'ere I am!

It says "Hey You", which I find rather too familiar, but then it does come off teh rude Interwebs. It's my Geospots map, a Google-ized variant of the various popular LJ friends' locations widgets:

Look at where my Friends are!
MyGeoSpots Map
Everybody will have one within a week, and then forget about it a week later. Someday, teh Interwebs will be full of obsolete maps showing the places people who once virtually knew one another once claimed to live.

When I first arrived at the site, it offered to put me in Durham, a town several miles from here, so I had to change the location. I have no idea why it thought I was in Durham, though I suppose it's possible that it has something to do with my ISP.

This particular locator can be quite precise, but I didn't exercise that option with my map. If I'd put in my street address, the little marker would have been very near the actual location where I live, but I just put in the name of the town, and so got a marker about where the downtown used to be when the place had one. I don't think that local map will be the first map you see if you click on the thingy above, though. You have to click on the state name links to the left of the map to see the local maps. It might do more stuff, but, like much recent Google-related stuff, I think it isn't entirely compatible with my browser, so I don't know.

Anyway.

It cooled off quite a bit tonight, though not enough to silence the crickets. I'm enjoying their song. The moon is very low in the southern sky, allowing the shadows of the tall trees to cover most of the ground. Flecks of light pass between leaves and branches and needles to gleam here and there, dimly revealing bits of lawn or wall or flowers. Many roses have blossomed lately, and I expect the deer to visit as they find roses to be a particularly tasty snack. So far, I've heard no hooves, though. The crickets and I have the place to ourselves. Oh, and the cat, of course, who hasn't tried to kill me for at least six hours. There's also some extremely tiny, translucent golden bug who has been periodically landing on my monitor. I have no idea what it is, and don't recall having ever seen one of its kind before. I've grown rather fond of it. I hope my spider (still crouched in the same spot) doesn't eat it.

Also, after more than five years with a computer, I've finally bothered to learn how to make screen shots using the print screen key and Windows Paint. I wonder what other stuff this machine can do that I've never figured out? Maybe someday I'll even figure out what that Pause/Break key does.

Now, off to find something interesting to make screen shots of.

Parbroiling

Oh, hot! It's a good thing it rained a lot this year, because I estimate that I'm drinking at least ten percent of the flow of Butte Creek all by myself. I run the risk that my sweat will cause rain clouds to form in my room, of course, and there'll be little storms throughout the day, getting all the electronics wet. But the alternatives are either dehydration, or spending all my time in the furnace the outdoors has become. I hate the idea of starting the air conditioner in the middle of May, but I might be driven to that extreme. The weather is broken! Broken, I say!


Something completely different:

Not really Great Poetry (a lot of what shows up in greatpoets is not great poetry), but a splendid piece of light verse I found more than usually entertaining: Patrick Barrington's My Love is a Theosophist. Theosophy. Heh. The modern Theosophy movement dates back to the 19th century, and in the early 20th century, Southern California became a hotbed of Theosophist activity, much to the displeasure of the mostly conservative Protestants who by then controlled most of the region's positions of power.

Despite establishment disapproval, Theosophy thrived in the area, and Pasadena (a place oddly hospitable to rather peculiar religious institutions) is still the international headquarters of The Theosophical Society, one of the largest Theosophist organizations. The Los Angeles area also proved fertile ground for various offshoots and heresies of Theosophy, including The Gnostic Society and Paramahansa Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship. (A rude little song we used to sing:

Paramahansa Yogananda, parlez-vous?
Paramahansa Yogananda, parlez-vous?
Paramahansa Yogananda, Paramahansa Yogananda,
Paramahansa Yogananda, Ooooommmmmmmm!)

And, of course, there's Scientology, headquartered in Hollywood, but they've totally jumped the couch. It's like Theosphy on 'roids. Growing up in the environs of L.A., I heard a lot about odd religions as a kid, the adults often speaking of them in the lowered voices they used when talking about the crazy aunt who ran off with the carny or the cousin who ended up in prison. As kids we just made jokes about them. But you never knew when the nice old lady down the block with all the flowers in her yard might whip out a tract for some "non-scheduled theology", as Lenny Bruce called them. They were everywhere- everything from Holy Rollers to Wiccans. In the end, most of them weren't that much odder than many of the followers of more conventional religions, so I came to see them as no more than another part of Southern California's rich pageant. As a rule, their sort don't go off and drink the Kool-Ade. They do sometimes end up in front of the speeding lorry, though- but there's nothing very odd about that.