Jack Manassas and Company

Coming of Age with Harry Potter I am really getting tired of reading about the Witchcraft/Wizardry angle of the Harry Potter stories.   Witchcraft and Wizardry is certainly the setting in which the story is told, but the books are not at all about that.   Harry Potter is a coming of age story, and it is very cleverly done. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we get to know Harry first as a non-magical Muggle.   He is an orphan, bumping along through life and being bullied by relatives who resent having to take care of him.   Strange things sometimes happen to him, but he has no plans, no insights into who he is and the significance of his life.   No one expects a child to have such fully-formed insights, but Harry’s relatives are no help to him at all in this respect.   Harry receives letters, delivered magically, that invite him to be a student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.   This is symbolic of destiny, follow...

20181212-All is Number I have been hacking my way through an entire volume of   a Chemistry Journal, abbreviated “Struct Bond.”   The volume is 148, published in 2013 with the general title, “Chemistry By Number Theory.” It is truly an amazing and revolutionary journal!   I might understand about half of it, but it has been well worth the read.   The final paper in the journal is entitled, “All is Number.” (1).   It is a review and summary of the rest of the papers in that volume.   Among the other wonders described by the authors, there is one particularly mysterious item;   About   4,000 years ago, a pattern of numbers was delivered to the Emperor of China “on the back of a dragon horse.”   These are known as the ‘Ho Tu Numbers.’   The peculiar patterning of the dots and the grouping of different areas provides some rather astonishing information.    The dots provide a map of the structure of DNA base pair...

20181025-Salmon in the Adams River We went down to the Adams River to take in the very end of the Salmon Run this year.  It was amazing, beautiful, and poignant to see the bright red Coho Salmon, after swimming hundreds of miles inland, struggling further up streams that are increasingly shallow to reach the place of their birth.  Once there, they fertilize eggs, and die. The salmon swam upstream, past the rotting corpses of other salmon that had completed their journeys. Canadian Parks took pains to let visitors know to stay on the pathways, to not walk on the river or get too close to the Salmon.  It disrupts egg fertilization.  They even posted signs in Chinese for tourists. Which were sometimes ignored... My wife scolded the tourists who were walking around on the river rocks.  One of their daughters said, “We’re sorry,” in English, and they got back on the path. “I’m so mad at them!” she told me.  “Don’t they know the Salmon populatio...

I've been collecting quotes that I'd like to see on a T-shirt someday--\ Here's my list so far, mostly from the commentariat of www.ecosophia.net and its gracious host, J.M. Greer.  I plan to update it periodically.  Got any T-shirt sayings of your own?? GREAT T-SHIRT SAYINGS You are not your opinions You are not their opinions either - JM Greer The [Pharmacy] Business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good people die like dogs. There’s also a negative side... –Hunter Thompson God, Grant me the serenity to know that I can’t change others, the courage to change the only one I can change, and the wisdom to know its me “The real world is just a special case of the Theoretical and can be considered trivial and ignored” –Jaz Nights How I found Jesus, lost weight and improved my sex life through Witchcraft –display as a book cover The plural of anecdotes really IS data Front of T-shirt; All g...

I saw these messages on the local message board: Two cats and a coyote. Hmmm.... We live in an area where it really isn't safe to let the cats out. Interesting arrangement of signs....

This happened in the early 1960’s, when I was 5 years old. My older brother was 8, and used to run around the woods near our home with a group of boys that called themselves ‘The Snipers Club.’   I doubt that any of them knew what a sniper was, or actually did.   I am pretty sure they got it from an episode of Combat on TV (“Starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason…”).   It was a mysterious and powerful name, so it suited them just fine.   I wanted to follow them everywhere they went, but was mostly not allowed access to the important matters of 8-year-olds roaming the primeval forests near our suburb of Northern Virginia .   This Summer day, however, was different. My big brother actually came looking for ME.   “Ya gotta help us!” he said, near panic.   “The Eagles have challenged us to a tree-climbing contest.   We want you to climb the tree for the Snipers!”    It was well known that I was the best tree-climber in the...

Lord of the Rings Trump Knock Knock Jokes Today in his blog, ‘Clusterfuck Nation,’ James Kunstler mentioned (in comments about US Political gyrations) that “… . This melodrama will make  The Lord of the Rings   look like a knock-knock joke.” http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whirling-whirling/ Since this is an I dea W hose T ime H as C ome, it falls to me to make the first few of them and start this giant ball of s…. -ahem- snow- rolling down hill; Knock Knock Who’s there? Sauron Sauron who? If you’re ‘Sour-on’ Trump, wait till you see what P resident Chthulhu does in 2020 ! KK WT Bilbo Bilbo who? Bill bo’ got away with Monica, why are you complaining about Trump so much? KK WT Mount Doom Mount Doom who? ‘ Doom’ is about the only thing our politicians HAVEN’T mounted in the last 40 years… KK WT Gollum Gollum who? The District of GOLLUMbia does Precious little to help any of us t...