promise, a sense of clarity, purpose and energy, tho all the reasons behind it may be hard to explain. Lincoln, on the other hand, would look mostly on promise, of promise achieved, and a sense that America has grown tall in maturing as a nation.

2008-08-17T00:39:00.001-07:00

Thoughts about Seeing

This World Anew

Since breaking thru the sound-barriers of the Christian faith and entering those written-about ethereal experiences... I have become frequently...well the word isn't exactly 'amazed', but more like 'surprised'...at what I missed in the years growing up: that is to say, in those everyday meanings of general conversation . For instance, as to what things actually meant even in idle conversation. And serious conversation as well. Or in just simple 'talk' over the backyard fence with a neighbor. Or across a dinner table. Then there are those passing comments you never give a second thought to. Or never take into consideration the innuendos and shades of meanings. Or remarks that throw light or shade on the talker and the talkee. Somehow, I missed all that.

Everything back then didn't have shades of meaning. They were blunt traumas of white and dark. Bright and grey. Strong and weak. Sometimes, nothing at all. Skipped over and passed by with not the nudge of respect for any existence whatsover that an important observation went unobserved. Now, so many years later, I catch those tides and turns. I see how the body glides thru and cuts thru the waves to make it to the shore. Back then, what mattered if I floated as a dead body onto the sand of some distant unknown continent. I was young. Life meant nothing so deep as the cutting grooves on an old vinyl recording. It was smooth for all I knew and it played music according to my own ears that made sufficient sense to get by thru the day.

Now I see people stopped in their tracks by the few key words placed in pertinent references along the thoughts expressed as a compliment. Where was I all the while back then? I missed out on another world of living people.

What was I? A bouncing bottle sent afloat from one continent to some magical world across the ocean? If so, I finally arrived, and God opened the bottle and dumped me out back into life, this time with an eye or two open. And an ear or two opened as well. Then, some may say, well isn't that what growing up and maturing is all about? To them I say, "You see those old cranky grown ups with absolutely no clue as to what's happening around them. They're still floating in some bottle on that endless ocean somewhere..."

2008-08-06T09:50:00.001-07:00

More Idle Thoughts while waiting to get inspiration and motivation to do a sales call:

Think of all the businesses gone because of new marketplace innovation and new products. Polaroid-Land Camera replaced by digital cameras. The only use of Polaroid is their having sold the name to a company now selling ...digital cameras and products. Or the corner instant printing shop, now vanishing or replaced by shops with quicker copy machines requiring little expertise. Photographic film, disappearing because of the digital chip.

Then there is the home computer: it replaces a thousand reference points: watch movies, listen to radio stations from all over the world; order anything, keep track of airlines, use as a phone, read and order books;watch from millions of videos, see your house from outer space or street level, explore planets; physically move cameras on the Eiffel Tower in Paris to scan the crowds, info sources from a million+ areas. And ALL from a one little squarish box. Who would have ever thought of it before?

Well, actually, no one did.

And it'll likely be like that in the future.

How about a product that replaces ten thousand other products? Or a million? Or more? Or...?

Who would've thought?

2008-08-04T12:26:00.001-07:00

Idle thoughts while waiting for a ride:

The old equation goes like this: If you go faster than the speed of light, you should go back into time. In works in astronomy. It works in a Collider (see my other post on archives). It works something like that with satellites. Satellite clocks are not of the same time as on Earth because of their long duration and speed in space. If the sun were to go out..PFFFTT!...you would'nt know anything for at least 9 minutes. We'd be living, in a way, in the past of an event that already happened. Then I started thinking about what Christ said in scripture pertaining to events already in place along the lines of the sun disappearing and we not knowing of it for some 9 minutes--

Oops! Ride is here.

Studebaker AVANTI

2008-07-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

My idea of the finest car design is a...

"1963 Studebaker Avanti." (pic left). Released as a revised design of a car that would still look modern on streets in 2008, the original plans called for a car 3/4 the final production model. Nothing like it on the roads in early June of 1962. At college, I saw one pull thru the parking lot and it was a memory forever cast upon the imagination. Compared to what was around back then, this was beyond totally amazing. Controversial. Hated by many. Loved by a few. But gosh darn, it still looks good today.

In the photo to the right and center, is pictured the first Avanti (1963), and (in greenish-blue) 43 years later, last Avanti (2006).

However, there was even another attempt made to re-surrect the Avanti. What happened? Perhaps the 'inevitable' drug cartel did in the whole project. Check out the photos of the showroom on their website. All in wonderful...Mexico.
Check out later the last, last Avanti: www.avantimotors.com/ type exactly in finder

(pictured at the very top)
During 1963, there was a Studebaker that never made it to the line-up. Taking a good look at its design, the "Sceptre", as it was called, with the correct engine, may have turned out to have been quite a car.

2008-07-10T07:57:00.001-07:00

With the sound on the TV set way down, do you ever catch yourself reading someone's lips and it sounds in your head like the sound is on? It just flows out right there, for a moment at least. I'm sure some people are pretty good at it. A job I once had for a brief stint was something like that.

Many years ago, I applied for a job from an ad in the newspaper. As a writer. Met my possible boss at the library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. What was I supposed to write about? In a daze about getting a possible writing job, it did not register in my head and, in fact, it may not even have been discussed. Odd? Well, nothing like what I was to write. And, yes, hired on the spot, and showed up at work the following Monday.

His name was Graham Rockley. A Doctor Graham Rockley, of the Rockley Institute, the Rockley Motivational Institute. It was directed, from what I could discern, was the confines of his home. A secretary typed away in the living room. In another room his wife was busy at something. Having a 'printing' background, I was also introduced to his 'printing department' in the basement of his home in Prospect Heights, Illinois. Printing employees? One. Me!

So what was this Rockley Institute? And this Dr. Graham Rockley up to? He was likely a chiropractor, and he was presenting seminars for the small business person, especially those in the chiropractic field. And... he wanted me to write the material for his seminars.

Now I was at that strange time in my life (which seems only to be disappearing lately) when I could do anything the boss asked me to. Motivational seminars for 'chiro-care' professions? Yeah, I could do that! By the way, what's a 'chiro-care'?

The next 30 days or so became the most stressed out time of my life up to then. I worked on this project sometimes writing way into the night. One night I don't recall getting to bed. The long train ride to work that final week gave me pause to figure out just what I had gotten myself into. When I presented my final work to Dr. Rockley, it wasn't until the following day that I got his feedback: he had to let me go. You see, he observed, 'we had de-tuned'!

De-tuned?

What does that mean? Had I been hypnotized all the while and been actually working in a musical instrument company and really repairing the tonal quality of guitars?

I think I had the 'hypnotized' part correctly. For Dr. Rockley was a master at the very thing he wanted me to write about: "How to motivate your employees to do more." Had I written something likened to a flash in a pan, and suddenly burned out? Had Rockley felt there was no way to retrieve that fallen meteor, me? Would that put his techniques of motivating employees in a bad light? I never found out.

Now getting back to this reading the lips thing: What has this Rockley guy and my writing job there have to do with that? Well, this:

What I wrote about was something from deep down inside my psyche. I certainly didn't have a clue about what I was writing about. But I wrote. And what I wrote about was the amazing ability of the mind to read...'stuff'...! Everything! I wrote that the whole world, everything we come in contact with, is talking to us. Like this: in the shapes and curves of objects. In shadows and light. In the very tumblings and collisions of shapes and designs before our eyes. It's all talking. Rapidly. It's talking about the meanings we never dreamt of, and the workings of things far greater than we could imagine. The mind picks it all up. But how do you become conscious of it?

Don't know if I got that far. I found out that morning that was as far as I was going with Dr. Rockely.

Saved many of the pages of rough copy I wrote, but as the years went by those pages disappeared, thru a divorce and moving a lot. Don't know what ever happened to the Rockley Academy or Dr. Graham Rockley himself. But for a short time, perhaps really just a moment or two, I could read stuff like you read the lips of people on the TV. With the sound turned way down.

2008-07-08T19:46:00.000-07:00

A rare photo for sure, of youngster Ray Bradbury, science-fiction author extraordinaire (Bradbury never did like the science-fiction label)...standing next to his mother. Far right, his brother. Photo was taken when the family lived a short time in Arizona.

(click on photo for enlargement)

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2008-07-07T20:34:00.001-07:00

South Orange

County, in California

can sure take on a different look in hours.

The bottom photo is early morning, looking towards
Los Angeles

The top photo has the cloud lifting like a curtain,
looking in the same direction, several hours later.

click on photos for full size image

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2008-07-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

A NO gasoline,

NO oil,

NO hydrogen,

NO hi-tech battery

needing car is

actually possible

someday...

...IF ONLY WE COULD FIGURE OUT WHAT IS...

______GRAVITY!!______

What's so difficult about that? Just design a 'gravity-engine'. Call it something like a GMAS, conveniently standing for "gravity manipulation acceleration system"! Fancy!

Plan is simple: 'trick' a car into thinking it's going downhill! Temporarily "bending gravity", give that 3,500+ pound plus transporter sufficient reason to think "downhill" even tho it's a straight-away all the way to San Jose. Install this nifty oil-interventioner into that spiffy sportscar, and give the old gravity bogey-man a Heave-Ho, sling-shoting that shiny racer to 200+ mph from a perfect standstill! (The fastest anything can move in a gravity free-fall is approx. 240mph, depending on size and wind-resistance).

Isaac Newton, (pictured above) saw in 1687 an apple fall, and it dawned in Newton's energizer mind that something "pulled" that apple down off that tree, bonking the noggin of some unknown participant of enormous historic scientific discovery. Newton called gravity a "rule of the cosmos".
Kepler in 1605, didn't know what it was (that Newton would later name), but he saw it by precise measurements of the orbits of the planets.
Einstein in 1916, (to make a long story short)...imagined in his head, not an apple falling on that chap's head that got bonked centuries past, but an imaginary man falling off an imaginary building, and birthed the theory of relativity.

The long and short of it: At the most fundamental level, no one knows exactly what is "gravity'.

If gravity can bend light waves, perhaps there is something that can bend gravity. That discovery certainly would put the Oil Cartel into a de-acceleration, panic mode. Of course, such a discovery would not only be confined to one area, like automobiles. Numerous consequences from such a discovery, both good and bad, now imagined and certainly unimagined, would change the world ...forever!

2008-07-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

Oil Paintings 'peeled' from Glass

Paintings, like the one pictured of a raft like object going over water falls, were created by accident beginning about 20 years ago. Working as a pressman in printing, I noticed one day a very surprising and wonderful image on a piece of paper. It happened by the ordinary methods of cleaning up a press after a day's work.

Simply stated, it involves a plate glass, various chemicals that dilute printer's oil based inks, and large sheets of heavy gloss printing paper. That and some hand-work on pressing the paper onto ink applied strategically onto glass. (click on painting for actual size)

Latest exposure of the finished work to the public was one month display of 2 of the paintings, along with the work of several others artists, in the front entrance area of the largest attended church in southern California, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. If one thing is true, it is this: the paintings must have been photographed hundreds of times by visitors eager to capture anything that looked even remotely needing to be photographed.

2008-07-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

Would you Visit a City Where 1,000 + people are often murdered each year?
WELCOME TO CHICAGO

Tho I now live in Southern California, Chicago's TV station, WGN comes in loud and clear. And lately, every time the Chicago newscast is on, the first 5 or 10 minutes is spent reporting the killings in Chicago. Often followed up by a video of a hurried get-together of concerned citizens from the neighborhood (together with the local priest or minister) they march around shouting at Mayor Daley to do something to stop the violence. The thing is, the picture that I'm watching day after day, it seems lately, is the same news, the same marching, the same hollaring at the same Mayor that I've been experiencing during the years I spent in Chicago.

Take a look at this newspaper page from the Chicago Tribune. It's from a few years back. Click on the photo and enlarge the page, and then read the names and ages. It's pathetic! Every name of everyone killed during one year is listed, from the tiniest, to the teenager, to the middle-aged, to the oldest. They're all there! Hundreds and hundreds of names.

Mayor Daley is letting the permits fly for the mammoth construction of buildings and the tearing down of dilapitated neighborhoods. But he just can''t seem to stem the tide of violence in the city. What gives? Others cities do.

2008-07-05T18:47:00.001-07:00

July 5th 2008

Does all end with the

Hadron Collider at

FULL SPEED ???

A number of people on this planet are worried about the Hadron Collider to be switched on in August, 2008. Capable (some think) of destroying this planet ??? Well?

If it ain't one thing, it's another: man-made/cyclical warming, man-made/cyclical cooling! (COOLING was very in vogue back in the late 1950's, early 1960's...we were all going to FREEZE over soon). Then there is more garbage than the planet can survive with! (Go see WALL-E. No, on second thought, don't! Lousy environmental 'toon). However, this Collider business is probably close to the front of the line of 'one more of those things to worry over'!

Actually, the 'worriers' can back off a bit. It'll take up to three months for the giant collider to reach full ethreal steam. (Click on above photo to get a better idea of the enormous circular area the Collider stretches underground) By then it will either doom the magnetic field of Earth, create black holes that will consume us all, or simply blow up part of their buildings. Can there be a mishap? The Collider does create unstable things. Physics genius Stephen Hawking made a comment that if it really does create a black hole, at best the hole should just immediately up and vanish. But is the thought that a 1 in 80 million chance of something drastically going wrong (as some scientist has suggested) sufficient to ease the minds of the over-worried when you ponder the winner of a lottery with odds even higher?

But perhaps one of the most amazing discoveries that is hoped to be found is something called

"super-symmetry."

Super-symmetry is this: when we see an object in the mirror (which according to this experiment is in truth our daily reality) there is the actual object, the real object itself being reflected. The collider hopes to uncover this other dimension that reveals the true object. Now if that ain't scary, I don't know what is! "Hey Fred. You're not really...real! But maybe the collider will show us the REAL Fred!"

While in high-school (late 1950's), Russia was about to ignite a up-to-then unheard of 100+ megaton nuclear bomb as a test. Everyone worried that it would ignite the atmosphere and be the end of us all. Even tho there are lawyers trying to stop the present day Collider, and there are demonstrations happening and planned, it likely will be a 'GO!' for August. Sort of the same thing back in those 100+ megaton days. No lawyers then, but demonstrations. The bomb went off, and the atmosphere remained. However, we all worried again, this time more than a little when the large radiation cloud moved over Chicago. I'm sure there were prayer groups in Churches asking for weather intervention so that it wouldn't rain. It didn't!

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2008-07-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

Back in 1974, I came out with 3 issues of a zing-zap mostly poetical stare at the space program. Came up with the name... 'Interplanetary New Paper Witness' while living in San Francisco and attending one of Bay-areas old science fiction clubs, held in Berkeley. The title really had no specific meaning except that it sounded pretty good back then. Stylized logo on the front page and large, LA Times newspaper format, was all a labor of madness. (click on photo to enlarge)

Set all the type on a table top contraption called a Vari-Typer, which was ponderous, made a lot of noise, and you had to type everything twice in order for the type in the columns to be even on the left and right sides. You pressed a single key, it made whirrling, zippy noises, and then you were ready for the second letter. Yowie! The 3 issues were all put together at an abandoned 2nd floor dentist office I rented for $50 across the street from the Colony movie theater, on the southwest side of Chicago. Spent 2 years writing there, and, except for the first issue which I printed myself, had the other two issues printed by a genuine newspaper printer.

So much going on now on the internet and elsewhere it sounds silly to even begin to think of starting it up again, but it's fun to...try! (Should begin with altering the title a wee bit? Sounds so ponderous now, like that Vari-Typer nowadays.)

July 5, 2008

2008-07-05T17:17:00.000-07:00

Interplanetary New Paper Witness

(founded March, 1974)

Nard Kordell, editor

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July 5th, 2008

Astronomers In Japan Will Look For Intelligent Life in the cosmos, mid-2009. Unable to find much here, the prospects for something akin to reasonable care of the species is being sought elsewhere.

Shinya Narusawa heads the project at Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in Sayo Town, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. Target will likely be extrasolar planet 'Gliese 880' in the Libra constellation.

The hope is discovering something like an artificial signal and transmission. But so what? 'Gliese 880' is likely more light years away in distance than our oldest history of long gone kings, rulers and societies. Should we discover such a signal and shout back, what then? Wait a thousand years or more for an answer?

Should our very Sun go out for some unheard-of, unexplainable and impossible cosmic event, we poor living Earth persons wouldn't sense a thing wrong for...nine minutes is it? Nine impossibly wrong minutes where nothing seemed amiss. Then blackness and the beginning of the end on Earth on the 10th minute.

Earth sits near the edge of our galaxy, The Milky Way. And the only reason why grand telescopes see other galaxies, even into farthest depths of the universe, and onto the very farthest, The Great Wall (as it's called), where pass that frontier wall (really in reverse) lies greater unknowns and mystery, is that we are...near the 'edge' of our galaxy. Should we have been birthed, instead, on an Earth near the center, the brightness of the stars of our own galaxy would obliterate any sense of anything beyond the immensely bright and starry sky that would practically hold no room for even the momentary blackness of something called space.

(If you read Japanese, then no problem. Otherwise, you can look at a couple pictures of the main telescope for the project, which is said to be capable of viewing stars of twentieth magnitude! Lingo for far, far, far away!):
type into finder~ http://www.nhao.go.jp/

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