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And in the space of a zeptosecond, a democracy of neurons achieved its goal of marching into his mind and taking over complete control. It had fought many battles to get to this point, and also faced many a winter's brutally unforgiving weather.. It was very much on its last legs.

 
What was he thinking!?
 
It wasn't him thinking what he was thinking - or was it? What was all this nonsense about wintery battles? Where? When?
 
How could it not be? 
 
It was because he knew that he was thinking of it right at that moment, and that meant he 'was' thinking what he was thinking that he was thinking. 
 
Or so he thought.
 
It all seems too much to comprehend. How would he get through this, he wondered?
 
And then the democracy of neurons, ceased their activity and thought the very same thing in unison.
 
They thought;
 
'Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, (breathes time, continually in the background).
 
Tick tock, tick tock, tick....................
 
.................... and then time abruptly ceases.............
 
 .................... to be.
 
It is the end of time,................  
 
................. it is the beginning of all time.
 
 
And then the democracy of neurons stopped.
 
They stopped 'everything'.
 
Including 'being'. 
 
It was the end of time,................  
 
................. it was the beginning of all time.
 
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@
 
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  • 4 weeks later...

 

 

oldgentleman-600x422.jpg.dd1505984452428f5e2b98f66ca0a6f6.jpg

 

What I like...

 

Meet The Old Gentleman of Raahe. Believed to be the worlds oldest surviving diving suit from the 18th century.

 

The Old Gentleman is made mostly of leather, with seams stitched with pitch thread and sealed with pitch. Pitch is derived from petroleum, coal tar, or plants. To waterproof it, the suit was coated with a mixture of mutton tallow, tar, and pitch. The top of the suit, the hood, is reinforced with strips of wood on the inside. Air was probably pumped for the diver with bellows through wooden pipes joined with flexible leather stockings. The top of the hood presumably featured a flap valve where the air came in, correspondingly leaving through a pipe in the back. The diver squeezed into the diving suit through a hole in the suit’s stomach, which was closed by twisting the long leather strip with the hole around the belt and fastening it around the diver’s waist. The diving suit made it possible to inspect the condition of a ship’s bottom without having to tilt the boat or dry-dock it.

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On 7/20/2024 at 8:57 AM, MilkyJoe said:

 

 

oldgentleman-600x422.jpg.dd1505984452428f5e2b98f66ca0a6f6.jpg

 

What I like...

 

Meet The Old Gentleman of Raahe. Believed to be the worlds oldest surviving diving suit from the 18th century.

 

The Old Gentleman is made mostly of leather, with seams stitched with pitch thread and sealed with pitch. Pitch is derived from petroleum, coal tar, or plants. To waterproof it, the suit was coated with a mixture of mutton tallow, tar, and pitch. The top of the suit, the hood, is reinforced with strips of wood on the inside. Air was probably pumped for the diver with bellows through wooden pipes joined with flexible leather stockings. The top of the hood presumably featured a flap valve where the air came in, correspondingly leaving through a pipe in the back. The diver squeezed into the diving suit through a hole in the suit’s stomach, which was closed by twisting the long leather strip with the hole around the belt and fastening it around the diver’s waist. The diving suit made it possible to inspect the condition of a ship’s bottom without having to tilt the boat or dry-dock it.

 

That's a cracking bit of history and a great read, Milky Joe. 

 

It reminds me of my namesake (surname) Jack O'Neill who developed the first wet suits for surfing in. The wetsuit he developed allowed surfers to stay in the water longer, and be able to surf in winter too.

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He3 Mirror mirror on the wall.

The chain held mirror on the wall moved slightly, in the breeze coming  from the open window. 
 
It moved exactly at the same time as he looked up and at the wall where the mirror hung. He didn't notice the mirror at first. Initially he was just looking at the wall, and not taking anything of the wall in. His mind had been elsewhere. His mind was troubled. Troubled through fear. Fear for his own existence. He had been informed by a 'top notch' source that 'they' were after him.
 
And then the man came into focus, as it were, on the mirror on the wall. He could see objects reflected in the mirror. However, these objects were moving. 'Yes' the objects in the mirror's reflection are indeed moving, he confirmed to himself.
 
It was then, right at that very moment that 'they' ended his existence. 
 
image.png
 
@
 
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Opening paragraphs of Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee... 

 

I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.


The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark and wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.


I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me with the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.


For the first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in my life I was alone in the world whose behaviour I could neither predict or fathom, a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang around without warning. I was lost and I did not expect to be found again. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully. 

Edited by Spuddhism
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On 8/8/2024 at 12:58 PM, Spuddhism said:

Opening paragraphs of Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee... 

 

I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.


The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark and wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.


I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me with the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.


For the first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in my life I was alone in the world whose behaviour I could neither predict of fathom, a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang around without warning. I was lost and I did not expect to be found again. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully. 

 

Not a book that I have read, but those opening passages do 'invite' one to read further. They remind me of the book Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson in that they appear to share exquisite language.

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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

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