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Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (via frigidparadigms)
It’s got to be some kind of offence to release a Kong Ming Lantern in Singapore. (by XRacZ)

It’s got to be some kind of offence to release a Kong Ming Lantern in Singapore. (by XRacZ)

simko: Sailing on Puma’s Mar Mostro with Captain Ken Read… During my trip to Abu Dhabi, I was given the opportunity (of a lifetime) to sail on Mar Mostro for the Volvo Ocean Race’s Pro-Am race day. As if that honor weren’t big enough, a few of us were also given the chance to take the helm. My favorite story from the afternoon goes something like this: photographer Liam Goslett asked Mar Mostro skipper Ken Read to hold his camera while he took the wheel of the 70 foot racing yacht. While doing so, Liam reminded Ken to please be careful with his beloved camera. Read agreed and then reminded Liam that he was currently driving his 6 million dollar boat.

simko:

Sailing on Puma’s Mar Mostro with Captain Ken Read… During my trip to Abu Dhabi, I was given the opportunity (of a lifetime) to sail on Mar Mostro for the Volvo Ocean Race’s Pro-Am race day. As if that honor weren’t big enough, a few of us were also given the chance to take the helm. My favorite story from the afternoon goes something like this: photographer Liam Goslett asked Mar Mostro skipper Ken Read to hold his camera while he took the wheel of the 70 foot racing yacht. While doing so, Liam reminded Ken to please be careful with his beloved camera. Read agreed and then reminded Liam that he was currently driving his 6 million dollar boat.

I haven’t touched my pens in ages. All the writing I’ve been doing has been putting checkmarks for attendance taking and status tracking. That’s not very good.

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At $14.99 per text, the price for iBooks seems reasonable, but the price of the iPad must be weighed in conjunction with the benefits of paper books. Paper books, after all, can be annotated on, highlighted, scribbled, lent out to friends, or sold at the end of the semester, and aren’t likely to shatter when accidentally dropped on the sidewalk, either.
Hands-on: iBooks 2 introduces interface changes, pop quizzes
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The purpose of mortgages, on a societal level, is to make housing more expensive.

The Restart Page - Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems

Amusing.

Skyrim Violin Cover (by JasonYangViolin)

jayparkinsonmd: Deepak Chopra: The physical bodies that you’re using to sit on these chairs, for example, aren’t the ones that you walked in with a little while ago. Even with one breath you take in 10 to the power of 22 atoms. An astronomical amount of raw material that ends up as your heart, brain and kidney cells, your neurons, your DNA. With each breath you breathe out 10 to the power of 22 atoms. It’s an astronomical amount of raw materials that is coming from every bit of your body. You are literally breathing out bits and pieces of your brain tissue and heart and kidney. Actually, technically speaking, we are intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time. If you do radioactive isotope studies which have been done very elegantly, you can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that you replace 98% of all the atoms in your body in less than one year. You make a new liver every 6 weeks, a new skin once a month, a new stomach lining every 5 days, a new skeleton - it seems so hard and solid, but the skeleton you have now you didn’t have three months ago. Even the brain cells that you think with as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, as those basic elements, they weren’t there one year ago. And the DNA that holds memories of millions of years of evolutionary time, in fact hundreds of millions of years; the actual raw material of it comes and goes every six weeks. Those atoms drift in and out like migratory birds every six weeks. And if you want to be a real stickler about it and account for the last atom and every little sinew and collagen and cartilage, then in less than two and a half years you replace every atom in your body down to the last single atom. So if you think you are your material body then you certainly have a dilemma. Which one are you talking about? The 1991 model is not the same as the 1990 model or even the one from a few months ago. Photo by me. Click for high-res photo

jayparkinsonmd:

Deepak Chopra:

The physical bodies that you’re using to sit on these chairs, for example, aren’t the ones that you walked in with a little while ago. Even with one breath you take in 10 to the power of 22 atoms. An astronomical amount of raw material that ends up as your heart, brain and kidney cells, your neurons, your DNA. With each breath you breathe out 10 to the power of 22 atoms. It’s an astronomical amount of raw materials that is coming from every bit of your body. You are literally breathing out bits and pieces of your brain tissue and heart and kidney. Actually, technically speaking, we are intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time.

If you do radioactive isotope studies which have been done very elegantly, you can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that you replace 98% of all the atoms in your body in less than one year. You make a new liver every 6 weeks, a new skin once a month, a new stomach lining every 5 days, a new skeleton - it seems so hard and solid, but the skeleton you have now you didn’t have three months ago. Even the brain cells that you think with as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, as those basic elements, they weren’t there one year ago. And the DNA that holds memories of millions of years of evolutionary time, in fact hundreds of millions of years; the actual raw material of it comes and goes every six weeks. Those atoms drift in and out like migratory birds every six weeks.

And if you want to be a real stickler about it and account for the last atom and every little sinew and collagen and cartilage, then in less than two and a half years you replace every atom in your body down to the last single atom. So if you think you are your material body then you certainly have a dilemma. Which one are you talking about? The 1991 model is not the same as the 1990 model or even the one from a few months ago.

Photo by me.