Rip Snorter's Blog

 

Hello readers.

I stopped in to the Pinon Cafe down the road here yesterday.  It happened that Wednesday evenings are a time and Pinon is a place where pilots, homebuilt aircraft enthusiasts, vintage aircraft and warbird enthusiasts get together to show one another pictures of airplanes they own, used to own, wish they owned, and talk over a buffalo burger or taco.

I saw on the chalk board out front that it was happening, noticed a couple of vintage humans sitting across from one another at a bunch of tables that had been pulled together.  Blue haired lady of a certain age, and a geezer.  I told the dishwasher who was doing double duty as a waiter in between reading through a dogeared, worn, vintage copy of Carlos Castenada, that I was taking a table outside.  There's a good view from there of the knife-edge northwest face of the Sandias where rosy cheeked, robust flatlander doctors and entrepreneurs are always getting themselves dead trying to climb the cliff face.

Anyway, I watched the old airplane enthusiasts trickle in until they filled the tables, aging wives of pilots finally able to go somewhere with their hubbies, now he's too old to take some other woman.  Watched through the window by the table as they passed around picture books and photos.  Got me thinking about airplanes, which got me thinking about my own old darling.  Cessna N90172.

A fine old hellion it was.  Might well be partly responsible for the fact that I can't hear too well these days, except for a lot of ringing in my ears.  Lots of noise inside the cabin of that old bird.

Anyway, watching all those worn-out hasbeens with their once glamorous wives, I noticed there weren't any youngsters among them.  Youngest one there was probably my age, maybe older.  I found myself wondering why it is young people don't care anything about flying anymore.  Which led me to wonder why they don't care much about doing anything else, either, except spectator sports and television.

I visited my old friend, Jim, out in Grants the other day... he's looking a bit worse for the wear, having retired from the military and a couple of other professions during his working years.  We were talking about the fact that nobody around today seems to be anyone you'd like to be young and grow old having to associate with.  Jim allowed that for the last 50 years we've created an ignorant, gutless society.

Ah well.  That's Jim.

Pretty interesting things happening with the numbers these days, eh?

I didn't get around to talking about risk-takers, gamblers and tools, except that old Cessna.  But I will.

 

 

Soft spring rain, clouds thick over the Sandias, Manzanos invisible, Jemez cloaked in cloud, Cabazon hidden behind cloud.

ALLLL is well with the world.

Numbers were good last night on MM for everyone, I 'speck. 

 

Gonna be good on PB tonight, run in their herds, graze peacefully, no strays, darting off into the bushes, not a whisper of sound except the rain to scare them off into the insanity kine and numbers are prone to.

Just sitting here listening to the rain, going outside to the porch occasionally to make sure it's not my imagination and inhale that aroma a man who grew up in the drought of the early 50s came to love .... the sexiest, most fulfilling odor in existence, the perfume that comes from water falling out of the sky and landing on the ground.

 

Sunny afternoon here.  Light breeze, nice day.  I'm thinking the wooly mammoths mightn't have to worry about another ice age after all, coming along and freezing them solid one spring day with a bellyful of new bloomed flowers in their burgeoning tums, a giant bolus in their goozles, still in their mouths half chewed.  No long centuries of icepack half a mile thick to have to shovel, no Rio Grande filling the valley washing down frozen Coloradoans to thaw and stink a thousand or ten years from now when it begins to melt.

Yeah, it's a nice day here.

I was supposed to go help Mel's ex sift through the ashes of the basement of her house that exploded about the time he was exiting the vehicle, her at the hospital instead of back there getting blown up and burned, but now thinking there might be a few things that can be saved in those ashes..a keepsake or two.  We worked a day on it a week or so ago and found enough to keep her crying as we worked.

But she had some other pressing business, so I'm sort of at loose ends.  Intended to work on the irrigation ditch out back, but just couldn't muster the inoculation for spring fever.  Watched an eagle soar over the village for a while, looking to pick off a chicken or housecat, figured to come back inside and work on the Road Runner numbers, just testing out various methods and patterns.

But I haven't.  Just feeling entirely too laid back for my own good.  Worthless, today, as that old tomcat lying over there snoozing and not feeling the least guilty about it.

Guess I'll move him off the couch and take a nap.

Jack

 

 

During my last entry I was ruminating over the fact that my personal offerings on this DB hasn't resulted in much discussion with other DB users, why this might be so, and some thoughts and observations about sharing of innormation. 

Four4me posted a comment that gave me better insight into what the reasons might be.  I'm paraphrasing his words, but you can read the entirety by scrolling down and clicking on the `Comments' tag.  I'll try to distill the essence of his thoughts.

"Rip that's real interesting what you said in this blog and many other posts. But really do you think that we have a symbiotic relationship with numbers, Or could it be possible that while you are just a new to the forum here.(some editing out here by me..jp) . . . .  Many of us have been sharing ideas for years and some of us have even made friends who communicate with each other on different pathways. Some people on lottery post have even visited other people in different states. Even more have PM-ed each other and have made joint efforts to try and out think some inert lottery balls.

Although the post required some study to comprehend, I gather from that reference to whether I believe we have a `symbiotic relationship with numbers', that Four4me is saying that while we have similar goals, we don't have a common cause.. No mutual effort going toward a common goal, but instead, individual and small group efforts to achieve a similar goal, more in a devil-take the hindmost scramble  (my words, not his).  Something roughly similar to treasure hunters, as I alluded in my blog entry, all searching for the same treasure, gleaning innormation from anyone dumb enough to share, but giving out as little as possible in return (except among the in-crowd). 

Four4me expands the allusion a bit further in his post, first by pointing out that I'm new here, which is true, and that there are `old-timers' who communicate by other routes and do share innormation (but mainly with one another ---by implication, not with newcomers. I read this, sharing with the clique members who have paid their dues:  "Don't share what you know with strangers," my old friend, Mel, would have put it, more succinctly.  But in this case, the word `stranger' is defined by how long a person has posted to the forums, instead of how many nights spent together listening to the night sky over the crackle of a campfire).

Four4me goes on to declare he's had some wins, which I don't doubt is true.

I don't have a problem with what he says.  As I explained in earlier blog entries, I've encountered the phenomenon before.  While I don't admire it and don't hold the people who subscribe to it in high regard, I understand it.

One of the least appealing facets of every DB I've ever visited was the tendency of cliques of users to lord their having been visiting there longer over the more recent arrivals, as though some virtue accrued with the duration of having visited there, and were sacred.  That attitude is easy enough to see here, as well.  Old-timers can behave in ways that would immediately label them trolls, were they recent arrivals, but they do so as members of an `in-crowd', and can actually solicit support from their friends in this behavior (and receive it). 

Of course, that's only a piece of what Four4me is referring to.  The underlying reference to the hoarding of `secret' knowledge, so frequently repeated in human behavior as to be expected, is also there.  It echoes the spinoff drumbeat posturing of many here over how adept they are at predicting numbers, how inept others are, what amazing fellows these posturers are, in general. 

If someone who's ever won a jackpot still hangs out here I tip my hat to him in horror, awe, and wonderment.  But a person who hasn't won, but who prances about proclaiming his ability to predict the numbers is only worthy of a shrug.

As I've said, I have no problem with this.  We humans tend to find ways to rhyme with ourselves in our inadequacies, and in this we've discovered yet another means of doing so.  The comparison between treasure hunters and lottery number aficionados appears to be a valid one, which is evidently what Four4me intended to communicate.  He succeeded, perhaps better than he intended.

I'll finish this with the observation that, if Four4me and his friends had discovered what they were looking for they wouldn't still be coming here.  When I do, I won't.  I'm not here to search for any new best friends with attitude.

Four4me, I appreciate the post.  If I've misread you here, I apologize.  Feel free to correct anything you believe doesn't do justice to your words.

Sooooo.  I'm posting these numbers here just to keep myself honest and to remind myself, should I be wrong, there's no disgrace in being wrong in public.  The disgrace would be in being fearful of doing so.  Of caring whether one might appear less in the eyes of men such as these:

I believe six of the following numbers will probably be on the MM draw Friday night. 

 

MM Friday
1	5	8	13	17	18
19	21	22	26	27	28
32	33	36	38	40	44
45	46	48	49	50	51

Distilled, they'd look this way:

5	13	17	18	22	26
27	28	32	38	44	45
46	48	49	50	51

Jack

 

I'm finding a lot of striking parallels here.  The search for the grasp of what the numbers are doing has a surprising similarity to some of the headier times during the search for the Lost Adams Diggings.  The flashes of insight, the anticipation of putting theory to the test, the unexpected discoveries of unrelated, but satisfying and fulfilling bits and pieces.

That's what I'd label the best of all this.

On the other hand, as I've mentioned in an earlier blog entry, there's cause to think the down-side of sharing innormation outweighs the returns by a long shot.  I suspected it before I ever began doing it here, remembering hard lessons learned doing the same thing on Treasure Hunting forums a decade ago.

If my old friend and partner, Mel was alive he would be laughing with bitter satisfaction at me now, telling me he warned me.  It really used to piss him off, all the innormation I'd post on those treasure hunting forums.  "You don't share what you know with strangers," he'd say.  "You won't get anything back out of it.  They don't know enough to be any help to you.  And you stand a good chance of losing everything you've worked for."

When I began posting the Strange Experience thread I really just threw it out there intending to find out if anyone else had experienced anything similar.  But it sparked some exchanges, early on, causing me to believe some mutual growth of understanding might come out of sharing innormation.

Instead, the thread grew into a series of semi-evangelical monologues with me posting all but the most crucial pieces of the puzzle, becoming a sort of celebration of discovery, but with me dancing alone in the process.  I allowed myself to barely notice the fact the thread was getting a lot of readers, but if anyone was joining the investigation, they weren't sharing whatever they found.

I'm prepared to accept the charitable view that a lot of the reason people weren't joining the thread as dialogue was merely because they weren't deeply enough into it to discover anything.  On the other hand, maybe they were simply curious, not actually getting anything from it, but reading it to pass the time.

In retrospect, the only serious return I've seen on the thread was the post by Alonzo containing a vague hint of the most important key to the process, which was worth the price of admission to the entire dance.  Otherwise, I'd have to call the thread a waste of time.

I'd have missed that post by Alonzo if I hadn't been posting to the thread, but that was some time ago, and there have been a lot of shared discoveries since then with nothing coming back.  I'd have to judge that everything on that thread following Alonzo's post would qualify as affirmations of Mel's point of view regarding the sharing of innormation with other treasure hunters. 

If the thread was going to result in any helpful insights by others, it was clearly placed on the right forum.  The people who read and post there, at least, are already accustomed to thinking outside the boxes.  But, the fact is we all think inside boxes.  The Mystical Forum people have merely moved their boxes outside the common boundaries and rebuilt them.  The ones on the software development and general lottery end of things have constricted their thinking so far they probably just aren't capable of contributing anything that doesn't echo what someone else has done.

I observed on an earlier blog entry that treasure hunters and lottery enthusiasts aren't long on sharing innormation.  I'd say that's worth repeating, but maybe in both instances most of the people involved just don't have anything worth sharing.

Jack

 

 

 

I'm finding a lot of striking parallels here.  The search for the grasp of what the numbers are doing has a surprising similarity to some of the headier times during the search for the Lost Adams Diggings.  The flashes of insight, the anticipation of putting theory to the test, the unexpected discoveries of unrelated, but satisfying and fulfilling bits and pieces.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> 

That's what I'd label the best of all this.

 

On the other hand, as I've mentioned in an earlier blog entry, there's cause to think the down-side of sharing innormation outweighs the returns by a long shot.  I suspected it before I ever began doing it here, remembering hard lessons learned doing the same thing on Treasure Hunting forums a decade ago.

 

If my old friend and partner, Mel was alive he would be laughing with bitter satisfaction at me now, telling me he warned me.  It really used to piss him off, all the innormation I'd post on those treasure hunting forums.  "You don't share what you know with strangers," he'd say.  "You won't get anything back out of it.  They don't know enough to be any help to you.  And you stand a good chance of losing everything you've worked for."

 

When I began posting the Strange Experience thread I really just threw it out there intending to find out if anyone else had experienced anything similar.  But it sparked some exchanges, early on, causing me to believe some mutual growth of understanding might come out of sharing innormation.

 

Instead, the thread grew into a series of semi-evangelical monologues with me posting all but the most crucial pieces of the puzzle, becoming a sort of celebration of discovery, but with me dancing alone in the process.  I allowed myself to barely notice the fact the thread was getting a lot of readers, but if anyone was joining the investigation, they weren't sharing whatever they found.

 

I'm prepared to accept the charitable view that a lot of the reason people weren't joining the thread as dialogue was merely because they weren't deeply enough into it to discover anything.  On the other hand, maybe they were simply curious, not actually getting anything from it, but reading it to pass the time.

 

In retrospect, the only serious return I've seen on the thread was the post by Alonzo containing a vague hint of the most important key to the process, which was worth the price of admission to the entire dance.  Otherwise, I'd have to call the thread a waste of time.

 

I'd have missed that post by Alonzo if I hadn't been posting to the thread, but that was some time ago, and there have been a lot of shared discoveries since then with nothing coming back.  I'd have to judge that everything on that thread following Alonzo's post would qualify as affirmations of Mel's point of view regarding the sharing of innormation with other treasure hunters. 

 

If the thread was going to result in any helpful insights by others, it was clearly placed on the right forum.  The people who read and post there, at least, are already accustomed to thinking outside the boxes.  But, the fact is we all think inside boxes.  The Mystical Forum people have merely moved their boxes outside the common boundaries and rebuilt them.  The ones on the software development and general lottery end of things have constricted their thinking so far they probably just aren't capable of contributing anything that doesn't echo what someone else has done.

 

I observed on an earlier blog entry that treasure hunters and lottery enthusiasts aren't long on sharing innormation.  I'd say that's worth repeating, but maybe in both instances most of the people involved just don't have anything worth sharing.

 

Jack

 

 

And the courage to believe.

I've been thinking a lot lately about Alonzo Wright, maybe the real name of the man who calls himself BigLoooser.  He evidently predicted the MM results for the third time last night, announcing his predictions before the draw to various members of the DB.

So what does this mean?  What does it say about Alonzo Wright?  What does it say about conventional wisdom?  What does it say about hard `knowledge'?  What does it say about the fundamental assumptions of scientists, statisticians, hard-nosed businessmen and politicians who promoted the governmental adoption of lotteries as a `voluntary tax on stupidity', as one politician described it when my own state was adopting Power Ball?

I'll begin with the last.  What Alonzo Wright, and the man I described in the Strange Experience thread under the Mystical forum have proven is that assumptions and matter-of-fact beliefs by people who `know' aren't necessarily any more solidly founded in truth than the bald declarations the guys sitting around in the barbershop used to make circa 1957, about how the Good Lord would destroy us, the same as He destroyed Babylon when they tried to build a tower to the sky.  Ain't going to be no artificial moons up there circling the earth.  Any fool knew better than that.

That was just prior to the Russkies sending Sputnik I into orbit.  

As for `knowledge', conventional wisdom, fundamental assumptions:

If you go back and read the posts in the Software Development thread under the Lottery Systems Forum, read how it was the days after Alonzo announced what he could do, but hadn't yet proven it, you'll see the 2005, version of the barbershop matter-of-fact pronouncements that he couldn't do it.  And any scientist, statistician, or hard-nosed businessman would have said the same thing.  That's `hard' knowledge for you.  Science.  Conventional wisdom, all wrapped up in a pretty package and tied with a bow.

For some reason, Alonzo had the courage to shrug off all that wisdom and knowledge.  He had the confidence that it could be done.  That he could do it.  And all the PHDs, book science and smartypants scoffers and naysayers on the DB weren't about to deter him.

Alonzo bought himself an adventure.  The tools he used were courage, self-belief and probably a lot of hard work.  We don't know much about Alonzo, but we know he's a man who's able to dream with the courage to go places most of us don't bother to go.

Alonzo had the confidence to disbelieve and the profound courage to admit it at the risk of appearing a fool in the eyes of lesser men.  A lot of those lesser men on this DB measured themselves during those days prior to Alonzo's demo, and forgot how tall they were immediately afterward.

Jack

News Flash

It seems certain the strange collusion between the numbers trafficking between Mega Millions Lottery and Power Bolls Lottery has experts and law enforcement officials baffled.  The possible connection between this phenomenon and the equally unpalatable fact that Power Bolls Lottery is unable to go more than a few draws before someone wins, has caused a mass-migration of potential Power Bolls potentates.  Lemming-like, they've swarmed from their homes to live in tents and under bridges in Mega Millions states.

Dwight David Einstein, spokesman for one of the areas where this is happening, states emphatically:  "This has to stop!  Millions of jobs that don't need doing aren't getting done.  Thousands of wives and children aren't being beaten, as they're accustomed to being. 

"The entire fabric of western civilization is threatened, provided a meteor strike or deadly microorganism we developed and sold to a friendly country in the Middle East (when we still had friends in the Middle East) doesn't destroy us first."

The jackpot climbing and dropping within an unprecedented range of 35 cents to half-a-dollar or so, has caused new heights of deep thinking and new lows of enthusiasm among Power Bolls players, who would prefer not to win much larger sums of money than the current jackpots allow.  One player, who lives under a bridge in Phoenix, tapped impatiently on his shopping cart, visibly distraught:  "It isn't even worth buying a ticket when the jackpots are only $10 million.  We have a RIGHT to jackpots large enough to change the quality of our lives!"

Albert Eisenhower, normer president of Citizens Against Pre-Marital Sex Between Number-Members of Unrelated Lotteries and For a Matrix (whatever that is) Change, explained, "We're victims of a conspiracy of numbers here.  Those Power Bolls states were picked to be in that Lottery because they were less populated, usually normer cotton growing states located along Ley lines that can only be detected by Ley Line Detectors, which no one's been considerated enough to invent yet.  People in those states aren't supposed to win.  They're supposed to lose and lose and lose until those jackpots get so big the entire state populations are spending all of every paycheck buying tickeees in hopes of winning more money than they can imagine ($340 Million).

"Instead, the Power Bolls numbers have been marrying their first cousins on Mega Millions every draw, resulting in hundreds of 11s, 22s, 33s, and 44s.  There's also an unsubstantiated rumor that sixes are changing to nines, 14s are changing to 41s, and that there's `way more banjo and guitar picking going on in the ether than there's ever been before.  Meanwhile, the MM numbers are pretending innocence, ignorance and building the expected prizes."

Here's a smoking gun-barrel indictment of what's really happening.  Power Bolls is first, then MM, then PB, etc, roughly ad infinitum:

 

4/9/2005	1	11	35	46	53	29
4/8/2005	5	13	17	33	35	35
4/6/2005	5	11	14	22	51	17
4/5/2005	4	19	45	51	52	22
4/2/2005	5	9	11	17	46	39
4/1/2005	11	19	28	32	45	10
3/30/2005	22	28	32	33	39	42
3/29/2005	7	17	18	30	42	38
3/26/2005	9	12	35	41	51	36
3/25/2005	11	18	19	45	49	2
3/23/2005	23	29	37	40	45	38

Despite the photo-op potential, the White House had no comment.

 

Hokay.  I try to think of five particularly communistic things going on in my life every morning, every evening, during the day, to find reasons for being grateful for.  It's a ritual I try to practice constantly, but if I begin the day with it, it's a lot easier to remember for the rest of the day.

Soooooo.

I'm going to let the numbers on the PB draw last night be my first, even though it's really easy.  Those numbers did good and I have a lot of good feeling about what hit last night.  It's cheating, but I'm going to be grateful for that anyway.

Hokay.  Number two.  It snowed last night.  Everything was budded out, and it damned well snowed.  Maybe you think I'm not grateful, but I am.  If the frost gets those buds for a third time there ain't going to be any apples, apricots, grapes, pecans, but there's always another year, and we need the moisture, probably more than we need the fruit this year.  It's been a long drought and the moisture deficit isn't entirely made up, even with all the rain and snow this winter.  Yeah.  I'm grateful.  Yes, I am.  I can feel it, reluctant, squirming, fighting every inch of the way, but grateful is emerging.

Number 3.  Tres.  I'm grateful for these affirmations.  That's an easy one too, cheating, but they've had an enormous influence on my life for the past decade, and sometimes I forget to be grateful for knowing how good they are for me.  And besides, it fills a slot, allowing me not to have to confide to you what some of the 'really communist' troubles I'm going to have to be grateful for before I get past these affirmations in my private mind, this morning.  But those are none of your business, so I'm going to try to keep this clean and well lighted.

Number 4.  Quatro.  Lessee.  A cat just took a dump on the rug over there across the room.  Knows better than that, but did it anyway.  It means, hopefully, that the cat was communicating to me the litter box is getting too full.  I'm grateful that cat reminded me of my neglect.  I haven't cleaned it up, but when I do I will examine the stool and make certain the cat wasn't telling me something else, something more important.  I'm grateful a cat will tell a person willing to listen what's going on with it, what sort of health problems might be hidden there in that pea brain, wanting to come out but not knowing how.

Number 5:  Half an hour after daybreak and the wind's coming back up outside.  I'm grateful for that wind, that howling and clattering of things loose on the porch, the rabid windchimes, the cold air whistling in around the old wooden frames of the windows.

Maybe you think I'm not grateful for that wind, but I am.  Here's why.

Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmmm.  I am.  Just give me a minute here.

Ahhhh..  I'm grateful for that wind because it's going to melt the snow quickly.  Maybe even soon enough to save the blossoms and buds.  Maybe that old wind will just evaporate enough of the snow, good old wind, temperature 37 degrees F, maybe it will have all that snow gone in no time at all and the new grapevines won't lose their buds, the apples will be okay.

A lot of people mightn't be grateful for that wind howling to blue blazes out there, me sipping my coffee here, typing, feeling the cold air on my bare ankles, but I am.  Yes, I am.

Jack

 

Sex and the numbers?  That why you're reading this, amigo?

There isn't any.  At least so far as I've been able to discover, there isn't.  But I hang out over on the metaphysical side of the forum street.  Might be that over there with the rocket scientists, the adders and subtractors, the wheel-dealers, maybe they've found it, but they're keeping it a secret.

Closest I've ever heard of anyone getting that far away was an apocryphal story in the '50s about a floor-show in Ciudad Juarez with a woman and a jackass.  Which isn't getting a lot closer to sex with numbers, but it's still far enough away from sex with people of your own species to give pause.

So.  Wossname, BigLoooser's system is loose on the world.  I went there and couldn't make heads or tails of how to get it to go beyond the number 31, along with some other shortcomings in my intellectualness allowing me to get filthy rich from his method and pretend I'm the hmmmm King of Sheba, Nero, Michael Wossname Jackson, whatever the football player's name was who cut his Goldilox wife's head almost off and got away with it, lots of others I'm not going to be able to imitate and maybe REALLY get my life all bolloxed up.  Too bad.

Anyway, I've got my Powerball tickets for tonight, came home and began working on the drawing for the 13th.  Discovered to my horror that it looks as though the numbers I picked for the draw tonight stand a lot more terribler probability of hitting on Wednesday.  At least that was my initial once over-lightly appraisal of the number/draw date/which-draw-of-the-month-it-is combo.

This business of thinking 2-3 draws in advance is a thing that needs a lot of work and understanding.  I'm obviously not there yet.

Windy outdoors.  Spend quite a while getting my windchimes to collide with one another without going that extra mile and tangling up all hell to breakfast.  Not sure whether it was a success.  60 degrees outside with a 90 mile an hour wind gives a wind chill factor of roughly 34 degrees below zero, plus/minus 3.92 degrees, depending on the gusts.

If I had a kite I think I'd go fly it.  But failing that, I thinks I might just go fly the llama next door.

Jack

First encouraging news in a while from Power Ball last night.  It appears to be backing out of the dark room where it's been held captive for the last while.

5	11	14	22	51	17
5	9	11	17	46	39

Was the prettiest sight I've seen in a while.  Things had seemed to be log-jammed, numbers not repeating, due numbers hanging around whispering to one another, peeking out of the ether, arguing about who could hold out the longest before having a climax.  Now they're getting behind on the conveyor belt, gonna have to catch as catch can.

I'm referring most particularly to these: 

 

8

15

44

Eight went due February 23/26.  Fifteen, February 19/23.    And 44 has been running from the law since February 2/5.  The weird thing about them hanging out there so long with serious bills due is that it seems to break up the patterns of all the other for a long while.  It wasn't quite so bad when 1 and 6 did it early December and didn't appear again until February 26 and March 19, respectively.  Got so a person let them slip his mind, not thinking of them as bail-jumpers, instead of just background music.  But then 21 pulled the same trick, took off for the tall timber on January 12/15 and hung out in the honky-tonks and back alleys AWOL until February 12/16, when it came back in for a hot meal and a shower, then bounced again until March 19.

But look at all those repeats in the last two draws.  Finally getting things straightened out up there in the ball coordinating headquarters.  But that new kid in the mail room with 8, 15 and 44 is going to have to pull them out and deliver them before things can level out completely.  Just admit he screwed up and face the music.

Meanwhile, the weather was awfully nice here yesterday.  Wind died down, maybe because the numbers are finally getting their act together:

Anyway, hard to find fault with a world where all those 17s, 11s and 5s are popping their cookies like springtime bunnies.

Been reading some of the blogs by other people on this DB.  Makes me think I need to get some enemies here I can talk uglies to in my blog, and who will talk uglies back to me in theirs. 

Whew!  Strange reality we've picked to spend a lifetime in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's a beautiful day here, aside from the normal New Mexico spring wind.  From the porch I can see the Rio Grande's having it worse than here, lots of dirt in the air.  But just below this old house the only road that could take a person anywhere besides downhill and out to civilization heads East into the mountain.  It's been closed since the first snowfall, but I was feeling some cabin fever.  Thought I might just be able to get through the pass above here into the East Mountains.

About 2/3 to the top I found it wasn't to be.  Packed snow still thick enough to stop traffic, maybe for another month.

On the way back down, stopped and hiked around a while just to listen to the streams running and smell the trees.  It was good.  All that water heading west, probably thinks California's heaven.  It wouldn't be in such a hurry if it knew where it's really going.  First it has the desert between here and the Rio Grande, where a lot of it will vanish off to a parallel universe.  Then, if it behaves in the normal manner, it will have to take a hard left turn into the Rio Grande, take a bath in the effluent from the Albuquerque sewer systems, then meander on south and east into Texas.

Not what it was expecting at all, I'm betting.  Otherwise it wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get down the mountain.

Near the base of the mountain on a cliff wall about three miles up the road from here is the Sandia Man Cave.  Stopped to fool around there a bit, think about those old outdoorsy guys up there in that cave, figuring how they'd be fairly ecstatic winter is over and they could get out of all those animal skins.

Sandia Man Cave was the home of some early people, maybe 12,000 years ago.  Folsum/Midland Era.  That cave was the place where the gnawed bones of the latest mammoth in New Mexico were found.  The folks there were evidently dedicated to improving the environment for the sake of those of us now by killing off the last of the mega-fauna around here.

Lucky thing, too.  I hate to think what those sabre toothed tigers and mammoths would do to pet dogs and orchards.

Jack

 

I saw it on one of the threads on this DB.  Someone was complaining how he/she was SOOOOO bored with one or another lottery.  Reminded me a bit of the old saw from the `70s.  Someone asked whether sex was dirty.  "If you're doing it right, it is!" came the answer.

The entire concept of boredom as it pertains to lotteries is a strange one.  Almost as strange as boredom, all by itself.  The idea that life, anything in life, could be boring.  There just ought not be room to squeeze something of that sort into our lives, what with the limited time we have to spend in this reality before we're whisked away into the ether to reflect on all the choices we made while we were here, plan for whichever choices we're going to be faced with next time around.

No time at all, thinks I, to be bored, to try to put the mind in a place where it's even capable of understanding such a concept.  I'm not going to do it.  Certainly not as it pertains to the whispers of the universe, the ballet of numbers dancing into our reality through the lottery systems.

But rather than digress and settle into some sort of monologue singing the rapture of the dance of numbers, I think I'd rather reflect a bit on why people might believe their lives are empty enough to allow them time for boredom (aside from the sickness of the soul that might allow them to view live as merely a search to fill the moments until death).

I believe it might be the fact that modern life, modern humanity has done everything possible to sever connection to what this reality is all about.  We've chosen a place for this lifetime where every single organism (with precious few exceptions) has to feast on the carcass of something else, just to survive.  Maybe that should tell us something about what we're supposed to be doing here, beyond just surviving. 

I'd offer the possibility that we're suppose to be trying to transcend the savage environment we've placed ourselves into.  Not by the lie of avoidance, of turning our eyes away from it in repugnance, as we're prone to do.  Not by disguising the meat or chicken on the plate before us in such a way as to allow us to avoid recognizing that it was a living, breathing animal a while ago, before it came to be there on the platter in front of us.  Before it was chopped to pieces and put on a foam plastic tray covered with clear plastic so we can see it, not as a piece of something once alive, but as an object.  A rock.

That piece of chicken on the plate was, just recently, a creature that lived several months inside a 2X2X2 cage...spent the entire span of existence there for the exclusive purpose of ending up on that platter looking appealing.  The eggs for breakfast were laid by chickens in a similar environment, cages lined up 3 deep, three football fields long, their entire lives.

We have to eat something.  We might as well eat the chicken on that plate.  Our not eating it isn't going to change things. 

But our failing to recognize, to pause for a moment to consider the creature that piece of chicken used to be, to acknowledge before we put a fork into that egg, that somewhere there's a 2x2x2 cage with a chicken inside living for no other reason than to drop an egg per day into a chute so we can eat it,  so we can spend more time on this planet being bored, seems a dreadful possibility.

We look at life through windows, through cathode-ray tubes connected to cameras held by someone else, someone who might, or might not be living.  We shut down our senses to shave away risk, pain, things that taste badly, things that smell objectionable. 

And we somehow discover that life is boring.

I'm going to have to think some more about this.  Meanwhile, give some thought to adding some adventure to your life if you think it's boring.

People are actually reading this blog-thing.  Amazing.

Okay.  What's been on your mind this morning, the readership asks, me adroitly putting the words into the communal mouth.

In between working on my numbers for coming Wednesday night, I've been thinking about Discussion Boards and Chat Rooms.  What is it about those things?  What's the appeal to us?  Why do they so frequently erode into acid exchanges between the users?  How do complete strangers come to have such a rancor for one another?  And how to otherwise, probably nice enough people (they have to be... someone would have taught them manners if they behaved that way offline) come to have such nasty streaks when they wear a mask of anonymity?

I've seen discussion boards and participated in a few previously.  A couple of prospector/treasure hunter boards during the mid-90s when I published the forerunners to The Lost Adams Diggings - Myth, Mystery and Madness.

In those days a few people were still doing non-spectator things outdoors.  Enough were, at least, to keep sites of that sort in business selling metal detectors, gold pans, books, sluiceboxes, dry-washers and whatnot.  That's when I first noticed this discussion board spinoff phenomenon I eventually came to think of as the snakepit.

People would come to the boards to learn about prospecting, about a particular lost mine, about some piece of equipment or other.  But on any site there'd come a time when a specific group of individuals would just sort of hang out there.  They weren't there to learn, and they obviously weren't there to share innormation.  Mostly, they were just wasting time, disparaging people who asked questions, disparaging the attempts others made to answer.  The snakepit.

These weren't just trolls.  They were men who knew the subjects the board was created to discuss.  But treasure hunters and prospectors have never been long on the innormation sharing business.  So instead, these guys hung around blustering at one another, arguing which had the most skill with a metal detector, which detector brand was best.  Online acquaintances who frequently hated one another and everyone else, but still hung around.

Mid-1998, I became convinced Y2K was an actual threat.  That belief led me to another type of chat room.  A place where people who believed similarly hung around to talk about  TEOLAWKI (the end of life as we know it) and exchange innormation about Y2K preparedness.  At least, that's how it began.

Before too long we all discovered that, while we each believed Y2K was going to happen, to one degree or another, we had some serious rifts in the other aspects of our lives.  Some were born again Christians who wanted to ask one another and answer one another whether this was going to be the Rapture, and if so, when it would begin, and what it would be like, both for themselves, and for the non-believers who'd be left behind to suffer it out on the ground.

That sort of thing.  That, and just how bad would things get, post-Y2K.  And how much a person should bet that it would happen at all. Attempts at risk analysis, though most of us didn't know a lot about computers.

From mid-'98 until I departed for my woods-retreat mid-'99, I watched the Y2K chatroom with a measure of awe, disgust, concern and wonderment.  I watched those people who came to the chatroom to learn become experts after a few visits (the fundamentals of preparedness were, after all, relatively simple).  I watched the competition among the new survival experts when `newbies' came to the chat room. people who'd just heard about Y2K and wanted to know more.  The poor old newbies found themselves swarmed by all the old-timers who were, themselves, newbies a couple of weeks earlier.  Everyone wanted to demonstrate his knowledge by telling some newby about it all.

Meanwhile, the rancor, the snapping and snarling, the pro-gun/anti-gun, born-again/non-religious wars raged among those folks who came there first to just learn, who all had the same reason for their original visits.  And, of course, the romances.

The snakepit.

So.  How do strangers who have no reason to give a hoot in hell what one another think come to such a pass?  What is it about discussion boards and chat rooms that draws people so closely into one another that they wish to apply pain, sarcasm, poison?  That they actually allow the poison being spewed by the malignant random stranger to pierce their feelings. 

It's a study.  I'll swear it is.

It's a small matter in the overall scheme of things.   Seems large at the moment, but it's small.  Infinitisimol, except in the lives of specific human beings, all influenced by personal decisions, personal choices, personal responsibilities.

Some guy, somewhere, was traveling around last summer making his living playing the lottery.  I met him in an accident of fate, talked a while, him telling me what he does and how he does it, me listening, but not believing him.  But it was a seed.  Eventually I discovered he was telling me the truth, began digging around in scraps of paper and fragments of memory, trying to reconstruct his words.

I was still experimenting, holding my own, but not progressing as much as I'd have liked.  I posted the story on the Strange Experience thread under the Mystical Forum.  Along comes another guy, makes a series of cryptic remarks that seemed pointless at the time, and 24 hours later I'm looking at something on the screen of a computer my brain has some difficulties accepting.  A direct result of the remarks made by the guy about the Strange Experiences thread.

Meanwhile, this guy, wossname, Bigloooser (BL),  posts a claim on another thread in another forum.  He describes what he's able to do to all the minions of this site.  The response?  About what you'd figure.  A lot like my own response when I met the guy over a cup of coffee last year.  Disbelief.  But the manner of expressing that disbelief ranged from mildly discourteous scoffs, to sneers, to outright hostility. 

BL goes on to tell these people, these lottery hopefuls, how if they'll just lift their thinking out of the box, they can do what he does.  It's cryptic, but it contains everything they need to know.  He also says outright that it's a personal crusade of his to bankrupt the lotteries, which I'm confident he can do.  But all they have to do, though he doesn't come out and say it, is open up their minds and allow themselves to disbelieve what they think they know, then do some thinking and listening to what he says.

So, the interesting thing about all this turns out not to be that a man has figured out how to bust the lotteries, those random, unbustable numbers.  The interesting thing is that these LotteryPost users are unwilling to think it out by themselves.  They're determined that he should hand it to them as an answer, not as a question they can answer for themselves.  They've seen his system work, but they'd rather not use it than give up their belief that what they 'know' is actually true.  They'd rather go on playing with wheels and making knowing statements back and forth to one another than give up one inch of their smug realities to stop and carefully consider what BL has handed them.

What he's handed them is an entirely  different way of looking at reality.  A way that erodes the foundations of everything they think they know, everything they believe.  Better, a person might say, to stand lost, solidly on a firmament I can feel when I stomp it, than walk into the quicksand of giving up what I 'know'.

The tide in the affairs of men, the bard said, if taken at the tide can lead on to grand events.  But he also described in few words what happens when we miss the wave. 

The wave is going to pass as soon as BL turns it loose on the world.  That's how long there is to sit and think about it.

Jack