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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Monday
Jul122010

door in the wall

Greetings,

Knowing the buried uranium at Hanford Unclear Facility will exist for 24,000 years causes great relief. Especially for citizens along and down the Columbia River.

North Korea, Burma and Iran have expressed geopolitical interest in purchasing spent fuel for their nuclear development programs.

This is good. Sharing is caring. Engineers from the three countries negotiated with the Department of Energy to inspect, buy and ship vast quantities of Uranium, Plutonium, Hyponitrite, and it's all right ma to their respective countries for processing. 

DOE is pleased with the deal. They have realized a huge profit and managed to get finally rid of the highly toxic waste. In Theory.

To entice the buyers they sweetened the deal by including the following:

  • British Petroleum oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico
  • Wild tribal mountain zones of Northwest Afghanistan
  • 16,000 endangered animal pelts, bones, and useful aphrodisiacs 
  • A free mobile telephone powered by U-235 with unlimited GPS capability
  • 10 Russian sleeper agents and one resourceful money man using a fake Canadian passport
  • One bag of high grade Cambodian rice and a barefoot woman to carry it on her back
  • A one year Tibetan meditation membership at Sera Monastery outside Lhasa with singing bells
  • A toxic river in China complete with slave labor factories and 1,000,000,000 peasants
  • Unlimited access to free medicine, diamonds, and utopian and dystopian literary gems
  • Unlimited access to high tech weapons of mass distractions
  • Free cable, lock and a key to a door in the wall 
  • A mask looking for a character with universal implications

Iran expressed interest in purchasing the entire state of Washington. Burma and North Korea thought this was egregious and outside the rules of a fair trade agreement. Iran said ok, maybe later. After we stone every woman for adultery because we live in the Dark Ages.

All parties shook hands boasting the event. They promised to play fair and look both ways before crossing the street carrying bright orange umbrellas while begging for food with compassion in silence.

They paid in cash. No refunds.

Metta.

 

 

Sunday
Jul112010

Hanford Plutonium Waste

Greetings,

Speaking of energy, waste, consumption and a deadly beautiful mess, here's a new story from the New York Times on the Hanford Nuclear facility in Hanford, Washington. Scary shit.

I've blogged about this before. I lived in Hanford in 1999-2001. One Sunday an engineer friend took me out for a six hour tour. I made images. A gallery is on the sidebar. I used material in my literary memoir, A Century Is Nothing, and have included an excerpt. 

...After she left to explore the Snake he went to buy stamps, specifically images from the Hubble Space Telescope with names like Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

He launched into a brief but stimulating discourse with the young unarmed postal worker woman about how amazing and beautiful were the colors and definitions of the galaxies mentioning how incredible it is to consider, even begin to glimpse them while trapped inside a federal building five short miles down wind from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor where fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste seeped into water table levels near the Columbia River.

Department of Energy teams dived into, under, and through Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth snaking, roaring past abandoned nuclear plants as radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W.II was flowing 130 feet down, down toward water tables.

Fascinating. He turned another fragile yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence or T.S.E. “It’s called Technicium, TC-99,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations, and D.O.E. think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations. Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and their children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

NYT story... 

Hanford Watch...

Metta.

 

Sunday
Jul112010

Mind at large

Greetings,

Your filters are up-to-date. What's a filter?

Filters are variables. Human brains have diverse filters. Give us an example. Humans evolved to survive. They were the prey. Life is short, nasty and brutal. Nature is kind and cruel. A paradox. A contradiction.

Human brains filter or eliminate non-essential sense data. Keep it simple stupid. KISS. 

Flight or fight central nervous system filters operating with naturally produced chemicals and produce reactions. Do I stay or do I go (fight or flight) is a basic immediate automatic response when a human faces what they perceive to be a potential life threatening situation. Do I run? Hide? Find a weapon? Create a diversion? Signal for help? Attack? Develop patience? Laugh because it's fucking hysterical? 

It's simple. Humans make it complex. There's a difference between complex and complicated but we won't get into the semantics now.

Metta.

Saturday
Jul102010

smell

Greetings,

I love the smell of Cambodian garbage and rubbish in the morning. It is a sweet sick smell.

Did you know the nose has trillions of sensors? It's one of the most highly developed human senses. This delicious aroma wafts through the air on ballet slippers. Why do you love the smell of garbage and rubbish in the morning? It reminds me of human consumption and dancing dervishes in Konya. Where is Konya? It is in Turkey. Turkey is a tomato based culture with a long history between east and west. Sniff.

Really? How is it possible to live between east and west? Well, they have an Asian side and a European side, like a double edged sword. One edge of said sword is fired to a fine point in Asia with Chinese propaganda tools. The other side of said sword is forged near Greece by Amazonian warrior women. 

They wear sunglasses and ride around in horse drawn carts finding tomatoes, natural gas (a buy product of consumption) expired optical dioramas and an emotionally withdrawn fictitious computer hacker named Salander in Sweden.

Can you show us the connection between: the smell of garbage in Cambodia, Konya, Turkey, a computer hacker and one breasted Amazonian warrior women? The mathematical uncertainty principle is an equation.

Metta.

 

 

Friday
Jul092010

798

Greetings,

Living in a huge art museum we can never escape art. Where does the artificial end and the real begin? 

798 is a district in Beijing where artists collaborate and present their vision, similar to the Left Bank or Greenwich Village.

798...

Wu Yuren, an artist who led a public protest over land thieves was recently arrested. “You don’t realize how arcane this system is until you have to deal with it,” Ms. Patterson, his wife said. “It’s a nightmare.”

NYT

Metta.