http://seattle.shmeng.com/ Shmeng en-us http://seattle.shmeng.com/images/logo.gif http://seattle.shmeng.com/ webmaster@shmeng.com http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=866 A few years ago, my friend Jim Semonik was diagnosed with cancer. This was actually bad news for the cancer, since he subsequently made the cancer his bitch and kicked it right the fuck out of his colon. He continued to promote shows here in Pittsburgh, as well as perform with his band Rein[forced]. It was after one of these shows that he was talking to Eric Powell of 16volt, when he decided to put out a compilation, and have the proceeds benefit cancer research. This started as a single disc, and then grew to 4 with a 5th digital disc added on near the end. Thus, Electronic Saviors was born. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=865 Preface: Many words have lately become hijacked and given meanings contrary to their original, causing an unusual lack of words to accurately and unambiguously describe terms of integrity or truth (conservative now means religious warmonger, for example, instead of its old meaning which had more to do with actually conserving resources, and science used to just mean knowledge and its objective pursuit but has come to be a dogma unto itself), so damn the torpedoes, here goes truthism. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=864 Rogue just convinced me to fix the Karma system that has been keeping people from posting for the last few years. I can't guarantee that everything else will work - in fact, I know there are a few things that are just broken. I don't have the time or motivation to fix them right now, but at least by fixing the karma, people will be able to post and try to motivate me to fix more. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=863 So, it seems like my installments are being written at the speed of Shmeng. I guess it's a good thing that my trip to Spain was so memorable, I can wait four months and remember it like it happened yesterday. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=862 A few weeks ago, I did something that several of my dear readers had been hoping for years that I would do. I went to Spain and met Arthegarn. These are the chronicles of that historic meeting. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=861 A long time ago, when I was a Catholic and I used to pray, I could hear God in my mind. It's not exactly that I heard It, of course, but I could sense God's replies to my questions and prayers. It was like as if, as I was verbalizing my emotions, giving them the shape of a thought by wordingthem or, at least as I was being conscious of what I felt and thought; I found God's answer inside me. My conversations with God consisted in a discovery, in the removal of a coat of doubt or fear or pain that covered an answer that had always been inside me. They were not, as I have been told that happens to other believers, like a dialog with an external entity. It was much more similar to the echo of a thought: I would make a thought and I felt how it quot;bouncedquot; inside my mind and turned into a reply. But the prayer never got out of my head, it didn't have to cross the vast interstellar spaces to the edge of the Universe to find God there.When I was a Catholic and I used to pray, God was within me. I felt God in me, with me, as a travelling companion, as another organ of my body or another side of my personality; more than as some kind of universal and know-it-all referee. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=860 The people of Israel needed a leader, so we could not fault them for following Moses. They wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, then finally built a home. Once they had a home, they went about the business of actually living. Moses died. His machine kept rolling. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=859 I have to ask you a question. Which is the real you?Is the real you the person who posts twitter like messages throughout the day updating your status with things about folding laundry? Or is the real you the person who posted late into the night, taking great care with the words you chose to put up on the screen? http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=857 Coming back from the burn, daylight lights the coppery-tinted windows of the skyscrapers and cityscape in a way that seems vastly foreign; a week in the desert, dust-soaked and beige-limned, the cleanliness of any urban landscape is alien, dystopic, and an alien distance in the past; like re-visiting the futuristic landscape of a 50's sci-fi drama after living in the neo-post-apocalypse for better than a week. Out on the playa, where the dust storms fly like Afhgani sand and the beat never ceases, just changes tones into the bizarre James Brown-techno-pulse from merengue, these creature comforts of showers and toilets are strange bliss. http://seattle.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=856 I suppose this can be seen as a second installment or a sort of response to MJs child-rearing basics...Let me tell you a bit about my daughter. She is three years old, she has short blond hair and big blue eyes. She runs around with an imp of a grin and a banshee of a shriek. She loves Batman, The Doodlebops, ACDC, and classical music. She has a black cat named Bogie, with whom she plays catch. She is a precocious thing who is too smart for my own good. She also loves wearing her boots. They are brown with a strap and a sparkly buckle thing. Those boots kicked off the whole episode in question.