So I had this friend Jill who was kind of a feminist, but not really a feminist in the orthodox sense; just very much her own person, gender be damned. Anyone who didn’t know her would have figured her to forever be a college radical.

And I had this other friend, Mike, who was one of the nicest guys in the world, but had a gleeful appreciation for crude jokes.

There is a joke which goes “How is a [man||woman] like a roll of linoleum?”

The standard punchline is, “If you lay it right the first time, you never need to worry about it again.”

Mike, being the funny guy he is, once asked it of Jill, using the (for her) empowering version. What followed is one of the funniest reversals I have ever seen:

Mike: How is a man like a roll of linoleum?

Jill: You can cut it with a knife.

My friend Andy, who keeps me forever jittery with cold-pressed coffee, asked me to redo the website of his band, Potato Moon . I said, Sure! Why not? No charge, just… every time you release a CD, send a few my way. Doesn’t cost you anything and I don’t have to pay more taxes.

Look for the the new design, and a front page, toward the end of the week.

The release party for their second CD, Midnight Water , is this Friday, December 13, at Schuler Books and Music . Another good friend Natalie, lately of Fonnmhor and now playing fiddle with the Conklin Ceili Band, will be sitting in so be sure to show up and give them all your money support.

In a day and age when multi-million dollar lawsuits are waged to keep people from stealing crappy music no-one with a lick of sense would pay for, it is good to have access to local music.

The amount of money you spend on a bottle of Scotch is a fair, but not perfect, indication of the quality of said Scotch.

The critics who panned Equilibrium completely ignored Christian Bale’s excellent portrayal of a man who feels emotions for the first time in his life. They also ignored that this was an intelligent action movie, and not a dumb drama.

Hebrew is a beautiful language.

Time is best measured, not by the ticking of a clock, but by what happens between the ticks.

Mediocrity feeds upon itself.

Rosie’s Diner has the most courteous wait staff on the planet, and they cook up a fine chicken sandwich.

So I have what is probably the beginning of a stupendous migraine. A muscle in my scalp just above my right ear is knotted and swollen so that I can see it in the mirror. It feels, to the touch, like half-frozen meat and it is pulling so I feel as if a constant cold wind is blowing deep in my ear. The knot has buried roots all around the right side of my head and down into my neck where I feel the tendons tightening and twisting my head. I sympathise with the guy from PI and his migraines, which he solved with an electric drill.

I have picked up an old Dynamic HTML/Trigonometry experiment from a year ago and am converting it to Flash. Should have it up in a few days…after the Yoga website update… and the Potato Moon website update… and the Sifu Lee site… and the hot date tomorrow…

This past weekend a group of Tibetan monks arrived in Grand Rapids. Two of them are from the Gyudmed Monaster in southern India, and two from a monastery in Mongolia, near Ulaan Baatar.

Early Sunday afternoon, at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts , they began the creation of a sand mandala. First they cleaned their work surface, a table perhaps six feet in diameter. Then, using a protractor, string, and folded paper, they drew the detail lines of the mandala. Fine lines of white sand were sprinkled over these lines; then, starting from the center and working to the outside, they drew gates and flowers and fields and religious symbols one grain of sand at a time. The final mandala was a little over four feet in diameter, and was built in three days.

And the monks did it all from memory. I asked one of the Gyudmed monks how he learned to do this extraordinary thing. He explained that the physical creation is only a part of a ceremony which, depending on the size and intricacy of the mandala, can last for many days. The monks first learn the meaning of the symbols, and all of the prayers which are recited as the sand is placed. They need to know the prayers which go before and after the work, and the reason behind these things. The mandala is laid out with exact geometric precision, and the colors are balanced and perfectly placed. The act of creating the mandala, a two-dimensional representation of the house of the gods, is itself a form of prayer, There are many different mandalas for different deities and concepts within the Buddhist religion.

Earlier this evening they destroyed it and threw the sand into the Grand River. Having been created, the mandala had served its purpose. The sand, and the prayers which had been focused upon it, was returned to the universe.

I just returned home from The Farm where I spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 hours eating, sleeping and taking pictures.

One of my goals was to take a good picture of a cow . You wouldn’t think this would be difficult; cows are not the stealthiest of creatures, nor the smartest. But they do have the middle-of-the-food-chain instinct of recognising that anything that looks directly at one of them is probably thinking of eating . So in order to coax the cows up to the fence I had to do the following: advance a few feet. Turn and face the other way. Look over my shoulder. Advance a few more feet. Turn and look the other way. Look over my shoulder. Turn around and stare off into the distance. Again, cows not being the stealthiest of critters I could hear them advancing, crunching and blowing. When the breathing was about arms’ length away I would do a kind of half-turn and shoot from the hip , so to speak. If I turned all the way around they would shy and turn their heads, and suddenly remember that they have not finished demolishing the wagonload of feed at the other end of the field.

So I now have a few good pictures of cows . Not the most imaginative poses, but just try explaining that to a cow . Their union is a bitch to deal with.

The big news of the past month is that, the day before Halloween, my step-father Don had what we of rural upbringing call ‘an accident’. He was cleaning out a jam in the cutting gear of a combine and caught his left hand on a belt. The belt yanked his hand through some pulleys and, to make a long (and fairly disturbing) story short, he now has eight fingers.

I like to think that thanks to violent video games I am immune to gruesome imagery. Then I remember a friend hosing down the inside of an old garage with Raid, which triggered a mass exodus of hundreds of spiders, all rappelling from the ceiling in a death spasm of silk. That gave me the heebie-jeebies for weeks. Don’s accident disturbs me when I wake up after having slept with my hands curled under my body, and one of them is asleep.

Continuing with my picture-taking odyssey I reacquainted myself with the farm where I spend so much of my youth, rising at 6 am or earlier to milk (sometimes) upward of 200 cows. I wandered around the old piles of junk and rows of discarded and obsolete equipment , watching my step and keeping an ear open for the inevitable farm dog or drunk hunter. Up around the bunker silo, up around the upright silos , into the barn , take a good hard look at the milking parlor and decide not to enter. I contemplate touching an electric fence for old-times sake, but I don’t know what that would do to my digital camera.

The high point of my day was when I discovered the decaying corpse of the Owatonna , a strange, distant relative of the combine. The Owatonna is to the combine as the mule is to the horse. This particular Owatonna had, when I was 12, chewed up my favorite cat, Mello Yello.

Don has phantom pain in his missing fingers, and sometimes he will jump as if he touched the fence. He is reading an article on how to deal with sensations in a part of you which is no longer attached. I once heard that the phantom sensation is usually of the last thing the limb or digit felt, so his accident is echoing in his nerves like a scream in a cathedral.

Farm equipment, which is of a class with construction equipment, comes plastered with a wide variety of warning labels, all of which are immediately covered over with mud and manure, never to be seen again. Some of it, like the warning on a power take-off (an external drive-shaft which plugs into whatever a tractor is pulling), are probably never seen outside of a farm. Others, such as those on silo blowers which warn you that kernels of corn are being shot a hundred feet into the air at near relativistic speeds and could give you a nasty bruise or even put out an eye, would be equally in place at a mining site.

Don is treating his accident with a ‘the worst is over’ stoicism coupled with a ‘could have been much, much worse’ awareness.

“Could have been worse” is always the case.