The Scotch for New Year is….
Ardmore 19-year (1977 – 1997) cask-strength single-malt Scotch Whiskey. Mmmmmmmm.

Now off for Christmas back on the farm with the fambly.

To build a mandala is to practice non-attachment. A thing of beauty is created, cherished briefly, then destroyed. While it is being created those who are working bear in mind that the mandala is a transitive thing. When destroyed it is gone, but the event is now a part of history and nothing will ever change that.

The ring (yes, That Ring ) is the opposite. Created of hard metal to last forever, coveted by all who come into contact with it; none moreso than its creator. Everyone wants it but no-one enjoys it. It traps the act of creation into a spiral which does not allow the possibility of creating anything else.

This is a good thing to bear in mind when handing off a project to a client. We built it, we cherished it, now it is gone, and now it is time to move on. A project is a mandala. To treat it as a ring is to continue work past the point of diminishing returns, until we are full of resentment and burned out.

The things we build are not our own. They will not last forever. Best to do it right, then let go.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

I’m not dead. Merely…distracted.

The Uzbeckistan Diary is the journal of an American, er, journalist, working to promote an independent press. Quite an interesting read.

Assume two possible states of the universe, or reality, (hereafter referred to as [R]). They are the open state and closed state .

The evening snack: One apple, one small block of sharp cheddar cheese, and a very small glass of St Julian Simply Red wine.

I was informed today that we will be given the entire week of Christmas as extra vacation time. Sometimes I love my job.

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.