Sam and Eva Kemp raised very young sons, Dick and
Jon, on their farm north of Fort Collins, Colorado in Weld County. The nearest
town was Ault.
When they moved to Fort Collins for a better school, John McClure moved to the
farm and farmed for "Dad" (Sam). Sam had a hybred strain of popcorn
(Kempkorn) that got the family through rough times. McClure later purchased the
farm, and the last Gina heard (1970's?) the McClures were still there.
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The story of Gilgamesh is set in the kingdom
of Uruk (in Mesopotamia). It begins with the goddess Aruru creating a
completely wild man.
She "pinched off a piece of clay, cast it out into open country. She
created a primitive man, Enkidu ... offspring of silence ... shaggy with hair
... luxuriant like grain. He knew neither people nor country ... he eats
vegetation ...".
The locals are terrified of this untamed warrior who runs with the gazelles. It
is especially troubling that Enkidu keeps freeing wild animals from the
hunter's snares! Gilgamesh contracts the whore Shamhat to seduce Enkidu. Once
seduced, Enkidu can no longer run with the gazelles. The wild animals now flee
from him.
"Enkidu had been diminished ... yet he had acquired judgement, had become
wiser ... he listened to what the harlot said 'You have become profound Enkidu,
you have become like a god. Why should you roam open country with wild beasts?'
". She entices Enkidu to return to Uruk with her, where he and Gilgamesh
become inseparable companions. Enkidu never recovers his direct relation with
the land and its wild inhabitants.
The parallels with Adam, Eve, and the expulsion from the garden are a little
hard to ignore. The tale of Gilgamesh is translated from cuniform tablets
unearthed at various sites in what is now Iraq. Ancient stuff from one of the
first agricultural, settled, cultures. Chewing over questions like "What
is a hero?" "Why are the gods crazy?" and "What does it
mean to come out of the wild to till and irrigate and live in the city?"
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Now I may spill some beans (if this movie could be
said to have any) so read on at your own discression:
I was expecting minimal theme, plot, character development, etc. - just enough
to support the special effects. I was not disappointed. I thought the acting
was rather good (pleasant surprise). The cyberpunk premise is about as
realistic as The Wizard of Oz... but since I took it at the same level
of entertainment as that series of books - it was a great ride! And to give it
it's due - the photography and effects really were first rate.
Within the unreality of a virtual future, morphing, men-in-black style bad guys
and such - they managed to make the virtual real. And share cynical humor with
the audience (I've been a sucker for that since "The Avengers" TV
show). "Hang on Dorothy, Kansas is about to go bye-bye".
The funny thing was - next morning I found myself musing about the elements
behind the movie. Ancient elements. Golems run amok (intelligent machines being
the modern golem). The comming of the messiah. Humanity's out of control self
destructive nature (byte the fruit of the tree of knowledge - go ahead - it'll
make you a god).
One part nagged at my poor abused brain till it finally surfaced. See - these
folks are living in a virtual world - their bodies are laying around somewhere
with probes stuck in 'em and most of humanity is completely lost in the dream.
Our heros have (of course) awoken from this virtual reality, and go back in to
rescue others. The thing is that in this state your mind is really in the
virtual world. You get killed there or the connection with your body gets
snapped, you die. Took me untill the next day to remember the astral travel
literature and the dangers of snapping the "silver thread". So even
in this detail the techno dark dream expresses old intuitions, in high tech
clothes.
So if you are looking for realism or plot or something - don't waste your time.
Want some dark techno humor? Some light reminders of the ghosts of the human
soul? Very good acting, given the material they're working with... and really
enjoyable eye candy? Don't miss it!
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I'm not sure where this originated, it came to me
by e-mail. Not sure how accurate it is, but here it is anyway:
Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over
the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English
soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned
English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future.
This famous weapon was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of
drawing the longbow was known as "plucking the yew" (or "pluck
yew").
Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began
mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French,
saying, "See, we can still pluck yew! PLUCK YEW!"
Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster
at the beginning has gradually changed to alabiodental fricative 'F', and thus
the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute are mistakenly
thought to have something to do with an intimate encounter.
It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow
that the symbolic gesture is known as "giving the bird".
And yew thought yew knew everything!
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Next to the day, the week is the most important
calendric unit in our life. And yet, there is no astronomical significance to
the week. Nothing cosmic happens in the heavens in seven days.* How, then, did
the week come to assume such importance?
The first thing to understand is that a week is not necessarily seven days. In
pre-literate societies weeks of 4 to 10 days were observed; those weeks were
typically the interval from one market day to the next. Four to 10 days gave
farmers enough time to accumulate and transport goods to sell. (The one week
that was almost always avoided was the 7-day week -- it was considered
unlucky!) The 7-day week was introduced in Rome (where ides, nones, and calends
were the vogue) in the first century A.D. by Persian astrology fanatics, not by
Christians or Jews. The idea was that there would be a day for the five known
planets, plus the sun and the moon, making seven; this was an ancient West
Asian idea. However, when Christianity became the official religion of the
Roman empire in the time of Constantine (c. 325 A.D.), the familiar
Hebrew-Christian week of 7 days, beginning on Sunday, became conflated with the
pagan week and took its place in the Julian calendar. Thereafter, it seemed to
Christians that the week Rome now observed was seamless with the 7-day week of
the Bible -- even though its pagan roots were obvious in the names of the days:
Saturn's day, Sun's day, Moon's day. The other days take their equally pagan
names in English from a detour into Norse mythology: Tiw's day, Woden's day,
Thor's day, and Fria's day.
The amazing thing is that today the 7-day week, which is widely viewed as being
Judeo-Christian, even Bible-based, holds sway for civil purposes over the
entire world, including countries where Judaism and Christianity are anathema.
Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Africans, Japanese, and a hundred others sit down at
the U.N. to the tune of a 7-day week, in perfect peace (at least
calendrically!). So dear is this succession of 7 days that when the calendar
changed from Julian to Gregorian the week was preserved, though not the days of
the month: in 1752, in England, Sept. 14 followed Sept. 2 -- but Thursday
followed Wednesday, as always. Eleven days disappeared from the calendar -- but
not from the week!
--------
*Yes, it's true that the average time from, say, half-moon to full moon is
7.383 days, but this is less than 12% closer to 7 than to 8. (Possibly mindful
of this, the Romans had an 8-day week.) In any case, the exact moment of half
or full moon is hard to judge. The moon determines the month, not the week (the
very word "month" has been related to "moon" for thousands
of years; in Sanskrit they are the same.)
- Vincent Mallette
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OK - I can't stand it - This is for the geeks and
webheads among us...
For those blessed to be "out of the loop", HTML is the code name for
the computer language used to create web pages on the Internet. You are looking
at a product of HTML right now. XML is a new buzzword that is getting a
ridiculous amount of hype as the "next generation" of HTML. It
isn't.
<Tirade> This XML hype is a pile of hooey!
First off - XML is not a language. It is a specification about how to make
specialized languages for data transfer. Everybody who wants to transfer data
with XML has to form a committee to design their own semi-private language. Is
anybody excited yet?
Get a clue geeks! This is smoke and mirrors! According to one of it's
designers, XML leaves the "hard part" to other folks, i.e. deciding
what the data specifications actually are... and in the same article
(Scientific American May 1999) he says that "Battalions of programmers
will be needed" to make this sucker work. At least he's honest.
So the part that XML requires but does not define is the meat and potatoes of
transferring data. I can't tell you how many hours I've played middleman
between various managers in a company trying to get them to agree on data
definitions such as "what is an invoice date?"... Dilbert is an
accurate picture of corporate America today (clueless)... especially about how
their own businesses work... and this is what XML requires but does not
specify.
Again - for the geeks among us - XML is just a beautification of EDI
(Electronic Data Interchange)... for that I am thankful. It will be a
heck of a lot easier to integrate into web based exchanges. But all the hype is
ridiculous. It is like the 1500/1 P/E ratios on web stocks - heck - there is
no P/E ratio on a lot of web stocks because there has never been any E!
Anyway - XLM is a heck of a lot better than EDI... but the hype is more
appropriate for selling used cars, running for president, or for the IPO of a
"dot com". </Tirade>
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