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Good Mountain Press Presents DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#13b
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In Memoriam: Sally Richards Doerries Hollander(1970-2013)
~~~~~~~~ [ Daughter of Del's Richards Cousin, Penny Doerries ] ~~~~~
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~~~~~~~~ In Memoriam: Paul Dietzel (1924- 2013) ~~~~
~~~~~~~~ [ LSU Head Football Coach, Won National Championship when I was a Freshman at LSU. ] ~~~~~
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WELCOME TO   DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#13b   November, 2013
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Quote for the Election Month of November:

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903 - 1987) , French philosopher

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DIGESTWORLD

GOOD MOUNTAIN PRESS Presents ISSUE#13b for November 2013
                  Archived DIGESTWORLD Issues

             Table of Contents

1. November's Violet-n-Joey Cartoon
2. Honored Readers for November
3. On a Personal Note
       Flowers of Shanidar Poems
       Movie Blurbs

4. Cajun Story
5. Recipe of the Month from Bobby Jeaux’s Kitchen: Equisetum Tea
6. Poem from Yes, and Even More!:"Advance Parts!"
7. Reviews and Articles Added for November:

8. Commentary on the World
      1. Padre Filius Cartoon
      2. Comments from Readers
      3. Freedom on the Half Shell Poem
      4. Wear Plus Lenses for Close Work
      5. Reply by Dr. Kaisu Viikari, MD PhD, Ophthalmology
      6. Life-size Noah's Ark in Netherlands

9. Closing Notes — our mailing list, locating books, subscribing/unsubscribing to DIGESTWORLD
10. Gratitude

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DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#13b
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ON THE WEB  
~ ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ~
2000: INAUGURAL YEAR: Jun  
#1 Jul  #2, Aug  #3, Sept  #4, Oct  #5, Nov  #6, Dec  #7
2001: Jan  #8,  Feb  #9,  Mar #10, Apr #11, May #12, Jun #13, Jul #14, Aug #15, Sep #16, Oct #17, Nov #18, Dec #19
2002: Jan #20, Feb #21, Mar #22, Apr #23, May #24, Jun #25, Jul #26, Aug #27, Sep #28, Oct #29, Nov #30, Dec #31
2003: Jan #32, Feb #33, Mar #34, Apr #35, May #36, Jun #37, Jul #38, Aug #39, Sep #40, Oct #41, Nov #42, Dec #43
2004: Jan #44, Feb #45, Mar #46, Apr #47, May #48, Jun #49, Jul #50, Aug #51, Sep #52, Oct #53, Nov #54, Dec #55
2005: Jan#051,Feb#052,Mar#053,Apr#054,May#055,Jun#056,Jul#057,Aug#058,Sep#059,Oct#05a,Nov#05b,Dec#05c
2006: Jan#061,Feb#062,Mar#063,Apr#064,May#065,Jun#066,Jul#067,Aug#068,Sep#069,Oct#06a,Nov#06b,Dec#06c
2007: Jan#071,Feb#072,Mar#073,Apr#074,May#075,Jun#076,Jul#077,Aug#078,Sep#079,Oct#07a,Nov#07b,Dec#07c
2008: Jan#081,Feb#082,Mar#083,Apr#084,May#085,Jun#086,Jul#087,Aug#088,Sep#089,Oct#08a,Nov#08b,Dec#08c
2009: Jan#091,Feb#092,Mar#093,Apr#094,May#095,Jun#096,Jul#097,Aug#098,Sep#099,Oct#09a,Nov#09b,Dec#09c
2010: Jan#101,Feb#102,Mar#103,Apr#104,May#105,Jun#106,Jul#107,Aug#108,Sep#109,Oct#10a,Nov#10b,Dec#10c
2011: Jan#111,Feb#112,Mar#113,Apr#114,May#115,Jun#116,Jul#117,Aug#118,Sep#119,Oct#11a,Nov#11b,Dec#11c
2012: Jan#121,Feb#122,Mar#123,Apr#124,May#125,Jun#126,Jul#127,Aug#128,Sep#129,Oct#12a,Nov#12b,Dec#12c
2013: Jan#131,Feb#132,Mar#133,Apr#134,May#135,Jun#136,Jul#137,Aug#138,Sep#139,Oct#13a,Nov#13b,Dec#13c
2014: Jan#141,Feb#142,Mar#143,Apr#144,May#145,Jun#146,Jul#147,Aug#148,Sep#149,Oct#14a,Nov#14b,Dec#14c
2015: Jan#151,Feb#152,Mar#153,Apr#154,May#155,Jun#156,Jul#157,Aug#158,Sep#159,Oct#15a,Nov#15b,Dec#15c
2016: Jan#161,Feb#162,Mar#163,Apr#164,May#165,Jun#166,Jul#167,Aug#168,Sep#169,Oct#16a,Nov#16b,Dec#16c
2017: Jan#171,Feb#172,Mar#173,Apr#174,May#175,Jun#176,Jul#177,Aug#178,Sep#179,Oct#17a,Nov#17b,Dec#17c
2018: Jan#181,Feb#182,Mar#183,Apr#184,May#185,Jun#186,Jul#187,Aug#188,Sep#189,Oct#18a,Nov#18b,Dec#18c
2019: Jan#191,Feb#192,Mar#193,Apr#194,May#195,Jun#196,Jul#197,Aug#198,Sep#199,Oct#19a

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1. November Violet-n-Joey CARTOON:
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For newcomers to DIGESTWORLD, we have created a webpage of all the Violet-n-Joey cartoons!

This month Violet and Joey reframe "Nose to Grindstone".
"Nose to Grindstone" at http://www.doyletics.com/images/131028vj.gif

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2. HONORED READERS FOR November:
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Each month we choose to honor two Good Readers of our DIGESTWORLD from those all over the World. Here are the two worthy Honored Readers for November, 2013:

Suzanne Hartmann in Dornach, Switzerland

Dan Richards in North Carolina

Congratulations, Suzanne and Dan!


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3. ON A PERSONAL NOTE:


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Out Our Way:

TRIPLE-TREAT IN VIEUX CARRÉ

"Vieux Carré" means "Old Square" which is another name for our French Quarter in New Orleans. We had been invited to join the Patio Planters of the Vieux Carré and went to our first meeting. It was on a Saturday evening after LSU lost to Georgia on a heart-breaking last minute field goal, a bane for the Fighting Tigers this year after they lost 10 top-notch defensive players to the NFL, so any diversion was welcome for the evening and we had two planned and adlibbed the third. The Patio Planner's meeting was in the patio of the Hermann Grimm house. We brought a casserole to add to the food and enjoyed the approaching dusk as we learned more about the organization, meeting new folks and a few old friends, like Stephen Chesnut there. Del returned from the ladies room to tell me it was located in the preserved apartment of Francis Parkinson Keyes, just off the patio, so I walked over to explore the famous writer's apartment. (Photos in First Review below)

This particular day was a special one for Del because fifty years ago on this day, she gave birth to her first child, her daughter Kim, and we found out that morning that Kim and some dozen of her Alexandria friends were driving down from Central Louisiana to the Quarter for her birthday celebration. We decided to walk down to the Bourbon-Orleans Hotel where Kim and her friends were staying to see if we could surprise Kim on her birthday. We missed the turn for the hotel and when we doubled back and walked into the bar of the hotel, there were Terry and Pat, who told us that Kim would be meeting everyone in the lobby in about 15 minutes, from where they would be walking across the street to Revolution, Chef John Folse's new restaurant for dinner. Del and I sat in the lobby for a few minutes and then we noticed what looked like Kim's friends waiting for her, so I walked over to them and said, "You look like folks from Alexandria." They said, "Yes, how can you tell?"
"Well, I have a woman with me who gave birth to Kim Gralapp fifty years ago today and she'd like to wish her daughter Happy Birthday." Del came over and we met Kim's friends and were talking to them as Kim came down the elevator into the lobby and was delightfully surprised to see her mom waiting to see her. After a few minutes we wished everyone goodbye and headed out for Margaritaville as they headed to dinner.

Our good friend Ted Graham was doing his first-ever CD Release Party at Margaritaville a few blocks away in the Quarter and we headed there, aiming to arrive just as Reverend Teddy was telling about his new House Party CD. Having been to many of Ted's house parties, we knew the name was appropriate. It seemed that August was not complete without an Elvis Party at Ted's house at which his music-making friends, some of them Grammy-winners, would arrive, get on the guitars, drum-set, and instruments and jam away until late into the night and morning in his garage turned den turned music room.

It was a dark room full of Voodoo, Mardi Gras, and music memorabilia, instruments, and a few chairs guaranteeing SRO every party. After Ted and Ruth moved, the new house had no darkened music room, but Ted moved into a regular weekend gig with Irving Banister's All-Stars in the Storyville Café of Margaritaville, a small lounge abutting the large room. Tonight Ted was center stage in that large room, and we wanted to be there. And there he was, with his own band, Reverend Teddy's All-Stars, whose newly released CD House Party was for sale, and who were playing some of the songs from the CD for us. Ted's house party had moved into a much larger darkened room, full of Jimmy Buffet memorabilia now, and hundreds of people who could sit down and order food and drinks delivered to their table while Ted and his buds entertained us.

After we got seated, we went over to greet Ted's wife, Ruth Ryan, and our friend Jo Huey. Ted introduced his son to the crowd, so I went over to meet Chuck and his wife Dawn. "Dawn is your name? Well, you're in the French Quarter where a lot of people are greeting you before they go home!" She laughed.

With Ted as singer and lead guitar, Verna with a Yellow Pocahantos Mardi Gras Indian costume sang a MG Indian song, Two-way Paco Way as Verna, a lithe black lady in her 60's, danced up a storm. Then she changed into her street clothes to perform Walk the Dog with 6 or more other folks following her around the small dance floor in second line fashion. We ate some crab bisque, bought Ted's CD, and left after dancing one of the few slow songs. It was a busy, triple-feature night in the French Quarter for us. The next day we were flying to San Francisco and needed to be at the Louis Armstrong Airport about the time most folks in the Quarter will be greeting Dawn.

MERRY IN MARIN: ALITO'S, SAINTS, MOSEL, COLTON, PEET'S, HUMMINGBIRDS

September was unusual in that I had finished all work on my DIGESTWORLD Issue a few days ahead of time and while talking with my son Robie about his upcoming conference, he asked if Del and I would be willing to fly to San Francisco to sit for his two teens so he could attend an important work conference in Las Vegas during the first week in October. I checked with Del and we agreed, so I sent off the October Issue a few days early and we flew out on September 29, stopping over in Salt Lake City en route. Robie picked us up at SFO and drove us through the scenic route, passing through Golden Gate Park and skirting the old Presidio where my brother David was stationed in the 70s. We stopped at the Vista Point over the Golden Gate Bridge to take photos of the city. A bright sunny day with lots of sailboats on the bay and one could see clearly all the way from the Bay Bridge across the SF skyline to the Golden Gate as my banner photo shows. A few minutes drive through Sausalito and we were in San Anselmo where Robie lives with his two teens, Sierra, 17, and Walden, 15.

Robie had to fly out the next morning, so we went to dinner that night at Alito's Restaurant in Sausalito, at Sierra's request. Plenty of seafood choices. Del chose the Sand Dabs after asking what a "sand dab" is? A local fish of the Pacific Coast. I had the crab omelette which looked a bit like a crust-less pizza, but was very good. There were bright lights shining in from the open doors to the outdoor table area, so I asked Robie to take a photo with flash and without flash. The one without the flash came out looking like Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting with the lights like huge stars in the background.

The next day we had to learn the kids daily schedule, learn where the grocery and coffeeshop were, the kids' Sir Francis Drake School was, and they were all in easy driving range of their house on Laurel Street. We had assistance with all these details from Dr. Meghan Harris, a practicing Psychologist in Sausalito, and friend of Robie. The schedule we chose was to fly out on Sunday because the New Orleans Saints NFL team played on Monday night, so we didn't miss the game and it would be broadcast on national TV. All of which was fine, except my son has no TV or cable in his home, so we located a sports bar and restaurant in San Anselmo where we could watch the football game. I took Walden, my grandson, who at 15 needs to learn about football before he goes out into the workforce in a few years or he'll be lost in water cooler conversations with his peers.

After Sierra and Walden headed off to school, Del and I took a walk up Laurel street, taking the left branch to head to the top of the hill, where we were told we could see Sausalito in the distance. Easy to recognize because Sausalito has a harbor which means its at sea level and has fog a lot in the mornings. From the top of the hill we could see the misty reaches of Sausalito. Saw an incredible mosaic-tiled retaining wall. Full of colorful patterns which extended about 150 feet from the curb disappearing around the back of the house from our view. The owner's car was at the curb section of the driveway and blocked my view of the mosaic so much I almost rang his bell to ask if he would move it so I could take a photo of it. We got back down in time to greet Walden when he came home for lunch; Sierra stayed at school to have lunch with her friends.

In the afternoon, we found the supermarket and bought groceries for the week. Fresh green beans and Irish potatoes which I fixed for supper that night. The kids really enjoyed the two hot meals I fixed for them. Later in the week, I made shrimp-stuffed merlitons. We each ate two, but Sierra saved one of hers in the fridge which Robie ate the next day when he returned from Vega trip. It was a dish I learned to enjoy when his grandma "Maman Audrey" made it for me in the 1950s and was the first thing I asked her how to make when I returned to New Orleans for good in 1976.

Back to Monday, after eating our supper of Green beans and potatoes over rice, Walden and I drove over to the pub to watch the game at 5:30 (7:30 New Orleans time). As we walked into the Iron Springs Pub, all I saw was a baseball game on the TV at the end of the bar. I asked the waitress if they would be showing Monday Night Football game, and she didn't know, but she directed me to head waiter. A burly guy resembling Vin Diesel said in reply to my question, "If there's a football game, it's on the TV!" and as he spoke my eyes had gone to the TV at the other end of the bar which was visible to me for the first time, and sure enough the Saints-Miami game had just kicked off. Walden and I found a two-man table with a view of the game, and I let him sit facing the TV and I turned to my left to watch it. We ordered some food and ate and enjoyed the game.

Walden and I got seated just in time to watch the Saints scat-back Darren Sproles run for about 50 yds along the sideline after a catch. He had 222 all-purpose yards, marred only by a fumble near the goal-line, but we held Miami from scoring off the turnover. Our defense was awesome with four sacks, a take-away from QB, and three interceptions of Miami passes. Jimmy Graham had another career night catching for 100 yds and 2 Tds. So did Brees with 420 yrds passing and 3 Tds I think. Saints are going to be in the playoffs if they keep improving the way they have. 4-0 sounds much better than the 0-4 start of last year.

Several guys got in way of screen and I used various ploys to get them to move. First one I asked, "Do you like football?" "Yes," he said and I replied, "So do I, could you move?" He did graciously. The next time, it was a tall guy with white hat, and the hat filled the screen. I asked him, "Do you like baseball?" Baseball was on the other screen. He said, "No." I said, "Well, I like football and my game is on the other side of your hat." He smiled and moved away. As I sat back down James, the guy seated to my left, laughed, and said "that's Mike", so as Mike left the bar, I said, "Bye, Mike." James had a T-shirt with some Math Stuff on it, so I asked if he was a Math Teacher, he said, no, but his wife was, that he was a history teacher. Later we had a chance to talk and I asked his specialty and it's the classics, Alexander, ancient Greece, etal. I told him about Professor Ken Harl's Teaching Co. Courses and how his collection of ancient coins helped him piece together how the ancient world's peoples moved from place to place. James said that he teaches at a school in Fairfax, next to San Anselmo, and came over later to meet Walden, asking where he went to school. "Oh, Drake? I live near there," he said.

Jennifer was the bartender and she looked like our grand-daughter, which I told her, and added, "She's almost as cute as you!" She has a great smile and it was a joy to see her smile and see how much she enjoyed her work. Meghan came in after her work at 7 or so and I asked Jennifer to bring her a root beer. She said, "What kind of beer?" thinking I had asked for a beer. The entire place was full of happy people. We watched the entire game and only left when Drew took a knee for the first of 2 victory formations to run out the clock. All in all a great day and a great night. A Merry time in Marin County was just beginning.

The next day we took another walk up Laurel, but taking the right-hand fork this time, which led us along a fence with a line of eight-foot high olive trees on the other side of it. I was taking photos with my telephoto SX30 and my pocket T300 cameras. Noticed some sawdust indicating a carpenter was doing some work, but didn't see anyone at first. The carpenter appeared and asked, "Is that house for sale?" referring to the one I had been taking photos of. He thought we might be prospective buyers.

We talked with him and he showed us his windows designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the work he was doing on some salvaged doors with leaded glass panes for his bathroom. He took us for a tour of the terraced garden that he built which on the top terrace had the row of olive trees we'd seen earlier on Olive Street. He asked if we liked figs and picked us each a couple of large delicious figs from his tree which we ate while walking. He had planted the olive trees we'd seen earlier. Michael Colton introduced himself to us, and said he had spent a lot of time at Esalen in the 60s back when Alan Watts, Fritz Perls, and others were there. His marvelous demeanor with gently smiling eyes showed us that he was at peace with himself. A truly rare individual. He explained how he had worked as a contractor all his life, loves doing exceptional work, and still takes contracts for small jobs. Has a young son around Walden's age. He told me about an elderly lady in her 80s that he knows with a large library of Rudolf Steiner books and offered to take me to meet her. Perhaps we can do that on some future trip to the area.

That night we took Walden and Sierra to dinner at the Iron Spirits Pub and the head waiter guy served us. His name is Mosel, named after the wine region which is ironic since he looks like Vin Diesel whose first name means wine in French. The food was great as was the service. Another Merry time in Marin.

Peet's Coffeeshop was another daily stop.
It was very cold in the house the next morning and I didn't feel like cranking up Rob's coffee maker, so Del came with me to Peet's. Kinda rush hour at first for them so we sat in the pick-up orders table area. A gal who claimed to be a dialect expert was talking to the long-bearded Barista and said he had an Alabama accent. Birmingham he said, and when a break in conversation came, I said, "Miss Dialect, can you tell me where I'm from?" She guessed the Northeast and I said, "New Orleans". Well, guess what she was from New Orleans where she lived from ages 6 to about 21 I think; now lives in Berkeley. She told me about the Hummingbird Grill in Fairfax near here and Del got directions to get there from the Barista. We had cleared Fairfax and were headed for open hill country when Meghan called to say she had some time, so we turned around and met her at the house.

Guess where Meghan had eaten breakfast that morning? At the Hummingbird Grill! Meghan didn't know till we told her that it was founded by Michelle, a gal from New Orleans whose father took her to eat at the N.O. Hummingbird when she was a kid. It was an old red brick place across from where Del worked on St Charles Avenue right above Lee Circle. So Meghan said she'd pick us up to go there for breakfast the next morning. And so it came about that we ate breakfast at the Hummingbird Grill in Fairfax, which was just a block down from the Iron Spirits Pub. Lloyd was our server -- a true character and an excellent waiter. Lloyd wanted us to meet Michelle the founder who is from New Orleans and likes to meet New Orleans folks when they come to her place, but it was her day off on our last day in the area. All in all, another Merry day in Marin county.


BACK TO SWEATING, BACK TO COOLING

After a week in cool, dry Northern California, we returned home to find that our bedroom AC was not working. I checked its outdoor compressor and it was running but the lack of warm air coming from the top fan indicated that the compressor was not cooling. With four Heating and AC units in our home, we can turn down the other units to keep our bedroom cooled, but this was a worse case scenario, coming on a Friday night and the AC people couldn't come until Tuesday. I turned down the LR unit and sometime Sunday, getting ready for Saints game in our Screening Room, which with its five TV sets needs cooling, I noticed that the thermostat for that unit was not working, at least its display was blank. Removed it and replaced batteries after cleaning the slightly corroded contacts and it still didn't work.

Now we were down to two units and had to pull a fan inside to help cool us off at night. We added that problem to the warranty call and when the AC technician came he fixed both. The compressor problem was a bad electrolytic capacitor. He told me that 90% of his calls are to replace these. We had one replaced a couple of years ago on the same unit and that one didn't last. "A Chinese piece of trash" he called it derisively. The thermostat was an easy fix. He cleaned the corroded contacts a bit better than I did and it was working again and we had manufactured California air blowing into our bedroom and screening room again.

NATURE, RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

Those of you who took the time to view the video I took last month of the two fishermen battling to get an eight foot alligator garfish landed, only to loose it at the last second, got a an example of Man battling Nature. The fisherman trying to gaff the big fish must have seen those gnashing teeth up close and lost his nerve several times, eventually causing him to lose the fish altogether.

This month, it was Nature against Nature. While I was working, banging on the keyboard at my desk, Del banged on the french door sharply by my desk and startled me, saying a Great Egret was eating a large snake in the Meditation Garden area of our West Lawn. I ran and quickly got my SX30 and videoed the entire eating process, including how the egret moved the snake around in her bill, from the tail to the head, so that she could clamp down on the head before swallowing it. You can see the snake bite on the bill before its head disappears into the egret gullet. Amazing. I posted it to YouTube and have a link to it below under New Stuff on Website. A few days later Del saw that the Great Egret was back, likely the same one, this time, stalking something. I got my camera and began shooting video as its head suddenly slammed down like the hammer on a shotgun when the trigger is pulled. It came up with a large lizard, apparently a skink, but bigger than any we've ever seen. The video shows the skink thrashing its legs for dear life before it was swallowed by the Great Egret. That video is posted alongside the other video with the snake below.

RUDOLF STEINER BOOK TRANSLATED INTO HEBREW

This month I received an email that a friend in Israel, Benzion Porat, has had translated into Hebrew and published the book, Rudolf Steiner's Mission and Ita Wegman by Margarete & Erich Kirchner-Bockholt, my review of which triggered his decision to publish it. I had reviewed the book using a book on loan from Rudolf Steiner Library and suggested Benzion get the book itself and obtain permission from the Rudolf Steiner library, which he did.

Here is his letter announcing the publication:

Dear Bobby,

Thanks to your book review of Rudolf Steiner's Mission and Ita Wegman by Margarete & Erich Kirchner-Bockholt, which appeared in your internet site, and with your further help, the book will be soon available to the Hebrew readers in Israel,
as we are near the publishing of its first Hebrew edition.

We acquired the rights for the publishing in Israel from RUDOLF STEINER PRESS.

Attached hereby is a picture of the cover of the Hebrew edition of the book.

I want to send to you a copy of the book, as my gratitude.

Please let me know your post address for mailing the book to you.

BENZION PORAT
ISRAEL

FOUR CLUB LUNCHEONS, REHEARSAL DINNER, WEDDING

Del was as busy as I was this month. Particularly on the wedding when our son John got married in Baton Rouge. As mother of the Groom, Del arranged the Rehearsal Dinner. She chose Sammy's Grill in Prairieville area as being convenient for most of the guests, and there were about 24 guests for the dinner. She decided on a chocolate doberge cake for dessert, and to my surprise the entire cake quickly disappeared. The very next day, she had a luncheon of Les Dames to attend in Red, Black, and Yellow to honor Germany for their Oktoberfest Theme. In addition she attended her Investment Club luncheon, Timberlane Garden Club luncheon, and Twilight Garden Club luncheon. How she managed to fit a Rehearsal Dinner and a son's wedding into her busy schedule, I'll never know. Sometime when she pauses for over twenty seconds between meetings and errands, I might ask her.

TIMBERLANE SCREENING ROOM UPGRADE

Due to our broken Mitsubishi Projection TV we have purchased a 42" Smart TV to replace it. Its loss has forced us into designing and having built two identical oak shelves to hold the four side TV's. The SONY WEGA has had problems with its remote and we've decided to replace it with a new 40" LED screen. The new shelves should be here and installed by December 1st. I have resisted this upgrade long enough. Only I know how much work it will take to get the new configuration connected similarly to the old, and my guestimate is probably on the low side, but it has to be done. One of my requirements for the two new TVs is that they are made by different companies so that the remotes will not interfere with each other. The details of connecting them together is something that I have learned the hard way must wait until all the TVs are in place and ready to connect. I learned decades ago to skip the laborious task of drawing a diagram of any current TV interconnection because of the number of changes it undergoes as I discover what works and what doesn't.

Any diagram was good for only about a week or two. Connect, test, re-connect, test again, stop when it works. That's the only procedure which works when you're trying to get five signals out of one cable with amplifier, Blu-Ray player, DVD/VCR player, Laptop, etc. all working together. One of the TV's from the pre-digital broadcast days has been donated to Patio Planters White Elephant Sale. I brought it downstairs, hooked it to the government supplied digital receiver and tested it. That worked. Then I inserted an old VHS movie into its VHS player and it works. Will be great for someone who has VHS tapes and needs a way of playing them. It and the SONY WEGAs of which we still have two, one upstairs and one downstairs, were the last of CRT-based TV sets, the boxed ones. And the downstairs WEGA box is going as soon as the new shelves arrive all 350 pounds of it. Give me TV sets I can move around on my own from now on.

SECRET GARDENS OF THE VIEUX CARRÉ

We volunteered to act as docents for the Secret Garden tours of the French Quarter. By volunteering we got tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday tours which are different sets of tours of seven gardens each. We were awakened about 5 am on Saturday by a tremendous downpour of rain and decided to skip the tour for that day and just do the tours on Sunday, the day we volunteered to serve at.

So Sunday morning I made a brunch for us. I fixed for me and Del my not-yet-famous Crawfish Eggplant Dressing omelette. For the first time I didn't use frozen tubes of the CED, but the remainder of the freshly made CED from the fridge, plus I had from our garden lots of fresh basil and parsley for the omelette mixture plus some tiny green onion tops for its garnish. Add slices of Valencia orange around the omelette and Talk About Good! I made this for Dan, Del's brother, and he never stopped talking about how good he thought it was. With Dan and his wife Karen visiting this month, I'm figuring they'll want that from the Timberlane Bed and Breakfast, open only for relatives and close friends.

We drove down to the French Quarter, but found no parking slots left in French Market Moon Walk area, so we drove to our favorite spot on Rampart. After we parked, we got to watch a Treme Cultural Event: a series of Second-Line marching, dancing, and music-playing krewes. Watched the first three krewes and then walked to the three closest Secret Garden's and at the third we got our marching orders for the day from Tim McGinn. We were docents at Secret Garden 4 and so we visited 7, 6, 5, and then skipped to 3, 2, 1 before making it to Secret Garden 4 exactly at 2 pm.

It was great fun to see Bob and Jan Carr at Garden no 3. Luckily Del recognized Jan at the door. I went back to tell Bob the parts of his book Raising our Children on Bourbon (About their home on Bourbon Street) that I liked best, like the gal with fuse problem on the box high on the wall who reached up under Bob's shorts as he reached up to fix the fuse. Or Bob and Jan's kids on the ladder talking to their neighbors while their parents made them stay out of the house as they sanded and painted the floors, the neighbors Bob found out later were nude Bourbon St. Strippers sun-bathing on the other side of the fence. The book is a must-read for all who know and love our fair city.

The two guys we replaced at Garden 4 were so glad to see us. Del held fort out front, but she was facing south and didn't have a hat to block the sun, so she asked me to replace her. I had started out in the shady patio and Del sitting on the chair checking off the tickets as people entered. After she asked me to switch places, I found that I loved being outside greeting people as they came up, finding out where they were from, Ohio, Georgia, Los Angeles, Australia, etc, and just observing the passing scene on the street. Two horse-drawn tourist wagons rolled by. A tour group on Segways segued by. A kid on a skateboard saw me writing something on the cards people gave me and thought I was giving them my autograph. He came up to me and said, "You famous? You giving autographs? Here, sign my cup." So I obliged, sign my one-day only autograph, my date glyph autograph which embodies the date in its design, a little trick I've developed over some forty years. I handed him his cup back as some more patio visitors arrived with their green tickets and as I checked off their tickets, I heard the kid vamping, "Yeah, I know your music. Love it man! Listen to it all the time." and stuff like that.

Don't know where that came from. Was he joking with me or playing along with joke or serious? I don't know. He rolled off down the block to Bourbon Street. So I autographed the tickets of other patio visitors. Told the story to Bob Carr when he and Jan came later to visit our patio, and I gave him my one-day autograph on his Secret Garden ticket.

One lady came up to me to get her ticket marked and said, "Anybody ever tell you that you look like James Lee Burke, the writer/" Didn't say it but it occurred to me that someone should tell James Lee Burke that he looks like Bobby Matherne, the writer.

A group of three or four hippie-looking 20-somethings passed on the street, turned to me and said, "Happy Sunday!" Sounded great, so I passed the greeting along to other folks walking by.

A small gray SUV pulled into a parking spot directly across the street from me. The young man got out and walked around to the back of his car to see if he cleared the no parking stripes. He turned to me for advice. I told him that it seemed he'd left enough room for the driveway to be used, but he might still get a ticket. As we talked and he pondered, a guy got into the car parked in front of him and drove away, so he was able to move his car safely ahead. As he got out the car he thanked me, knowing that I had not been there to talk to, he'd probably had pulled out to look for a legal spot before the guy vacated the spot in front of him. I told him that when good things like that happen, one should always thank one's Guardian Angel who put the idea in his head to talk to me as a way of getting him to wait for the spot ahead to open up. He said, "Thanks" and he walked away said, "I'm heading to rehearsal at Le Petit Theater for 'Hair'. Come and see us." You know, when someone says come and see us in Hair, it's like saying come and see us naked. Will be fun to hear the "Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" sung in person for the first time. It's showing in November, in a few weeks.

Maybe it was the Hair reference that got me to thinking of the alliterative phrase "Indecent Docent", so when the next group of patio viewers came up, I told the three young guys, "I just got here to replace the previous guy who had taken off all his clothes. He was an Indecent Docent." One of the guys said, with a smile, "I'd have paid extra to see him," which left no doubt about their sexual orientation. I told them as they walked into patio, "I think he's working on Bourbon Street now."

I had a lot of fun on the street. Never a dull moment on any street in the French Quarter. My job was to mark an X over the Secret Garden 4 spot on each ticket to keep people from passing it off to others to come in for free. As time was winding down to ten minutes left, a gang from Ohio asked about where to get tickets and I let them in to see our garden patio.

I had talked to the guy who came out of the house to smoke a couple of times. He confirmed that he lived in the condo that goes with our Secret Garden. Later when I walked back to the patio to talk to Del at the end of our shift, I realized that might be the guy I had seen painting through the windows overlooking the patio. I walked over, and sure enough it was. So I tapped on the glass and got to meet him. Wayne introduced himself and Janet. They were both working on a different paintings. Wayne was doing the street out front where I had been sitting for two hours. I could see the Armstrong Park Arch from where I sat. It was from a photo he took of that street on Red Dress Day. Will be lots of red in painting, he said.

As we walked back to our Maxima, we spotted Carol Fleischman's Red Smart Car near her condominium and figured she was home, so we rang the bell. We sat on her patio for a few minutes to rest our weary legs and share tales, then we got back to our car and Del drove us home as I tried to catch 40 winks. No Secret that this had been a most interesting and exhausting day.

LAST MINUTE EVENTS

Our beloved Saenger Theater re-opened, fully renovated, including an expanded stage which can now handle full-sized Broadway Plays. With our season tickets we are hoping to enjoy some top class Broadway shows without having to take our shoes off at airports. The first night was a memorable one, not for the lugubrious and obscene musical that wasted our time, but for the sparkling new Saenger Theater, its gold leaf details shining, its chandelier returned to the lobby, its Greek-statued lined ruins on the walls of its theater with clouds and stars shining down from above. A quick visit downstairs revealed that the two rest rooms and the concession area had also been restored. Truly this was a night when the Saenger was the star of the evening! !

In our traditional last Twilight Concert in City Park, we met Renee and Burt Lattimore at the Two Sisters Pavilion for the John Rankin Concert. It was a tough choice between three events scheduled for this one night. There was a lecture we wanted to attend and a performance by the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra. When John Rankin mentioned that his wife went to the NLOFO gig, he highlighted our own ambivalence. The New Leviathan played the original score for the silent movie of 1922's Beau Geste at the Prytania Theater. Since the NLOFO doesn't play any music composed after 1933, this was a wonderful opportunity for them to show off their skills, taking the audience on a trip down memory lane to a time before most of them had memories and before movies had voices, only music, namely, the 1920s.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !!!

Publishing on the first day of each month makes it too soon in October issue and too late in November Issue of DIGESTWORLD to wish you a Happy Halloween, but we can give a look at a local resident's Halloween yard display. Like the sign under the Skull says, if you have any wicked ways, "Turn Back Now".

KITCHEN TOUR

At one of the Secret Patios we visited the previous weekend, Del felt in love with a kitchen which was open for view off a patio. When we met our friend Ann Maier at the patio we were docents for, she invited us to a Kitchen Tour on an elegant street bordering City Park the following weekend and we naturally took her up on the suggestion. The homes we visited on Allard Street were all beautifully appointed and the kitchens often had a chef or two prepared one of their specialties, in thankfully small sizes. The tender steamed mussel with red caviar and the flan were two of our favorites.

The Brocato canolis were very tempting, but we ate them in our imagination, receiving thin calories thereby. Oh, and the crab cheesecake which I opted to have without the brown meuniere sauce on top.

The other treat was a chance to meet and talk to Dickie Brennan of the Brennan Clan of restauranteurs and chefs. We talked about the importance of growing one's own vegetables and shared a couple of recipes along the way.

The day was knockout gorgeous with clear blue skies and cool weather. Luckily each home had a lovely patio and outdoor spaces so we didn't need to stay in the kitchen any longer than necessary to find out about how it came about and to enjoy the treats fresh from the hands of the Chef's.

HALLOWEEN HAYRIDE

On the Saturday night before Halloween, the Timberlane Country Club sponsors a Hayride for the kids which wends its way along the Golf Cart path directly off the edge of our West Lawn. This year, two new friends who now own our previous house at 217 Timberlane Road, Robert and Cynthia O'Byrne and their son Ryan came over to join us and Connie and Don filling the Trick or Treat bags of the costumed kids in hay-cover trailers and pick-up trucks. This year we added stobe lights, spooky sounds, wolf howls, and Halloween decorations to our candy table. Del brought finger sandwiches for the parents, and Connie made Polynesian rum treats for the imbibing age adults who wishes one. Several of the trucks said, "You have the best stop of anybody!" Dan and Karen got in during half-time, when the counter-clockwise flow of the 20-something float parade stopped, and the clockwise flow started. When the last float arrived, we had barely enough candy to fill the up-raised bags of the tots saying "Trick or Treat".

DAN & KAREN'S VISIT

The next morning I made my crawfish-eggplant dressing omelet for Dan and Karen before they left for the Superdome for the Saints game. They flew in yesterday from Charlotte, NC and reported a lot of Buffalo Bills fans were on their flight, who said, "We don't expect to win; we're just going down to have some fun!" Well, the Bills kept it close, but with Drew Brees pass completions to ten different Saints, five of which went for TD's, the eighth time he's done this during his career, the Bills found it hard to keep up. Especially with the Saints defense positioned in last the previous year and working its way up to first in the NFC this year. On Tuesday we're meeting for lunch at Galatoire's before they fly home and we head to Baton Rouge where Del and I will staying overnight on the LSU campus for the first time.

TIGERAMA

The Tigerama is an annual fund-raising event for the LSU music program, this year the event is funding the LSU Band's trip to Dublin in 2014 to march in the St. Patrick's day parade. Our friend Allison Stewart was performing with the LSU Golden Girls during the event. She is aiming to become a Saintsation, dancing girls for Saints games in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, when she graduates in about twelve months. Before the event we met our daughter, Kim Gralapp and her two offspring, Kim and Weslee, who are students at LSU. We had dinner together at the Chimes Restaurant at the North entrance to LSU campus, a large retaurant which includes the corner drugstore, Maxwell's Rexall Pharmacy, which had a luncheon nook when I was a student there. I was delighted to see that the Varsity Theater, which showed Ingmar Bergman's films in first run, like "Wild Strawberries" when I was matriculated at LSU.
Can't say I watched any, being too busy studying, as were Katie and Weslee on this night, as they skipped the Tigerama to hit their books. One of the highlights of the performance was the hundreds of brass instruments which filled the aisles of the upper deck of the PMAC playing along for one piece with the orchestra on the arena's floor. One baritone trumpet stood over me as she played, a few feet from my aisle seat. A lowlight was a woman who was on her knees working on something between the dais and the TV commentator, who acted as Emcee for the event. Clearly it was something electronic not erotic, but it looked suspicious.

After the event everyone went down to get posed photos of Allison with her friends and family, something I prefer to avoid as much as possible. I had a great shot from our seats of Allison with my Canon SX30 telephoto, and that was enough for me. But I couldn't resist one of Del and Allison together at the end. Del and I had a long day and we decided to walk back to the Lod Cook Hotel on West Lakeshore Drive, a romantic walk along one the LSU Lakes, which was refreshing in the cool night air of Fall.

The next morning we had breakfast with Kim and then headed south towards home, planning to stop at Cabelas in Tanger Mall. It has a huge store filled with every type of hunting, camping, and hiking gear and clothing you might want.

We decided to meet the newlyweds, John and Kim Hatchett, for lunch and drove to Amedisys Headquarters, the Fortune 500 Company at which they both work, to pick them up. We had a nice lunch, Del looking at wedding photos, and then drove back home, ready for some alone time after a very active two-day mid-week trip. The only remaining activity before November 1, All Saints Day, arrives, is the Halloween Block Party on Colony Drive, a short walk across the fairway from our West Lawn. It's been a fun and very busy October, during which I took some 361 photos and have selected the best hundred of them to show you my Good Readers. If your photo got into this issue, we thank you, if not, enjoy these, perhaps next month you'll be in that number.

EVERY GOOD THING MUST COME TO A NEW BEGINNING, SO UNTIL NEXT MONTH

The past 31 days of October have seen us on the move constantly. First we had a triple feature in the French Quarter with Patio Planter's meeting, daughter Kim Gralapp's 50th birthday, and Ted Graham's CD release party at Margaritaville, then off to San Francisco for a week baby-sitting two grandkids, (two keen teen-kids). Then up to Baton Rouge for Kim and John's wedding rehearsal and wedding on consecutive days. Following that, our first Broadway play in the newly renovated Saenger Theater, a night which was more about the magnificent building than the play itself. Then we closed out the month with Dan and Karen Richards coming from Charlotte for a visit on the night of the Halloween Hayride across the back of our west lawn.

LSU and Saints both lost a close game by a last second field goal and won the next one handily. Our newly re-branded New Orleans NBA team, the Pelicans, are 7-1 in preseason, LSU's basketball team is rated high in the SEC, and LSU's baseball team seems poised for another run at Omaha College World Series again. Our new southside pergola now has its sunshade installed and the flower garden around it is beginning to shape up. The herb garden has been expanded to include broccoli and brussels sprouts and is looking great. The veggie garden has been weeded and ready for its winter crop and the other two veggie gardens are under mulch for the winter.

This coming month of November will find us busy again. There will be Saints games each Sunday, LSU games on Saturday, and Broadway Musicals at the re-opened and enlarged Saenger Theater downtown on certain Friday nights. Plus a Comedy dinner play Alone Together starring Spud McConnell at our Timberlane Country Club, a Southern Repertory production of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Hair at the newly remodeled Le Petit Theater in the Quarter, and special Thanksgiving Day production in Bobby Jeaux's Kitchen. Add in a few other events like the Gretna Green Centennial Clubhouse Affaire at which we will be hosting a table for some friends, and it will be another busy month. Till we meet again in these pages in December, God Willing, we wish you Fair Winds and Following Seas, and remind you, wherever you go, whatever you do, wherever in the world you live, be it returning Winter or Summer, of our slogan for this God-given Year of Grace:

MAY THE WORLD CONTINUE PEACEFUL AND SERENE IN TWENTY-THIRTEEN

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Quotes Selected from quotes.htm this month:

  • It is a provision of the spiritual world that every real spiritual fact appears in the script of the starry heavens.
    Rudolf Steiner (December 12, 1910)
  • Statistically speaking, every human has one ovary and one testicle.
    Bob Greenberg ( of San Francisco Performances, 21st Century Composer and Lecturer for Teaching Co.)

  • New Stuff on Website:
  • On October 9 about noon, Del called my attention to a Great Egret eating a snake. We've seen them nosh on small anoles before, but this garden snake, likely a garter or king snake, was about three feet (1 meter) long and you can watch the Egret move the snake around until its head goes in first, the snake could only bite on outside of the Egret's hard yellow bill before its head was smalled by the bill.(Left Side) The very next day the same Egret was back in the same spot and I caught him stalking a large lizard, probably a skink, grabbing it, and eating it. (Right Side) Note: Videos start off a little out of focus on full screen but quickly sharpen up.

















    From Flowers of Shanidar, A 1990 Book of Poetry by Bobby Matherne

    INTRODUCTION
           In a small dark cave in the hills of Northern Iraq near the Turkish border the excavator Ralph Solecki found in 1960 the bones of a young man placed in the recess between two large boulders. Analysis of the remains from the cave of Shanidar determined that the burial occurred over 60,000 years ago.
           Soil samples collected near the bones were only analyzed several years later and produced a quite unexpected result. Ordinarily a small random assortment of pollen grains would be found in funereal soil samples, but the Shanidar soil analysis revealed thousands of pollen grains from wild flowers of the region. Flowers of rose mallow, hollyhocks, hyacinths, and other indigenous varieties of flowers had been systematically collected and transported to the cave of Shanidar as a funerary tribute.
           Astonished, the scientists were confronted with the earliest known evidence of a burial ritual. From the very dawn of mankind a message had come down to us, written in pollen grains from the flowers of Shanidar, of the birth of a new consciousness — the consciousness of death.
           How far have we progressed in the knowledge of ultimate destinations in the 600 centuries since that funeral celebration? As we stand before the door to the new millennium, do we dare to knock? Are we ready for the new flowers of Shanidar and the birth of consciousness that will surely accompany our passage into that new era?


    These poems are from Bobby Matherne’s 1990 book of poetry, Flowers of Shanidar and have never been published on the Internet before. Here in the beginning of the new millennium, we are publishing each month five poems, one from each Chapter of the book. (Flowers drawn by Artist Maureen Grace Matherne)

    1. Chapter: Hollyhocks

          Mental Training Wheels

    There was once a time
    When you didn't know
    How to ride a bike.

    Then one day you learned
    To cast off your fears
    And pushing air in front of you
    You moved across the solid world
    Upon two skinny rolling wheels,
    Learning with each turn
    That moving faster
    Makes for better balance.

    How to go from the unbalanced stop
    To a balanced motion is a trick
    That every rider learns to do:
    From shaky start to easy coasting.

    Life is like a shakedown cruise
    In the middle of eternity
    So take each lick upon your chops
    With equal equanimity.





    2. Chapter: Hyacinths

          Natural Martini

    It's not the sum of their successes
           That impresses me,
    Those undaunted men of science,
    It's how they stuff their rosy truths
           Into the waiting olive pits
    Then pour their vodka
    And vermouth on top and shout,
    "Ah, there's a martini
           like nature intended it to be."




    3. Chapter: Rose Mallow

          Virtual Reality

    Someday Virtual Reality
           will be a common novelty -
    Our psyches will be populated, one and all,
           with computerized folderol.

    With Cheshire Cats and zero G's,
           Dial-A-Beach or mountain tops,
    Become a grand piano or a hockey puck
           Or a comet buzzing distant galaxies.

    Create your universe from scratch
           or pop your head into a pigeonhole
    No telling what kind of cosmos you will hatch
           from all the cybernetics rigmarole.

    But until the Cray costs pocket change,
           to create Virtual Realities of bliss,
    Plug in your imaginations, let them range,
           live them in the world the way it is.

    4. Chapter: Rainbows & Shadows

    This month, as we near the completion of Bobby's first book of Poetry, Flowers of Shanidar, we continue with a poem from his second book of Poetry, Rainbows & Shadows (1995). This month we read the title poem.

          Rainbows and Shadows

    We call it a rainbow
           but each viewer sees
           a different rainbow

    We call it a shadow
           but from each angle
          it's a different shape

    We call it a sunset
           but to viewers directly beneath
           it's only an afternoon sky.

    In the childhood of man
           Plato and friends
           created an ultimate reality

    And psychologists created
           in individual man
           a single personality

    But each viewer sees a different facet
           of crystalline individuality

    In the unsuspected normalcy
           of multiple personality.


    5. Chapter: Violets

          Precession of the Gods

    It was the dawning of the Age of Taurus:
          The Minotaur snorted and cavorted
                in his labyrinthine cage.
          Gemini youths were manna heaven sent
                to break the fast of the wily bull.

    It was the dawning of the Age of Aries:
          Moses descended the fiery mountain,
                enraged by the golden bull
                his atavistic kinsmen forged.
          Moses destroyed that idol of the past,
                blew his fearful horn of Ram,
          and led his flock into the promised land.

    It was the dawning of the Age of Pisces:
          The sacrificial Lamb was hung
                upon the cross,
          His fishers of men let their nets
                out into the depths.

    It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius:
          The fish-kills clog the streams and rivers,
          The Water Bearer pours out the Gifts of Joy,
    Peace, and Love into every one of us.




    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    New Stuff on the Internet:
    Our grandson Walden came up this link.

    Click on Image at Left.

    If you've ever seen a Harbor Freight Ad, you'll love this wonderful spoof. I have bought many good tools from this company and hope this bit of satire will bring them many more customers.






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    Movies we watched this past month:

    Notes about our movies: Many of the movies we watch are foreign movies with subtitles. After years of watching movies in foreign languages, Arabic, French, Swedish, German, British English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and many other languages, sometimes two or three languages in the same movie, the subtitles have disappeared for us. If the movie is dubbed in English we go for the subtitles instead because we enjoy the live action and sounds of the real voices so much more than the dubbed. If you wonder where we get all these foreign movies from, the answer is simple: NetFlix. For a fixed price a month they mail us DVD movies from our on-line Queue, we watch them, pop them into a pre-paid mailer, and the postman effectively replaces all our gas-consuming and time-consuming trips to Blockbuster. To sign up for NetFlix, simply go to http://www.netflix.com/ and start adding all your requests for movies into your personal queue. If you've seen some in these movie blurbs, simply copy the name, click open your queue, and paste the name in the Search box on NetFlix and Select Add. Buy some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. You get to see your movies as the Director created them — NOT-edited for TV, in full-screen width, your own choice of subtitles, no commercial interruptions, and all of the original dialogue. Microwave some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. With a plasma TV and Blu-Ray DVD's and a great sound system, you have theater experience without someone next to you talking on a cell phone during a movie plus a Pause button for rest room trips.
    P. S. Ask for Blu-Ray movies from NetFlix, and if it says DVD in your Queue, click and select Blu-Ray version.
    Hits (Watch as soon as you can. A Don't Miss Hit is one you might otherwise have missed along the way.):
    "Emperor" (2012) magnificent and touching story, worthy of a haiku:

          Dancing through the bamboo
          A red dress and a smile
          Japan on its feet

    “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (1975) “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (1975) by Werner Herzog who portrayed the puzzling life of man found in Nuremberg who had been chained in a cave for all of his life, could barely walk or talk, but provided a naive view which attracted society around him. How could this have happened? It’s a, you know, enigma.
    “NCIS: Season 11, first episode (2013)” Ziva’s tells Tony goodbye in Israel after confessing her love for him. Gibbs gets beat up by a thug hired to do so, like the same one who killed the Sec Nav in bomb blast and hired the sniper who shot at Tony in his apartment. Abby’s depressed about her family being threatened and losing Ziva. No a happy episode, but another great one. Fournelle was in danger from the businessman he was providing safe conduct for and was id’ed by McGhee as the one who pulled the trigger on Sec Nav and the hospital bombs. This will likely drive the episodes of S11.
    “Mud” (2012) Matthew McConaughey plays another seamy character, but a very interesting one this time. Two 12-year-old boys go to claim a speedboat stranded in a tree on a deserted island and finds him, Mud, living in the boat. The three help each other as the good guys,(the Law) and the bad guys, (the relatives of guy he shot to save Reese Witherspoon from) are angling to put him in jail or kill him. A gripping tale which will hold onto you as he held onto Reese. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Now You See Me" (2013) full of insulting hypnosis pranks and obnoxious magicians trying to give the world a wedgie! Baffling stunts and once more Morgan Freeman speaks out of his dark cave and goes into it. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Walk, Don't Run" (1966) Cary Grant walks off the screen after this movie, in which the eponymous Maguffin is what Olympic Event will Jim Hutton the architect be in? Samantha Eggar advertises for a room mate to share her tiny Tokyo apartment and gets Grant and Hutton in this fun and funny romantic comedy. A DON'T MISS HIT !
    "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (1980) "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (1980) three Moscow gals try to find husbands; two do, the third gets pregnant, and thereupon lies a tale. Will it be happy ever after or full of tears, or both?
    "NCIS, Season 11: Once A Criminal (2013)" with Tony all distracted by she-who-shall-not-be-named when ghosts of an earlier case from his Baltimore cop days return.
    "Blade Runner" (1982) on Blu-Ray, Director's Cut, as good as watching it in a first-run theater, even better because of extra and fleshed-out scenes cut from theaterical version. Amazing computer graphics during early days. Replicants smarter and faster than their human creators ingeniously scripted by Philip K. Dick. A DON'T MISS ! ! !
    "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969) Maggie Smith still has her prime and plays a school teacher helping her girls into their prime, and getting the shaft from a girl already in her prime. For Maggie Fans, this one is A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "NCIS Season 11 (2013) Women" has Gibbs rethinking an earlier decision Mike Franks urged on him, as another potential Ziva replacement shows up, no lying!

    "Oblivion" (2013) A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! ! with Tom on Cruise control ala Top Gun. Flying futuristic copter and chopper on a devastated Earth scheduled to move all its people to the moon Titan, but like Matrix, things are not all they seem to be, and hope springs when the soft voice of Morgan Freeman speaks out of the dark cave. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Crossing Over" (2009) Harrison Ford, like Cusacks in Numbers, tries to save a young girl who later dies, and learns from this lesson. A look at the life of immigrants in Los Angeles in four story tracks.
    "Numbers" (2011) John Cusacks plays the numbers from both sides & comes up a winner.

    "The Captains" (2011) Bill Shatner, first-ever James Tiberius Kirk, decides to interview on film the other Star Trek captains, each in their own milieu, and finds himself interviewed along the way. We learn that he was called in by Roddenberry after the first pilot failed after a very serious portrayal by Jeffrey Hunter. Shatner gave Kirk a sense of humor, a verve, along with an intensity to boldly go where no man had gone before. Patrick Stewart - a Shakespeare veteran, Avery Brooks - a jazz musician and singer, Kate Mulgrew - daughter of fiery Irishman, Scott Bakula - a prominent singer, and Chris Pine - a reborn Shatner - all of these expressed how they strove to build upon the sturdy foundation laid by Shatner. When Stewart told Shatner on camera how he has become proud to be known for his portrayal of Jean Luc Picard, Shatner came to the same realization of his Captain Kirk persona, for the first time. For Trekkies and non-Trekkies all: A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "The Student Prince" (1954) Sigmund Romberg's music punctuates this on-again, off-again love story of a beer parlor sweetie and a prince in Heidelberg, singing by Mario Lanza. A Don't Miss Hit !
    "Jack Reacher" (2012) "Jack Reacher" (2012) is off the grid, but available if needed, to settle scores. Tom Cruises through another "Top Gun" movie, this time with cars and handguns. A Don't Miss Hit !
    "The Graduate" (1967) Must be seen on disk or TCM to appreciate the wonderful Simon and Garfinkle songs which punctuate and enhance the plot line. Mike Nichols' direction is absolutely perfect, Dustin and Katherine Ross were only a half-dozen years younger than Ann Bancroft when movie was made. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Bullet to the Head" (2012) Sly as hit man in this bloody battle of bullets and knives shot in New Orleans. C 4 yourself.
    "Eleanor Roosevelt: American Experience" (1999) "Eleanor Roosevelt: American Experience" (1999) details the life of Eleanor, both as Franklin's wife, mother of five children, First Lady for 15 years, and Most Esteemed Woman of the World for eleven years. They left out her development of the improved outhouses for rural America named "Eleanors" but covered her work for equality of races and sexes, drafting the UN Statement of Human Rights, and much more. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (1975) "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (1975) by Werner Herzog who portrayed the puzzling life of man found in Nuremberg who had been chained in a cave for all of his life, could barely walk or talk, but provided a naïve view which attracted society around him. How could this have happened? It's a, you know, enigma.

    Misses (Avoid At All Costs): We attempted to watch these this month, but didn't make it all the way through on most of them. Awhile back when three AAAC horrors hit us in one night, I decided to add a sub-category to "Avoid at All Costs", namely, A DVD STOMPER. These are movies so bad, you don't want anyone else to get stuck watching them, so you want to stomp on the disks. That way, if everyone else who gets burnt by the movie does the same, soon no copies of the awful movie will be extant and the world will be better off.


    "Cosmopolis" (2011) Not believing this new movie could deserve a One-Star NetFlix rating, we watched and we report: NOT SAFE TO WATCH THIS MOVIE IN ANY PART OF TOWN. AVOID AT ALL COSTS

    Your call on these — your taste in movies may differ, but I liked them:

    "Dangerous Moves" (1984) a high-stakes Chess match ends up in a life and death finale. The master who manipulated people's lives to win the match forfeits with his life.
    "Mona Lisa" (1986) Bob Hoskins as a British thug just released from seven years in prison has to become a driver for a high-paid prostitute before returning to a job he can get his hands on.


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    4. STORY:
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    Le Boudreaux Cajun Cottage, drawn by and Copyright 2011 by Paulette Purser, Used by Permission
    Adapted from a Justin Wilson story he told one day on his cooking show while he was cooking a deer sauce piquante:

    Boudreaux and Broussard worked offshore in the oil field, seven days on and seven days off. On their days off, they loved to go to their hunting camp outside Many, stuck in the woods alongside the lake far away from any civilization, which they liked a lot because no one bothered them there.

    One time, some decades ago, before area codes, when they still used exchange names in phone numbers, Boudreaux was cooking up a big duck sauce piquante for Broussard who was out in the duck blind hunting when a long distance phone call came in. It had to be a long distance call since there was no place anywhere near their camp.

    The operater said, "I have a long distance phone call for Mr. Broussard."

    "Mais, he's not here; he's out in de duck blind hunting."

    "Can you write down a message for him when he returns?"

    "Okay, Ah got me a pencil and a piece of the Sears Roebuck catalog to wrote on."

    "Would you please ask Mr. Broussard to call Operator 61 in Lafayette at Capitol 2-1236?"

    Boudreaux said "Huhn?" Then he paused for a while and asked, "wat yah said?"

    The operator repeated her request, "I said, 'Would you have Mr. Broussard call Operator 61 in Lafayette at Capitol 2-1236?'"

    "Yas, Ah heard dat me, but told me sumpin, how you make a capital 2?"


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    5. RECIPE of the MONTH for November, 2013 from Bobby Jeaux’s Kitchen:
    (click links to see photo of ingredients, preparation steps)
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    Equisetum Tea

    Background on Equisetum Tea: Equisetum tea is a marvelous concoction for protecting and saving plants and trees from mold, mildew, leaf-yellowing, and any of the so-called diseases which, rightly understood, stem from soil problems. All you need to get started is to locate a supple of horse-tail rushes which are actually equisetum arvense (their Latin name). It is called Preparation 508 in Rudolf Steiner's Bio-Dynamic Preparation list. One cannot simply add the chemical silica to a soil to condition it, only live silica from growing plants can condition the soil properly, and equisetum owes its tall, hollow stems to living silica. Thus a tea made of these rushes will help counteract the influences of the Moon forces, especially after a rainy winter which causes all kinds of plants and trees to develop mold, etc.

    Ingredients
    A bundle of horsetails rushes (equisetum arvense)

    Preparation
    Place the rushes into a large pot, fill with water.

    Cooking Instructions
    Bring to a rolling boil and let boil for an hour.

    Serving Suggestion
    Make large quantities of tea and bottle it in gallon containers. It will last for year. Dilute to about 10% for garden application as a small amount of this silica-rich tea goes a long way in the garden. It is not necessary apply to the molded leaves, apply instead to the roots of the trees. We have used it successfully to eliminate a black mold from patches of our St. Augustine grass. After one treatment, the mold disappeared in a week and never came back. When in doubt, pour some out for your plants and trees. Rudolf Steiner writes in his Agricultural Course:

    Quartz is insoluble in water - the water trickles through it. It therefore seems - at first sight - to have very little to do with the ordinary, obvious conditions of life. But once again, you need only remember the horse-tail - equisetum - which contains 90 % of silica - the same substance that is in quartz - very finely distributed.

    Other options
    This tea has various calming and medicinal properties which can be looked up. Take special care to clean the rushes first if making tea for consumption.

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    6. POETRY by BOBBY from Yes, and Even More! :
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          Advance Parts!

    All my mistakes are made
           by advance parts of myself:
           my future selves,
           that I don't understand,
           up until now.

    Look carefully within
           and you will see the future
           in your advance parts.

    Look carefully within
           and you will glimpse the future
           in your advance selves.

    Look carefully for they are the solution:
           our advance selves.

    Yes, and God knows, the riddle, too.       

    Advance, Parts!
                  and be recognized!


    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    NOTES for Advance Parts!: Written February 29, 1996, Leap Day while watching Desert Fury with Burt Lancaster on AMC over Cox Cable. Don't remember the exact inspiration, but I made a minor error and the thought came that errors are not made by some inept parts of me that have been around a long time, but they are rather made by new parts that are trying out something new, a Process (behavior) so new that it seems like a mistake to me. That would make the part doing the behavior an advanced part of myself, a part that will come into existence in the future if the behavior proves to be useful. That makes it a part of me from my future. Instead of insulting it by blaming it for some prima facie misdeed, I should thank it for its appearance and help in advance, and then wait patiently for the current parts of me to understand the new part's behavior.

    If all else fails, I can always say, "I don't understand the meaning of this failure, up until now." The embedded command to all my other parts is "understand the meaning" and which intiates the process of understanding. Sometimes the answer comes immediately, and sometimes the answer takes more time, but trust yourself that it will always come. If answers have not come to you like this in your experience, perhaps you have been doing other behaviors, up until now. So you have a choice, you can review and thereby perfect your current behaviors, or try something new. Ever meet anyone who seems to have spent their life perfecting their faults? It is a common occurrence for people to spend the portion of their lives after the age of twenty-seven years old justifying their behaviors rather than learning new behaviors. They may learn new aspects or content of processes that they already know. A new golf grip, a new tennis racket with graphite handle, a new newspaper, a new drinking buddy, but notice in all these examples one thing: that the processes remain the same: golfing, tennis, newspaper reading, and drinking.

    Those miscellaneous failures that we call errors, small and large, are orchestrated by our future selves, but those future selves are delicate and disappear at the first sign of disapproval. Nourish them instead of disapproving of them and allow them to remain around to enrich your life from now on.

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    7. REVIEWS and ARTICLES for November:
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    For our Good Readers, here are the reviews and articles featured this month. The first two reviews of this month are ones published before the first DIGESTWORLD ISSUE in 2000 and will be of interest to our new Good Readers. The rest of the items will be new additions to the top of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, new additions to A Reader’s Treasury, or Essays previously unpublished.

    NOTE: some Blurbs may be condensations of the Full Reviews, lacking footnotes and many quoted passages. For your convenience, if you wish to read the full review or to print it out, simply CLICK on the Book Cover and choose Printer Ready option at the top left corner.

    The first review this month is from 1997 back in the earliest days of my development of doyletics as a science.The second review is from 1987. It is about a very funny book, and it has not appeared in a DIGESTWORLD Issue, up until now. Hope you enjoy them both.

    1.) ARJ2: The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux

    LeDoux says in the beginning of this book that he wanted to know how brains make emotions. He ends his book with this statement: "The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion."

    Before I review the contents of the book, let me provide the reader a brief summary of how the bodily responses comprise emotions based on the nascent science of doyletics . Brain states are accessible by neural researchers with micro-electrodes; our physical body states are accessible by everyone. Physical body states comprise the substrata of the human capability known as emotions or feelings. [See ARJ: PANACEA!, Emotional Intelligence, Passion&&Reason, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, and Thinking in Pictures.] LeDoux's work dramatically demonstrates that physical body states are stored in and retrieved from the amygdala.(1)

    The amygdala consists of two almond-shaped structures in the brain's limbic region. From three months after conception until five-years-old all of a human's physical body states are stored in the amygdala together with the perceptual contexts which accompanied the states. An example will help: if a pregnant mother slipped and became frightened, the physical body state of the mother [pounding heart, muscle tension, etc] is experienced by the baby in her womb. The physical body states associated with fright are then stored in the baby's amygdala along with the perceptual context of the falling motion when its mother slipped. During a subsequent slip, the baby will experience the same pounding heart, etc, regardless of whether the mother does. The fright experience is re-triggered by its amygdala automatically. This same pounding heart will be experienced thirty or forty years later when, as an adult, the person is flying in a jet airliner that experiences momentary turbulence. Same perceptual context, same physical body state, only this time it is experienced as a "fear of flying."

    The amygdala has two jobs, two processes to perform:

    1.) store any novel physical body state with its associated perceptual context,

    2.) when presented with a familiar perceptual context later, to re-trigger its associated physical body state.

    At the age of five the amygdala stops the first process, and continues the second process for the remainder of the person's life. After five years old, an age known in doyletics as the Memory Transition Age [MTA], it is as if the cache memory of the amygdala had been filled and no new physical body states can be added again. This finding is substantiated by thousands of doyle traces with no known exception. This makes it an observation about empirical results (relying solely on practical experience) not theoretical expectations. [See ARJ: PANACEA!.]

    To keep from repeating the phrase physical body state over and over, I call them doyles after the creator of the basic theory, Doyle P. Henderson. The memory capability in the amygdala that stores the doyle is thus called doylic memory, and the trace that removes a doyle, a doyle trace. The nascent science described herein I call doyletics, which I define as the science that studies the acquisition and transmission of emotional traits. As genetics is the study of genes, so doyletics is the study of doyles. The basis for the second process is empirical also: during a doyle trace the physical body state (doyle) that comprises the unwanted emotion is traced back to before its first occurrence and is thereby converted from a physical body state in doylic memory into a brain state in "cognitive memory", also known in recent years as "declarative memory". Converting an automatic physical body state (in doylic memory) into a brain state (in cognitive memory) has the very practical effect of completely eliminating the unconscious affect associated with the perceptual context. For the person with the "fear of flying" mentioned above, the pounding heart and muscle tension will disappear. They will perhaps remember doing the doyle trace instead. The mere presence of a physical body state is evidence that process 2.) exists.

    The evidence for the existence of process 1.) is that whenever a doyle trace is stopped before reaching the Memory Transition Age (about five-years-old for most people), the unwanted physical body state disappears for a time and returns later. Only if the trace goes back to before the MTA is the removal permanent. Again this is not a theoretical prediction, but an empirical result of a myriad of doyle traces without a single variance. [See Amazing New Truths by Doyle P. Henderson for details of some of these traces.]

    The observed result is that after the Memory Transition Age (five) one's amygdaloid or doylic storage cache for emotions, feelings, and automatic motor operations seems completely filled. It will never be added to during one's entire life. This prediction is a result of many doyle traces. If the post-MTA addition of doyles was common, it would not be necessary to proceed before the MTA in every doyle trace. There may be exceptions to the no-new-doyles-post-MTA rule, such as survivors of lightning strikes and other extraordinary events, but the research to prove this is yet to be done. The hypothesis that doyles can be acquired post-MTA is unnecessary at this point.

    What does happen post-MTA is that your physical body states or doyles will be combined with other doyles or attached to new perceptual contexts. This is the process known as anchoring in the Neuro-linguistic Programming field developed by Bandler and Grinder. When such a combiner event happens (two or more doyles get connected) you will likely experience it as a new emotion - a novel feeling - such is the power of the combination of the two physical body states. A simple physical body state of disgust (e.g., a curled-up lip, stored as a doyle at age three) may get attached to broccoli at age seven. Your experience from then on will be, "I hate broccoli!" Any work that is done to remove the doyle stored at age three will remove the broccoli food dislike, and any work done to remove the combiner event at seven will remove the broccoli dislike. What's important to notice is that the doyle removal at age seven will leave the curled-lip doyle intact, and it will still be attached to perhaps many other perceptual contexts. Without the theory of doyletics as a guide, many pop therapists are providing temporary and incomplete relief by removing only the surface symptoms. This may seem trivial for a broccoli dislike, but when the symptom is an intense heart-pounding that leaves a person incapacitated for an hour or so, it is rather important. Removing all the combiner events can take a lifetime of weekly therapy sessions for some people and can provide a nice retirement plan for some therapists, all the while leaving the root doyles intact!

    The offending doyle is like the root of a tree and its associated perceptual contexts are like the leaves of the tree. Removal of the root doyle by going back before the MTA will remove the entire tree of unwanted responses.

    It is a common experience that some of food dislikes disappear past age thirty or so. This seems to indicate that some infantile doyles disappear of their own accord, by some sort of unconscious doyle tracing process that we all have. Since the process is not consciousness, it is useful to have some conscious, predictable process available for removing unwanted doyles. This is exactly what the speed trace provides. [See the Introduction webpage for details.]

    With this brief description of doyletics, let us examine LeDoux's book for data and experiments that would confirm or deny the basic tenets of doyletics, which are:

    1.) All emotions, feelings, and automatic motor operations are composed of physical body states or doyles.
    2.) Doyles are stored in and retrieved from the amygdala together with their associated perceptual contexts.
    3.) Storage of doyles stops at age five and retrieval continues indefinitely whenever an associated perceptual context is encountered.
    On page 23 LeDoux sets the tone for his research into a scientific basis of emotions when he says:
    I believe that we can get a unique and advantageous view of this puzzling part of the mental terrain by peering at it from inside the nervous system.
    Confirmation that emotions are composed of physical body states comes on page 44:
    The mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to the physiology, not vice versa: we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad; we are afraid because we tremble and sad because we cry.

    This is another way of saying that emotions are the labels that we have given to the various physical body states (doyles) so that we humans may communicate about our subjective experiences with one another.

    Magda Arnold's appraisal theory is presented on page 51:

    STIMULUS => APPRAISAL => ACTION TENDENCY => FEELING

    If we substitute PATTERN RECOGNITION in the place of APPRAISAL, and understand that we are referring to the pattern recognition of a perceptual context by the amygdala, we get the following basic diagram of doyletics:

    STIMULUS =>PATTERN RECOGNITION => TRIGGER DOYLE => FEELING

    This shows that the pattern recognition by the amygdala of the perceptual context triggers a physical body state (doyle) that creates what we call an emotion or feeling.

    In 1980 Robert Zajonc's exposure effect experiments showed that what Arnold called appraisal occurs independent of cognition, and thus is more consonant with amygdaloid memory than with cognitive appraisal or memory retrieval. From page 53:

    If the subjects are exposed to some novel visual patterns (like Chinese ideograms) and then asked to choose whether they prefer the previously exposed or new patterns, they reliably tend to prefer the preexposed ones. Mere exposure to stimuli is enough to create preferences.
    The novel visual patterns, when presented a second time, trigger a physical body state or doyle of recognition that leads to a preference for the preexposed patterns. If we combine the PATTERN RECOGNITION => TRIGGER DOYLE into one state and label it UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT, we get Figure 3-7 on page 54, which describes Zajonc's Affective Primacy Theory:
    STIMULUS =>UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT => FEELING

    If we add a conscious cognition feedback loop as in the diagram below, we demonstrate the interdependence of cognition and emotions.

    |<=CONSCIOUS COGNITION <=|
    \/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\/
    STIMULUS => ~~~~UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT => FEELING
    A stimulus creates an unconscious affect (doyle) which creates a conscious cognitive response (after a short delay), which in turn creates a new unconscious affect that modifies the unconscious affect. This is the feedback loop that is utilized during the process known as cognitive therapy. It allows someone to assess or appraise the meaning of an unwanted emotion and to move quickly to a more desirable feeling state or emotion. Cognitive therapy allows one to move from an unwanted emotion to a more desirable emotional state quickly; it does not remove the substrate of the unwanted emotion. The doyle trace allows someone to remove the substrate, the doyle, so that it never returns. That is the power of doyletics , simply stated.

    On page 69 LeDoux summarizes the brain organization of emotion contained in the rest of his book. He says that these key points justify his "belief that emotion and cognition are best thought of as separate but interacting mental functions mediated by separate but interacting brain systems." Below I restate his summary points using the terminology and concepts I have introduced above:

    • The stimulus recognition and doyle triggering [UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT] occurs in a different part of the brain from the CONSCIOUS COGNITION.
    • The stimulus recognition and doyle triggering [UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT] begins before any CONSCIOUS COGNITION can start.
    • Doylic memories and cognitive memories are provided by different brain mechanisms.
    • Stimulus recognition and doyle triggering [UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT] are fixed and automatic, whereas CONSCIOUS COGNITION processes provide the highest flexibility of response.
    • Stimulus recognition and doyle triggering [UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT] necessarily create emotions, whereas CONSCIOUS COGNITION processes do not necessarily create emotions. (An example of when CONSCIOUS COGNITION processes may create emotions is during a doyle trace. Note in the diagram above CONSCIOUS COGNITION exists in the feedback loop. It creates emotions by activating UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT when it accesses emotionally charged cognitive memories.)

    From page 118:

    Some people end up being stoics and show little emotion, even in situations where society allows emotions to flow freely.

    Each person has a unique history from conception to age five. If someone had only a few doyles stored for facial expressions, that person will have a natural poker face. If someone had few doyles stored for emotional expressiveness, that person will be considered a stoic. Some professions, e.g., medical doctors, continue in the same family for generations. Given that the children of a doctor will be exposed to the appropriate doyles for being a doctor by its parents, it makes sense that such children would feel comfortable growing up to become a doctor.

    From page 120:

    Ortony and Turner caused quite a stir in the world of basic emotions. They made it painfully clear that basic emotions theorists could no longer continue to agree that basic emotions exist and at the same time disagree about what the basic ones are.

    The problem with trying to identify the basic emotions is that emotions cannot be typed the way plants and animals have been. There is some similarity: emotion is like tree: elm names a specific type of tree just as joy names a specific type of emotion. But that is as far as the similarity goes. We live in one world with a single ecology of plants and animals, no matter how diverse their species might be. We each live in a different world of emotions; we each have a completely different ecology of emotional responses. Thus the joy of one person may bear only superficial resemblance to the joy of someone else.

    To a person that was severely abused as a child, joy might be the simple absence of externally afflicted pain or discomfort. Joy is the name that each person gives to some exceptional state that they prefer - it is the label given to an idiosyncratic doylic memory, a re-created physical body state. Some might liken joy to the state of Adam and Eve in Paradise, but each one of us lived in our individual Garden of Eden before five years old. Such joyful emotions as we experienced then, we later label joy. Each human being, as the product of its own pre-MTA emotional history, has a unique emotional ecology. With the advent of doyletics the nature-vs-nurture basis of our emotional life weighs in heavily in favor of nurture.

    In Chapter 6 LeDoux pinpoints the amygdala as the portion of the brain responsible for emotional fear responses. The sensory signals go from the hypothalamus to the amygdala in 15 milliseconds and from the hypothalamus to the cortex in 25 milliseconds. As a result, the amygdala is creating emotional responses before the cortex has even received the signal to be processed. The amygdala has limited pattern recognition capabilities compared to the cortex, however, and performs a quick and dirty pattern recognition and response. The cortex applies its refined cognitive processes to the same signal and provides the amygdala with signals for a more reasoned approach to the same sensory input. If we consider the thalamocortical path as the high road and the thalamoamygdalic path as the low road, one is reminded of the old Scottish song, Loch Lomond, which goes:

    "Oh, ye'll take the high road and I'll take the low road,
    and I'll be in Scotland afore ye."

    Taking the low road from the hypothalamus to the amygdala, we respond before we know it. A dark shadow and noise in the alley at night, and our heart begins racing an instant before we realize that it's only an alley cat. During the evolution of our species, at a time when the local cats were saber-tooth tigers, those humans who reacted without thinking to such shadows lived longer than those who thought first.

    The effect of the automatic response is so strong that Charles Darwin in his study of human emotions once tried an experiment at the local zoo. He placed his face against the thick glass of the puff adder's cage and steeled himself to ignore the inevitable strike against the glass. When it came, Darwin was chagrined to find that he had jumped three feet back from the glass.

    Earlier in this essay I claimed that children acquire physical body states from their mothers in utero and up until the age of five-years-old. On page 237 LeDoux presents some experimental data from Susan Mineka which confirms that the process of doylic transmission between mothers and children occurs in primates.

    It had long been thought that monkeys have an inherited fear of snakes, so that the first time a monkey saw a snake it would act afraid and protect itself. However, Mineka showed that laboratory-raised monkeys are in fact not afraid on the first exposure to a snake. Most of the earlier work had involved testing of the young monkeys in the presence of their mothers. If the young monkey is shown the snake when separated from its mother, it doesn't act afraid. It appears that the infant learns to be afraid of the snakes by seeing its mother acting afraid.

    Quoted from Mineka article: [RJM: edited slightly for readability.]

    Marks and Nesse (1994: 255), following Mineka and Al (1984), describe such a case in which fear does not emerges instinctively, but only after a specific learning experiment:
    "Rhesus monkeys are born without snake fear. Enduring fear develops after a few observations of another rhesus monkey taking fright at a snake. . . Likewise, a fawn is not born with fear of a Wolf - its lifelong panic is conditioned by seeing its mother flee just once from a Wolf."
    At least in the case of rhesus monkeys and snakes, this is a clear example of learning, rather than innate response. Rhesus monkeys learn to fear any moving object in this way, and to less extent non-moving objects too.

    The presence of such generational transmission of doyles in primates provides strong evidence for an equivalent process in humans. Any caretaker of a child until it reaches the age of five may be responsible for the storage of a doylic response that may stay with the individual for their entire lifetime.

    On page 243 there is an interesting diagram of two hippocampal neurons from a stressed and an unstressed primate. The unstressed one has a richer set of dendritic connections. This corresponds to Bruce McEwen's findings that "severe but temporary stress can result in a shriveling up of the hippocampus." (Dr. Sapolsky indicates that severe stress will flood the hippocampus with glutocorticoids which prevent the hippocampal transfer of declarative or cognitive memory to the cortex. Implications are that this is the root of PTSD.) The experiments with stressed primates involved exposing a subordinate male to a dominant male. Apparently coercion has permanent effects on the hippocampus and reduces brain capacity. (This will not come as a surprise to anyone who's watched the United States Congress in action on C-SPAN.)

    On page 248 LeDoux says: [Note: In the quote below, lesioned refers to removal by a scalpel.]

    Several years ago we were examining the effects of damage to visual areas of the cortex on the ability of rats to be conditioned to visual stimuli. The lesioned rats learned just fine, supporting our contention that there are subcortical pathways that take sensory information to the amygdala during conditioning. But when we tried to extinguish the fear responses in these animals, something unusual happened. We couldn't do it. Normal rats, after several days of seeing the light without the shock, stopped acting afraid in the presence of the light. But the rats with lesions of the visual cortex were like the Energizer batteries - they just kept going and going.

    These experiments confirm that the amygdala provides visual pattern recognition because when the visual cortex was disabled, the rats were able to conditioned to a fear response by shocking them with the light signal was turned on. The amygdala stored a fear doyle and re- triggered it every time the light was subsequently turned on, even though no shock was applied. In normal rats the CONSCIOUS COGNITION feedback loop corrected the amygdala's UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT after a few days of seeing the light (via the visual cortex) without the shock. In the rats with the lesioned visual cortex, the CONSCIOUS COGNITION feedback loop was effectively broken: no light signals could reach the cortex because visual cortex damage. The amygdala had no choice but to continue to respond to the light by re-triggering fear doyle.

    LeDoux uses the expression "emotional perseveration" to describe the behavior of the rats with the lesioned visual cortex. He points out on page 249:

    One of the hallmarks of frontal lobe damage in humans is perseveration, the inability to stop doing something once it is no longer appropriate.

    The experiment with lesioned visual cortex in rats suggests to me that perhaps the perseveration that is so prevalent in autistics may be due, not to some malfunction of their visual cortex, but to a differentially heightened functioning of their amygdala. (Recent autopsies of autistic brains have shown that such brain stems have smaller neurons with an attendant higher packing density. Higher density of neurons could provide the heightened functioning.)

    In a human subject with a lesioned visual cortex, the fear response to the light signals could be extinguished by a doyle trace, but this is not an option with the rats.

    Another interesting quote from page 250:

    Extinction, in other words, involves the cortical control over the amygdala's output rather than a wiping clean of the amygdala's slate.

    The CONSCIOUS COGNITION feedback path in the above diagram provides cortical control over the amygdala's output. When applied during the process of cognitive therapy, cortical control will modulate the amygdala's output. A simple doyle trace, however, be able to wipe the slate clean by completely removing the offending fear doyle.

    Two related quotes:

    Unconscious fear memories established through the amygdala appear to be indelibly burned into the brain. (page 252)
    The amygdala's emotional memories, as we've seen, are indelibly burned into its circuits. The best we can hope to do is to regulate their expression. And the way we do this by getting the cortex to control the amygdala. (page 265)

    Emotional memories of all types are with us for life, until they are removed either consciously or unconsciously. Some may be removed unconsciously during the maturation process, and the others may be removed by a conscious doyle trace. Some regulation of the expression of these emotional memories is possible through cognitive therapy, but the permanent removal of recalcitrant and resistant unwanted emotional memories requires a doyle trace. The expression, "indelibly burnt into the brain," reminds me of what, in computers terms, is called a read-only memory or ROM. It can only be read and not written, therefore it stays exactly the same forever. With the advent of doyletics , we must re-examine whether emotional memories in the amygdala are stored as PROM instead, that is, a programmable (changeable) read-only memory, one that is changeable only by some special process, for example, a doyle trace.

    To complete this extensive review of LeDoux's book, let us examine three additional related quotes:
    Although this may seem obvious, the study of emotion has been so focused on the problem of emotional consciousness that the basic underlying emotional mechanisms have often been given short shrift. (page 282)
    It's hard to believe that after all these years we actually still don't have a clear and definitive understanding of the role of body states in emotions. (page 295)
    Although thoughts can easily trigger emotions (by activating the amygdala), we are not very effective at willfully turning off emotions (by deactivating the amygdala). Telling yourself that you should not be anxious or depressed does not help much. (page 303)

    These quotes point out that the basic emotional mechanism involves the amygdala's storage and retrieval of physical body states.

    By doing a doyle trace one can be quickly convinced that it is possible to remove indelible, burnt-in emotional memories like anxiety and depression. One cannot judge the food by eating the menu; one must taste the food.

    ------- Footnotes ----

    Footnote 1.
    Note: later research since this review has shown that the hippocampus is the gateway for declarative or cognitive memory going to the cortex. If later in life, such as under extreme stress, the hippocampus is temporarily disabled, new doylic memories can be stored after five years old. This is the likely source of Post-Traumatic Stress or PTSD events.

    Return to text directly before Footnote 1.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tebrev.shtml



    2.) ARJ2: I Think, Therefore I Laugh by John Allen Paulos

    The title translates (thanks to Prof. Stephen L. Pearce) to: Cogito ergo rideo in Latin. Ridere is the root of risible, which means laughable or to laugh. I wonder if "to ride someone" originates from ridere?

    Entomology(1) (and, of course, etymology) aside, Paulos wrote Mathematics and Humor, which I added to my humor collection several years ago (seriously). A wonderfully insightful writer, he brings humor to otherwise dreary subjects. The story from Leo Rosten about the kid who shot first and then drew bullseyes around them he says explains the organization and contents of this book: a miscellany of potshots with meaningful bullseyes drawn around them - examples:

    • Friedrich Waissman, in his rebuttal to logical positivists, who claim that the meaning of every proposition (except their own) is in the method of its verification, said, "To believe metaphysics is nonsense is nonsense."
    • Hy Marx (Groucho's estranged uncle) claimed that the smell associated with flatulence is for the benefit of the deaf.
    • Howard Eves calculated the probability of there being two separate bombs on one airplane as so small that whenever he travels he carries one with him.
    • Using medical research logic, Paulos proves that the lack of aspirin in the bloodstream causes headaches.
    • When told that girls like these three topics of conversation in a man: food, family, and philosophy, the following tete-a-tete ensued:

    He: Hello, do you like noodles?
    She: <startled> Why, no.
    He: Do you have a brother?
    She: No.
    He: If you had a brother, would he like noodles?

    • Wife laughs at distraught husband with a loaded .45 at his temple. "Don't laugh," he said, "you're next." Ever notice that when people say "Don't laugh" that a laugh usually follows? There's a paradox in there somewhere.
    • Told by his doctor to take a calming ten mile walk each day, the man reports in a month later "Things are fine. I'm very relaxed, but I'm 300 miles from home."
    • Step right up and win the million dollar lottery: $1 a year for a million years.

    Let's leave laughing with a comment on "man's inhumanity to man." "That's what communism is all about," you say? I agree, but with Western governments, it's the other way around, up until now.

    __________________________

    ----- Footnote -----

    Footnote 1.
    Like in, "Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."
    "Yes, I see it. It's doing the breast stroke."

    Return to text directly before Footnote 1.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/ittilrvw.htm



    3.) ARJ2: Letters Through the Veil by Loryn 'Solana' Walton

    Losing a loved one is tragic at any point in one's life, but three weeks after marriage it is heartbreaking. Shown in the wedding photo, the author's husband was only thirty-three and died of a heart attack quite suddenly. This book is Solana's story of coping with the trauma, surviving alone, and thriving afterwards. But in a very real sense, following her beloved husband's death, she was not alone.

    [page 1] In the middle of the night after his death, I woke up hearing his voice in my head. He was singing the words of our wedding song to me. He continued to comfort me all through the night. I felt his presence whenever I was alone.

    Our usage of the word death glosses over the fact of our survival in the spiritual world and leads to the usage of transited instead of died to talk about the loss of a loved one. The word transited reminds us that we are immortal beings who have come into physical form on the Earth for a time, from which we transit back into the spiritual world in spiritual form at later time. The process of death is the flip side of birth, but unfortunately while we can say dying", we have no equivalent verb form for birth, as birthing refers to someone assisting with the process of birth or the mother giving birth and the word is used an adjective. So there is no verb form from the perspective of the one being born, which allows us to talk about birth as we do death, up until now. But it is clear that we both birth and die, is it not?

    Life is a puzzle with an enigma at both ends. And the puzzle and two enigmas will remain until we understand that the spiritual world experiences our birth as a death, just as our material world experiences our death. In other words, we leave the spiritual world at birth, just as we leave the physical world at death, both are transitions into each other. We live in the physical world during our time between birth and a new death, just as we live in the spiritual world during our time between death and a new birth. While this will seem strange to many ears hearing these words for the first time, as a scientist, the symmetry of these two descriptions is compelling.

    Perhaps if we looked at it this way: We start work at a new job, and the first words we hear from our companions at the new job are, "Where did you work before?" If we were given an amnesia drug as part of our severance package for each job, our answer would be, "This is my first job." or "I don't know." So far as we know, we would consider this our first job, and our last job. One shot, at one job, and we're done forever. But it's not that way with jobs, is it? We can move to new jobs and can tell others where we worked before. We are hired by employers who expect us to use the experience we had at other jobs to do our current job. With each new job, our abilities increase, and we are given bigger jobs to do. Our friends at our previous job are sad, because we may be moving across the country or to a distant city where they won't see us again, but they are comforted to know that we are available for us to talk to over the phone or write letters to.

    Some people leave one job, perhaps voluntarily or perhaps via a lay-off, and they spend a lot of time without a job. What do they do? They can try-on other work activities while they decide what they want to do for their next job. Seen from the job market, these so-called idle times when one is not working appear wasted. But anyone who has gone through such an out-of-work time will likely admit that when they went back to work, it was in a new job with a new attitude, and they felt rejuvenated. So, the dead space in one's job history, as seen from a résumé, can be a lively time of growth and learning which prepares one for a new job.

    In the author's case, her husband, Rock, transited to the spiritual world and remained in distant contact with her, helping both of them immensely to cope with their mutual loss. The author's self-stated goal was "not to prove the truth of life after death" but instead to speak of what helped her.

    [page 2] Mine is a love story, a self-help book, a journal, and, through an introduction to metaphysical concepts, a glimpse into the greater mysteries of existence.

    About a year after Rock's transition, Solana began writing her first letter to him. In it she dealt with her shock over his sudden death. The doctor was cold and unfeeling and ordered her to leave the room, and she refused, saying, "I will sit right here outside his room. As long as you're still working on him I need to stay close and keep praying." In another letter, she recalled getting into bed and crying out for help.

    [page 26, 27] First after climbing into bed I remember crying out for help and asking the angels to be with me. I was feeling such extreme emptiness in my heart. I called out for some relief from this depth of pain piercing my heart. I immediately felt a loving energy come and comfort me. It was as if a huge wing of love came and enveloped me until I finally fell asleep.

    Each of us has a Guardian Angel who follows us around like an agent follows around a movie star from job to job, only our angel follows us around from life to life. Whenever we call for help, our agent angel will come to our rescue, rarely seen, and often the agent-angel's deeds are also unseen and thus unattributed and unappreciated.

    Something good just happens, and we say it was a lucky thing that it did. But direct intervention such as the author received was felt immediately by her like a huge wing of love; the very metaphor she uses reveals why angels are so often depicted as having wings. Obviously angels, as spiritual beings do not require wings for motion, but people over the ages have had similar experiences after asking for help, and thus wings have become part of our understanding of angels.

    On the day my mother died, I had picked up my dad and took him with me to a stockholder's meeting downtown. Mom had gotten her hair done that morning, but it pained me to look in her eyes so much that when she took a photo of me and Dad with my camera, at my request, that photo came out with my eyes closed. I spent that morning with the first two people I knew in this lifetime, my nuclear family, as I was the oldest child. This was the last day the three of us were together in the flesh. That day she spent alone at home, but she called all her sisters -- she was one of ten girls and seven of them were still alive, living a long-distance phone call away. Mother hated to pay for long-distance phone calls, but on this day, she called and talked to each of them, as we found out later. Looking back, it seemed as if she were calling them to say goodbye.

    A similar thing happened to the author and her husband in the three weeks leading up to his sudden death.

    [page 31, 32] Just within three weeks we had met about fifty new people through the firewalk, sweat lodge, and the energy healing night. They were all shocked how one minute you had become a new friend to them, and the next minute you were gone. It really seems to me that those last three weeks of your life were like a huge, long going away party. And how strange it seemed that you had reconnected shortly with some old friends that had ended up being a goodbye for you.

    A time eventually came when writing letters to her departed husband that Solana began to hear him communicating back to her. Here is one of the first replies she received (marked in italics). Bear, as she calls him, elaborates an important truth which I call EAT-O-TWIST for Everything Allways Turns Out The Way It's Supposed To, where supposing is what you do when you think of possible future realities. What you suppose eventually becomes a reality.

    [page 58] It's never a waste to create beautiful, purposeful thoughts even if they don't physically manifest. Everything you think does get created at some level. So, watching your thoughts is important, if you want to consciously know what energy you're putting out into the universe.

    There is a tradition in Greek and Shakespearean tragedies where the blind man can see what is oblivious to the sighted man; consider the plays Oedipus Rex and King Lear as prime examples. The spiritual world is all around us, but in this stage of human evolution, most of us are unable to see it, so we wander like blind men through the spiritual world. But with our feelings we have direct access to the spiritual world, and it is through feelings that the blind are able to see what the sighted cannot; feelings provide insight into the spiritual world. Bear explains it this way, referring to seeing as what happens in our conscious mind, and feeling as what happens in our heart:

    [page 67, 68] There is mystery about human life that is meant to be there. Everything is not meant to be understood with the conscious mind. The conscious mind is not always capable of moving into that understanding. Some things are meant to be felt by the heart, and allow the mind to rest by knowing it's okay to accept the mystery of life. If there is a time when the mystery is to be revealed to you, then it will be when the timing is right.

    The time came for Solana as she walked through the airport after her week of meditation in Delphi, feeling "glowing and beaming with love and light" as if "walking on clouds". Then she experienced a chance to feel sorry for someone and something happened to her.

    [page 70] The most profound part that remains strongly in my memory today is when I saw a black man around the age of 60 sleeping in one of the chairs in the airport. I could sense my first reaction would be to think he was a bum living in the streets. I then had a vision where I saw his soul as being this beautiful being that had purposely chosen to live his life in this manner. I could see he was choosing some particular life experiences for his soul. My whole viewpoint changed and I saw him as someone to be honored for his decision rather than judged for his way of living.

    In other words, she saw the man, not as a victim of circumstances, but as an immortal being on a journey of exploration, on a journey worthy of being honored. Later she shares her understanding that there are no innocent victims to be pitied or felt sorry, but rather to be respected for their life's journey.

    [page 141, 142] It takes a lot of strength to be able to stand by and support someone. I want to give compassion without allowing their feelings to bring me down. I need to stay strong and centered and not feel sorry for them. There is no need to feel sorry for anyone. There are no victims in this world. All experiences, even those that seem bad, are in some way beneficial, but seldom clear in the moment.

    What is frustration? The author writes on page 168, "Frustration always shows up when I do not use my energies to create my life." To my mind, frustration is when your illusion of the way things are does not match your illusion of the way things ought to be. Rightly understood, one has complete control over one's frustration because one need only change one's illusions. Imagine a control knob which allows you move your illusion of the way thing ought to be until it matches your illusion of the way things are. Your frustration will be gone! With the disabling effects of the negative emotion, frustration, out of the way, you can devote your attention to supposing how you would like things to turn out and thus set the positive emotion of EAT-O-TWIST into motion to create that new reality.

    Our thoughts create elementals, primitive spiritual beings, which can directly affect other people. Solana comes to this conclusion after a demonstration done on her during a Silva Mind class.

    [page 197] It is important that we realize that when we are angry at people we are actually shooting hurtful energy at them and possibly weakening them.

    Her departed husband has become a guide for Solana through her letter-writing process, as she wrote to him and then listened to his replies and wrote them down. Let us read the last of his letters to her.

    [page 280] We will continue to work together in different ways throughout the rest of your life on earth, which includes more writing at another time period as you continue on with your other life experiences. I am one of your guides and am grateful for this opportunity to be able to watch over you. You're safe in the world, dear one, and I am with you.

    This book is a testament to the author's courage and fortitude in pulling herself through the depths of despair after her beloved husband died so soon after their marriage. Was she communicating with him, or with her idea of him? It's not possible to know for sure, but clearly this book will help others get through the loss of a loved one. That makes this book valuable for her, to have written it, and valuable for others to be able to read it.

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/lthruvel.htm

    = == == == == == == == == == ==

    I hear often from my Good Readers that they have bought books after reading my book reviews. Keep reading, folks! As I like to remind you, to obtain more information on what's in these books, buy and read the books — for less information, read the reviews.


    == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
    8. COMMENTARY:
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to converse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.

    1. Padre Filius Greets the Ghost of Steiner, our Beloved Schnauzer, in San Anselmo this Halloween Month:

    Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of the Digest to share with us some amusing or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.

    This month the good Padre greets the Schnauzer Security Patrol:




    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    2. Comments from Readers:

    NOTE: I love hearing from all my Good Readers and including your missives here (slightly edited).
    If you prefer any comments or photos you send to be private, simply say so and they will not be published.
    EMAIL from Kiki in Atlanta re: DW13a Movie Blurb:

    I saw "Robot and Frank" last year when it was in one of the very few theatres it played here in Atlanta for only a couple of weeks. I thought I'd fall out of my chair laughing. Some of it could be very true to life and I want one of those robots.

    Kiki Butgereit

    ~~~~~~~~~~ RJM Reply ~~~~~~~~

    Ha Ha. btw, my wife has a Robot: me.

    EMAIL from Kiki re: Colorful Birds
    I thought since you loved photography you'd like these.

    Kiki Butgereit

    ~~~~~~~~~~ RJM Reply ~~~~~~~~
    Thanks. Click on Mandrake Male Ducks above to see remainder of the great photos that Kiki sent. These photos have been added to the Tidbits of Amazing Photos and Tricks Section.
    Bobby

    EMAIL from Christopher Tidmore:

    I thought you might appreciate my script for next Saturday's Ghostly Galavant Weekend Fundraiser in New Orleans. I'll be playing my ancestor Jacques Phillippe Villere.

    Christopher Tidmore
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Bonjour, Je m'appel Jacques Phillippe Villere', Governeur de la Etat de Louisiane. . . Qu'est, que . . . Oh, you don't speak French . . . Americans, Je comprends.

    D'accord,..uh...It's alright. My English, not so good . . I learned Anglais late in life, and only used it sparingly, even when I was elected Governor of the State of Louisiana, the first native governor . . .

    Of course, my French was not always so good either . . . At least Academy Francaise French. When I was a page at the Palace of Versailles for the old King, Louis Quinze . . . you would say Louis the Fifteenth, I spoke a Creole French taught to me as a boy in New Orleans. And, the other pages, all of aristocratic backgrounds, made fun of me, often violently. . .

    But, I knew who I was. My father had led the first American Revolution in 1768.

    Oui, I said 1768. Mon Dieu, please tell me that the terrible Americanne schools did not ignore the fight for liberty that helped spawn your own revolution. . .

    But, you have never heard of 1768? . . . Well, there was the Seven Years War, in America de Nord the Anglais called it the French and Indian War.

    To make a long story short, the French lost and the English won. And, so that Louisiane would not end up in English hands, our King, Louis Quinze, gave this colony to his Cousin Carlos, the King of Spain, of course, no one asked us in New Orleans . . .

    We did not want to be Spanish. They have inquisitions!!! We have parties, and Mardi Gras Balls. . .

    So, a delegations begged King Louis to take us back. He would not consider it. Then, we did what any self-respecting colonist would do. Declare Independence.

    My father's closest friend, Lafreniere, wrote a document, Le Manifeste, which called for all men to be have the same rights before God, to form their own governments . . .

    Sound familiar? And, mon pere, my father, Joseph Villere, organized the Germans who lived around his plantation, and led them to hold the city as a free nation.

    There was only one problem. When you Americans declared independence, there were 3 million of you in the 13 colonies. When we did it, there were 2000 of us.

    The military governor of the Indies, Don Alehjandro O'Reilly sent 2000 troops to New Orleans. He promised a general amnesty, but when my father surrendered, O'Reilly went to arrest him. My father tried to escape, and was killed by Spanish soldiers. He would have died anyway. Lafreinere and the other five organizers of the revolt were all executed, and in those days, the sons were in danger, so at the age of 14, I was sent to France.

    Louis XV felt sorry for me, and made me a page at Versailles. It was . . . unpleasant, but educational. I became a gentleman, and reminded myself that my great-grandfather had been Valet de Chambre for Queen Anne.

    The King sent me to the Academy Militarie, and by the time I was 24, I was an officer in France's most valuable colony Ste. Dominique. Modern day Haiti.

    Then I heard my sainted Mere, my mother, was on her death bed. I had to return, knowing that I faced arrest, and possible execution. But, ma mere . . .

    Forgive the tears. To the French, it's not a sign of weakness . . .

    I was not in Louisiane for very long before I was arrested. The Governor, a Spaniard named Galvez ... You know an Island named after him, Galveston?...He offered me a deal . . .

    I could get my family's lands back, become his chief military aide, join the Superior Council, and all I would have to do is swear allegiance to Spain. Or I could die.

    I may be brave, but I'm not stupide!

    Governor Galvez explained that his King had pledged support for the Americans in their Revolution. And, he had not trained Military officers . . .

    So to war we went! We seized Baton Rouge from the English, and then a year later, Gov. Galvez led the most courageous amphibious landing I had ever heard of, giving us victory at Pensacola. (And, returning Florida to Spain after more than a decade in English hands.)

    And, I got to know the Americans. I admired and LIKED them. Most of my fellow Creoles (the word 'creole' means 'son of the colony') had a very good opinion of the Americans. Only ones they knew were the Caintucks, the Kentucky traders, that came to the city to sell their goods.

    So, when the Louisiana purchase came, I was one of the few Frenchmen happy to become American. And, that was rewarded. By the time we became a State in 1812, just a decade later, I was Major Gen. of the Louisiana Militia.

    Then, we went to War with the Anglais again. And, we were losing. Badly. In Canada. At Baltimore. And, they burned the White House in Washington. We called it the Executive Mansion, but then they painted it white to cover the burn marks. Vraimont! Truthfully!

    And, we had few guns or defenses here in Louisiane. The English considered the Louisiana purchase illegal, and said we must be given back to Spain. Do you believe that if the Anglais came here, they would ever leave?

    Me neither. They were sending the best troops in the British Empire, the Duke of Wellington's Peninsular Forces that had fought Napoleon to a standstill in Portugal and Spain.

    And, where do they land? My plantation. They captured my son Caliste, but my older son, Gabriel escaped.

    He made it to New Orleans, where General Jackson and I were trying to figure out how to defend a city with no defenses. The Anglais were only six miles away on my land at Chalmette.

    So, we attacked at night, made them think our forces were huge, when they were almost non-existant. Even man, woman, and child in Nouvelle Orleans came to build a fortification, and the British waited for three crucial weeks. By then, we were ready.

    Barely. They were over our walls when their commander, Gen. Packingham, was killed. And, inexplicably, they quit.

    Shortly later, we learned a treaty had brought the war to an end, but do you think that they would have given back New Orleans if we had not prevailed?

    I ran for Governor a few short years lat er, and served honorably. I would still be there were it not for Bernard de Marigny splitting the French vote.

    And, here I am today. I was planning to attend my Granddaughter's engagement party. She's marrying a young army officer, a good engineer, Named Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard.

    PGT Beauregard. Have you heard of him? Vraiment. Well, time passes, and I must be off . . .

    Who knows. Maybe we will meet again in time. Perhaps my Great-Great-Great Grandson will be alive to talk to you in your time. Au Revior.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    EMAIL from Tess in Virginia:

    Hello, Mr. Matherne. Thanks so much for your review of Steiner's Towards Social Renewal. I enjoyed your point of view and especially the encouraging and apparently feasible conclusion that freedom must be built. I am a sculptor so this prospect is a primary directive for my life in a three-fold way!

    I am terrifically impressed and would love to secure a copy of Dr. Galambos' book.

    Your work in doyletics looks very interesting also.

    May I have permission to link to your article, emailing it to friends? One of those friends is connected to many via social media. I would point to your Copyright holder declaration so that she does not miss it.

    I appreciate the time you spent to write the review and thank you again for its content. I am quite happy just now because I realize that this review is a primer and I may move forward alone without reliance on the perceptions of others to build freedom.

    That pursuit's evident reality is a priceless contribution to human evolution, Mr. Matherne!

    Sincerely,
    Tess

    3. Poem from Freedom on the Half Shell: "Literal Demoncracy"


    Give me your poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free and I will give them taxes, regulations, restrictions, and every manner of unfairness ever created by persons saddled with the illusion that they can decide what is best for someone else's welfare. The individual, like the business professional, knows what's best in a given situation and, given the freedom, will take that action. The forces of coercion are prying open the shell that contains the living muscle and spirit of the American people — will we resist those forces and keep our muscles and spirit alive, free to open at will, or will we give up like the oyster and settle for "freedom on the half shell?" Here is another poem from Freedom on the Half Shell:


                  Literal Demoncracy

    Sturgeon said,
           "95% of everything is crap."
    I wonder if he was thinking
           of democracy when he said that.

    Pareto said,
           "80% of the work is done
           by 20% of the people."
    I wonder if he was thinking
           of democracy when he said that.

    Emerson said,
           "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
           of little minds."
    I wonder if he was thinking
           of democracy when he said that.

    4. Wear Plus Lenses for Close Work
    I became myopic at 17 after a childhood filled with reading and doing up close work without glasses. Suddenly I couldn't see individual leaves on trees and I was given minus lens to correct my myopia or nearsightedness. What no doctor told me back then was that if I had been wearing plus lenses to read, then when I took them off to see the distance, my eyesight would have remained perfect at all ages. No doctor told me this until Dr. Kaisu Viikari, M.D. Ph.D. in Ophthalmology in Finland did several years ago.


    I immediately began using plus lenses (cheap reading glasses) for all close work and within several weeks my distance vision began to return. After several months I was driving without glasses for the first time since age 17 and I am 73 now. My minus lenses were -2.5 and now I only need -1.00 lenses to drive at night and hardly use them otherwise. My residual Myopia came from over fifty years of deforming my eyeball to allow me to see up close. Deforming the eyeball made it easier to see up close. People whose eyeball do not deform as mine did may be subject to intense migraines if they are hyperopic, I. e., have farsightedness, and can see up close and far and thus never get prescribed with minus lenses or plus lenses, but they also absolutely need plus lenses to do close work.

    It was very strange and unpleasant for me to realize that the one thing I did perfectly was see up close, but Dr. Viikari said I needed to wear glasses to do close work. And she was right! I never wear glasses except to do close work or drive at night from now on. I'm wearing some +.5D lenses right now even though I can read my computer screen sharply without them. I'm doing this to reduce the accommodation spasm left over from those first 41 or so years of wearing minus lenses even while doing close work.

    As for migraine relief, over 2,000 patients came to Dr. Kaisu Viikari from all over Europe and found relief from their intense migraines following her advice. I have never had migraines, a feat I attribute to my eyeballs adjusting to and relieving the accommodation strain, but that adjustment also led to my pseudo-myopia, which I have now been able to safely reverse most of the way.

    Whether you are nearsighted or farsighted, Wear Plus Lenses for Close Work, it's better for your eyes and for your overall health.

    5. Reply to my Plus Lenses Commentary by Dr. Kaisu Viikari, M.D., Ph.D. in Ophthalmology
    I would like to say that when Bobby writes about the most glaring, but the easiest helped, ailment which mankind is suffering from, it is only the tip of the iceberg.

    The difficulty lying behind and masking the whole vision problem is latent hyperopia, i. e., the tremendous amount of plus diopters which up to old age (about 60-80 years old) are lacking in mankind, up until now. The immediate usage of plus lenses would constitute a panacea for so many ailments. The more fragile a person is, the more important is the immediate use of plus lenses. This is especially important in this time of the galloping increase of close work, especially with the widespread use of so-called smart phones.

    Why is this condition of latent hyperopia so under-diagnosed by well-meaning ophthalmologists, up until now? Few eye doctors use the one proven method to effectively reveal latent hyperopia; it demands that the eye doctor master the fogging procedure which will reveal the presence of hyperopia. This fogging method is one that I developed and used to great effect for over forty years. (See Kaisu Viikari publications, 1972 in Tetralogia in Finnish, and later Panacea in English. In the eyes displayed on the book cover, one can easily see reflected in them the pain of the multitude of human ailments that could be alleviated by more robust diagnosis procedures of eye doctors from now on.)

    For example, in Panacea, pp 41-50, the last paragraph begins with the sentence:

    "The acid test of a good oculist is whether he has the skill and the staying-power to reveal latent hyperopia; without this skill his work will be of little value."

    However, the professionals have not been keen enough to familiarize themselves with that time-consuming and, indeed, interest-demanding method.

    But if the ophthalmologist will do everything possible for his patients' well-being, his work will reap unparalleled rewards for his patients and himself.

    6. Life-size Noah's Ark in Netherlands

    On the Hour of Power, we watched the man who built a life-size Noah's Ark being interviewed. As they showed photos of his work, we recognized it because we passed it in Rhine River about 2 hours upriver from Kinderdijk, Netherlands. At right is the photo I took of it from our Viking Riverboat.

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    9. CLOSING NOTES:
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    Thanks to all of you Good Readers for providing the Chemistry which has made this site a Glowing Success. — Especially those of you who have graciously allowed us to reprint your emails and show photos of you and by you on this website — you're looking good! As of June 1, 2019, it enters its 20th year of publication. The DIGESTWORLD Issues and the rest of the doyletics website pages have received over 21.6 MILLION VISITORS ! ! !

    We have received over ONE MILLION VISITORS per Year to the Doyletics Website since its inception June 1, 2000, over twenty years ago. Almost 2 million in the past 12 months. We are currently averaging about 150,000 visitors a month. A Visitor is defined as a Reader who is new or returns after 20 minutes or more has passed. The average is about one visitor for every 10 Hits.

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    My reviews are not intended to replace the purchasing and reading of the reviewed books, but rather to supplant a previous reading or to spur a new reading of your own copy. What I endeavor to do in most of my reviews is to impart a sufficient amount of information to get readers comfortable with the book so that they will want to read it for themselves. My Rudolf Steiner reviews are more detailed and my intention is to bring his work to a new century of readers by converting his amazing insights into modern language and concepts.

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