H. Kent Craig
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H. Kent Craig |
| January 2005 Blog Archive |
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Monday, January 31 
Here a couple of photos I took in request for a couple of readers of my blog who wanted to see this knife I mentioned I had bought at the Dixie Knife & Gun Show a couple of weeks back.
Even though the handle is plastic and shows its age, I’m estimating that this is from the late 60’s to early 70’s, the steel that the blade is made out of, is something else! With a perfectly-made taper, the steel is obviously hand-forged or at least drop-hammer forged for the initial pattern and then finished by hand-forging, there a couple of “tells” that tell me that it was, and then expertly heat-treated before the knife was finished. What I love most about this blade is its late 13th Century/Early 14th Century Florentin (Italy) dagger pattern, 8” long, the perfect dagger length, and with the tiniest bit of forward-balance, as all true daggers should have. 
Among quality commercially-made knives from any post-Industrial era, you just don’t see this particular pattern, which is why I jumped on it.
The handle says “Anderson, Glendale, California” on one side and “U S A” on the other. I did a Google and there’s not an Anderson Knives or Anderson Cutlery anywhere, but there is someone named Anderson who is selling factory-made knives. I intend to write to him and see if this was his original creation all those years ago or if he knows who did make it. +++++++++++++++++++++ 
I had lunch with my parents today and during lunch, my Alzheimer’s-ridden father almost exploded and did get very angry and accused me of stealing his mail.
Those of you who pray, please remember my father, Harold Craig, in your prayers tonight, thank you. Friday, January 28 
Had the very distinct pleasure of having a nice lunch today with Russell Smith of
Starr Electric’s Durham NC office
.
Russell has been a loyal reader of my regular column on project management in Contractor magazine and had written me a very nice email about a recent column where I had pissed and moaned about how our profession was changing from one of project to more process management, politely and respectfully disagreeing with me, he seeing the future of PM’ing as a career from the perspective of the glass being half-full rather than half-empty even with all the coming changes because construction jobs will always be unique and someone will have to manage them. Russell has only been a project manager for about five years, having come into it from the architectural/engineering construction quality assurance field and at a young forty-three brings the kind of honesty, integrity, energy and dedicated professionalism to our industry that will ensure his success in the future and makes him a credit to it now. I had wanted to meet him for lunch at Bullock’s BBQ in Durham , Bullock’s being one of three of my all-time favorite Eastern North Carolina-Style pork barbecue places (Clyde Cooper’s in Raleigh and Wilber’s in Goldsboro being the other two; please go to my BBQ Page for a listing of all my barbecue joint reviews) but had somehow forgotten that Bullock’s doesn’t open for lunch until 11:30AM, not 11:00 as was our appointment to meet, I having to get back to Cary by 2:30PM to attend to other matters, so . . . so, taking an emailed invitation from earlier this week to heart from the owner of the establishment who had suggested to me I stop by and try his place and then maybe review it for my BBQ Page, I suggested to Russell instead of waiting half an hour for Bullock’s to open, we run around the corner to 
Hog Heaven Bar-B-Q on Guess Road in Durham.
Big mistake, trying a new, untried place for a semi-business semi-personal business-oriented lunch. I’m going to do a full review of Hog Heaven Bar-B-Q next week so I’ll spare words here now, let’s just say my recommendation is not to go there unless nearby Bullock’s isn’t open and maybe even then still don’t go. Yeah, not good at all. ++++++++++++++++++++ While in Durham, trying to combine three business-oriented stops with a couple of personal ones, stopped by one of my all-time neat-o antique/slash/junque shops, “Everything But Granny’s Panties” to see if they happened to have a fairly hard-to-find semi-antique semi-yard-sale item, a tri-fold or four-panel privacy screen like you used to see in old movies. I wanted a couple of them for later on this year when I get back into my art, am going to use them as the physical bases for triptych paintings. “Granny” didn’t have one in the shop right then but said she had at least one in inventory and would save it for me and bring it to the shop tomorrow so I could pick it up then and it was just, well, the price is none of your business, Grin, but let’s just say I was very happy with the price, I know the market value of it and it was about 50% under what any other place would have charged me. When I go back to Durham tomorrow to pick it up, provided we’re not being hit by the blizzard which is forecast to hit this area tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to stop by the gravesite of the deceased wife of Gen. Julian S. Carr, a local industrialist who gave the land that Duke University sits on right now back in the late 1800’s (Gen. Carr gave the land and “Buck” Duke gave the money for the endowment and the buildings that now sit atop Gen. Carr’s donated land in what is now downtown Durham). My second-ex-wife, Liann, was a huge fan of cemeteries and me being an empath I didn’t mind, it’s live people who bother me, not dead ones (though a scared or beligerant spirit can nag you to tee-total-death, pardon the expression, especially if they’ve been lonely or very bored for a long time), and she kinda got me hooked on visiting old, historic cemeteries, a hobby which I found out is much more popular than you might think. Anyway, the gravesite of Gen. Carr’s widow is the greatest single tribute at a cemetery I have ever seen created to honor a passed-on loved on. Words can not describe the beauty of its sculptures, the attention to its architectural geometry, its touching way it invites you in to honor the love that General Carr obviously felt for his wife. Unless it starts snowing, and I’ve meant to do this for ages and will try to do it tomorrow so I can do a static webpage to add it to my listings, will take many photos of it and get some measurements and all and then share it with you later next week or soon. +++++++++++++++++++++++ Speaking of webpages and NC-BBQ places, if you want to see a truly horrendous mistake in web page design, check out Smithfield Chicken & Barbecue’s homepage . I gotsta’ ask you, folks, even those of you who don’t do design work, when you include not one but three virtually identical advertising boxes for something totally unrelated to the main product you’re trying to sell, in this case you’re trying to sell barbecue and your webmonkey places three ad box for MSNBC cable network squarely in the middle of your corportate headquarters homepage, don’t you think that is just plain dumb, too? I mean, does the dollar-and-fifty-cents in quarterly pay-per-click revenue generated by those ads really mean that much to Smithfield Barbecue’s owners that they’re willing to totally ugly-up what amounts to the frontdoor of their business? Go figure. When I saw that, I just scratched my head. Having a dynamically-generated topic-specific ad banner like Google Adwords which I have all over my own site here is one thing, for one thing Google’s system reads the content of each page and then places relevant ads appropriate to the content of that page, but to have static, non-topical ads on your homepage just for what, less revenue than a barbecue sandwich costs? Still scratching my head over that one. BTW, the main reason I have Google Adword boxes all over my site isn’t for the couple of bucks of revenue they generate me, I just as soon not have the revenue and not have to bother to declare it as income, Seriously, it’s because placing a Google Ad-Banner on a page helps ensure the Google algorithm will pick it up and work its way through the Google page-rank hierarchy, just sharing a little web design trade knowledge with you. +++++++++++++++ And lastly for today, since this I don’t blog on the weekends unless something extraordinary happens, just wanted to plug my favorite radio station in this whole wide world, WKNC-FM which is the campus radio station for nearby NC State University, NC State University where men are men and sheep at university-sponsored veterinary research farms run scared. Click on this link to go to KNC’s website where you can find out how to easily stream KNC’s live radio broadcast directly to your desktop. WKNC, the best in college-oriented rock. And yes, I am forty-eight, not eighteen years old. Thursday, January 27 
By eight o'clock this morning I had talked with one friend and three acquaintances about Maryland's victory last night over Duke. Maryland didn't throttle Duke, didn't smash them to pieces, didn't make them look bad, they just had more points than Duke at the end of the game. Every single person I talked to this morning about last night's game asked the same question: "did Duke throw the game?"
This isn't the first time this question has been raised when a clearly inferior opponent has made look Duke look bad for all but the last two or three minutes of the game when Duke would somehow kick it in a higher gear almost without effort and win at the last minute (typical of many Duke teams the past ten or so years) or even beaten Duke on the road when they were playing an opponent on the opponent's home court (rare, especially if the opponent is a non-ACC opponent, but it has happened). But for Duke to lose at home to a Maryland team that Duke's third stringers should have been able to beat makes one scratch one's head indeed. So many people are convinced that one or more Duke players throw games that it just flabbergasts me. I an not saying that Duke players, past or present, have ever thrown a single game, and definitely NOT saying or implying that they are "on the take", NO, I am NOT saying that!!!, let me make that beyond clear, I am merely recording the speculations of others in a pubic blog. Coach K of Duke is a beyond-honorable man. I honestly believe if he even had a tiny suspicion that a single one of his players deliberately tried to throw a game for any reason, he would cancel the rest of Duke's season. I truly believe that. Thing about the top twenty elite basketball colleges of which Duke stays consistently in and actually in the Top Five in the country is that even if one or two or even three players on a squad want to throw a game, if they're not producing during the game to Coach K's standards, then they are immediately pulled from the game and replaced with a player of virtually equal skill levels. It's hard to try to throw a game when you're an elite team like Duke unless the entire and I do mean entire team is in on it and as much as all the players love Duke as not just a basketball team and college and institution, I refuse the believe that the entire team could or would conspire to shave even one-tenth of a point let alone throw an entire game. They simply have too much pride. Yet, when a so-so NC State team beats Maryland by 25 on Maryland's home court a couple of weeks back and then State loses six games in a row and Maryland struggles against four nuns and a three-legged goat and then dominates a clearly superior team like Duke, you can learn three very valuable lessons: conspiracy theories are for suckers, college kids aren't pros even if they think they are some of the time, and all bets on college sports are made from the heart and not from the head. 'Nuff said. ++++++++++++++++++++++ Just got through watching #22 nationally ranked Georgia Tech beat #5 nationally ranked Wake Forest at GT 102 to 101 in an overtime game that came down to Wake Forest having the last shot to win with 2.8 seconds to go and Chris Paul their star player driving to the lane and missing the relatively easy for him eight footer. It was like watching the basketball equivalent of "The Thrilla' In Manila" and the ACC basketball season is just beginning to get cranking. Will there be other ACC matchups even better than this game tonight before the season ends? You betcha. Hard to believe, I know, but yes, there will be. Do you think a diehard ACC basketball fan thanks God everyday for being born into the heart of the premier league of college basketball in the United States Of America? You betcha! Wednesday, January 26
My eighty-three-year-old father has been having a particularly bad few days lately and his Alzheimer's, along with my eighty-year-old mother's complete denial that he has it despite nine of their ten core Doctors telling them both that he has it ("well, the one says he doesn't have it, that his behavior is result of a light stroke, and he is a Doctor after all!"…."but Mum, what about all your other physicians that have flat-out told you he has Alzheimer's, including Dr. Moreschi that's been treating you both now for what, 20 years?"…."well, the one could be right and the rest be wrong!"), is just sucking the life out of me.
I made a vow, no, I made an oath to them both years ago to do whatever it took to keep one or both out of rest homes slash resident care facilities for as long as I could, but I am an only child and there is no one to help me with them and I don't mind admitting publicly that I almost regret making that promise to them all those years ago, right now at least. I know there is one of God's lessons in all this for me, shoot, probably more than a single lesson, so I try to be level-headed and strong as possible and not be a complainer even though I am publicly complaining now a bit I guess and definitely not be a whiner about things since I can't stand blankety-blank whiners. I do know if I ever chose to break my word to them and say "screw it" and not be here for him/them right now when they need me most, my doing that would hurt me a lot worse than it would ever hurt them, I would never be able to trust me for my own word ever again, so I do what is necessary when it is necessary. I am healer, dammit (sounds like a SNL parody of Star Trek episode now, doesn't it?), but even I as a healer can only do so much. I don't heal, let me make that very clear, I understand and know that only God can heal, I'm just merely a conduit and even then when I heal there's a true lesson in that for me as well as the person whose path I have crossed to "heal". It is so frustrating for me who, as a conduit of God's purpose and love and energy, has healed those with so-called incurable inconditions who were given literally days or even just hours to live and I can't do damn eff'ing thing for my own father. But now I am complaining close to the border of whining, sorry. In Pop's aura and in my deep scan of him, I see a veneer of submicroscopic aluminum. No surprise there. I have seen similar in many other Alzheimer's patients, including the auras and bodies of Pop's six older brothers who have passed before him, he's the oldest of the four remaining alive, all of his brothers also dying of Alzheimer's at about his age now which even he remembers or dying of complications related to Alzheimer's, so no big surprise there. I've been saying since I was a small child and saw the reflection of body-and-brain aluminum in my scan of a family friend who had Alzheimer's that it's not aluminum of and by itself causes Alzheimer's but the way certain combinations of family-trait genetics handle and process and sometimes, yes, embed aluminum in brain and body fat cell tissues sometimes and not always but enough of the time to cause damage, the molecular-level sub-atomic-almost trace aluminum which is so slight even most so-called modern medical scans and test can barely if ever pick these residues up, yet. Yet, sigh. I'm only one of a large host of empaths and healers that have been trying to tell the medical science community this for decades and I know of only one or two studies in passing that have even sniffed at this as a possibility for finding a "cure" for Alzheimer's. I say that with skepticism since, just like viri, if you find the cure for one virus or one genetic condition, once our still-primitive medical science advances far enough to be able to do that, you can then extrapolate the technology and find "cures" for the rest of them. What if I am right and there is a direct genetic-link to aluminum absorption and deposition in the brain and other fatty tissues, does that mean one should never drink out of a soda can or throw all their aluminum cookware away? Of course not! Even if you did, there is so much air-borne aluminum around in most urban communities which isn't noticed let alone regulated by the EPA since it's not considered a hazardous substance by them so you can fugitaboutit. You can't live your life or make decisions based on near-irrational fears of what might be no matter how remote the possibilities. You chose the path you chose before you came here for a reason and only you and God knows that reason or reason(s) plural. Don't worry about it. Act prudently, but not fearfully. Don't speed, don't smoke, don't share IV needles with crack addicts or anyone else for that matter, but other than the friggin' obvious, just don't worry about it, live by The Golden Rule as best you can and then just don't worry about it! ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Picked an old CD from my "B" collection to listen to while I wrote today's blog and picked at random Van Halen's "OU812". After the first song I wondered aloud why I spent the $15 to buy it in the first place back in the 80's and then "When It's Love" came on next and I remembered why since "When It's Love" is truly one of the great rock power ballads of all time. And when "Feels So Good" played at Track #6, it was one of those "oh yeah"'s, "that's why I bought the CD". I love both songs and the rest of the tracks, unless you're a beginning guitarist who wants some wicked licks that almost no one else save Eddie Van can do live but you still want to try to copy them, the rest of the album is so-so. I've always thought Eddie Van to be more a guitar stage magician than a world-class guitarist, there's several hundred guys out there who could play him off the stage in a live cutting-heads contest, but still you gotta give the guy credit for laying it down the way he figured out how to do, even if it is great nice-sounding noise instead of great guitar playing. The fact that only Eddie Van sounds like Eddie Van is testament enough to some skill in there somewhere if it is stage magic instead of musicianship. And, you gotta love Sammie Hagar. He, along with Steve Perry of Journey define what a lead singer for a power-rock stadium-band is supposed to sound like, giving credit to Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon who actually invented the genre, much like Ronnie James Dio and Ozzy Ozborne define what a lead singer of a heavy-metal concert band is supposed to sound like, also giving credit to John Kay of Steppenwolf who not only invented the genre but whose influence is felt across many other platforms of music to this day. Unique, quality voices are genuinely hard to find, I mean, look at American Idol, and Sammie's is definitely both unique and quality and a pleasure to listen to. "Feels So Good" is one of those songs I would like blaring in my headphones to psych me up if and when I ever need to go into combat. Although the lyrics are a little syrupy, that driving bass line just gets my adrenalin going. Damn good two songs and an album worth picking up if you don't mind the otherwise slightly adolescentile and sophomoric and frat-boy and somewhat misogynistic lyrics of some of the songs. Tuesday, January 25 
Last night's episode of
"Medium"
on NBC continued to break totally new ground on network television, going all the way to edge of the sensibilities of most of middle America and tippy-toeing slightly over them.
In one of the three subplots of the evening, Allison's young six-year-old daughter who has just started first grade hasn't made any friends and spends much time while outside on the playground with an apparently imaginary friend who of course isn't imaginary at all but instead is a "trapped spirit" bound by pain and hurt and loneliness on this plane like so many so-called "ghosts" and the interwoven thread deals with Allison's husband's somewhat negative reaction to his/their daughter being an empath/medium like his wife/her mother is and Allison's very touching and very real-life-based motherly concern and love and then using the opportunity to gently begin teaching her daughter about what, in Allison's own oft-repeated words "something I wouldn't ever wish on my worst enemy!", the reality of being a dweller and communicator between two worlds. Doing this blog has given me not such much more courage but definitely more resolve to be even more honest to the world about certains of my realities, my being an empath/sensitive/medium among them. I no longer fear what consequences, whether those consequences be positive or neutral or negative, befall me because of this increased not so much honesty because it's been my reality that I must always answer an honest question with an honest answer but increased public persona which based on my always-present desire to help others, by words yes but also by examples. The segment of the episode concludes with Allison taking her daughter in the middle of the night to the school's playground where the spirit of her daughter's friend resides in pain because he was killed there very traumatically five years before which bound his spirit to that place and then in a moment that should be worthy of an Emmy® nomination, she and her daughter and the manifestation of the spirit of the dead little boy all lay down on the playground's grass together and drift off to sleep together, the little boy so desperately wanting to sleep, to rest after five years of being afraid to because he was afraid of what was to come next which he didn't know which is why he was afraid and in sleep came rest, eternal rest. No preaching, no special effects, no over-dramatizing, just a moment I know had to be taken out of a real-life page of the real-life Allison's life because it was not only believable but also perfect. All of us who are born as empaths/psychics face a confusing time growing up, no more confusing than the typical searchings and explorings of an otherwise typical childhood and adolescence but we do learn our reality nevertheless that our reality is indeed different from most others and we also learn to keep from upsetting adults to keep our mouths shut lest we be shuttled off to a psychiatrist or worse. The very lucky child born and raised by a parent with similar traits who can not just help them but also teach them and mentor them is one lucky, lucky child indeed. Never the less, most of us do manage to muddle through our developing years and we all somehow stumble across enacting and coping mechanisms and become adults who are as happy and productive as the rest of the population which aren't empaths. In the end, guess what, it just doesn't matter anyway, because we all are born into this time and place to learn what we need to learn in this brief classtime called life and when we're through learning we leave until we need to come back or go somewhere else to learn another lesson we need and in the process each time become a little closer to Father, to being completely reunited with God Our Father, which in the end is the ultimate goal of all souls anyway. 
Kent's early line on the Super Bowl is New England by 8-1/2. If I were a betting man, which I am NOT, I'd take the points. That said, my prediction for the final score despite hoping and a little praying that Philadelphia will win, I mean, who actually wants New England to win except those who live around Route 118?, is that The Patriots win over The Eagles 34/14, which of course is in direct conflict with my points line and stating that I'd take the points which should be a reasonably easy bet to place come a time closer to the game. New England is the new NFL dynasty, after all. That said, I need to make it very clear I have no clue what the actual points and betting lines are and don't care, this is just for fun.
Now, when on Super Bowl Sunday both of those severe hedges turn out to be completely wrong and I hope like hell no one actually places any bets based on those wild guesses of mine above, it should prove once and for all my old maxim that being a so-called "psychic" (very long finger nails being drug across a blackboard loudly, Arrrgghhhh!!!) isn't an art nor is it a science but is simply a state of being, a state of being a human being, and human beings make stupid mistakes and stupid predictions all day long every day of their lives. Having foresight does not give you a gunsight, and even an accurately sighted-in gunsight on occasion doesn't guarantee you'll always hit the target! Monday, January 24 
I recently did the
website for my parents' church
, a simple little "advertising shingle" that is totally cross-platform compatible and SEO/Search Engine Optimized-friendly and totally Section 508/Handicapped accessible as are all the websites I design, and doing that brought up a discussion about how my parents' little church is dying because of lack of new members.
They used to attend, actually were one of the founding member-couples, of Asbury Park Church Of God in Raleigh before some folks who shall remain nameless brought in a bunch of new folks who agreed with their own personal agenda more than Asbury's best interests and took over The Board Of Deacons and sold the somewhat historic old church building and property (this was the church I was raised in…the church building still stands at the corners Buck Jones Road, Jones Franklin Road, and Hillsborough Street and Western Blvd. in Raleigh), and after the coup happened there they were no longer welcome so they moved their membership over to the much smaller College View Church Of God on Crest Road off of Western Blvd. in Raleigh. I don't go to church, any church, when I "lift a stone or break a twig there is where I find my Father", but I did go to my parents 50th wedding renewal vow ceremony there a couple of years back. Now, I had met their pastor, Amos Clark, an affable fellow and man of God, but didn't know any other members. Nor did they, not at first when I first arrived for my parents' ceremony, know who I was. Not a single member of the congregation came up to introduce themselves to me, not in the half hour to an hour of me milling around. I was very deliberately hanging back, not being rude but not making an effort to introduce myself either, to see exactly how cliquish the little church was. It was damned cliquish. Only when Pastor Clark arrived and the let everyone know I was Harold and Mildred's son did anyone and then only a couple of them make any effort to make me feel welcome at all. That overt, almost rude cliquishness is why their little church scares off and runs off the few new potential members that somehow for some odd reasons do wander in from time to time, is what I told my parents was the problem and after thinking about it agreed with me. That said, I've been invited to attend and went to a couple of locally popular new-age-style Christian churches with all the new-fangled contemporary Christian music and the wearin' of the polo shirts and casual slacks even during church service (Sly Grin) and was almost mobbed by members at both places for a brief time when I first showed up those first respective times, but, I don't know, they did make the effort to at least let me know I was welcome but as soon as they would say their kind words I could tell most of their time their attitudes shifting immediately and the welcome was more lip-service in the end than genuine. I don't know, maybe I am being too critical and too harsh in my judgment of my treatment there, but I'm just being honest, it's just what I felt, honestly. I have been to one church in the past couple of years where I felt totally welcome and totally at home and would love to join even now, Nutbush Presbyterian Church up near Kerr Lake and the Virginia Stateline, but the hour and a half drive there is simply too much for me to make each and every Sunday, Sigh. ++++++++++++++++++++++ I am not a God-fearing man, I am a God-loving man! Friday, January 21 Stumbled across a very nice article on Mama Dip's Restaurant of Chapel Hill N.C. in the January 2005 issue of Southern Living magazine. As most of you know, I'm a huge fan of Mama Dip's, go there at least a couple of times or more per month when possible and consider Mama Dip/Mildred Council 
to be the dame letters de creance of Southern Cuisine who is deserving of all the accolades bestowed upon her.
Yes, I know, I've been procrastinating on writing the review of her place for here, but I will get to it, hopefully next week if possible, Promise, kinda. But in the meantime do pick up a copy of the January issue of Southern Living to read the nice article about her, and to clip out and save the handful of her recipes which follows the article. Mama Dip has no secrets to her cooking and doesn't mind sharing the secrets to her success: simply the best ingredients possible, consistently cooked with patience and attention to detail and consistency, served with a downhome friendly style of presentation. That's all there is to it. Just consistent perfection. +++++++++++++++++++++++++ There was an article in today's News & Observer" from Kristen Scharnberg of the Chicago Tribune about how The State Of New Hampshire has opened its decades-long formerly sealed supposedly forever adoption records. Finally. As a true open adoptee, something very rare for when I was adopted at seven months old in July of 1957 and not much more common even in today's so-called "liberal social climate", I really don't "have a dog in this hunt" as a familiar Southern saying goes but as an adoptee if an open one still have a rooting interest in having my full civil rights that every other citizen of the United States Of America given to me even if I choose not or need not exercise them, doesn't matter, I still want my full brace of civil rights that all save adoptees have. Some years ago when I put up the first incarnation of this website, I wrote one of my first online op-ed pieces "Adoption . . . The Last Slavery" which has been linked to from countless other websites, reprinted in I can't count how many print magazines and even translated and reprinted in a handful of other languages, all of which I am proud of. Doesn't matter. What matters is that adoptees for no other reason than collective societal shame that society doesn't really give a flip about families and children in crisis, no, not really, society doesn't, not when it comes down to the bottom line bottom line of it all, the bottom line being the bottom line of trying to keep families in crisis, which is the root of 98% of all adoptions including my own, not only costs money but also costs embracing of the fact that our society as great as it is isn't perfect because human beings themselves can never be perfect. Doesn't matter. What does matter that say, if legislation was introduced in any State legislature today let alone the US Congress to strip any identified minority or sub-minority group of some of their basic civil rights, you pick the group, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, The Rotary Club, some of those rights including the most basic right to know your genetic history including predispositions to chronic and potentially fatal genetic conditions and maladies, then there would not only be howls of protests and not just Million Soul-Marches but Ten-Million-Persons-Marches on the State Capitol or Congress the likes of which have never been seen. Doesn't matter. Because punishing the innocent of the adopted has been such an accepted way of not dealing with the real issues that force children to be given up for adoption in the first place, society even now in this slightly-increasing somewhat-more enlightened age is still reluctant to shed its gestalt guilt about sentencing an entire class of its otherwise fully enfranchised citizenry to a life of gaunt and hopeless faithlessness that even though life can never be fair you would think the freest country in the world would at least attempt to treat all its citizens equally, which it doesn't. Doesn't matter. What matters is, is that you've been kind enough to read this and be a loyal reader of my humble blog, and maybe, just maybe, your positive thoughts and prayers about how the system might change one day and welcome home the last disenfranchised element of this otherwise great country, its closed adoptees, into its bosom of love. Thursday, January 20 The past couple of days have brought to my consciousness a couple of questions of "The Jewish Question". First was an AP pop about an "Alosia V." who was a distant relative on Hitler's grandmother's side who was killed by the Nazis in 1940 because she was "mentally defective". I read and re-read that little blurb in our local paper, The News & Observer and pondered its meaning to me, my life and the universe, coming to the conclusion that not only does God sometimes have a confusing sense of humor but that His sense of irony is so deep at times that it kinda flies over the head of mankind. That article got me to thinking about when I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum back in June of 2003. The one major disappointment I found with The Holocaust Museum experience when I went there was that it somehow and for some unknown reason didn't mention the first victims of the Nazi Holocaust, those who had Down's Syndrome and institutionalized schizophrenics and others who were labeled "mentally defective". This was a major disappointment to me that, as you start walking the timeline of The Holocaust on the sixth floor and begin walking downwards as the spiral of man's inhumanity and evil towards man ekes you onward yet not upwards that The Museum mentioned, much to my pleasant surprise, every single group holocausted' by The Nazis including ethnic Gypsies, Catholics, gays and even much to my total surprise but it was nice that they acknowledged this actually happened, the systematic identification and extermination of The Freemasons in Germany much contrary to the sometimes promulgated myth that The Nazis had their origins somehow in the mythology of Freemasonry which is and out-and-out lie but yet, but yet no mention of the first group to be targeted for mass murder, those of whom were "not normal mentally". I just visited their website tonight and it looks like they have made at least a small, cursory attempt to correct this huge omission in The Holocaust's timeline as they presented it to the pubic in 2003, hard to tell from their truly world-class website presentation if what they show about this is actually part of the museum's permanent collection or not and even if it is still isn't enough to address the first historical pogrom against those who were mentally different in Nazi Germany but at least it's better than nothing. When any society targets any specific group for first abuse and then slow then faster extermination, are you listening whoever is now in charge of foreign national prisoner interrogations via physical and mental torture, then if a government can get away with that, with abusing the lest of its citizens, it's just a matter of time before they become emboldened and begin abusing then exterminating even the stronger of its citizenry that disagrees with its policies. If The Holocaust teaches future history nothing but that, hopefully that bell-echo of truth will ring forward throughout time. This minor but stick-in-my-craw nitpick about The Holocaust Museum conveniently forgetting that the first victims of The Master Plan were the mentally ill, never the less I recommend, no, I urge to the point of begging anyone who goes to Washington D.C. for any reason, tourist or business or just passing through, to stop by The Holocaust Museum and spend the couple-three hours and take the tour. I guarantee it will change you, alter your perception of mankind's dual nature, to the quick of your very soul. Admission is free but purchase of a ticket is required for admission, either at The Museum's box office or through any TicketMaster location which of course charges you a service fee for a free ticket (TicketMaster does); they require purchase of a ticket so that massive crowds won't ruin the experience for you, keeping a steady flow of visitors coming basically on the half-hour, allowing you the walk and look and reflect and observe and reflect and soak in what actually happened and reflect some more. When I went to The Holocaust Museum in June of 2003, I had gotten our tickets in advance for myself and my ladyfriend whom I was spending the week in D.C. with on a combination business and semi-vacation pleasure trip for admission to the 12:30PM time, which allowed me to finally, finally go by "The Wall" and visit an old friend there I had been wanting to see forever and never had the time when scooting in and out of DC on business to go visit and spend some time with, not in all the years since it had been built and I had been doing the Raleigh to DC shuttle frequently since. What happened to me at The Wall I do not want to write about now because I do not want to become a basket case and not be able to finish today's blog entry. Let's just say that what happened to me at The Wall was one of the most intensely personal experiences of my life. My ladyfriend took a photo of me at The Wall saying good-bye to my first sensei and sorely missed friend, dammit, I said I wasn't going to do this and I am not, anyway, at future date this year, probably in a few weeks or couple of months, I'll write a more detailed account of what happened to me at The Wall and post it here within my website. I also plan to do a painting and then a limited edition giclee' print from that painting of a photo my ladyfriend took when I was saying good-bye to my friend, a very moving photo which will inspire an equally moving painting and print. But, what a day that was! First, visiting The Wall early that Friday morning to finally say good-bye to my close friend and then a brief respite at the nearby National Gallery Of Art so my galpal could buy some gifts for her nieces and nephews and we both could catch our emotional breaths and then, THEN caught another cab to go a few blocks more to The Holocaust Museum. Folks, said and recommended with a humorously ironic but sincere tone in my voice, I do not recommend anyone visit The Wall in the morning, especially if you have a family member or a loved one anchored there, and then The Holocaust Museum a little later on in the today, uh-uh, don't do it, not too bright, especially if you're an empath/shaman/psychic or are just plain sensitive, uh-uh, don't do it, it will overwhelm you, at least it did me. I do more than recommend every single person on the planet visit The Holocaust Museum at some point in their lives, do make a pilgrimage there, it will change you for the better forever no matter what you do or don't know or believe about what happened since it's not about The Holocaust per se' but about forcing you to deal with dark balance-side of your very soul. And I do recommend that if you have any connection at all to Vietnam, even if you were simply alive during it or have even a distant connection to a distant relative whose name is engraved on The Wall to do please go there as well, just be careful of emotions welling up from places inside you that you don't normally even acknowledge is there. I will write a detailed account of that day of Two Great Personal Revelations, promise, just not tonight. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The second thing that happened concerning matters of Jewishness or not was that I had to break off a potentially great friendship with a great guy, a retired Special Forces captain whom I met at the Dixie Gun & Knife Show at The Fairgrounds last weekend whom I had a lot in common with and really like as a person, because of his extreme not just prejudice against Jews but venomous hatred of them. As anyone who knows me knows, when I look at someone, I do not see physical bodies first but rather I see someone's actual immortal soul and then the inward-outward reflection of their perception of who and what they are as represented by their physical body. Of all the things I care about when I met someone, their skin pigmentation, what house of worship they attend or don't, their accent, their tribal customs and such, are the least important things I care about. Their honesty with God and themselves, their humanity, their following The Golden Rule or not, for examples, are what I care about. I do respect all, even those I disagree with. That said, if you're a flaming bigot of any kind who can't talk about anything else but how you hate any stereotypical group for whatever reasons, yes, my ethics mandate I must respect you as a sentient being and give you your right to your opinions however ignorant and misguided I feel that they are, you have them for your own reasons necessary for your own growth after all, but that doesn't mean I have to give you any attention or validation whatsoever let alone invite you to my house to share dinner with me or have a beer with you at your place. I hate that too, because this guy and I had so much in common, except for the fact that he hated one or more groups and I hate no one. Let me close tonight's entry which a sentence or two about "The Jewish Question". I don't believe for one second that Jews or any other group controls this or that aspect of any part of our society more than any other. I've known and had many friends who are Jewish, my younger sister converted to Judaism and I've worked with and for and employed many of the Jewish faith in my career. I've also known as many Greeks and members of The Greek Orthodox Church as I have Jewish friend and colleagues, and Jews no more control anything than Greeks or members of The Greek Orthodox Church does or any other ethnic group does. Yes, stereotypes sometimes do accidentally fit, such as Jews being disproportionate in the jewelry business or Greeks owning and running a disproportionate number of local restaurants in any community where there is a thriving population of Greeks, but that doesn't mean that there is any grand conspiracy of any kind for one ethnic population to control any aspect of any part of our economy, our free market system of more or less what's left of our capitalist ideal won't allow that, period. Wednesday, January 19
Last night's ACC basketball match-up between #3 nationally-ranked Wake Forest and generally unheralded FSU/Florida State ("don't call us 'Free Shoes University'") gave another example of why any sport fan with a competitor's bone in their body just loves the Atlantic Coast Conference and why grown men shouldn't bet their children's shoe money on college basketball games.
On paper, it was no contest. Wake Forest was and is still is a legitimate #1 ranking throne-holder depending and Florida State for all intents and purposes should be in the perpetual cellar of the ACC, having one maybe two players that maybe could start on another ACC squad but that's about it. But, as the saying goes, that's why the play the game on the blood-and-guts court and not within a spreadsheet of stats. It felt like for a second that FSU who took an early lead was going to run away and hide from Wake Forest, but anyone who's watched ACC basketball for any length of time knew better. With one second in regulation time to go, after Wake Forest had made an NCAA all-time record for consecutive made free throws at fifty as in five-zero 5-0 stretching back to their last game when they played and beat Carolina and made 32 consecutive free throws in that game and had made 18 in a row last night against Wake', they missed their 19th free throw attempt of the night and broke the streak at fifty and the game went into overtime where Florida State while not trouncing them made a convincing argument by team defense and unconsciously great offensive play that they did indeed deserved the victory. In any other conference last night's contest between Wake and FSU might have gone down as one of the great games in this hypothetical conference's history and while definitely a great game which kept your attention for the entire game and overtime, such balls-to-the-wall heroics and heart-breaking-breaks are if not typical for most ACC conference games then certainly are nothing that unusual, such is the overall caliber of play within the conference. The rest of the season is going to be a whole, whole lot of fun! +++++++++++++++++++++++ After the game, I watched most of NBC's Law & Order - Special Victims Unit , a show which I sometimes watch but often times choose not to because the writers to tend to stretch the over-reaching aspects of one or more topics and cross over from the needed suspension of disbelief which is needed to watch and enjoy any entertainment program into that realm of total incredulity against any and all belief that a given show might actually happen in real-life. Last night's show dealt with, in no particular order, 1) gang violence, 2) oral rape, 3) subtle hints of incest, 4) murder/accidental homicide, 5) gender roles in this society, 6) parents' rights to choose what and what is not appropriate medical treatment for their minor children, 7) gender roles in our society, again, 8) potential hermaphroditism and lastly 9) surgical sex reassignments of minor children. Yeah, wwhheeewwww!!!! Yet, somehow, the writers for the show managed to bundled all the above and a little more up in a neat, tiny 48-minute package that kept throwing plot curveballs at you and kept you guessing right until the last three or four minutes and did so with panache, yeah, some damned good script writing indeed. That's why I at least tune in when I'm home and have time to watch it just in case the plot for that night isn't too fantastic or too preachy or too boring and when it's none of those I know it's going to be a great one, like it was last night. Spun-off from the original Law & Order series which is starting to show it's age, starting to become a little too long in the tooth despite the injection of new (?) blood in the new detective character as played by under-rated fine character actor Dennis Farina, I find the original L&O unwatchable most of the time, L&O-SVU manages to tackle topics which are still taboo to much of society and educate and enlighten without being preachy (usually) about things. I also like, about every other episode at least, the latest incarnation of the genre, L&O - Criminal Intent which stars the next great totally ignored and mostly unrecognized but one helluva talent Vincent D'Onofrio as Detective Robert Goren, a NYC Police detective who could pick Sherlock Holme's pocket and then laugh about it while sharing a beer with his mother. D'Onofrio's portrayal of Det. Goren as a brilliant yet lonely man who may or may suffer from (and this is hinted at different times in different episodes) Asperperger's Syndrome which is characterized by among other things a lack of social skills combined with a pattern recognition and problem-solving savantism is one of the truly overlooked week-in-week-out yeoman journeyman approaching master acting traveling shows that there is on network television, and he really should get more awards and recognition than he does. You gotta give the originators of the L&O genre credit…they took reality from the local news, made it more like reality than reality actually was, added a little extra but not much extra sex and violence as salt and pepper, cooked it to fit within a network timeslot, and voile', a franchise which has done credit to all involved even to NBC who still has no clue after all these years as to exactly what to do with it. Still, brilliance, and near-genius. Tuesday, January 18
If you follow this blog at all you know I was glued to the television last night at 10PM to watch my current favorite major network TV show, NBC's
"Medium"
and again I was not disappointed. With great script writing and an excellent cast and a true understanding of the shell libretto of the subject matter dealt with, if NBC doesn't watch it, it'll have another runaway hit that it will have no clue whatsoever to do with.
Last night's episode dealt with the main protagonist, Allison, having a series of seemingly incoherent dream-embraced visions that made no sense whatsoever even to her until her boss, the Phoenix DA, put two-and-two together as is the wont of hour-long serials at about the thirty-five minute mark after temporarily pairing her up with a hotheaded, rude, jackass, too-intensely focused caricature of a detective to help find a serial killer no one except she and the neolithic detective actually believed existed. Considering the character Allison's own mule-headed-stubbornness at times, it was an interesting interplay between the ultimate skeptic (the curmudgeonly detective) and the ultimate this-is-my-life-dammit! psychic. At one point, when he is finally starting to give her at least the possibility that she is for-real, he asks her to clarify things when she can't put an absolutism on her visions, "how do you do this thing that you do?" to which she responds honestly "I don't know, Whoever made me this way didn't include an instruction manual for me to read." As a fellow empath, stunning, simply stunning insight. This show simply can not be any more accurate in its portrayal of what it's like to be a walker between two worlds. Very, very few of us born into the world of shadows and grey are lucky enough to have or find a mentor, a sensei, a teacher who can help guide us along and while not tell us what to do can provide insights and anecdotal experiences of their own to help us find our way as we walk between the light and the darkness. Those two lines of script were a stunning bit of self-acknowledged insight indeed. The interesting subplot, and as a writer this is where I've seen the true quality of the scriptwriting come forth, whoever/whatever team is writing the scripts they're doing one helluva good job, was Allison's family trying to plan a surprise birthday party for her but of course since she is an empath/sensitive that's kinda impossible but they try nevertheless and she let's them think they've all fooled her so, after a hard week of tracking down and catching another serial killer, she comes home to an empty house with no surprise party bursting at her and her kids gone and her husband surprising her with two plane tickets for a weekend getaway for themselves to Mexico. This is where the quality of the script writing shows itself. In a sweet plot vehicle move that even I didn't see coming and I am, well, a fellow empath and a fellow professional writer, as she lays down on the bed fully clothed as her husband darts to the bathroom and urges her bellowing as he gets ready for her to get a bag packed since the plane leaves in an hour, she politely yells back "I am, Dear, just a minute!" and then, and I shook my head ticklingly because I swear I didn't see this one coming, she pulls out a pre-packed weekend bag from underneath the bed, she having sensed the ruse-within-a-nice-ruse all week and already having packed for her surprise weekend in Mexico. Show ends. Damned good approaching great scriptwriting. The character Allison's abilities both as a psychic, a psychic being one of foresight and second sight and insight, a seer if you will, and as a medium, a medium being a shaman and a soothsayer of one who walks the boundary of the worlds of the living and the dead is not uncommon for a "sensitive" or "empath" to be both but the show also heavily hints at times which is very true that it's not always the case. One can be just a psychic or just a medium and while often both one is not compelled by anything save one's fate and pre-birth choice to be either, both, or none. Having second-sight does not mean you automatically have the ability to communicate with the spirit world and being able to talk with dead people does not necessarily mean you have the ability to see slightly over the horizon. I know I'll bore you to tears by saying this a thousand times before it's all over with, but this humble little show on NBC, "Medium", has and is doing more good to humanize those of us who do walk between the veil of heaven and Earth than any artifact of popular culture before or since. Just picked up a copy of Scott A. Shane's new business book "Finding Fertile Ground - Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities For New Ventures" (Wharton School Publishers, 2005) and I must say am impressed enough with it to spend the time to recommend it here to you. While ostensibly meant for newly-minted and somewhat seasoned higher-tech entrepreneurs, it actually provides a challenge-based-common-sense-approach to doing pre-market pre-business-establishment truth-tests that can and should be applied to any business venture that you-yourself are thinking about plunging into and not just high-tech ones. If you're thinking about going into the buggy whip business (and I understand the horse-people market is stable, pardon the pun, but the S&M market for buggy whips is growing by whacks and bounds) or creating a biopharm enterprise from scratch, this book is a must-read for you. With a Spartan writing style that uses almost-too-tightly-woven eight-word-rule sentences, Scott Shane never the less manages to inform above all else, yes, but also entertain and keep your attention all the way through the book. Once you begin reading it, you'll realize that if you try to skim over even some tiny parts you might not find as interesting, you could conceivably miss a critical insight of his which might, might end up costing you real money on down the line, so you end up reading and not skimming over every single word and thankfully because he's a decent writer, that's not a chore. I also picked up and read over this past weekend a somewhat older coffetable art book "Judy Chicago - An American Vision" by Edward Lucie-Smith (Watson-Guptil Publications, New York, 2000). Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" is one of the truly great works of American art, period, pardon the slight pun. The thirty-nine ceramic place settings where the plates were artistically-inspired vaginas of famous and infamous women from the timeline of human history set atop needlework placemats incorporated conceptual, representational and craftwork elements to bring modern womens' consciousness another notch higher. Routinely savaged by critics even to this day after its initial debut in many years pushing decades back in 1979, it goes to show you that all great art however inspiring must ultimately also disturb. Castigated by critics but adored by the public, "The Dinner Party" whether one hates it or loves it no one has a non-opinion about it and that is another definition of great art, much like her near-equal seminal work "Red Flag", a seriagraph from 1971 which shows one blatant reality of womanhood of an anonymously gendered female pulling out a bloody tampon from within herself which by its sheer unapologetic graphicness became a true feminist icon in the purest sense, an icon as a graphical representation of a true touchstone emotional place. While the book covers her entire career up to the Year 2000, most who buy it will purchase it for its coverage of the feminist heart of her career from 1969 through 1983, and that is not a bad, it's a good thing, because as time passes Judy Chicago's body of work will become more important to history, more important to the future of art than it is now in our somewhat indifferent to all things rendered non-shockable present. Monday, January 17 This past Saturday I tried to go see the North Carolina Museum Of Art 's special exhibition on The School Of Paris featuring works by Picasso and Matisse and Degas but not only were the sold out for Saturday morning but were sold out for Sunday, the last day of the show as well, so I wandered on down to The Flea Market at the NC State Fairgrounds less than a mile away (both are less than three miles from my home) which I hadn't been to in a year or more and wandered around and up and down the aisles of dealers and not finding anything worth taking home noticed that The Dixie Gun & Knife Show was also going on and not having been to one in years and years wandered on in to it, if you call standing in line for close to half an hour to purchase an $8 general public admission ticket wandering on in. The last gun show of this type, where you have literally hundreds of dealers of every stripe and specialty, I had been to had to have been ten maybe fifteen or more years ago and my-oh-my how things have changed. Fear of the ATF and the new super-restrictive Brady Bill had completely put an end to all under-the-counter handgun sales from what I noticed in my three call it four hours there. Every dealer automatically assumed you were an ATF undercover agent, not that I asked about buying a firearm of any kind, I was there to look for knives and other interesting miscellania but that was all, but the weird but not hostile just eyes-open suspicious of all the hundreds and thousands of potential customers vibe that permeated the place couldn't help but confuse me a tad. I mean, if you're a dealer and as long as you're going to comply with the letter and spirit of the Brady Bill and other laws, why care if someone is or is not a gun-narc, since they might actually be there to shop themselves, might be a potential customer? Such is a perpetual fact of my reality that as an empath I pick up on loudly broadcast thoughts and fears, shouldn't complain even though I know I do at times. Prices on most items with a few exceptions seem to be very reasonable, almost cheap at times. Even "cache' dealers", those who specialize in higher-end specialty firearms and other expensive sporting goods, had affordable prices most of the time. This was genuinely surprising to me. I did find a truly good bargain, an Anderson Cutlery dagger from the 60's or early 70's which once authenticated should turn out to be worth several times the $15 I paid for it but that's not why I bought it, I bought it because I loved the quality of its construction and the pattern of the blade which was apparently inspired by a 14th Century Italian Florentian dagger design. The dealer had it priced at $20 and I bargained him down to $15 just on principle. I think he thought it wasn't worth much because it has a common, ordinary gray plastic handle, tsk tsk. He even threw in a nice generic nylon sheath for it for free when I started bargaining him down. I also met and talked a while with custom knifemaker Dave Vail from Hampstead, N.C., down on the coast near Wilmington. Dave's work really, really impressed me. I am definitely going to find an excuse to head down his way one weekend reasonably soon and pick up one of his exquisitely crafted hand-forged blades. He doesn't have a website or I would post it here. Cameras weren't permitted inside the fun, pardon me, gun show or I'd have some photos to show you here but they wouldn't let my camera in and when I mentioned that I write to my own personal blog they warned me against doing "media interviews" which by terms of the ticket purchase weren't permitted. I assured them I wasn't part of "the media". Anyway, Dave Vail is a true up-and-coming blademaker and I look forward to going down to Hampstead and spending some time with him and seeing his shop and coming back with a report for my blog here. I also met a very interesting character, a retired Special Forces captain whose name I'd rather not mention for reasons of his privacy. We stood there in his booth space yacking away, going along real good, he handing me his card and inviting me down to share a beer with him at his home in Fayetteville, good vibes just a' going until he began a rant against not just Israel but Jews as a religion also, going off on the old Jewish bankers control the world nonsense, at which point I politely mentioned that my youngest sister had converted to Judaism and personally I didn't know anyone could call themselves a Christian and not be supportive of what is rightly called the Judeo-Christian ethic and for good reason and after that the vibe with him while still good kinda faded. I'd still like to spend some time with this dude, have a beer or two with him, he is one fascinating character, we shall see. The Dixie Gun & Knife Show did lack what I remembered as being a pretty harsh political tone last few times I went years and years ago. There weren't any booths for so-called militias, no racist group crap, no overtly political anything anywhere that I saw and I went by literally every single booth and table in the whole show. I've always said that the cure for speech you don't like is for you to speak speech yourself that you do like, but I also support the right of a businessperson, the person that owns and runs the gun show, to restrict what can and can not be said on his temporary private property if it rented from the State Of North Carolina just for the weekend it's still technically their private property. Contrary to popularized belief by anti-gun liberals who've never actually been to a gun-show, it's not a super-macho, testosterone-saturated pissing contest of a bunch of wild guys who like to go around killing things including helpless animals and each other. NO, it's NOT! Gun shows like Dixie's are more "trade shows" for those interested in a narrow, specialized, specific topic, that of small arms and weapons than a recruitment center for right-wing nutcases or a convention of hardcase wannabes. In fact, poseurs are so obvious, the handful of them I saw, that the rest of us just kinda ignored them and left them alone. When you're the real-deal, you don't need to advertise it, and most of us there, me included, wanted to be and stay as low-key as possible, we were there for one or more reasons but having to prove anything to anyone else wasn't it. I will say it was nice going to an event like that where I wasn't the only person 6'4" tall or taller, I'd say a good one out of every five or six show attendees was at least as tall or taller than I am. The only other place where that's typically true is at my annual Craig family reunion up in North Wilkesboro, where, since only one living male relative is under six feet tall and he's a cousin who's 5'11"-3/4ths, my height doesn't draw attention to me. Walking on that hard concrete floor I knew was going to destroy my messed-up right ankle and it did, I couldn't walk at all hardly yesterday even with a cane and today it's some but not a lot better, but hey, it's either take the pain and go out and do things and not be a frigging cripple and meet people and socialize and have fun and not refuse to give in to "the chair" that always waits nearby eager to swallow me whole never to let me up again if I ever do decide it's not worth the fight against my bad arthritis and other bad orthopaedic conditions but I am simply too stubborn to give in to it, so when the Dixie Knife And Gun Show happens again in three months, as long as I am in town and don't have other more pressing plans, yes, I do plan on going back, since it was much more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be and even with the anticipation of mind-numbing pain from walking way too much on the concrete, it will still be worth it to me. Friday, January 14 Weird week, folks. Can't go into as much public detail as I wish I could since, so let's just say it's been an "interesting" week. In anticipation, finally, hopefully, maybe of finally being able to do my main landing/welcome page at http://hkentcraig.com redesign early next week and be closer if not there of hanging out a nice-looking shingle now that a time-and-energy-blackhole of a recently found and now lost new friend is gone from my life, I have completed a handful of initial sites for friends and close acquaintances to be part of my initial portfolio. As a special offer to readers of my blog, while I can't do them for free, I do need to build my portfolio up and do so rather quickly, if you'd like to email me about creating a website for you, I will give you a "deep discount" to close to cost of my actual expenses and a little but not much of something for my time for doing a website that you might have always wanted but thought you couldn't afford. This offer is subject to change at any moment, so email me quickly as you can if you think you might be interested. For most sites with a handful or less of pages and nothing that requires fancy custom-made graphics or Flash animations and such, we're probably talking less than a hundred dollars in most cases, write me and we'll talk. Here's some of what I did this past week. http://teresasorrellmanning.com - a site done for my fifteen-year-plus hairdresser http://collegeviewchurchofgod.com - for my more or less church . . . I do not actually attend church there but know many of the people who go there including my parents of course and since I was raised Church Of God/Anderson Indiana, well, ya' know… http://davidnealmuir.com - this is an example of what I think will be my big initial "hit" . . . for $79 pre-paid, you get your name registered as www.yourname.com and the domain name is yours to keep (modest yearly renewal fees apply after this first year which I pay for as part of the package), then I convert your resume in MS Word or similar format that you send to me into your main HTML "landing page" and add some links to your email address if you wish along with a database-friendly plaintext .txt version of it linked so that potential employers can more easily add your resume to their databases, + you also get a year's free hosting service as well, all for the truly low price of just $79, truly a great deal! http://beckyscakes.com - a very nice-looking single-pager of a local custom wedding/anniversary/birthday etc. cake creator. http://www.goldstarmech.com - an old site done last year for an HVAC company. I may or may not post something tomorrow, very busy day as are all my Saturdays and of course I seldom if ever post to my blog on Sunday, so if I don't see you tomorrow which probably you won't then I'll yack at you on Monday then, see you then, and thanks for being a loyal reader of my blog, I do appreciate it! Thursday, January 13 
President Bush's recent trial balloons about reforming Social Security still fail to address the one absolute fact that I think has appeared anywhere in the American press including blogsphere which I write from once maybe twice at most which is the fact that Social Security is not a pension program but a welfare program. Let me repeat this fact: Social Security is not a pension plan, it is a dressed-up, prettified middle-class-values-acceptable pig of welfare program but the fact that it's not called a welfare program still doesn't mean it's not a pig.
Fact is, and you can do the math and/or look this up, if someone retires now, today, within 4-1/2 years of retiring, said retiree has taken every single dime in principal they ever paid into the system completely out along with all accumulated compound interest and from then on it becomes, gasps America loudly, welfare. There's nothing wrong with welfare per se'. There is nothing wrong with not letting old people not starve on the streets. There is nothing wrong with making sure that those that are too old or too sick are taken care of. But let's quit calling Social Security what it isn't and call it what it is and then, maybe, we can engage in honest debate and then common-sense resolutions about genuine Social Security reform. The original blueprint for what we now called Social Security was created by Count Bismark for the Weimar Republic in the late 1800's as a way of ensuring worker loyalty to The State. By guaranteeing a pension and a reality of not starving to death once a worker's productive days were no more, he sought to create a sense of obligation from the worker towards The State more than vice' versa, a sense of uphill obligation that meant that "the worker" would produce at maximum efficiency for the full term of their working career and therefore The State would reap much more benefit from those thirty-some-odd years of steel-driving-intensity than the worker would ever receive in so-called "retirement benefits" especially when you consider that the retirement age for Count Bismark's original plan was the same as it is now, age 65, during the Victorian Age when the lifespan for a typical male working-class worker was not much more than 52. If you were to apply the same stretch-gap logic to the American Social Security system, early retirement would be at 77 and full retirement benefits at 82 or so. Think about it. Fact of the matter is, is that when my son who is now 23 reaches the current retirement age standard of 65 in the year 2047, there will be less than one worker putting money into the Social Security trust fund for every retiree drawing from it. What then? Will the sheer scale of the then-present economics demand an even more socialistic system of income redistribution in this country than we have now? Yes, it will, if something isn't done about it and soon, and even then, even if measures are taken to shore up the current weakspots that need attention now, without a fundamental rethinking of how we are going to take care of our elderly and our truly infirm then this country will be less of a democracy and more of a socialist republic. Without a fundamental paradigm shift outside of the box to where we can humanly take care of those who by physical more than moral-choice disabilities from age and infirmities, then we'll end up by sheer weight of circumstances returning to the very bad old days of "the poorhouses" and "the workhouses" where the elderly are stripped of all of their dignity and most of their rights as citizens and without exaggeration warehoused like so many refugees from a world than no longer values them because they can't produce and we'll have come full circle once more back to the backdoor of Count Bismark and his attempt to drag the old world into a new and somewhat scary new world order, a new world order that even with hiccups and fit and starts and spectacular failures and often modest successes, seeks to treat the least of those among us as humanly as possible as it strives to treat all of its citizenry by The Golden Rule, its citizens fulfilling their obligation of support for The State and The State fulfilling its obligation of support to its citizens. Wednesday, January 12
Just got through watching UNC mug Georgia Tech 91-to-69 like a crackhead biker working over a Japanese businessman behind a seedy San Francisco warf-bar at midnight and all I can say is, thank goodness, ACC basketball is back in full swing!
Being a native who grew up watching ACC basketball and who was present at its modern-day birth when the league finally decided to stop calling touch foul calls where if one player even looked hard at their opponent then the ref's would call a foul which lead to ACC teams simply getting confused a lot of the times in post-season play when outside conference referees would have none of that which resulted in a lack of post-season success and let the teams play like the rules dictated they should and then when, finally, UNC's 1959 national title aside, the modern era of the ACC began with NC State's historic win for the men's national Division One Basketball Title in 1974, I am a willing convert and acolyte of the Official State Religion Of North Carolina in the form of following the precepts and tenents of The Holy Round Ball Through Da' Hoop belief system, eeerrrr, sport of men's college basketball. C'mon, folks, ACC haters, when the ACC had, for the first time ever in its history if not the history of college basketball, five of its teams in the Top 9 in the polls this past week, you can't deny we're the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in college basketball this year, and yeah, Phhhttttt!!! at the Big 2-Little 8 and Big Easy-East-Mistake. Well, maybe I better be a little kinder, karma does have a way of biting one on one's ass especially when you get pride mixed in with exuberance accidentally. Some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent watching the greatest coach in the history of college basketball Dean Smith lose. After my son was born in 1981 at UNC Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, by his birth I became a reluctant fan of UNC when they played anyone else but NC State, my having grown up just three miles from NCSU but never attending there as a student mattering not. Carolina' is still is so smug, so quietly arrogant, well, no more than Duke but that's beside the point, that it's easy to still hate them save for the fact that Coach Smith eventually proved himself worthy of an Order Of Cincinnatus by not crowning himself king, eeerrrr, Governor Of North Carolina when he could have easily done after his retirement a few years back by simply by announcing to the world that yes he would accept the lower of rank from demigod to governor, that and the fact the fact that the new coach of The Tar Heels, Roy Williams, is, well, shuffles feet and pouts a little still wanting to dislike Carolina even though I have to root for them because of my son, because Roy is such a class act and perfect Southern gentleman if his courtliness is from the relatively harmless brainwashing of having originally attended UNC as a student and not by God's gift of birth to be delivered within the fences of God's Full Acre in North Carolina. Yeah, immature emotional rootings are hard to break, but I do root for 'The Heels now because, and God forgive me for saying this, my hand upon the bible of the ghost of Stormin' Norman Sloan, they really do deserve the success they are earning. When UNC meets Wake Forest this weekend it will be another split-loyalty game because while I never attended either, family members of both basketball genders did. Folks outside of ACC country, you really have no clue how pervasive this madness of ACC basketball can be. Without any exaggeration whatsoever, marriages have broken up, relatives have been shot, people have been fired from jobs they had for thirty years and there is more than one once-child now-adult who's had to go and legally change his or her name from "Krzyzewski" to "John" or "Jane" all because of the weird polystatic tribalism that is created from picking one or two favorite ACC teams, regardless of if you actually attended said universities, and following their rollercoasters as of their respective seasons, usually culiminating with the now-familiar phrase which marks the end of another cycle of life and life and birth and death: "damned Gonzaga, I had no idea that their team was that good this year!" 
The Triangle Transit Authority
was dealt if not a death-knell to its plans for trying to be more like Washington DC is then even DC is by linking together the vested economic interests of downtown property owners of Durham and Raleigh along with blasé' corporate migrant labor camps out in Research Triangle Park when The Feds told TTA "hey guys, and when exactly did you become San Diego?"
It's not enough that the TTA wants to burden we poor little taxpayers with the barbecue railroad equivalent of Beantown's Big Dig, no, they want do so flying in the face of all common sense and logic by not including a spur and station at RDU/Raleigh-Durham-Urban (yes, that's what the "U" in RDU stands for, though when the designation was given it fifty-sixty-some years ago the airport was in an blank space between The Three Sister Cities Of Hope, Faith & She's The One That Puts Out) will ensure that the first words out of the mouths of legions of newcomers to our region will be "a $40 cab ride from the airport to downtown, you have to be friggin' kidding me!". Tuesday, January 11 Hhhhhmmm . . . tons of stuff happened today, but nothing I want to or even can talk about publicly, not right now. What's a blogger to do when he wants to tell about and record his day but can't for all sorts of reasons? He keeps his silence, as he should. Oh, I suppose I could tell you about the immaculately-dressed 83-year-old gentleman in a $1,000 imported Italian suit with a thick Cary NC accent who opened the door for me at my post office today and when I thanked him he simply said "you're welcome" and when I commented "it's rare to meet a fellow true Southern gentleman in this day and age" he broke a tiny smile and replied "well, you were much larger than I am (he was almost as tall as I am but in much better shape, much thinner) so I figured I should give you the right-of-way" and when I replied to that "well, in any event your courtesy and good manners were still appreciated" to which he softly gave back the ending "well, after eighty-three years, if I don't have good manners by now, I don't think I ever will" we both smiling at that and letting our social intercourse come to a polite end, yeah, I could relate that incident to you, but that would be boring. That does beg the question: are blogs personal journals for their writer, entertainment for their readers, both, or something else entirely? I think they are the individual brain cells for an emerging cyberconsciousness, but that would bore you to tears if I went off on a tangent about how the Internet is interactively interconnecting in live terms with the human gestalt consciousness, so I won't bore you with that, either. Funny joke to end today's entry: The President went to a nudist colony where he announced the firm date for withdrawal of all American ground troops. If you get the joke, then email me what it was, see you tomorrow, Friends. Monday, January 10 The NBC teevee show "Medium" was on again tonight and of course I watched every millisecond of it. This episode's frontal plot aside dealt with the very real problems that being an empath in a relationship can bring, especially when your spouse/SO isn't one. My first wife of a 23-year relationship/20-year marriage was an empath/psychic seer with gifts and abilities very close in range and depth to my own and yes, it made for an incredible relationship when it was good, when it was good it was beyond all comprehension, and when it was bad it was hell on earth because we couldn't have any privacy from each other, couldn't break our "link" that bound us together if we wanted to and tried our damndest to. When a mated pair of true empaths make love, it is like they are making love not on Earth but in Heaven, the connection between the two of them is so strong. But when feelings get hurt and arguments and fights begin, Jesus, pardon me Old Friend, the psychic long knives really do come out in spades and there is much metaphorical karmic blood left on the floor after such heated arguments. As in every relationship, there is always balance, whether balance is wanted or not, and the fact that in a marriage of empaths there are lines of communication and ways of manipulating the forces of the universe back and forth like playing a game of tennis with psychic hand-grenades instead of soft lovey-dovey wafts of healing energy like are usually present, well, makes for some damned interesting strong disagreements, if you get my drift. My second wife had a bit of the genetic-Gypsy-Hungarian-folk gene in her and was a tad psychic but not too much, not usually, and after seeing first-hand evidence early in our relationship and then subsequent marriage really freaked her out at times. The fact I was/am shaman/empath and she could feel it and see evidence of it all the time but wasn't herself well only on some rare occasions was always an unspoken white elephant in the room with us all the frigging time. I don't know which is easier or harder of the two above to actually make work. Well, yes I do. Any, any FT 24/7 relationship/marriage takes a lot of hard work and some good luck as well to actually be successful and last where both partners are and stay relatively happy, whether that marriage is between two "normals" or between two residents who live in the space between the two worlds of here and then. I will say this, too: a lot more women are naturally psychic than are men. I think this is probably because there is a "psychic gene" that is probably passed on through the mitochondrial DNA which is the gene we all get from our mothers only and which the biology of women, the biology of daughters somehow activate more often and stronger than in sons/men. I truly believe science will identify this specific gene and give it the scientific scrutiny it deserves and despite the scientific orthodoxy that will try to suppress this knowledge, it will still come out, eventually, and the world will be a better place for this-then accepted fact of science, that we are all souls with certain empathetic and psychic and shamanistic abilities, it's just that some of us are more gnat's-behind-more-developed this way than others, much as some of us are born athletes or evens scientists who will ultimately confirm this in, say, about twenty years or so. Found out today that "Kent" in Japanese means "edge" as in "the edge of a sword", and at 48 years of age, have found another reason to be even more comfortable in my adoptive skin and identity as who I am, Kent. Saturday, January 8 The recent overturning of Allen Gell's wrongful murder conviction has raised concerns not just in North Carolina but around the world about the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty. When the prosecutors deliberately withheld evidence that was clearly exculpatory to Gell's innocence, they committed a crime no less heinous than the original murder which they were trying to get a conviction for. When vain, evil and totally corrupted by power-mad-driven prosecutors set their sites on convicting a person truly innocent of the crime of murder, not a frigging parking ticket -murder- , then they become equally culpable and accessory to the original crime of killing an innocent person than the person who actually pulled the trigger to begin with. When these prosecutors set off to kill a clearly innocent person in the name of the justice for the state, they become even worse criminals than the person who committed the original crime, because they are using their position of power to bring the full force of the state against someone, anyone, in the name not of justice or even state-sanctioned retribution but in the name of their own soulless egos. When prosecutors possess evidence that clearly clears all doubt as to the innocence of the person they are charging with murder and then don't disclose said information during the pre-trial process of discovery and proceed with the trial in hopes of getting a death penalty sentence against said person, then when found out later, those prosecutors should be charged with attempted murder, because that's what they've done, they've attempted to use the power of the state to murder an innocent man. Don't get me wrong, I'm no namby-pamby on this issue. I do not believe the death penalty should ever be imposed for any crime that doesn't result in the murder of someone. For all property crimes such as grand theft (don't laugh, people have been hung in the past for this crime in this country), for rape, for armed robbery, for drug dealing and other "crimes of commerce" that do not result in the intentional or accidental killing of someone else, for any crime no matter how heinous that doesn't involve the purposeful killing of someone, then the death penalty should never be imposed. But for treason against the United States Of America which by definition result in the eventual killing of American civilians, for acts of terrorism that result in the slaughter of Americans, for forethoughtful killing of another human being whatever the original motives, then yes, the death penalty can and should be applied. For all other egregious crimes of a truly horrid nature, the rape of a child for example, a killing of a spouse in the heat of passion by the other spouse, or a reckless alcoholic despite having numerous drunk driving convictions and never being permitted to have a legal driver's license again still gets drunk and drives illegally and in the process kills a car full of innocent people, then those kinds of crimes should be fittingly punished by life imprisonment. To me, life imprisonment is a death sentence anyway, it's just a very slow, painful, almost-tortuous death sentence which keeps society hands' a little cleaner and society's conscious a little more amnesiac. I could go off on a rant right now about prisons and crime and punishment and such, but it's beautiful January winter Saturday morning in North Carolina with a temp of about sixty-five right now and climbing with high clouds and a friend is coming over in a couple of hours and we're going off for a bit and enjoy the freedom, the freedom that can only be experienced as a non-incarcerated American citizen to use our free will agency to chose or not what we wish to do and how we wish to do it on this glorious day of perfect harmony with the universe, so let me finish up the remaining 2-3 entries and scoot.
Oh, USC played some already-unremembered opponent in the national championship game for the mythical national title of college football last week? And tell me, exactly why should I give a rat's behind about this?
The young lady I spent last weekend with, two days of non-stop sex and passion which never quite clicked when we were having sex but which reverted back our true intimacy developed through the Internet and over the phone when we would stop having sex and talk as close friends again apparently has broken off all contact with me and won't tell me why. Of course, I know why, it was a couple of reasons, first being even though we knew better, last weekend was the first time we had ever met FTF/Face-To-Face and within thirty minutes we were naked and having wild jungle sex (I had promised her I would have her seduced and naked and making love to me within thirty seconds of our making RL/Real-Life eye contact but actually took thirty minutes, not thirty seconds for that to happen), like I mentioned, the emotional chemistry developed through countless hours on the Web and on the phone simply was many magnitudes better and greater than that first-time physically intimate encounter ever could have been in our wildest hopes and dreams and we knew that going in, but still. She was the fifteenth woman in my life I had ever chosen to make love to out of literally hundreds of past possibilities, and as my earlier blog entry of this week told the story more completely, she and I both had agreed that at least the physical intimacy of our relationship would be "for a season" and then, hopefully, we would stay intimate emotional friends forever after that, especially considering that I truly believe whomever you make physical love to bonds you to them for all of eternity. Second reason I'm pretty sure of is that she wanted her cake and eating it too. She wanted me to stay true to my monogamous nature and not have physical relations with another future partner, not until I wanted "it", the making love part of her's and mine relationship, to end, but she wanted to have physical relationships, mainly manual and oral but also including actual sex if she ever so choose to do so, without jeopardizing the physical relationship she and I had. In other words, one set of rules for me and another one for her, and these rules became more liberal for her, something we didn't agree to before meeting, as our hot passionate last weekend progressed, for some reason, go figure. To me, the above is a simple lack of respect, lack of respect for her ownself and lack of respect for me, and even now she would tell you I did nothing if always give her (as I give everyone) complete respect. So, I sit here writing this feeling not so much angry as feeling mutedly betrayed, betrayed by my own sense of hope, of hoping, no, not that she was "the one" because we agreed upfront that neither one of us was the other one's "one", but of hoping for a truly intimate friendship that would last for the rest of my time on this planet this go 'round. The fact that this special young lady and I will remain bonded, our souls will remain bonded to each other for all of time in this life and into our eternities to come, well, doesn't mean a whole heckuva lot to me or apparently her right now, but such is the nature of love and relationships, of love attempted and hope lost. Oh, well, oh blankety-blank well. Speaking of a special young lady, the young lady I am going off shopping with and eating lunch with shortly is a truly special friend, a special friend with whom things didn't work out but whom we both made a connection with on many levels and just enjoy each other's company, is an example of a near-relationship that didn't work out but which in its own way did. We went out to dinner once and two days later she was here and at her request she was naked on my bed, I remained fully clothed the entire time as this happened, My Word, as I gave her a full-body nude massage which ended up I swear accidentally including a "full pudendal massage" but where my fingers did not cross the imaginary lines into her interior, My Word as a gentleman, and after that, well, I dunno, I know I sound totally clueless but hey I still have been officially single for the first time in my adult life for less than a month still and am still groping around, ohhpsss, pardon the pun, trying to figure out the rules of singledom, after that she told me that because of my Gnostic Christian beliefs of which my unbreakable belief in reincarnation is a major part of, she couldn't "get past that" and couldn't reconcile it to her personal Christian belief system (not that I ever asked her to) so all we could be from then on in the future was "just friends". Oh, well. And her actual now-boyfriend, whom she met the exact same day that she and I met, is driving up to see her later on this afternoon and they'll spend the rest of the weekend together. Oh, well. Yeah, being single is more fun than being with a barrel of crackhead monkeys who are also toking up Lebanese blond hash while locked inside a Turkish prison with me, tons of fun indeed, yeah. Friday, January 7 Had a very rough day physically yesterday too, the aftereffects of all the actual work moving furniture around and getting rid of some and bring some new pieces in for my new workspace in addition to having to rewire everything so I chilled out last tonight semi-bored watching a little more TV than I sometimes do and happened to run across "The Quest" starring Veronica Vela on local cable access channel Raleigh Television Network Cable Channel 10, a show that I will surf in and out of while churning the remote. I would like to provide a link to RTN10's website, but the local Time-Warner Cable is too pissed off to provide one since in the latest rounds of re-negotiation with The City Of Raleigh, The City played hardball with them and actually made them upgrade their then-very primitive cable access studios and hardware. It was a nice non-coincidence that Veronica had a new live call-in show tonight on RTN10 and half an hour later there was a rerun of Monday night's pilot of the great new NBC show I love, "Medium". Even though I had watched Veronica's show over the years casually, I was skeptical of her "powers" and "abilities" like she seemed to demonstrate live on the air with a new show every couple of weeks though being an empathy/shaman/whatever I did indeed recognize she definitely had some but probably nothing like she seemed never to claim herself but which were acclaimed by those calling in, one night I was bored silly so decided to call in to her show. I'll never forget doing that as long as I live, Seriously. I didn't give my "usual" name of Kent which is my real name but gave her another name instead which is no less my name than Kent is and just started talking to her more than asking her questions about my view of my deeply spiritual beliefs and such when, from the apparent clear blue sky but of course I knew better, knew where this came from, she said, among other complimentary things I just as soon not repeat here for fear of breaking my right arm trying to pat my own back, she said "yes, you are truly one of God's chosen sent here to help mankind in your angel-way, as demonstrated by your many-times-daily prayer you say to Father 'Thy Will Be Done', which Father likes by the way because you humble yourself to Him and try to do His Will by offering your prayer of 'Thy Will Be Done'." I was beyond dumbstruck. At that time, I was very closeted, not ashamed, not proud, just very private about my beyond-deeply held spiritual beliefs and maybe, maybe five or six people on this planet knew what my daily prayer had been since I was a child, "Thy Will Be Done", and Veronica definitely was not part of my inner spiritual circle. Dumbfounded can not begin to describe the feeling I felt then and even now a bit. Yes, she was definitely "one of us", and I shake my head even now recalling that. A few days later, I very anonymously for my own reasons dropped her off a Clay Cross CD of Christian music I like and a poem I wrote in her honor and told her how much I thanked her for being in this place in time and quietly left it in her office foyer. Last night, I also channel surfed and bopped in and out and want to mention a neat place I ran across, plus want to mention a couple of other websites I've been wanting to plug too. I watched North Carolina Weekend on UNC-TV/Public TV For N.C. program segment about what looks like would be a very cool place to get the hell out of Raleigh/Cary and spend a quiet country weekend in the mountains, Old Trap Mill Inn , which I do plan on going to sometime this year for certain. One techie website I check in at least one daily is Alice & Bill.com , who used to write for Computer Shopper back in the day when CS was the geek's bible more than Byte magazine was even, do check them out, thanks. A friend sent me a link to a friendship page which is very sweet and which gave me a nice warm fuzzy, click here to check it out, it's been on The Web for a long time and you may have seen it before you may have not but it's still worth the 30-second read again even if you have, and do pass it on to your friends' list if you haven't, {Click here to go to it} . And lastly for today, here's the link for my Blackpage.html page at my site, which I created for myself, is less than 1K of code, to provide a solid black background in Explorer when I know I'm going to be in IM chat for a long time and want to give my eyes a restful background behind the open IM windows. There's also an "Easter Egg" within the page but I'll leave it up to you to figure out where and how to retrieve it, that's the fun of Easter Eggs. Thursday, January 6 My computer had a near-melt-down early this morning and it killed a day's productivity in setting up my web consultancy practice but such is the nature of computers. I thought the problem was another hiccup in my 4-year-old Sony POS/Piece Of Something desktop, when I first got it four years ago it would crash almost every other day seemingly and I'd have to do a complete diskwipe and system restore but it's been relatively stable cross your fingers and knock on wood this past year or so especially, but no, what happened today was so weird I'm not sure what exactly happened. Something happened to simply lock the system up and create spurious calls on system resources that bloated out all available memory and sent the HD into a perpetual tizzy and wouldn't let me in or out of the system, keep me suspended in a perpetual state of system ether limbo. I've been messing with computers since 1976 when I first learned both "C" and Unix on an old pre-PC PDP-11 so I could do one of my early consulting gigs for the government and my first PC was actually a pre-PC-PC, a Morrow twin-floppy machine circa 1979, so it's not like I don't have a bag full of tricks that I can use to rescue a machine from total meltdown, but today, almost nothing worked. Finally, after the sixth or seventh try, I did get my NortonSystemWorks2004 System Rescue Disk to finally "take"/"hit" enough to where I could finally F7 the machine and do a CkDsk task run, and the error it found, an "I"-code error, was so massive it took over an hour almost two to do what it had to do to finally correct whatever problem was actually present, all I know is - is that my current setup and non-backed-up files were saved, if the system still was unstable and jiggy for another hour or so until I finally got it blueprinted back to normal. So, anyway. Took my parents out to their/our usual late Thursday afternoon outing at the Golden Corral at Crossroads Shopping Center nearby in Cary and "Pop", my 83-year-old father who has early stage Alzheimer's, got his/our special waitress, Connie, who made sure he got his special order of shrimp which always puts a smile on his face and they were perfect today…another routine day in my routine boring life. Speaking of "routine", all my friends know that back in my middle twenties I was given the monicker/title of "The Most Boring Man In America" by someone who had pretended to be a close friend but who actually was an SBI (North Carolina State Bureau Of Investigation) undercover informant who, well, I won't tell the story here right now, not right this minute but maybe will another day. I've never been shy about telling the story about how and why I was given the title "The Most Boring Man In America", it's actually a title I have been and still am quite proud of and yes it is more or less accurate, it's one of my "core stories" that I tell someone early in a newly burgeoning friendship as we get to know each other better, so who knows, I might just post it here one day too, maybe. All for now, see ya' tomorrow. Wednesday, January 5 
Well, today is quite literally the first day of the next day of my life, at least I should say more accurately the first day of the next one-third of my projected lifespan this time around. The new super-Google-slurpable main landing page is now up, created very specifically to be maximum friendly to Google's algorithm so it can start its climb through the maze before I tweak it down next week to a slightly less G-friendly but prettier page that will look more like a professional web designer actually did it.
No major hiccups were encountered on this transition, save some junk phone jacks I bought from Lowe's because I happened to be there last week and made the mistake of picking their offbrand junk up instead of going ahead and driving the three miles down the road from Crossroads Shopping Center in Cary and going to the Radio Shack at Cary Towne Center and buying the quality products from RS that I have come to expect as a nearly-forty-year-customer of theirs. Once I made not one but two trips to the Radio Shack at Cary Towne the past couple of days, the rewiring of my office for my new DSL/voice line and the second dedicated line for the fax was complete and at that moment I suppose I was officially back in business, back in a business. I have owned three-four businesses in the past, but this is the very first time I have gone completely sole proprietor. In the past, I have always had the need for other employees but the new reality of the pyramid of multiple subcontractors bundled and aggregated for specific projects dictates process management more than project management and since I am world-class at both, not that I expect immediate success, my business plan calls for a best break-even point six months down the road and a fallback break-even stop on my one year anniversary on January 5 2006, but we shall have to see, we shall have to see. Oh, you were asking/thinking about my remark of this being the beginning not of the last half of my life but the next one-third? I've been saying this ever since I was a teen-ager, actually since I was a child. Because of my own relatively unique genetic structure and the fact that both sides of my biological families have members that frequently live to hit the century mark, I figure that between the two and new modern medical science miracles I hope I can afford by the time I'll actually need them that I can comfortably project a lifespan of one-hundred-and-twenty years, living to see the US's TRI-centennial on July 4th 2076. Of course, as would most people, if I am not at least more or less physically mobil to be able to do what I want in those advanced years go where I want see who I want do what I want and if I don't have my mind intact, if I can't write my blog then or my poetry or my magazine articles and columns and do my art and music and such, then, yeah, screw living that long, but as most people would say I think, as long as I have my mind/brain intact and my body's not completely fallen apart, then yeah, I definitely would like to live that long. Of course, I could shot by a jealous husband tomorrow. Oh, wait, since I don't have a girlfriend at present married or single, no I couldn't, Smile! As you might can tell, my blog from now on will have more a free-wheeling, respectful but more free in style posting style, now that it's off the main page and is tucked back it's own little corner of my website. For new visitors of my blog, you can find out approximately 80%+ of my public life by digging through the main topic category pages the link for which can be found below on this page. While absolutely no subject is or will ever be taboo for me here, what you won't find me blogging on a lot are partisan politics or even politics in general except for truly major concerns like the DMCA or The Department Of Homeland Security and the now-notorious Transportation Safety Administration which I truly detest being nostalgic for the old days where you could carry a gentlemen's nail clipper onto an airplane without being body cavity searched first, nor will you find rude or disrespectful rants against any particular person unless said person does something so truly insane as to negatively affect many, many people, nor will you find twisted takes on drop-dead serious issues. As many of you who have followed me for years in print and elsewhere know, what you will find here is a semi-serious tone of respectful opinion and discourse on basically any topic which concerns me at that moment or for a longer period or even forever, combined with the occasional and hopefully catchy bit of funny wit injected when least expected, that is how I am like in real-life, along with an interesting polyglot assortment of left-field items that have caught my attention. Hopefully, if I do my self-appointed job here, you'll come back frequently if not daily to drop in and see what my latest musings are. When I started this blog stuff, and keep in mind I've been on the actual Web since 1990 and had my own and have done websites for others since 1998 so I've been kinda "static blogging" since then, I thought it was going to be a chore to force myself and sit down and write something, anything, every single day but it's become just the opposite. Now, I actually look forward to smearing my electron words onto protonic paper and sharing a conversation, if it is one-way most of the time, with you, my dear reader, whom I converse with like you a true and good friend, which you are by definition or you wouldn't be sharing a beer or a glass of iced tea with me right now as we link through the Ether Bar & Grill. Please do send me feedback as you wish, the only way I truly know how good or bad a' job I am doing is if and when you tell me, and I do take all negative, neutral or positive comments as opportunities to learn something new. All for now, and for a special person who knows who she is but wishes to remain anonymous, a former lover who in her own way has loved me as much if not more than any other person in my entire life before I did something very jiggy and five-year-old-ish and blew it with her (no, I did not cheat on her or otherwise betray her, it's a truly private matter between she and I that will never be discussed publicly here or anywhere else) but who in her kind heart and gracious soul still has remained my loyal and true friend through these past years, My Prayers Of Hours go to you tonight, Dearest, may God's Will be done, and I shall always strive to be as good a' friend to you as you have always been to me, I Always Will Love You, and yes, between God's Plan and your sweet stubbornness and sheer determination, we'll get through this, together, as the bestest of friends that we will always be, forever, Amen. Tuesday, January 4 
Last night I did happen to catch a good part of NBC's pilot of a hopeful new show,
"Medium"
which aired at 10:00PM. I didn't catch all of it because evidently someone in programming at NBC smells a hit and there seemingly was five minutes of commercials for every four minutes of actual television program shown, so I would surf out (I don't TiVO) and do IM's with a couple of friends and then click back in enough to catch the gist of the libretto. I liked it!
As a "true" empath {please do not call me a "psychic" even though that term might be accurate to describe in some instances, that word is so, well, loaded with negative connotations and doesn't begin to describe what my reality(ies) are like that I have to live with day-to-day} I had a good feeling about the show based on the promos and I wasn't disappointed. So many shows about "sensitives" and "psychics" and "mystics" and "shamans" etc. tend to make us with conscious second-sight awareness and those of us who "live in two worlds" out to be either perfect god-like never-make-a-mistake avatars or near-schizophrenics who can't possibly be for-real because the writers of a particular script aren't just skeptics but are outright hostile bigots towards us as a group. It was genuinely refreshing to find a mass-market-media depiction of we empaths that reflects the sometimes disturbing and confusing reality-edges we have to deal with, without making us out to be released mental patients or demi-god beings. Based on my personal reality, "Medium" pretty much got it correct. Of course, some things were Hollywood-ized, deliberately glossed over, deliberately left out and sometimes poked fun at which was okay, because the writers and produces of the show showed the humanity of the real-life person
Allison DuBois that the main character of the show is based on as played by Patricia Arquette. Yes, those of us who walk in two worlds as human as anyone else, make mistakes, misinterpret visions and signals we are offered and given from all sources, have our own ordinary problems in daily life that we all have to deal with, root for those we like, don't help (usually) those that we do not like, seldom if ever use our so-called "powers" for our own personal financial or other benefit because anyone who is for-real knows the karmic price for doing so is way too high, are subjected to fear and ridicule and prejudice just like any member of any other non-majority group, in short, we are your family members, friends and neighbors and the show does a very good job in portraying we of the shamanistic heritage very humanely.
Well, today is the last day you'll find my blog on this landing page/main index page since I am officially hanging out my shingle as web designer and consultant as of tomorrow, so please don't forgot to update your bookmarks to the new page at http://hkentcraig.com/index3.html at which time my new shingle as a website designer will go up here and you’ll have to go to Index3.html to access this humble little blog of mine, which is why I am asking you now to reset your bookmarks now, thanks! and thanks for being a loyal reader, it's appreciated! Monday, January 3 
Hello Everyone, and hope your News Year’s Eve & Day were fun and happy and that the New Year brings you the joy and prosperity and happiness you deserve.
My own New Year’s weekend was pleasant but mixed. Something less than a month ago, I met a very special lady friend online and since then we have been making connections that are seemingly too difficult to make in RL/real-life anymore but which are possible online if you are of open heart and open mind. She and I met on/through a special-interest YahooGroup . Three days after we began exchanging emails, she was intrigued by the unique-sounding "handle" I used there, we talked literally from 10PM that night until 5:30AM the following morning, yes, seven-and-one-half hours straight, wearing out, completely draining the batteries in two rechargeable portable phones on both of our respective ends of our phone landlines, much to the amusement of her (platonic) housemate who had seen her talking to me as he went to bed that night and saw her in her same clothes the following morning as he got ready to go to work. We talked marathonly similarly another 2-3 nights and at least 2-3-4 hours per night every night . We did the usual Internet dating shuffle also of unstated rules but not exact quid pro quo of releasing more and more personal information about ourselves to build senses of mutual trust and confidence so she could know enough about to be reasonably sure I wasn’t a serial killer and I would have confidence that she wasn’t a psycho hosebeast, and of course we exchanged recent and older personal photos of ourselves to help build mutual mental images of what we would look like once we actually met FTF/face-to-face. My first wife and I being failed swingers {click here to read my article about these experiences in the early Pre-Web dating and swingers’ scenes as published last year in Babel magazine online} , seeking out others from 1979 on using the then-primitive BBS's/single-line-dial-in computer bulletin board systems , I have more than most, almost too much experience in creating online relationships for the purpose of trying to translate them into RL ones. It is because of all my past experiences in this unique paradigm of creating a new kind of human relationship, at least a new angle on the oldest geometry of the human spirit world, that while keeping hope high I’ve learned to keep expectations if not low then as realistic as possible. It is a sad but true fact that the most of intimate of Internet/email/chat/phone relationships simply aren’t the same once you’re both in the same room together. The incredibly intimate online relationship will either become even more soulful and connected once you’re close enough to smell each other’s pheromones or it will deflate like the proverbial balloon with a microscopic pinprick in it, even if and maybe despite the fact that you’ve both been beyond-honest with each other during the online courting dance process. At first, she wanted to slow things down, not meet for a few weeks, despite my urgings, okay, gentle naggings to come on up from her residence in a nearby state and if nothing else just let me take her to dinner at a nice restaurant just to see if we clicked in RL or not, with the plan being that even if we clicked right then that night then she would head back home no matter what and come back another time to consummate our relationship if the vibes were still that strong later. Not meaning to seem crass or cruel, but as close as we had become in a very short time, if we weren’t compatible in RL, then we would both need to move on, as heartless as that may sound to you, hopefully staying close emotional friends but forgoing any physical relationship if the attraction wasn’t there. She, being close to late-middle-age-age as I am and experienced in online-to-real-time relationships as well, also knew the emotional risks as well but what we had come to feel for each other was very special indeed. Then, her best girlfriend and she went to dinner, actually went out for drinks last Thursday night where her friend told her “you might regret going to see Kent, but one thing I do know is that you’ll regret forever not going and then wondering about what might have been if you had gone”. That was a sweet sentiment but she and I were going to meet eventually, it was just a matter of when. In any case, she and I talked late Thursday night and she asked if she could come up to see me the following day, New Year’s Eve Day, leaving after she got off her shortened holiday workday around noon, having packed before she went to work, and come on up to see me and we would spend at least one night together, New Year’s Eve, and if things worked out, then the following night as well and because she had a meeting of a social group on Sunday night would need to leave by noon on Sunday, yesterday. Excitedly, I agreed. As an only child, I have been in a semi-caretaker position of my 83-year-old father for the past 3-4 years my role becoming more and more day-to-day as his m |