In Need of Better Equipment

Once upon a time, I saw a marvelous and mysterious occurrence in the night sky between Kansas City and Topeka. I was on a date with handsome soldier who had been deployed in Vietnam as a medic. He was spending his last few months in the Army at Ft Riley. We had gone to Kansas City for a concert but the tickets were sold out. Instead of staying in KC for the evening we opted to buy wine and return home. (A lot less expensive for guy on a soldier's pay than partying in the River Quay area would have been.) If we had stayed in Kansas City, I would never have witnessed the only thing I have ever remotely considered as a possible UFO.

As we were driving back from Kansas City, I was slouched down in the passenger's seat, gazing into the northern sky. There was not nearly as much light pollution then as there is now so once we left Kansas City behind, I could see a few faint stars in the north. A particularly bright one caught my eye. There are no exceptionally bright stars in the northern skies but this one was not so bright or so large that I thought it was a plane or anything artificial. It simply looked like a bright star. For whatever reason, it kept my attention as we rolled through the dark night for about seventy miles. I just happened to be looking at the "star" when it suddenly turned bright red and accelerated in a razor straight line to the west, literally disappearing from sight in an instant. I was so astounded that I shouted, scaring the soldier, "Did you see that?!"

"What? What?" He was shocked by my outburst. I excitedly tried to explain what I had just seen. I am certain he realized I had truly seen something startling. He knew I was not lying about seeing something is what I mean, but he had not seen it.

I have seen falling stars many times. Though they are fleeting, they fall toward the horizon, toward the ground. You have a beat or two to witness their fall. This thing, whatever it was, shot out of sight supernaturally fast. It seemed to have disappeared into a point.

Since then, I have kept my eyes open, hoping to see something like it again, but the odds of seeing anything travelling that fast are infinitesimally small. If I had not been looking directly at that star when it turned red, I would never have seen it move and disappear. It was an amazing thing to witness. There might be some natural explanation. I have often wondered if it was a meteor falling toward earth that hit the atmosphere and glanced off. That might explain why it turned red and might explain why it shot away at such a tremendous rate. I am not sure if glancing off the atmosphere would cause it to travel at such a tremendous speed? If it had been falling toward the earth at the same speed that it appeared to have accelerated into the west, wouldn't it have appeared to be moving relative to the other stars, at least a little bit, before it turned red? I was looking at it for almost an hour before it disappeared.

Sometimes I think that if it was some sort of a spacecraft - just thinking here, not saying I believe it was actually a spacecraft - maybe they will come back for me some day. So, the other night when I turned north on Snokomo Road, I noticed a brilliant light low in the west that is normally not there. I took a photo of it with my phone but all it captured was this fuzzy orb. Venus is visible in the eastern sky right now, and Jupiter doesn't rise until 11 pm CST. My little phone takes good photos, but not nearly good enough to determine what this brilliant orb was. I need better photographic equipment! Alas, I do not think it was the mother ship coming back for me...

The Stories We Tell

I read something entirely remarkable today: at least 16,000 fans of Game of Thrones have signed a petition demanding HBO remake the final season that ends the 8-season series. They are upset with the way it is ending. My first thought was, "Go pound sand, you entitled idiots! Write your own fantasy series and good luck finding the millions and millions of dollars to get it made into an A+ television series!"

Of course I understand the disappointment when a wonderful book is made into a film but things go askew. Maybe the actors are not talented enough to bring the characters to life. Brad Pitt comes to mind, ruining the character of Louie in Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire". I read Pitt changed his mind about acting in the film but it would have cost a fortune to back out of his contract. He sullenly honored the commitment and subsequently ruined that character. Tom Cruise was cast as Le Stat, the main character, an ancient, beautiful, elegant, soulless vampire who decided to walk the world again in modern times. Tom Cruise looked nothing like the way Anne Rice described Le Stat in the book, and the fans of the books were so disappointed - including me.

As for Game of Thrones (GOT), I watched the first two seasons piece-meal because I was traveling, spending four nights a week in a hotel where HBO was available. After the traveling came to an end, I did not want to spend the money for cable at home. Lo and behold, streaming technology has evolved since then! Via my internet connection, and a much less expensive monthly fee for HBO, I recently decided to catch up on the entire GOT series in anticipation for the final season. I am very glad I did this. It is a remarkably well done story with excellent actors and top-of-the line CGI and other digital effects, superb costumes, sets and authentic locations. And most thankfully, because it is HBO, it is free to tell this enormous story in adult terms - adult language, violence, nudity and other adult themes. The universal themes and the wonderfully developed characters struck chords with people around the world.

I was thinking about the enormous effort required to create such a sprawling, fantastical world as the one brought to life in GOT. I went looking for statistics.

According to the article, "Game of Thrones: By the Numbers", Dona Feldman, published in Forbes magazine, April 11, 2019: there are some astounding GOT numbers.

Broadcast in 207 countries and simulcast in 194 countries and territories

Season 7 had 32.8 million viewers

It was filmed in 10 countries, with 105,846 days for extras across all 8 seasons and countries where it was filmed. (This boggled my mind until I realized it was similar to "manhours")

68,143 hotel rooms were booked during the filming of GOT

There are more mind boggling statistics in the article, found here:Forbes Article

The enormous creative endeavor of GOT spread work and money across the world, and required all manner of expertise. Imagine what is involved in support of filming this series - the countless crews and the support needed for all those crews. The food and lodging and transportation of hundreds of people and tons of equipment. Imagine all the trades and skills needed to create buildings, sets, props, special effects, stunt people for all of the battles and fights and thousands of movie "extras" to bring the world of Westeros alive. There were scores of horses the various characters and armies needed, especially the Dothraki - a warrior race, like a cross between Genghis Khan and Native American Plains horse tribes. All those horses required food and shelter, transport, veterinarian attention, farrier services, grooming, handlers, costumes of their own, and of course, consummate riders! The raw materials needed for costumes and sets - such things as fabrics, lumber, plaster and energy to power everything - required money be spent in every location, and surely there were suppliers and specialists located around the world.

There is a high tech aspect of a fantasy series like GOT. The three dragons that hatched from ancient eggs, grew from cute baby dragons into enormous fire breathing monsters of legend, were CGI and they were almost flawless. They were so real that they were the stuff of nightmares! The technical expertise to meld CGI with special effects, real actors, real scenery into seamless motion pictures is truly remarkable. The technical advances developed for movies absolutely finds it way to dozens of other commercial (and likely government and military) applications. The creative efforts of modern film making moves the entire species forward.

Game of Thrones is routinely referred to as a "cultural phenomenon" but I heartily disagree with that. From the first human being until the last, we are storytellers. Before we ever scratched our art and stories into rocks or painted cave walls, there were people in every tribe who memorized their history using knots on a counting rope, beaded leather strips, shells on strings, reed tapestries, pottery, or animal hides. Written language evolved, then we recorded our stories on baked mud, parchment, animal skins, papers and in stone. Now we record our stories using art and theater and technology. It is not a phenomenon that something as innately human as the stories and characters in Game of Thrones appeals to people all over the world, speaking dozens of languages. It is the story of being human.

The basic premise of GOT is that humans must put aside their tribal differences and unite to fight the White Walkers, a race of undead creatures that only exist to feed on the living. If the living do not destroy the dead, the human race will be utterly destroyed. Of course, most of the humans recognize the need to cooperate, but some humans only see a chance to enrich themselves, isolate in their rich cities so to be left to plunder the world when the other humans have all been killed or sufficiently decimated. It puts you strongly in mind of a certain American President and his greedy, short-sighted, compatriots absolutely rigging the odds in their favor to plunder whatever is left of our natural world for their own monetary gain.

George R. R. Martin, the author of the books that Game of Thrones is based on, was writing a different book when the first chapter came to him. He had to stop his other project in order to write the entire series. Stephenie Meyer, the author of the young adult books that became the "cultural phenomenon" of the Twilight movies dreamed of a young girl and a beautiful vampire sitting in a meadow discussing the challenges caused by falling in love. When Meyer woke up, she wanted to know where that story led so she began writing what became the Twilight series.

Twilight is a story about tolerance between whites and Native Americans, vampires and the Native American shape-shifting wolf warriors. First they must learn to respect each other to protect the half human/half vampire child born to Bella the girl and Edward the vampire, the two characters Stephenie Meyer dreamed. Vampires from across the world and the wolves had to unite to battle the ancient evil, all-powerful vampire rulers that tolerated neither the wolves, nor the inter-species child, nor vampires who wished to live in a different manner than the old vampires dictated. The message was very clearly transmitted to a generation of young people all across the world that tolerance and cooperation is clearly desirable.

I am not a big Harry Potter fan but I am certain that "cultural phenomenon" story came to J.K. Rowling, the author of all those wonderfully magical books, in some sort of an imperative-to-write manner as well. The Harry Potter books have been translated into 74 different languages to date. I think there are similar messages in that work, what little I know of it.

While I can understand the investment the 16,000-and-counting fans have in seeing Game of Thrones end in a satisfying way, there is not a single ending that will satisfy everyone! Instead of whining, I wish they would be still and contemplate the truly amazing evolution of human story telling, and be thankful for it.

Here's to our long human history of superb storytelling. Here's to Sunday night and the end of something amazing.

Mysteries

The flaming sunset

Life is full of mysterious things. We explain them with science so they seem commonplace and routine. If you are like me, sometimes you begin to contemplate ordinary things until they appear extraordinary. I most often succeed in merely confusing myself. Sometimes, though, I scare myself.

I blame my mother for the first time I scared myself. She insisted I go to bed at 8 o'clock every night whether I was tired or not. It was torture to lay in bed wide awake. The lights had to be off and there was no excuse to get up, to make any noise, or complain. I discovered I could read by the dim single light bulb on in the living room if I laid on the end of my bed with my head hanging over, angling the book above me to catch as much light as possible. I read a lot of library books this way! But the neck, arms and eyes could only hold out so long. Sometimes my mother would go to bed early leaving the house in darkness, making it impossible to read. Then I would "think about" things, simply because I had no other option until blessed sleep arrived.

I do not know what led up to this little exercise, but I imagined I was above my bed looking down on myself. Then above the house looking down on the roof. Then the town, the state of Kansas, which looked remarkably like the map in my text books. Then the United States. Then I was out in space viewing the earth below me, which looked a lot like the globes we had in school. While I was out in space, I decided to take a little glance around. Suddenly facing the cold black infinity scared me so badly I fell back into my body on the bed and never tried that again. But I continued to amuse myself "thinking about" things, and I still do.

I recently burned a brush pile in the corral. Of course, I waited until the countryside was dry and flammable to do this, so I could not leave the fire unattended. It was several long hours of silent contemplation. None of the animals were interested in keeping vigil with me so I had a wonderful opportunity to "think about" all manner of things.

A common meditation exercise is to meditate by being aware of being aware. For the longest time, that was too complicated for me to understand. Eventually I realized it was simply paying attention to whatever was in my awareness. It is very simple, but like so many of these meditation practices and lessons, it may be simple but exceedingly difficult to accomplish or to understand. Since I was sitting and staring at the fire anyway, I might as well meditate. I do not think it counts as true meditation but soon enough the inevitable questions of the nature of fire came into in my mind. I know that fire is a rapid oxidation process that releases heat and light, a transformation of energy from one form to another. I wondered why human beings were created from combustible materials. There must be a reason. I know how we are combustible but I do not know why we are combustible. Wouldn't the Creator have figured out a safer way for us to exist in these bodies, especially since fire is exceedingly common in our dimension? He figured out the best way for ice to freeze in rivers and ponds in order to allow the aquatic life to survive through the winter but He left in one mystery. If you fill ice cube trays with hot water before placing them in the into the freezer, it freezes much more rapidly than cold water. This fact was disputed by an entire department full of engineers so the youngest, prettiest secretary filled two trays - one with cold water and one with hot - and proved this is true. As far as I know it is still a mystery to science. Did the Creator play a little joke on us, knowing eventually there would be a world full of hot shot engineers who would mock the women in their office? Possibly.

I digress. As I was staring into the flames, I was thinking of the true nature of our combustible bodies and what may be left behind after my time is up. I was deeply contemplating the true nature of our physical bodies - 60% water - more space than matter at the atomic level - and if that is all we are, then why doesn't everyone look like their race's equivalent of Jason Mamoa or Sophie Vergara? If we are all the same physical ingredients, then why are our bodies so different? Again, I know how this happens, but I do not know why it is designed this way.

I am supposed to come to some understanding of the impermanent nature of our existence by meditating. I am assured that it is possible to still and discipline the mind well enough that serious inquiry into the authentic nature of existence will lead to enlightenment. The Tibetans are not overly optimistic on how quickly a person can gain this knowledge: countless eons. Soooo... I have plenty of time to sit around watching the fire burn.

After some time watching the flames I was, in fact, still. It was mesmerizing to let my thoughts gently float on the edge of understanding the nature of fire. Some things are beyond words. As the entire mass of limbs reduced to red hot coals, some of the larger limbs were burning with an almost invisible flame. Had it been night, I could have seen the flames close to the charred logs, but it was bright afternoon. I could only see the energy distortions as the flames moved silently in the intense heat of the coals. The question came again and again, not in words but in something beyond language - how is your life like this transmutation you are witnessing in these invisible flames? I tried to sit as still as a stone because I knew for certain if I could sit still long enough, the mystery of the universe would open to me right there in the ashes of the fire. I grew impatient. I am not stone. No wonder it takes countless eons...

The mystery of spring arrives.

The mystery of the living sky

The mystery of the Solar eclipse

The mystery of a foggy morning

Why is a rose beautiful?