Change, Constancy, Timelessness, Immortality

French Isle of Amsterdam

Flora and fauna
The island has Phylica arborea trees, which are also found on Tristan da Cunha.
The island is home to the Amsterdam Albatross, which breeds only on the Plateau des Tourbières on Île Amsterdam. The island is also home to other rare species, such as the Great Skua, the Antarctic Tern, the Gentoo penguin, the Subantarctic Fur Seal and the Elephant seal.
The only existing herd of completely wild cattle also lives on the island.
François Auguste Péron (1775 - 1810) was a French naturalist and explorer. He is credited with the first use of the term anthropology.

This island was discovered by the Spanish explorer Juan Sebastián Elcano on March 18, 1522, along his first world circumnavigation. Elcano did not name the island, however.
Having found the island unnamed, the Dutch captain Anthonie van Diemen named it Nieuw Amsterdam (Dutch for New Amsterdam) after his ship in 1633.

French Captain François Péron, was marooned three years on this island. Péron had been on the French ship Emélie, which wrecked on New Amsterdam in 1792. He was rescued and taken to Australia in 1795. Peron's Memoires, in which he describes his survival alone on New Amsterdam, were published in a limited edition and are now an expensive collectors' item.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele_Amsterdam

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Pondering "New Amsterdam" (a show on Fox)
"John Amsterdam is annoying to those around him - he seems to know everything. But there's good reason he's a walking encyclopedia.

He's lived in New Amsterdam since the time of the Lenape Native Americans. Instead of being cursed by gypsies, and is without a soul, Amsterdam is rewarded with immortality for saving a girl from certain death."


He "can't stop the world from moving, time from passing, people from aging and dying - as he remains constant."

"But one constant with Amsterdam is his yearning for love . . . " "By searching for his one true love, he searches for an end to his immortality . . ." "Amsterdam's immortality will end when he finds his one true love and the partners give themselves to each other."

The "PR on love is that it is timeless - time stops . . . "

" . . . The truth may be that love, the time before it happens and the time after it ends, is what seems to have no end. In those moments is the essential human immortality where we seem invincible . . . " or " . . . when we feel our humanity most keenly."

Why is there always an end? Finding those flaws in our loved one - that mortal aspect of humanity that brings us back down from that immortal coil - thinking then, love has passed us by once again?

My question is: What is John Amsterdam really looking for? Is true love, after all, a fairy tale? Is the equation:

Love + consummation of love = true love?

Or is it:

Love - consummation of love = true love?

I don't know. But if this last equation were practiced, would we lovers then have real true love forever, as if in a timeless cocoon of immortality, never changing, and ever present?

The French Isle of Amsterdam appears from space as a lonely isle, but what must have Peron discovered, surviving those 3 years alone, besides being the first to use the word anthropology?

Reference material:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/idolchatter/2008/03/is-change-the-only-constant-po.html

You Asking For the Permission to Mock the Barack?

If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.
On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:
“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ " ~ Maureen Dowd's, May We Mock, Barack?


ROCK WITH ME HERE

This subject is politics for fear
My dear
Which is Rovian Queer
Oh yeah, Rover's a Seer
You don't want to go near.


Right beneath my ozone hat
You can rock the Barack
But please don't mock our Barack
While he's in Iraq
He's no Muslim sock

Though it's perfectly okay
To be a good Muslim
Don't be a bad Muslim
Cousin.


May you mock the Barack?
You need a permission slip?
Oy!
Please . . .
Do as you please
But don't tell me New Yolka
Is an Egghead
Purely bred!


I'll brush it off as oh so silly
We don't need no Dr. Full of Shilly!
And please don't make me
Suck the culture of "Pop"
When the ripest parody is McCain-McPop.


Nitpick the white collar crime for a change
The ozones are permanently insane
Dump the Rovian Brain Drain
It's all the McSame thing.

~rock with me here based on may we mock, below~

July 16, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
May We Mock, Barack?
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
When I interviewed Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for Rolling Stone a couple years ago, I wondered what Barack Obama would mean for them.
“It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys,” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” Stewart scoffed.
Then he and Colbert both said at the same time: “His dad was a goat-herder!”
When I noted that Obama, in his memoir, had revealed that he had done some pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” the two comedians began riffing about the dapper senator’s familiarity with drug slang.
Colbert: Wow, that’s a very street way of putting it. ‘A little blow.’
Stewart: A little bit of the white rabbit.
Colbert: ‘Yeah, I packed a cocktail straw of cocaine and had a prostitute blow it in my ear, but that is all I did. High-fivin.’ ’
Flash forward to the kerfuffle — and Obama’s icy reaction — over this week’s New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.
“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor, too?” wrote James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times, suggesting “an irony deficiency” in Obama and his fans.
Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.
“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,” Jimmy Kimmel said.
Carter also observed that there’s no easy comedic “take” on Obama, “like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic personality.”
At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?
Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious.
But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!
If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.
On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:
“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ”
John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.
He’s already in danger of seeming too prissy about food — a perception heightened when The Wall Street Journal reported that the planners for Obama’s convention have hired the first-ever Director of Greening, the environmental activist Andrea Robinson. She in turn hired an Official Carbon Adviser to “measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed.”
The “lean ‘n’ green” catering guidelines, The Journal said, bar fried food and instruct that, “on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include ‘at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.’ (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70% of the ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel during transportation.”
Bring it on, Ozone Democrats! Because if Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.

Don't Rain On The Propaganda Parade

PINEHURST, N.C. A former Army medic made famous by a photograph that showed him carrying an injured Iraqi boy during the first week of the war has died of an apparent overdose, police said.Joseph Patrick Dwyer died last week at a hospital in Pinehurst, according to the Boles Funeral Home. He was 31.The photograph, taken in March 2003, showed Dwyer running to a makeshift military hospital while cradling the boy. The photo appeared in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts worldwide, making Dwyer became a symbol of heroism.Dwyer laughed when a reporter told him of the photo and its widespread circulation, and he tried to deflect focus to his entire unit. His mother, Maureen, said then that the photo embarrassed her son because it singled him out while other soldiers were doing the same thing.http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003824518

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Don't Rain On My Parade

Don't tell me not to live,Just sit and putter,Life's candy and the sun'sA ball of butter.Don't bring around a cloudTo rain on my parade.Don't tell me not to fly--I've simply got to.If someone takes a spill,It's me and not you.Who told you you're allowedTo rain on my parade!I'll march my band out,I'll beat my drum,And if I'm fanned out,Your turn at bat, sir.At least I didn't fake it.Hat, sir, I guess I didn't make it!But whether I'm the roseOf sheer perfection,Or freckle on the noseOf life's complexion,The cinder or the shiny apple of its eye,I gotta fly once,I gotta try once,Only can die once, right, sir?Ooh, love is juicy,Juicy, and you seeI gotta have my bite, sir!Get ready for me, love,'Cause I'm a "comer,"I simply gotta march,My heart's a drummer.Don't bring around a cloudTo rain on my parade!

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Partial transcript of Randi Rhodes commentary on The Randi Rhodes Show on July 7, 2008. I call it:

"9 Seconds For What? More War?"

. . . And we know that we have a government that actually tells health care providers at the V.A. not to diagnose Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, 'cause it's very expensive to treat, obviously. Because you can't send somebody into a war where you're gonna see burnt babies; and you're gonna see people's heads on one side of the road, and their arm on another side of the road; and you're going to smell burning flesh; and you're going to see people just as carcasses; you're gonna see flies and other things eating human flesh. You're going to see blood and bodies ripped apart and brains on the outside of a head. You're going to smell sewage; you're going to smell urine; you're going to smell everything that smells like hell.

And then you come home to a nation that has no idea that it's at war. And when you have somebody who is running for the presidency of the United States [Obama] who says this is no reason to send those kids into that situation. There was nothing there, there was no there, there. This was about oil. And this was not a good war. This was the kind of thing that was chosen - not necessary. This was something that was desired. Not something we were defending. The troops did exactly what you asked them to do. And now they're back home because they have seen these things and they have walked in those places and they have smelled these things and they've heard these things.

And you owe them.

Because you sent them there.

And so, I don't know what the hell the media is thinking when they put on these "9 SECONDS" and laugh at it and say:

Oh you know he wants to pull the troops out, but he doesn't, but he does, but he doesn't. I don't know, I think he's a flip-flopper.

You know they talk about war like it's not real - like it's - NOT REAL. And it's about as real as you can GET. If you're terrified of hell, then war should be something you're terrified of.
'Cause it is hell - on earth. It's man-made hell. It's PURE hell. It's BURNING everything.
It's . . . terrifying . . . and ugly, and smelly, and brutal, and bloody, and flesh bleeds from a person - drips off of a face.

I mean the idea that we just don't get that, 'cause the meed-ja decided that, you know they don't wanna do that. They don't want to show that. They don't want to go there - it's VERY bizarre, I must tell you.

And so, to talk about it in a cavalier way, as the media did all freaking weekend [4th of July] makes me sick. Because this story [Joseph Dwyer] came out the same time that the "Obama 9 SECONDS" were hacked out of a longer expression of why he [Obama] wants to end the war and HOW he's going to end the war, and the pace at which he expects to end the war, and a time frame - 16 months - 1 to 2 brigades a month, as safely and as carefully as possible to extract troops. We'll go to Iraq - listen to the commanders on the ground about an exit strategy - how do you do it, how do you move them - what's the best way.

And then you listen to a man like John McCain who knows war is hell - says it all the time. But would do it all over again - even though HE is the one who has reversed himself.

HE SAID that it would be EASY to topple Saddam Hussein; that we would have an overwhelming victory in a very short amount of time. That is what he said. I opened the show with that clip. He said it. He said easy, easy, he said overwhelming victory, very short time and now he says: anybody that didn't know it was going to be hard and long - is STUPID - or wasn't paying attention. There's a reversal for ya.

I don't know if the media thinks John McCain is just too boring; or if they've done focus groups and people have said I don't want to see that man on TV; he has no chance of winning; I want you to focus on Barack Obama because I find him fascinating; I don't know what the hell they're doing. But I can tell ya what they're NOT doing: they're not showing you anything about what our troops are going through. They're not following up on the Walter Reed story; they're not following up on what it's like to come home; they're not following up on whether or not our reservists have lost their jobs - even though it's illegal to take a reservists' job away because they've been deployed.

They're not talking to you about the 15 month deployments, the second deployment, the third deployment -- some are on their fourth deployment. They're not telling you anything about the surge. They're not reporting about what the General Accounting Office found out - the GAO - non-partisan, oversight - found out that none of our goals are being met in Iraq. And the reason: the Iraqis do not feel loyal to their own government because they think their government is US. And you know - you think about it: let's say the Iraqis came here, and they took over our government. Would you FIGHT for them? No, you would fight for your neighborhood. But you wouldn't go and join the military to fight for some foreign power that you thought had taken over your government. It's not that they're incapable. It's that they're not loyal to a government that's not Iraqi. Just like you wouldn't be loyal to a government that wasn't American.
(47 after.) http://www.novamradio.com/live/founders_podcasts.php

End of podcast transcript

Postscript:

The propaganda message: Barack Obama is moving to the center and he is a flip-flopper - propel it and drill it over and over till everyone believes he wants lots and lots of war just like John McCain. By the time we get finished, the media says, there will be no difference between them. Mission Accomplished!!

Then there's the breaking story of PFC, Joseph Patrick Dwyer, a used up, forgotten, government propaganda tool, who died because of untreated PTSD, and the 24/7 media circus said, hey, don't bring around a CLOUD to rain on OUR propaganda parade - it's the 4th of July - let's mock Barack!! (Saying behind closed doors - let's see how many MORE times he'll come out and make a speech to correct our reporting.)

Yeah right, REPORTING.