This morning I'm bouncing around the house realizing I've again misplaced the black hat, beaver felt, by Paul Kaufman. My name's in the lining and I'm the only Kirby Urner. Last time this happened, a bright engineer who had a longing for hats, knew Kaufman by reputation, found mine and chose to return it. He made a ceremony out of it, where I bought him beers and we played 20 questions. Turned out we both counted Princeton an alma mater, knew some of the same people. Will I see the hat again this time? Who knows (no one). http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/01/hat-adventure.html So what is Kimberly Cornish saying again? I've written two posts thus far. I inherited access to 'Jew of Linz' in receiving a generous donation of worldly goods from someone interesting in walking his talk of simplicity, under the tutelage of one Satya, Buddhist monk and character about town, written up in WW last Xmas season: """ STREET MONK: Satya Vayu (right) serves food he?s collected and prepared at a Food Not Bombs gathering at Colonel Summers Park. IMAGE: leahnash.com Satya Vayu and I are sitting across from each other on floor pillows in the sparse living room of the house where he?s staying in Southeast Portland. His legs are crossed and his feet are bare, the bottoms calloused and dirty from walking around shoeless outside. """ http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-16472-the_true_meaning_of_.html Alex, his mom a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, has gone off into Nietzsche more for the time being, also Borges. Last we met at TaborSpace, he was inclining towards fiction. We talked about Pynchon. So I'm catching up on my Wittgenstein reading, when I come up for air from the day job teaching logic, mentioned below. After frantically bouncing around the house for my black Quaker hat this morning, which hat has given me much mileage in Photostream, including at Pycon, I adjourned to the Linus Pauling House, long ago a rooming house ran by Pauling's mother, after his father died, and whom the network TV show said was mentally unstable thanks to a simple vitamin B deficiency. That fits in the the orthomolecular interests of the late Pauling, x2 Nobel Prize winner, and the feature of Monday night's 'Oregon Experience', a TV show on Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB). He'd cured himself of life-threatening kidney problems through diet, much as our visiting scholar from Savannah is doing, through the chemistry of raw vegan (lots of krauting, pro-biotics, almost no sugar or carbs). As a matter of routine, I meet with my friends in said Linus Pauling's boyhood home, just a few blocks hence, like on alternating Wednesday mornings. The lecture series (ISEPP.org) for which George Lakoff was in town (recent chatter), is connected with this house. Quite a few Cal Tech alums, like Steve Mastin, who was there today. The house doubles as a headquarters for CraigMore Creations, which, like Dark Horse Comics, is part of the ToonTown scene (Oregon is known for its contributions to tooning, not least through Davenport of Silverton). http://www.craigmorecreations.com/ http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2006/12/wanderers-20061212.html Kimberly thinks Wittgenstein deviated from his Jewish roots by tapping into a cultic Aryan religion, basically the secret to their past success (like in India), having that kind of mystical understanding which might transmit to impressionable young Hitler. Of course Hitler had other sources, such as Wagner, and most importantly Schopenhauer (their source in common). So yeah, Adolph and Ludwig were boyhood rivals, the evidence builds, with the latter having a lot of social advantages, but also appearing unworthy of adulation in many ways (highly teasable, fair game). OK, so then LW grew up to match his destiny as the great philosopher of his day, and, Cornish avers, likely the secret to Soviet success in stealing whatever UKer crown jewels he thinks he knows about (all quite murky, Special Branch mentioned). He links to LeCarre and some obsession with a secret recruiter, like how could all these bright boys at OxBridge come off sounding like Marxists for gosh sakes, never mind it was the parlor talk of that day, the philosophy to embrace or decry. Gotta finger somebody evil, and LW fits the bill, in being a believer in the same neo-Aryan powers as Hitler does, but exercising them more discretely, to say the least. Not saying I'm buying the hypothesis, just writing about what I've read (yes, it's a book report, like they assign you in high school). As a veteran viewer of the Laughing Horse Books collection here in Portland, one of the better video archives out there, thanks to Dominic & Co., I'm reminded of some of these wild stories coming from Webster Tarpley and like those. These are respectable intellectuals, no question, with Tarpley a frequent guest on RT (Russia Today). But their grand vistas of history are somewhat one-of-a-kind. You'll be able to cross-check some of the facts, but a lot of it hangs together in a less cross-checkable manner. Lyndon LaRouche, David Ickle... As a ranking member of Esozone.com nay Laughing Horse, I'm familiar with unique versions of history, and find them fascinating. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2010/05/surveying-history.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?vÏods1KSWsQ http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4000192665/ (Trevor, creator of Struggle! magazine covers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/5777119078/in/photostream ) Sometimes you know you're reading speculation, sometimes sheer speculation. Bucky Fuller, a well known transcendentalist, is up front about being speculative in his 'Critical Path' (Kuromiya as adjuvant), where he like walks in from stage left, peg leg and parrot, eye patch, and starts spieling out these yarns that are either outright lunacy or some secret code to some esoteric maritime sisterhood, a witches brew of impossible metaphysics and bioeconomics, a nonsense stew that's both unbelievable and somewhat savory and mytho-poetic (at least in my experience). The prose settles down after awhile and by 'Grunch of Giants' (the sequel) it's somewhat smooth and clearly satire. One of my favorite in all American literature. His mythography switches over to 'Tetrascroll', which is right off the bat called a 'fairy tale' (as if we needed to be told -- some do in our literalist age). So Kimberly's somewhat tabloid treatment comes across as somewhat familiar and Fox Newsy, i.e. as sensationalist. It'd make for lots of fun movies. The characters are rendered in a spectacular manner, and their Machiavellian triangles are amazing, such as the one between Wagner's significant other and Princess Wittgenstein, mistress of Liszt the itinerant virtuoso. The Wittgenstein family later adopts Joseph Joachim, the violin virtuoso and grooms him to be the best of the best. He's soon out of favor in the Wagner camp, almost by computation (Montagues vs. Capulets) . So much culture in such a small space! An amazingly dense packing job, like a Russian novel. Tolstoy (Wittgenstein's hero) even has a role, albeit not a big one (a good storyteller knows how to keep focus). No mention of H.S.M. Coxeter (another Wittgenstein associate), so important to the stories I circulate. Gotta draw the line somewhere. For its nutritious density alone it's a worthwhile book and I've been encouraging including it in the syllabus, for its biographical contents if nothing else. Also the movie 'Wittgenstein' with Nabil Shaban as the Martian, is worth more literary criticism. Much more good writing could be done, not saying by yours truly, as I'm off in the wars helping Global U students build logic muscles. I call myself a "logic coach, mechanized devision", which got me some flak from seasoned military (Glenn / NSA), as computers are not really "machines" when you get right down to it, hardly any moving parts. Maybe the hard drive? SQL engines aren't really "engines" either now are they, whatever "software engineers" might be thinking. We need Wittgenstein-to-the-rescue here, some kind of deus ex machina, to explain about language games again, about namespaces. I'll take a picture of the book cover, for those not seeing it before (of course the cover is available through Amazon, other sources). Then a couple pictures of the TimeCapsule, in its current state. For the hat, we'd have to go back (thinking of Sartre, and what it's like to miss someone in a coffee shop -- the absence is palpable (Alex misses his dog Bear)). http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/5787107913/in/photostream (the book on my desk) http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/5787663684/in/photostream (TimeCapsule, June 2011) I talked with my mom this morning by cell. She's in North Carolina working with WILPF, one of Ava Pauling's causes (they didn't know one another). We drove her to the airport last night, Tara joining so she could learn about the UN declaration of human rights, the consequent treaties, ratified and not, with a lot of the history (Eleanor Roosevelt crucial). This is factual background feeding in to her cases. She's before judges in Dallas in a couple weeks, arguing a just government theory. By then she'll be 17. Kirby