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We Haven't Forgotten

SOL: Fremont Sustainable Solstice Parade 2007

Sustainable Solstice Festival is a celebration of the arts, lasting community and positive futures. Sustainable Solstice is about co-creating a celebration that inspires us all to live well and joyfully, while living more lightly on our planet earth.

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From the Seattle PI:

Popular nude bicyclists once again lead off annual Solstice Parade

Gerardo Gonzales' heart started to race just before noon Saturday.

He stood by his roommate on North 36th Street in Fremont with his bicycle and the support of friends who coated him with the body paint that would be his only covering. He isn't a typical "naked guy," but something intrigued the 26-year-old Seattle man about the naked cyclists -- traditionally, one of the most popular groups in the Fremont Solstice Parade. "There were about four or five guys and a few girls standing around in our group. One guy said, 'OK,' and we all 'dropped trou,'" Gonzales said. "It was pretty scary at first, but you make friends really quickly when you're out there naked."

Dozens like Gonzales led the 19th annual parade, part of the Solstice Saturday celebration organized by groups including the Fremont Arts Council. Thousands of people who packed North 36th Street cheered the riders, who were painted up as bumblebees, cowboys, flags -- even one as Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
"This is just fun," said Ballard resident Cindy Boyer, who sat with her 6- and 8-year-old boys along the parade route. "This is the first year (the boys) realized they're naked, but I don't think it's a big deal. They like the artistic side of it."

Seattle police reported no arrests and most businesses along the parade route welcomed the crowds.
"We've had a line out the door for the past two hours," Jeremy Charbonnban, an employee at Cafe Ladro, said at about noon. "Normally, we're only a quarter as busy as we are today. I think this makes a lot of people aware of what businesses are in the area."

Lack of parking was the only consistent complaint among parade goers. Some paid $20 to homeowners a few blocks from the route, while most walked a mile or more through Fremont neighborhoods full of garage sales and entrepreneurial kids with lemonade stands. Last year, Kate Walsh tried to watch the parade, but gave up when the closet parking spot she found was at Woodland Park Zoo. She planned ahead this year and was dropped off to drink mimosas at a Fremont apartment two hours before the parade's noon start.

As Walsh stood along the parade route praising the drop-off method, friend Raymond Loyola saw a fellow Boeing engineer ride by in the buff. "That's going to get around the office e-mail pretty fast," he joked, showing a digital side-view photo of his polka-dot-painted friend. The naked cyclists were a crowd favorite, but only a fraction of the parade participants. A marching band followed men with leather vests and whips. Middle-aged women sang about their breasts, a colorful bubble man drew flocks of kids and one entry included a hard rock band. The parade ended with the Sustainable Solstice Festival at Gas Works Park and the Solstice Pageant.

Gene Rose, 54, of Bremerton, is a regular attendee and was among the thousands who vied for prime seating on Gas Works Park Hill overlooking the pageant."Happy, freedom, fun," he said of the event. "It's just beautiful."Cindy Yarbrough, a lifelong Seattle-area resident, went for the first time Saturday. "I've heard it's an experience you have to have once in your life," she said.

The pageant, described as "Sun Arc -- How humans learned to walk more lightly on the Earth," featured elaborate and colorful costumes. There were performers dresses as trees, stars and 24-foot tall puppets. Spear-wielding humans dressed in E.T.-like costumes chased animals and cardboard cars entered noisily on the scene. The loosely choreographed dance featured dozens of volunteers who performed in front of the gasworks structure and weaved in and out of the audience. The musical score came from the improvised sounds of guitars, bongos, didgeridoos -- an Australian wind instrument -- and even mallets on a bucket.

Earlier, at the parade, Jason Curry, a cross-dressing 36-year-old, captured the popular image of the annual Fremont event. "I heard it was a festival with a bunch of freaks and naked people, so I'm ready," he said, standing near North 36th Street. He heard of the parade as an eight-year Seattle resident, but hadn't gone before moving to Fremont this year. Saturday afternoon, he danced to a drum beat in multi-colored, crushed velvet pants and a long blond wig, next to friends who didn't take a second glance. "It's a great place to be yourself," he said, "and have a lot of fun."

Kayakbiker Went to Manila & Showed Up at the Daily Kos Garden Blog!

The temperature is hot and steamy and it's just right for growing orchids. Several places offer potted orchids for between 3 and 7 dollars. The expensive ones are large plants with 3 main sections each with blooming flowers.

I can't stick around for the blog. I had to bribe the owner of the internet cafe to stay open past her closing time of 9 pm. I'll check back some other day to read what happened this week.

This photo shows the fruit of a marungay (Ilokano) plant; in English it is called moringa oleifera. The content of the pod is eaten -- it tastes like wood and for me its an acquired taste, one that I never developed. I first tried it in Hawaii. The Wikipedia states that this highly nutritious plant is used as a supplement for threatment of persons with HIV/AIDS.

Kayakbiker (at Daily Kos)

The weather in Seattle today is overcast and shitty. The weather in Manila is pleasant and sunny.
Slugbug

PS Hat Tip to Astrobuff

Remembering Mr. Wizard (The Importance of Science)

To someone my age, Mr. Wizard was synonymous with science. I watched him on tv and tried again and again to duplicate his feats, such as putting a silk scarf into a glass of colored water and pulling it out dry.

My friend Chris is a hardware/software engineer who reads Scientific American cover-to-cover for pleasure and his father was a science teacher. I emailed him about Mr. Wizard as soon as I heard that he had passed on.

He wrote:
I learned a lot from Mr. Wizard, and my dad always loved watching it with me (or, actually, me watching it with him) and he often explained more details about the science with me and taught me a lot. I remember an episode where Mr. Wizard showed 4 ways to cook a hot dog: over fire; in boiling water; electrical wires plugged into a hot dog to be "electrocuted"; and then he wrapped a hot dog in a napkin, put a toothpick through it, put it on a paper plate then then put it in a "Microwave Oven" for 30 seconds and it came out steaming, but the paper hadn't burned!! My dad knew about this technology but I could hardly believe it and never thought it would become commonplace (I always remembered this when microwave ovens first became available)...

I collected together some favorite quotes about science, which I believe is one of our hopes for the future, if we use it (like any tool) wisely.

For Chris:
The microwave oven is the consolation prize in our struggle to understand physics. ~Jason Love

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. ~Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer. ~Thomas Browne

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. ~Henry J. Tillman

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. ~Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. ~Wernher Von Braun

Science does not know its debt to imagination. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. ~William Lawrence Bragg

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ~John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men. ~Jean Rostand

Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. ~Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1905

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. ~Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual, 1965

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it. ~Alan Valentine

Science is simply common sense at its best. ~Thomas Huxley

Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"

Physics is imagination in a straight jacket. ~John Moffat

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos. ~Robert Quillen

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it. ~Albert Einstein

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ~Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 1995

The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it. ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999

The great men of science are supreme artists. ~Martin H. Fischer

Science is the topography of ignorance. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays, 1883

Observations always involve theory. ~Edwin Hubble

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions. ~Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, 1964

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature. ~Martin H. Fischer

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy. ~Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science, 1925

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. ~William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1910

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974

There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. ~Richard Davisson

The doubter is a true man of science; he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science. ~Claude Bernard

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. ~François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1572

Science is the record of dead religions. ~The Oscariana of Oscar Fingall O'Flaherty Will Wilde [1856-1900] for George Bernard Shaw

Physics is geometric proof on steroids. ~S. Sachs

Ethics and Science need to shake hands. ~Richard Clarke Cabot

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. ~Albert Einstein

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. ~Marston Bates

Life preys upon life. This is biology's most fundamental fact. ~Martin H. Fischer

DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine. ~Kenneth Boulding, "Energy and the Environment," Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms, 1976

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. ~George Wald

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed. ~Thomas Henry Huxley

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. ~Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1926

Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them. ~Abraham Flexner, Universities, 1930

Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more. ~George Bernard Shaw

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science. ~Anton Chekhov

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956

But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. ~Francis Darwin

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. ~Gerard Piel

Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts. ~George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896

Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money. ~Leon Lederman

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. ~Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956

Not fact-finding, but attainment to philosophy is the aim of science. ~Martin H. Fischer

There is no gravity. The earth sucks. ~Graffito

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics. ~Immanuel Kant

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. ~H.L. Mencken, "Minority Report," Notebooks, 1956

This is not a Family Blog

This is the latest rage around the military bases here, strangely enough:

Prick

My internet has been out, and when I returned to the blogs, this is the most informative thing I found so far.

prick [prik] noun

(slang, vulgar) a nasty or contemptible person
Example: He is such a prick!

Arabic: شَخْص حَقير
Czech: idiot
Danish: røvhul
Estonian: jobu
Greek: πρόστυχος, χυδαίος (μειωτ.)
Hungarian: pofa
Indonesian: orang yang menjijikkan
Italian: cazzone
Latvian: maita
Lithuanian: bjaurybė
Norwegian: ekkel person
Polish: kutas, chujek
Russian: мерзавец
Slovak: blbec, otravný človek
Slovenian: kurec
Spanish: gilipollas
Swedish: jävla as
Turkish: boktan biri

Naked Bikers Are Coming!!

We got the middle one ..

Dr. Death Released From Prison

(NYC, May 2006, Slugbug)

Outside the Bubble: Route 666