Ice Dreams

It's that time of the year when memory takes me to Fairbanks, Alaska ... and part of me is glad I'm not there, and part of me wishes to be there so bad, I've been looking at plane fares --

The World Ice Art Championships were just judged. This is an amazing event, held in Fairbanks every year in March. In 1999, I photographed it -- at night, under lights. Here's the rub: being a pro photographer at the time, I did it "properly." I shot transparencies. Which were all packed away safely when we moved house in 2004 ... and haven't been unpacked yet. They're in storage -- with 90% of my best pro work -- and are unlikely to be unpacked anytime soon.

So I can't show you my own ice art photos ... but I can give you a link through to the World Ice Art Championships website, and show you the winners here, in the hopes that it'll inspire you to go there and see the show!

So here is Ice Alaska (dot com, believe it or not)...

And here's the winners ... and having said that, the competition must have been close to impossible to judge, because there isn't a hair's breadth of difference between #1 and #10 ...






...and yes, it's cold beyond your concept of cold (unless your from Alaska, Finland, Siberia, Manchuria ...!), and yes, I wish I could be there again. I know. I'm weird.

Cheers,
MK

Fairbanks on my mind (alas, not Douglas)

Fairbanks is a place as well as a person ... actually, two people if you count Doug Jr. as well as Snr. -- but you'd have to be a movie historian to know either one of them. We've reached a point where kids don't know who Harrison Ford is, and it takes an archaeologist to delve back far enough through time to unearth 2001: A Space Odyssey. Somebody had better invent a time machine sometime soon, or we're going to lose the 1960s utterly.

That said ... it's Fairbanks the place which is on my mind today, though I couldn't tell you why. Brain wiring or some such abstract human expression. I just stumbled over the data highway to link back through to the mnemonic circuits where Fairbanks is stored in the chaos and clutter of my memory. For some reason, the sounds and smells of the place -- the fell of loess between my teeth! -- are all bright and sharp.

So,with Fairbanks on my mind, let's go there, if only in pictures. Here's a photo essay, complete with a yack-track. Better than getting roped in for a slideshow with beer and popcorn, because this way you can turn me off when I get boring. The images were scanned at 200dpi, so click on a picture for a larger view. The only thing I haven't done (no time today: gotta work) is enhance them to take UFOs out of the prints. Sorry ... but if you ever want to be reading THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE, I have to stop blogging sometime, and start working! Here goes:

FAIRBANKS MEMORIES

The Chena River runs through the heart of downtown ... if you can call it "downtown." You're looking at it. Downtown, that is. Alaskans call Fairbanks a "city," but even Aussies would call it a town. At 35,000 people, or thereabouts, it's something like Murray Bridge or Mount Barker, which are towns in Adelaide's neck of the woods...
It's actually prettier in winter, when a light snowfall will turn the whole landscape into a sort of "winter wonderland," right out of an animated movie. As a bod from downunder who hadn't seen snow in 25 years (since the family moved out from the UK) I was enchanted. Also frozen to the bone marrow. I was wearing two pairs of socks under the boots, leggings under the ski pants, thermal shirt, plus long-sleeved tee-shirt, plus sweater, plus jacket, insulate gloves, and hat. And I was still cold. I'd fly out of Australia in February or March, where it would be 95 degrees (summer), and arrive in Fairbanks ... on a night flight, of course, which would land long after nightfall, with temps of 20 below zero and a skating rink for a parking lot. Woah, such fun. (And the weird this is ... it was. It was different, challenging, and there's something of the "exotic" about Alaska -- unless you're an Alaskan, of course, in which case it's just same old, same old. They think Australia is exotic. Yaaawwnnn.)
Alaskaland is a kind of theme park, where Alaskan history is sorta-kinda encapsulated within a ... park-type area. It's bordered on one side by Airport Way (which is the main drag running through what they call "Retail Row," linear miles of stores, and on the other side by the Chena River, which follows the line of the railroad for a few miles. My favorite area was the riverbank behind Alaskaland, where several little footbridges went over the water. You could stand in the middle and watch beavers on a sunny day, or hike over and take weird tech-noir photos of the railroad marshaling yards ... or see the ice carvings, in winter: the World Ice Art Championships are held about a mile from what you see above.
The heart of downtown is Golden Heart Plaza ... Pioneer Square ... with a clock that plays musical arrangements on its chimes (Frank Sinatra, Sound of Music, Camelot ...!) and a fountain around which are inscribed, on bronze tablets, the names of the pioneer families who opened up the region in the days of the riverboats and gold miners. Also, see the great bronze statue, the monument to the pioneers. The bronze stands in the middle of a pool and fountain ... which freezes solid in winter. There's another shot of this, below, in summer.
Fall arrives at UAF, on a hill outside and slightly above the town. This view of UAF is from the back side of the campus, around by the paddocks used for experimental agriculture. The campus is vast, the size of a town within itself, with students from every continent. It has a great museum, complete with Blue Babe," a mummified ice age bison. Very impressive.
On a summer day, looking down from the campus, you can see all of Fairbanks, and the snake-like meander of the Chena River, which almost ties itself in knots in places. Looking back at this photo, I do believe it was cottonwood time. Folks in the US will know what this is about, but for benefit of Aussies and others ... "cottonwood" is a tree that grows like a weed throughout many parts of the US. Alaska is full of it, and in springtime the trees fill the air with strands of ... well, cotton ... pollen. You lie flat in a patch of sun and look up, and you think it's snowing again. Very pretty -- not quite so great for those who have allergies. Fortunately, I was immune at the time.
And what would a photo-tour of Fairbanks be, without at least one good refinery shot? A large part of Alaska is about oil. There's no drilling in the Fairbanks region, but there are several refineries. This one belonged to MAPCO Alaska Petroleum, which in 2000 or so became Williams (at least as far as gas stations were concerned). Don't know if they changed the name of the refinery, but the service stations all changed. This photo was taken on a hot, dusty afternoon in 1997.
There you are, Virginia, Santa Claus does exist, and this is where he lives when he's not jetting all over the world delivering parcels. Seriously ... this is a store which sells Christmas goods all year around, located at North Pole, which is (!) south of Fairbanks by about fifteen miles or so. Fairbanks and North Pole are part of the "Fairbanks North Star Borough," which is what the Lower 48 would call a county. Cute store. Weird, but cute.
This was fun. There are very few roads that run OUT of Fairbanks, and this is one of them. It goes about 70 miles to Chena Hot Sprints (a resort hotel in the wilderness, founded on the, uh, hot springs), and there, the road stops. In spring, the hundreds of creeks over which the road crosses become swollen with meltwater. The water can overwhelm the road and close it, or ... it can be a foot deep over the road and be big fun. Like this. I was taking the photos here. The trick is to hit the water fast, and throw up a spray about ten feet high.

Winter ... they plow the streets out, or you wouldn't be able to make your escape to get to work. This area of Fairbanks is known as Arctic Park -- a suburb, where Lathrop and Kennicott intersect and the Captain Bartlett Inn stands on the corner of Airport Way, just around the corner from the Big Dipper Ice Arena. Around the back of this hockey rink, the City of Fairbanks dumps the snow which has been plowed out of your streets. I learned how to drive on snow and ice in the parking lot there, which doubles as a snow dump. Wheeee.
And here's the little car that shared so many adventures. A 1996 Pontiac Sunfire, as imaged by Keegan on one knee in the snow, in March 1998, off one side of a road ... I have no idea where, short of, uh, Fairbanks, Alaska! You would not believe the places this car went, and the things it did. If you click to enlarge the photo, you'll see an electrical appliance plug sticking out of the radiator grill. USns will know what this is (well, Floridans might not), but for the benefit of those of us who hail from more tropical climes, I'd better explain. When you park a car outside in Fairbanks winter nights (which can be fifty or sixy below zero), if you don't want the engine block and oil pan to be frozen solid, the battery flat and the radiator turned to solid glue, you (!) plug the car in for an hour or two before you want to start it in the morning; or you leave it plugged in all night. You run a loooooong extension cable to a powerpoint in or on the house and feed the car some juice ... keep the core temperature of the engine up just high enough so it'll actually turn over for you. Cooooool.
And this is the one you've been waiting to see, right? The pipeline. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline itself ... the pride of the Alyeska Pipeline Company. Crude from the North Slope travels at high velocity to the oil terminal at Valdez, on Prince William Sound. Alaska has been about oil for a long, long time (before which, it was about gold), and very soon it'll be about gas. There's not much oil left in them thar hills, but there's enough gas to be interesting. The problem is, getting it OUT of those hills without killing the environment. Think about this: the GROUND in the tundra is flammable. Seriously. You can strike a match and set fire to permafrost, due to the percentage of methane, or marsh gas, frozen in this ground. You really want to be dilling for gas in the middle of the equivalent of a lake of gasoline...? Hmmmm.
As promised above, the image of the tribute to the pioneers memorial statue, in summer, when the fountains are running and you can actually see the engravings on the bronze tablets. Golden Heart Plaza on a glorious day. In the background, in the early afternoon (when this pic was taken), the clock would be chiming out selections from Camelot or Oklahoma! for your listening enjoyment, while coach loads of tourists from Japan and Korea, Russia and parts of America itself, go through. I would take a half hour, sit by the river and watch the world go by: people watching.
And here's a pungent memory. Only in Alaska! Oh, okay, and Canada, all right, point taken. Caribou Crossing. One of my best memories is of fiddling with a long lens off one side of the Richardson Highway, while a herd of caribou -- wild as anything in Jack London -- galloped into the blue distance. I gave up on the lens and just enjoyed the sight. One of those "never forgotten" moments which come along too rarely.

And now --

Back to work. More tomorrow -- when DreamCraft and Keegan might just have something new to show, and I hope to be asking for test pilots. In other words, there's a couple of new Keegan book pages you might like to help us test, and tell us what you think.

Ciao for now,

MK

President Sarah Palin: commander-in-chief at the end-of-days

The hardest thing about this post was finding a starting place. The subject is vast. Too vast even for a normal-length book, let alone a blog post. The best I can do here is point you in some extraordinary directions and ask you to personally verify the things I'm going to say ... because, on face value, some of those things might sound outrageous.

The thing is, I'm a novelist, not a political commentator; this is usually a "blog about stuff," where I'm equally likely to talk about software, junk food, gay issues, movies on DVD, celebrities, writing and editing, publishing and, of course, gay books, which is where I work. I've only recently begun to dabble (or is it babble?) in the realm of politics, and specifically US politics.

Blame the impending presidential election. Or shoot for the heart of the matter, and blame my involvement on an air-head in eye-glasses who comes from the very nice town of Wasilla, Alaska. I've been there many times; it's a lovely place with great people ... except, they have this one church. Sarah Palin's church. And this was the place where the first barrow load of sh*t hit the first fan; but said manure could land in every part of the world.

I honestly wish I had the time to devote to this. If I didn't have to work (you know, earn a living, keep a roof over my head, food on the table, the lights turned on, that kind of thing), I could easily have done the investigative journalist routine, and written the book. However, before anyone asks if Keegan plans to write it: no. Don't have the time, guys; and besides, I rather suspect that a hundred such books are being written right now.

So, let's recap what we know for sure (it's all over the Internet right now; the regular news media will catch up sooner or later), as briefly as possible and then go on to the subject of election fixing.

Sarah Palin is a member of a Wasilla church that is a part of something very big, and very nasty:

The religious background of Sarah Palin is not unrelated to her bid to take the nation’s second highest office. She herself has been extremely vague about that background. Given the details, it becomes clearer perhaps why.

Sarah Palin has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America. Palin comes out of the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as ‘Joel’s Army,’ an offshoot of what is called Dominionism and sometimes also called the Latter Rain cult or Manifest Sons of God. The movement deliberately attempts to remain below the radar screen.

Sarah Palin is a product of an extreme fringe of the American Evangelical movement known variously as the Third Wave Movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or as Joel's Army, a part of what is called Dominionism. Until 2002 according to their own website, Palin was a member of Wasilla Assembly of God with Senior Pastor Ed Kalnins. Online video clips of Palin speaking from the pulpit of this church are revealing. Curiously, between the time this article was begun on September 9th and the 11th, the video was removed without explanation:
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20712.htm.).

As one researcher familiar with the history of the Third Wave Movement or Dominionism describes, ‘The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form ‘Joel’s Army’ to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.’4

The excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

Sarah H. Leslie, a former Christian Right leader, describes the ideology of Dominionism:

‘The Gospel of Salvation is achieved by setting up the ‘Kingdom of God’ as a literal and physical kingdom to be ‘advanced’ on Earth in the present age. Some dominionists liken the New Testament Kingdom to the Old Testament Israel in ways that justify taking up the sword, or other methods of punitive judgment, to war against enemies of their kingdom.

‘Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom. They assign to the Church duties and rights that belong Scripturally only to Jesus Christ. This includes the esoteric belief that believers can ‘incarnate’ Christ and function as His body on Earth to establish His kingdom rule. An inordinate emphasis is placed on man’s efforts; the doctrine of the sovereignty of God is diminished.’

Leslie quotes from Al Dager’s Vengeance Is Ours: The Church In Dominion: ‘Dominion theology is predicated upon three basic beliefs:

1) Satan usurped man’s dominion over the earth through the temptation of Adam and Eve; 2) The Church is God’s instrument to take dominion back from Satan;

3) Jesus cannot or will not return until the Church has taken dominion by gaining control of the earth’s governmental and social institutions.’

Sarah Leslie pinpoints to the central deception behind the current spread of Dominionism among various Protestant denominations across America today:

‘Dominion theology is a heresy. As such it is rarely presented as openly as the definitions above may indicate. Outside of the Reconstructionist camp, evangelical dominionism has wrapped itself in slick packages – one piece at a time – for mass-media consumption. This has been a slow process, taking several decades. Few evangelicals would recognize the word ‘dominionism’ or know what it means. This is because other terminologies have been developed which soft-sell dominionism, concealing the full scope of the agenda. Many evangelicals (and even their more conservative counterparts, the fundamentalists) may adhere to tidbits of dominionism without recognizing the error…

‘To most effectively propagate their agenda, dominionist leaders first developed new ecclesiologies, eschatologies and soteriologies for targeted audiences along the major denominational fault lines of evangelical Christianity. Then the 1990s Promise Keepers men’s movement was used as a vehicle to ‘break down the walls’, i.e., cross denominational barriers for the purpose of exporting dominionism to the wider evangelical subculture. This strategy was so effective that it reached into the mainline Protestant denominations. Dominionists have carefully selected leaders to be trained as ‘change agents’ for ‘transformation’ (dominion) in an erudite manner that belies the media stereotype of southern-talking, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist half-wits.’

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10167 ... read it all. Please.

Enter Sarah Palin, spotted years ago as a prime candidate for enlistment to be an "end-time soldier in God's army." This is the church Mrs. Palin attended for 28 years; this is the church where her pastor boasts about being a witchhunter. (You can watch videos of Palin telling proudly, how the witchhunter performed the "laying on of hands" and prayed her into office. using the power of spiritual warfare. You won't need a link for the source of this: it's everywhere on the Internet. This is stuff you already know. )

She's been Governor of Alaska for just 19 months, and was chosen to be the running mate, and veep, for a president who is very likely to die in office. He's old, reportedly frail, and already has what is described as "severe skin cancer." Upon the death of President McCain, his veep will assume the office. President Palin, Commander in Chief of God's Army at the end of days.

Is this who America needs in the oval office of the White House?

She has stated that she believes the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. As a 28-year affiliate of a sect so fanatical it was declared heretical, she will have been taught its beliefs since childhood -- therefore she must also believe that "Jesus cannot or will not return until the Church has taken dominion by gaining control of the earth’s governmental and social institutions." (See above.)

What better way to set up a real, physical Kingdom of God than to get a Dominionist into the White House, enlist the "soldiers of god" by the tens of thousands, clothe them in the uniforms of the American armed forces, and then ... well, subdue the world, one way or another.

You already know how many times the USA can "make the rubble bounce" with surplus nuclear warheads. This is a statistic, not a theory. It's been a statistic for forty years or more. And ... "Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom."

Right. And you though Opus Dei was way out there.

You would wonder why in any world anyone would be even considering a vote for McCain, yet the Republicans are running just about neck and neck with the Democrats. Having read the above, if you want to give yourself the scare of your life, go here:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/

These religious extremists (who could teach the ayatollahs a volume or two about dangerous fundamentalism, no matter the religious platform) are so close to the White House, it makes your blood run cold. Americans en masse are inclined to vote their way, and you wonder why. Ignorance? Stupidity? The genuine faith that the Kingdom of God is right around the corner, and they want to live in it, even if living there means slaughtering the 99% of humanity who don't measure up, according to Christian fundamental standards?

The thing is, I believe in the right of free speech and free thoughts. You know me. You know my novels! For my money, people can believe whatever they want -- I'd actually defend their right to believe in pink elephants wearing tutus dancing across these massive lawns on Pennsylvania Avenue. But -- the Dominionists? In order to bring the Kingdom of their specific God into reality, the rest of the world has to be conquered, physically, for real.

If the feather-heads who believed this were a bunch of simple-minded folks in Haiti or Burundi -- or any small country, gods help us! -- I wouldn't be concerned. They could believe God was made of green cheese for all it matters, because they couldn't do enough to hurt the rest of the planet.

But the Republicans are Americans, the leaders of the free world ... with enough nuclear warheads to bounce the rubble at least a dozen times over. They can hurt, badly, anyone who stands against them when the time comes to establish the Kingdom for real: "Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom."

To this, add the hard fact that Republican America is 7.5 trillion dollars in debt to China -- a country which can expect to be destroyed utterly in the end-of-days war; and they're still borrowing. Of course they're still borrowing. What makes you think they intend, or expect, to pay back a red cent? The "end of days" could easily be started by simply picking a war with the Godless Horde.

Damnit, where's Jesus when you need him? He's supposed to stop this kind of thing, not ignite it and participate in it. At least, that's what I was taught when I was little. (Born Catholic, raised agnostic, woke up to what I, myself, believed while still a teen.)

There's a article you might like to read, but I'll include a small disclaimer here. Not that it's an article with an iffy pedigree -- it isn't. But it might be a damned "hard read" for a lot of people. It's a professional text, and fairly dense:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html -- "What Makes People Vote republican" by Joe Haidt -- who answers the puzzle of why, no matter what rational people say, how they say it, or how often they repeat it, massive numbers of Americans will always vote Republican.

This time, one hulluva lot of them are voting in sheer ignorance. You can't make me believe every Republican voter wants to nuke the world into submission and wait for Jesus to arrive. They couldn't be criminally insane in such numbers! (Could they?) A lot more are voting with way too much Heaven on their minds; the rest are voting on a knee-jerk, because they always vote this way, and they haven't (yet) bothered to read the fine print, find out who and what they're voting for this time.

The bottom line is, President McCain, and President Palin (due to slither into office about four or five months into 2009) are a whisker away from the White House. And if the vote is too close to be measured, well, now we enter the fascinating, frightening, enlightening realm of election rigging.

Ballot fixing. It appears to be common knowledge to American citizens that this can, has, and will happen, but for the rest of us, who might be less well acquainted with the dank, swampy underbelly of US politics, Go here:

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud_ohio.html

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2553

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Don't take it up with me -- argue with Rolling Stone magazine and the rest of them.

In this post (which I swear up and down will be my LAST political post for a long time, because I find it utterly depressing), I've nominated Sarah Palin as the likely replacement for Mr. McCain, when he answers the bugle call to glory in the sky.

However, in recent days, there's been increasing protest against Mrs. Palin, and now we see the very real chance she'll be dropped as McCain's running mate, and replaced with someone else.

However, there are two thoughts I want to leave you with before I go and grab some coffee and try to get the bloody Apocalypse out of my head, so I can get back to THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE.

One: Palin has put her foot in her mouth many, many times because she hasn't had enough time for the grooming and training needed to take a really good crack at the White House. Give her four years under the tutelage of Republican puppet masters, and she'll be suave and smooth. She'll be back. Four years or eight years will lay some extra time on her, make her look more credible as a wannabe president.

Two: drop Palin next week, and she'll certainly be replaced by another one of the Republican Dominionist "change agents." McCain will still be just as old and sick. He only picked Palin as his running mate to throw the cat among the pigeons ... a woman! A sop, or a bribe, to Mrs. Clinton's camp. Now, replace Palin with a good looking, clean-cut, Christian young man with a wife and five kids, the very model of American manhood, just out of the army, gainfully employed, church-going, with a cute little Republican mom carrying an apple pie with flags sticking out of it. Only the gender of the veep changed.

Where is it written that the midwife who birthed the Apocalypse has to be female?

Tomorrow, I swear I'm going to talk about gay books.

Not gay? Think you're safe? Wrong. Jewish, Pagan ... Sarah Palin is hunting for your hide

Much of the body of this post, right now, is a re-post from http://www.wildhunt.org/2008/09/palins-anti-pagan-coreligionists.html ... and I'll be talking about this in my own next post. To date, I've only looked at Sarah Palin and the Republican religious fundamentalists from the perspective of the gay community. Frankly, it's worse than that.

You've known for some time that Palin is weird, but you probably don't know HOW weird. You knew, when she was gaffer in Wasilla, she charged rape victims for the rape kit. You know she was looking at ways to ban books. You know she and McCain will usher in a new AIDS epidemic, with their ban on condoms. Okay ... you're not gay, you're past procreating age, you don't read gay literature, you're not a rape victim, so you're saying, "I'm in the lifeboat, Jack -- pull the ladder up."

But, are you really in the lifeboat? Is there a lifeboat?

After reading the following, you will seriously doubt that any such lifeboat exists. This report comes from an American Pagan site, but it could just as easily have been reposted from an American Jewish site, an American Gay site, an American Catholic site -- or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Taoist, or anything other than the church to which Palin belongs. (Find out what a pagan is before you judge them. Find out what they think, believe, and say, and try to bear in mind your own Good Book's tip: "Judge not, lest ye be judged" ... wiser words were never spoken.)

Take a look at this, and squirm -- and I'll be back tomorrow, with a lot more...

9.09.2008

Palin's Anti-Pagan Coreligionists

Here I was thinking to myself that the chances of a modern Pagan angle to the Republican VP pick of Alaska's Sarah Palin would be truly minimal. Sure, you had her support of aerial wolf hunting (a cruel method that violates the ethic of "fair chase"), and her drill-happy attitudes towards ANWR, but nothing explicitly anti-Pagan had emerged. But a number of bloggers, most notably Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action, have been digging into Palin's religious background and found some disturbingly anti-Pagan connections.

"Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world."

These "Third Wave" Christians believe in supernatural powers, demon possession, curses, and ongoing spiritual warfare. Most of them are loosely grouped around C. Peter Wagner, founder of the World Prayer Center, and coiner of the term "Third Wave". Wagner believes that one of the greatest opponents to Third Wave Christian dominance is The Goddess.

"Several of their top prophets and generals of intercession spent weeks in intensive prayer to "confront the Queen of Heaven." This queen is considered by them to be one of the most powerful demons over the earth and is the Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon in Revelation ... Wagner and his group also claim that the Queen of Heaven is Diana, the pagan god of the biblical book Ephesians and the god of Mary veneration in the Roman Catholic Church."

Wagner is so serious about the "Queen of Heaven" (you know the one the ladies made cakes for) that he has written two books on the subject: "Confronting The Queen of Heaven" and "The Queen's Domain". Third Wave Christians participating in spiritual warfare against the Queen of Heaven believe their efforts (directly or indirectly) have caused earthquakes, hurricanes, large fires, and killed Princess Diana and Mother Teresa.

As for Palin herself, she spoke approvingly of being personally prayed over by Thomas Muthee just before winning governorship of Alaska. Muthee is a popular figure among Third Wavers for driving out the "spirit of witchcraft" that resided in Kiambu, Kenya.

"He and his wife committed to six months of prayer with various types of fasting before ever entering Kiambu. Their goal in prayer and fasting was to ask God to reveal the name of the demonic principality ruling over Kiambu and keeping the city under such oppression. God revealed through a vision that a spirit of witchcraft was the ruling principality there and that a number of other demonic spirits were functioning under the headship of witchcraft. An effective strategy for conquest would be to topple the spirit of witchcraft first and thus bring the coalition of evil spirits into disarray and drive them from the city."

Muthee's vision of spiritual warfare fits right in with the Third Wave's, and he has spoken at churches across America, including 10 consecutive sermons at Wasilla Assembly of God (Palin's main church until very recently). The idea of that sort of anti-witch hysteria being imported and cross-pollinating with extremist American Christianity is troubling.

While Palin has striven to present herself as a "post-denominational" Jesus follower, it should be noted that most Third Wave Christians also present themselves in this manner. Also, lest you think this article is some sort of liberal Pagan anti-Christian take-down, it should be noted that this Christian movement has been deemed heretical by several (conservative) Christian groups, including Fundamentalist Baptists.

What Pagans need to know, especially those who are considering voting Republican, is if Palin condemns or rejects the spiritual warfare teachings of the Third Wave movement. A movement that essentially espouses malicious Christian magic. Pagans have seen first hand that the religious opinions of Presidents have been used in the past by government agencies to deny us our legal rights. What would happen if our vice president thought we should be supernaturally eradicated?

... ... ...

So ends the repost. Stay with me a while longer: there's more...



Let me give you a couple of links to other pages you should look at without further ado:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/uselections/2008/09/palin-linked-el.html
... witch hunts will be "on" if these people find their way into the oval office...


http://shannynmoore.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/keith-olbermann-shannyn-moore-pastor-problem/#comments
Jewish, Israeli, or support thir community: on the above link, zero in on this comment:

I was worried about Palin’s religious views before I knew about the the pastor as witchhunter.
Palin beleives that Jews are going to Hell because they don’t believe in Jesus. She belongs to a church where the pastor could invite a “Jew” for Jesus as guest speaker. You can’t be Jewish and accept Jesus as your savior. If you are trying to convert Jews you are trying to reduce the number of Jews. Ultimately there wouldn’t be a single Jew left on the planet.
Palind also beleives that Israel plays a role in the endtimes. She supports Israel because she believes that Jews must convert for the Second Coming to happen. A Jewish state with no Jews would be the result.

Posted by "Susan" on September 20.



http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10167
Read this several times to let the details sink into your brain ... the first time you read it, you'll be so gobsmacked, a lot of them will bounce right off. Armageddon, here we come. Got your bags packed? Make sure to pack something cool (cotton breathes), because we are ALL on the express elevator leading waaaaaay down.

You wondered why the Republicans would blithely borrow trillions and trillons of dollars, and are still borrowing? They only need to win (or fix) one more election, and the Second Coming is right around the corner ... they don't have to pay back a dime.

Or, so they believe.

More tomorrow.

Blogging in the vacuum

As promised, the next time the dreaded Blogger's Vacuum struck ... Alaska pictures. I scanned these at 200dpi (because they're worth it), so if they take a little while to download, invest a bit of patience; and click on a pic to get the full size scan, of course.

These pictures were captured between 1997 and 2000, which explains why they're scans. I was using a couple of Pentax K-1000s and an assortment of lenses, with my favorite being a Tamron 80 - 200 zoom. I also used a polarizing filter, which is why some of these pictures look fairly awesome. The old prints were scanned using your basic CanoScan machine, straight into IrfanView for manipulation; and where there are blots in the sky etc. (scanner measles) they were cleaned up with Micrographx. So, here goes:

Trapper Creek in high summer, an absolutely glorious day. Been there in winter, too, and photographed the exact same view, buried under snow ... will see if I can find the pictures and upload them when the Vacuum strikes again.


A fine (cold) day on the Kenai; one of scores of glaciers makes its way to the sea. Shot from a tour boat, believe it or not. From the picture, you'd think it was warm, but I can tell you, the cold was stinging...



Alpenglow on the Chugach ... or, "the view from Jewel Lake Road, standing right beside the firehouse." You can actually Google the location, put yourself right where I was standing to take this shot. The time was about 11:00 or a bit closer to midnight, and it wasn't cold at all. This was in the "freak August" of 1997 -- people said Keegan had brought the Aussie weather with him...


Now you KNOW you're in Alaska. A float plane makes its landing approach to Lake Hood, which is one of the world's busiest airports. Alaska is full of these planes. Don't let Hollywood fool you: you can NOT drive to Alaskan country towns, other than Fairbanks at t'other end of both the northbound highways. Everywhere else -- which they call the bush, same as the Aussie term -- you fly in and fly out. And this is how you do it...


Fall comes to the tundra. This is Stampede Trail, not so far outside Fairbanks, in the fall of 1999. Again, a glorious day, though Aussies would call it cold. The landscape was bright with color; I blew several rolls of Fujichrome right there, and wished I could do more.


Fall comes to the Fairbanks hills ... the landscape turns into an enchanted forest. Everywhere you look, you think you've blundered into Rivendell without remembering how you go there. You might wish these conditions would last for several weeks, as they do in other parts of the world, but in Fairbanks, fall can last a couple of days. Or a single day, if a weather front comes through just as the trees turn...


High summer ... could be the Kenai or Prince William Sound. Calm conditions and deceptive photo quality: it was bloody freezing. The puffins were out that day, as I recall; cute little buggers, but too small and too fast to photograph well. I never did manage to get a puffin photo worth printing...


Chena Lakes, close to Fairbanks, on a day so calm, there wasn't a ripple on the water. One of those days when you also had the place to yourself, and the quiet was stunning. And then --


The same lake a few months later. FROZEN solid. Anyone bring their skates? The thing about birch woods is that when they drop their leaves, they look really, seriously daggy. The landscape can look kind of "shabby" for months, but you live with it because in season (and especially in fall) birch woods are amazing. Like this:


Early fall in Denli Park. Weather such as you pray for and get on rare occasion in the north. And there's the little car -- Pontiac Sunfire -- which went places and did things most little cars only dream about.

And I do believe I have something important to blog -- nay, to RANT! -- about tomorrow; I just need to research it a little and make sure. If Keegan is going to get up on the soap box, let's make sure the rant is justified. Right.

Ciao for now,
MK

Fond (and freezing) memories

With the Mel-o-Sphere being its usual event-free self, nothing happing worth mentioning and no particular bee buzzing in my bonnet today ... pictures, as promised. Alaska in the wintertime, counterpointing the summertime photos I put up a while ago, and the summer/winter shots of downunder.

The view from Rabbit Creek ... "Sleeping Lady," or Susitna, on the horizon. Rabbit Creek is a very upmarket subdivision on the hill right above Potter Marsh, ten minutes or so outside of Anchorage. It's an interesting drive, getting up and own there, on ice. This was a glorious blue-sky day, and cold like you wouldn't believe. I think this is 1999.
Here is a beautiful view looking northeast over the White Mountains, outside Fairbanks. White Mountains ... sounds (and looks) like something right out of Tolkien. Another glorious, COLD day, where the air was so clear, it was like champagne. This was also 1999 ... before the advent of digital cameras. I was using a couple of Pentax K-1000s at the time, and strictly rationing the shoot. Optical photography was getting expensive, and in those days you set the shot up with some serious thought and took about one shot in 10 a many as you'd take right now. Today? If I were in Alaska now, I'd be doing several gigs a day.
Through the windscreen, on the road, heading back into Anchorage ... just short of the Knick River Arm, I think ... but I could be dead wrong: it's been 10 years, and my notes are packed, along with two thirds of my library (and 100% of my slides. All my best work is on slides ... and I haven't seen them for four years or more. I need to scan them off ... but first I have to FIND them).
The frozen river, as it wanders through the heart of downtown Fairbanks. This would be February or March. You can drive on the river; they hold dog mushing races on it. And yes, I have tramped about on it. I have stacks of photos of Fairbanks in the snow ... where the heck are they?! Hunting out these pictures, I only just realized I seem to have misplaced a lot. (Shot term memory is always the first to go...)
A roadside scene somewhere in the regions of Trapper Creek. The giant Princess Hotel is not too far away ... I didn't stay there; was only passing through at the time. The hotel was also new enough in those days that you could still smell the paint and wood stain! It's a tourist stopover. I wasn't a tourist that time ... with luck, I will be next time. Who the hell wants to be in such a glorious place, and have to work?? There are numerous hotels I'd like to stay at along the way ... and I have to say, Anchorage has some of the best restaurants. There's one called the Sourdough Mining Company, which is decorated throughout to look like a Gold Rush era mine. (In real US fashion, they serve eight times more food than any normal person can eat ... but you give it a shot anyway!)
One of my favorite pictures ... the courting swans ... ice sculpture, at the World Ice Art Championships in 1999. And now I really need to find my boxes of slides, because I shot the whole show after dark, when they were lit in with colored lights. The slides are astonishing. When they show up, I'll be scanning them, and will upload some. Thank gods I shot a lot of prints too.

No news and views today ... I'm blank. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, I just gabbed for long enough to suffice.

Ciao for now,
MK

Blue genes and gay publishing

As you go by the solstice of winter and don't have anything bright and shiny to look forward to until your birthday (which is a date of mixed blessings: My gods, are you still alive? How old are you? You're kiddin. Be fair, nobody's that old!), you start to ponder upon the meaning of Life, the Universe and similar Jazz. The days are short, gray and bloody damned cold (this is the coldest winter in anyone's memory), and you wonder what you were bitching about last summer, when you were flaked out on any available horizontral surface, chugging anything cold, and begging for a flurry of snow. Of course, come January and February, you'll be saying the exact same things again ... humans are not terribly adaptable.

There's a bright, lurative future for the geneticist who isolates and markets the adaptability gene. They'd sell it by the pill or by the shot, and you'd go get your shot in, say, October, and start mutating for summer. Your body would change shape and consistency between then and Christmas, and by New Year you'd have the body and constitution of a Masai warrior, to whom 110 degrees is peachy. Then, you'd go back to the clinic and get another shot in April, and by June you'd look like a native Siberian or Canadian or Alaskan ... Inuit, or Inupiat, or Yupik ... folks to whom 50 degrees is balmy and warm. On a day like today (the forecast is for 12 degrees Celcius, which is something like 54 in real degrees), with your Inuit body and constitution you'd be sipping on a cool drink, lying on an air mattress by the pool.

Was talking to the other side of the family (in Alaska) at the weekend ... they're having the coldest summer in anyone's memory. They've tickled 60 degrees F on a couple of occasions in Anchorage, and in the Valley (Mat-Su), it snowed last week. In July. Most of Alaska is rain-soaked, and folks are wondering where in the hell their summer went to --

And here's Keegan bitching about the climate, the winter, while "enjoying" almost identical weather. Yes, BUT --

It's what you're used to. You get acclimated to summer, and then it ... stops.

Okay, I'll shut up about it now.

There's a new screensaver at the Tenth Dimension (the members' zone at MK Online). No hunks this time -- next time, guys. Be patient. This one is an SF screensaver which is rated "office safe." You can go ahead and install it wherever, without getting glares. I'll save you a trip to the website, and give you the direct links right here:

Click on this to download the XP self-installer; and...

Click on this to download the file for Vista (This Vista one doesn't instll itself. Extract it from the archive to your desktop, double-click it, and you get a pop-up menu.)

And a very good question from a thoughtful reader, while I'm here. This visitor from the UK asked, why did GMP cease to be, as a publishing entity? It's a long and complex story, but I'll try to be brief. The business was started quite a long time ago now, by a group of people (I think there were five guys, Richard Dipple, Aubrey Walther, David Fernbach, and two others) who were all investors in the enterprise and worked for GMP too. The business started with a couple of books and at its zenith was doing 26 new titles per year -- which was the point where Keegan signed with them. The future looked bright indeed; at that point, I had no idea Richard Dipple was seriously ill. Richard was one of the nicest human beings I have ever known, and his death was not merely a tragedy in human terms, but also for gay publishing. Without him, GMP unraveled itself. The four other founder members went in different directions; two stayed (Aubrey Walther and David Fernbach), but things were not as lucrative as they might have been, and ... frankly, I should think the inspiration had gone. When the joy goes out of something, it turns into work, and sometimes damned hard work. A day arrives when you're glad to let it go. That day came, and GMP passed into the hands of Prowler Press. Now, Prowler was a magazine publisher which had become interested in having a gay book list, and it might have worked out, if Millivres (the big, BIG gay magazine publishing house) had not assimilated Prowler in the perfectly natural process by which huge publishing combines consume their more modest competitors, in order to iron-clad their market share. Here was the problem: Millivres had no interest in running a gay book list. Over the space of several years the last titles (which had already been contacted for at the time of the takeover) were published; anything else was scrapped; on-shelf stock was run down, and ... it was over.

The really sad thing is that with the loss of GMP, gay publishing outside the USA suffered a major blow from which it's never, really, recovered -- or at least, not yet. Many writers (myself among them) are out there on the Internet, breaking trail, and doing very nicely at it. But (and I cannot stress this enough!) writers like Keegan had an existing "name" to tout, when we started self-marketing. MK could quote a stack of titles from GMP and Millivres, and even a credit from Alyson (Breakheart); I could rattle off the reviews I'd received yonks ago. All this builds a foundation under the new Internet book marketing project. Gay books, any kind of books, makes little difference: you have to find readers and get them to part with their money. And it's easier to do this when they either know you already because they have a shelf full of your old books, or they're reasonably impressed with the fact you were professionally published much more than one time.

Not for a moment am I saying that new (gay or otherwise) writers can't make a go of markering their books on the web: they can. Have you heard of a book called "The Didymus Contingency", by Jeremy Robinson? No? Google it. Seriously. It was self-published, he paid Kirkus Reviews their pound of flesh for a write-up (and they have become bloody expensive), and before you know it's he's signing a contract with a pro publisher. Another writer who went the DIY route and succeeded massively was Matthew Reilley: from self publishing to signing a high-six-figure contract with a major UK house, in about three years flat.

I guess what I'm saying is ... new writers have to be prolific, dedicated, incredibly talented, and have quite a lot of money to invest in promoting their books. Then, they need some real, genuine luck. Not everyone has the investment capital, or the luck. And I think it's so sad that a good, solid gay publishing house no longer exists -- a house that's been established so long, the publisher can afford to take a risk on someone new.

This is what happened for me: Richard Dipple took a risk on Mel Keegan. Now, ICE, WIND AND FIRE got some stinking reviews (for being sexy; can you believe that?) but Richard looked at actual sales figures, which were good, and gave me another shot...

That next shot was DEATH'S HEAD. The rest is history. DEATH'S HEAD had a good many teething problems of its own, but David Fernbach and I got through it, and ... here we are.

The bottom line is this: I would love to see another publishing house come along to fill the void left by GMP. I'd be involved with it myself, on some level, if I were given the opportinity. And now --

I have to go back to work, guys! More tomorrow.

Where were you, when --?!

They do say that everyone who was alive at the time (and old enough) can still remember where they were and what they were doing when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Adrin got their boots firmly onto the surface of the Moon. (These days, 39 long years later, it would probably be prudent to explain to most people that Armstrong didn't ride a bike there. It's been ... a wee while since it all happened.)

On this side of the dateline at least, it's July 20th, and I can't help remembering the night when it happened. I was a little kid, but old enough to still remember sitting by the hearth with my parents, watching, entranced, as the drama unfolded in glorious black-and-white ... that being the capacity of our TV. Fortunately, the Moon, and spacesuits, and space, tend to actually BE black and white, so it turned out the upmarket folks with the color tellies didn't benefit much -- and some of them actully phoned up the broadcasters, asking why they were receiving black and white pictures. Because, sir or madame, Outer Space is black and white. It's Star Trek that's in color. Easyto see how you could confuse the two. Neil Armstrong, Bill Shatner? Amazing likeness, there. Twins, I agree. It's the pointed ears, they're a dead giveaway.

Next year will be the 40th anniversary, and one would hope something major will be done to mark it. The technology has become antequated, and the fact Project Apollo was little more than a political maneuver in the Cold War has become public knowledge, which tends to somewhat tarnish the early space program. But, damn, it was a thrill when it was happening for real.

And yes, the little kids who watched it happen (I was one) really did think humans would be on Mars by the turn of the century. Our teachers used to tell us to study hard, 'cuz we'd have the chance to live and work in space.

Right. Uh huh. Okay. In retrospect, you have to wonder how naive we all were, but -- shoot, it was fun while it lasted. The dream ebbed away during the 1970s, when the public became bored with moon missions. (South Australian TV didn't even cover them. We had bigger things to spend broadcast time on, like "Hey, Hey, It's Saturday!", and the "The Don Lane Show.") But I do believe the whole thing is going to turn full circle.

In fact (if anyone's interested -- and actually, it's pretty interesting) I updated the whole article, "The Future According to Mel Keegan," for the NARC page, just recently. Let me save you a trip to the website:

A history of the future, starting ... well, right now!

The original article is four years old now (and archived right under this one on the same page), and I gotta tell you, it's a little bit creepy, how 'right' ol' Mel picked it. Have a squiz, see what you think -- let me know.

The next 10 - 15 years could easily be as exciting as '65-'75. Here's hoping.

Otherwise, the dead calm of the Mel-o-sphere continues, and is so featureless a horizon that I'm going to upload pictures instead.

Today, I'm pasting in Alaskan shots, largely for Aussie and European visitors (of whom there are many -- and thank you, all, for dropping by!) ... tomorrow I'll paste in Australian pics, for US'n and European visitors (again, thanks for visiting, and don't be strangers, now!) ...

NOTE: pictures are parked on Jade's Flickr account for sheer convenience at this time. Keegan took 'em, but if you want to use 'em elsewhere, contact either one of us either via Flickr, or the blog or the website...


Potter Marsh, the bird sancuary just below the suburb of Rabbit Creek, on the shores of Turnagain Arm, maybe 12 minutes outside Anchorge itself. Glorious place ... so quiet, you can actually hear yourself think. Imagine that. It's even more quiet in the wintertime, but on this day in the summer of 1999, the salmon were running and the creeks were teeming...



You would not believe the miles I covered in this little car. It's a mid-1990s Pontiac Sunfire, and on this particular day it was parked on the far side (reckoning distance from Anchorage) of Belugah Point, somewhere between Bird and Girdwood. That's Turnagain Arm in the background. The Chugach is a mountain range which surrounds the city and seems to guard it like a fortress.



Here's food for thought. Sure, it's a gas station. Tesoro Alaska, not too far from the Portage exit, as I recall (or is it the one closer to Girdwood??) ... but, take a look at the price of gas!


This might even have been the same day ... I'm honestly clueless. Moose, grazing in the puddles off the side of the road along Turnagain, maybe 20 minutes out of Anchorage. Daddy Moose is the guy with the 'rack' of antlers, obviously.



And here's the city of Anchorage itself, seen from the Coastal Trail, Earthquake Park. The fluttering blobs in the foreground are swallows, which nest in the cliffs.

More tomorrow, either pics or blather, if anything has actually happened in this neck of the woods worth the blathering space!

Ciao for now,
MK

Domestic scene with DVD recorder

Big, big discussion today, between folks downunder and their counterparts upover: Yuletide. Winter solstice, whatever you choose to call it. Does it mark the dormant time of the year? It's certainly supposed to. The tradition is that (and I'm quoting), "deity is reborn at mid-winter, escaping the underworld in the form of an eagle." Loosely ranslated into English this means, 'life gets a kickstart off the lengthening days as winter gives way to spring." In the north this is the perfect metaphor, but down here ... nope, sorry. Winter is the season when things GROW, everything goes gangbusters (including the people), trying to make up for the blister zone of summer. So, how difficult is it to make the model of wintertime dormancy fit into any traditional model that's going to encompass Australia?

I was on a bus one time, two thirds of the way to downtown Anchorge (Alaska). There was a Native guy sitting beside me, talking his head off. I got about one word in four, both because of the racket of the bus and the thick Athabascan accent, which can be difficult to follow. He suddenly broke off and said, loudly, "Goddamnit!" I thought that, at the very least, the bus had run somebody over. But no; he had just noticed how the grassed areas around Westchester Lagoon had gone brown. Which, to him, meant that summer was gone. I laughed a little bit and told him, "Where I come from, when the grass goes brown it means summer just arrived."

So there you have summer as the dormant period down here, while, simultaneously, winter is the dormant period up there ... or, to put it another way: both places are dormant at the same time, albeit for different reasons, and despite the fact they're a complete spin of the compass apart. How weird is that?

(Speaking personally, I'm an interested spectator at such discussions. Get folks onto the topics of politics, spirituality, the environment, best recipe for chicken soup, and they can get pretty steamed up. Stick your nose in, and you can get yourself into the market for a nasal splint.)

For at least an hour this morning I pushed and shoved the plot of my haunted house novel; I think I killed off about a half-billion brain cells, to no decent avail. Yup, I've plotted myself into a deep, dark hole. I had an intuition that I was getting a little bit too clever for my own good, but there are times I ignore the still, small voice at the back of my mind, and carry on regardless.

This appears to be one of those times, so -- you'll have to wait a while for the haunted house piece, and DreamCraft will be publishing the fantasy instead. That's okay: the fantasy was next on the list. We're just jigging the order a little, it all works out. Writing is like that, so long as you have a publisher who will cut you the slack. I can't imgine anything worse than being on contract, writing what you're told to write, when you're told to write it. Writing would become a job, and as soon as anything turns into work, 90% of the fun goes away. (I wonder if anyone's even bothered to ask hustlers?!)

Otherwise, the Mel-o-sphere is a flat calm. It isn't brillig, and no slithey toves are gyring or gymballing in any wake I know of (let's see what the spellchecker makes of that). Work chugs along, the Tour de France has a week to go, and it looks (mind you, looks) like an Aussie might actually be standing on the podium and wearing YELLOW in Paris. This one, I gotta see. I enjoy the Tour de France a lot ... which is not the same as saying I'm not relieved when it's over for another year, because after three weeks, sleep assumes the top spot on one's agenda.

Thank gods for DVD recorders.

Reflections of a winter's eve

Waiting for the internet this evening is like waiting for Christmas, when you're nine years old. If I'm right, it's something like thr middle of Saturday night in the States, so I imagine servers everywhere are shut down for maintenance. Certainly Payloadz was, an hour or two ago. Unlike Lulu.com, they don't have a message which pops up, telling you they're doing something disgusting to the machinery. Payloadz just sits there like the proverbial bump on the log, and leaves you assuming you timed out. So, if you're buying the ebooks there, and if this happens -- give them an hour and try again. The service is actually excellent, and the occasional lapse for oiling up the gears is understandable.

Speaking of ebooks, the screenreader version of NOCTURNE went up to Payloadz this afternoon (hence, the jousting with the system while it was down). If you've been waiting for this one, let me save you a trip to the website:

Get NOCTURNE from Payloadz.

This is the format which suits Palm and iLiad, Sony Reader, Pocket PC and so on. I don't actuially have one of those gadgets, but folks tell me they're handy, esp. if you have a hell of a lot of time to kill on the bus or train. I'm eternally grateful that I don't have to commute.

(There'll be a newsletter from DreamCraft in the next couple of days to announce this ebook, but if you're reading the news here, you're ahead of the bunch. The other thing in the newsletter will be the raft of freebie screensavers which have been promised for some time. And at this point, the only ebooks which are still pending are the screenreader format of WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT, and AQUAMARINE -- which I'm still working on. I know, I'm slow. Head cold, winter blues, and work.)

Not that you'd have known it was winter, through most of today. It was the perfect winter's day, I suppose, with bright blue skies and far-from-cold winds. As nice as this is, it ain't what we need. We need rain, more rain, then some more rain. Showers are supposed to get themselves back into gear next week.

Incidentally, if anyone in the frozen north is remotely interested (Hi, Toshua!), I'll link you through to the weather forecast page for this neck of the woods:

Bureau of Meteorology, SA Page. There are pretty cool maps and radar loops.

I don't think we actually have weather here. Now, Alaska has weather. Boy, do they have weather. One of the great things about the State of Alaska is that, so long as you're not among the mountains, there is nothing to impede your view of the sky. Looking from Anchorage out toward the Gulf of Alaska, the sky looks exactly like a weather map on TV ... and it's huge. (The downside to this is, you can see the next squall line coming in, and you know ahead of time exactly how cold and wet you're going to be in three hours!)

In some ways I guess I kind of miss the weather. Skating through the parking lot to the grocery store (Aussie readers: I'm not kidding you!), and going for a walk at breakup time, and suddenly finding myself thigh-deep in water, because the ice-cover on a massive 'puddle' was too thin. Realizing that the temperature inside the the freezer cabinets in the store is warmer than the parking lot outside!! But you were aware of Mama Nature, you actually felt the weather in your face and knew you were standing at the very bottom of an immense ocean of air.

By contrast, this part of the world has an amazing ambience for most of the year. Only in summertime do you begin to feel overpowered by the weather gods, who seem to have decided to turn you slowly on a spit.

The winter blues are about to be alleviated with a bottle of honey mead. It's made by a local company called Maxwell's, and there's nothing like it for brightening up a chill, dark evening:

Here's their page ... I like the Viking icons on the labels. So there you have it -- Maxwells. The winery is a couple of hills over, at McClaren Vale.

Weather-wise, if last night's life Tour de France telecast was anything to go by, the south of France (city of Toulouse, specifically) is having the exact same weather as ourselves ... but it's summer up-over. Makes you think.

Here's a note to end on which would put a smile back on the face of any writer. The old DreamCraft edition of NOCTURNE is starting to show up in the hands of rare book dealers. Now, you can get the ebook for under ten dollars, and the Lulu paperback for under thirty. The asking price for the DreamCraft 'rare edition,' with my paw print on it, is eighty American. And that's grand.

Sledding down memory lane

Memory is a strange thing. I can quote you the lyric to the Maverick TV show, which was made in 1960, and was in reruns when I was a kid ... but I'll be damned if I can remember the fantastic plot I thought of at 2:00am this morning. It was a humdinger. The kind of plot that gives you goosebumps, despite the fact you're lying on an electric blanket ramped up to MAX because the bedroom is like a meat locker. I knew I should have got up, got the lights on, jotted the whole thing down, but it's the middle of winter, and cold, and ... yeah. I told myself I'd jot it down in the morning.

Who is the tall, dark stranger there?
Maverick is the name.
Riding the trail to who knows where?
Luck is his companion, gamblin' is his game.

(There's a lot more of it, AND I know it all, AND I recall the tune, even though some of you are probably about to get up and flatly deny any such show ever existed. Well, before you do, I can prove it. This here is a link to James Garner's page on IMDB, and in case someone says I made THAT up too, argue with the DVD cover. The DVDs are not available in Australia, which is probably a good thing, because I would probably feel like Methuselah.)

So, where the hell is the neural super-highway to get back to this plot idea that was going to make for a novel that would knock our your eyeballs? It's utterly
gone.

I've heard you can have yourself hypnotized to remember things. Let me think about it. I've no desire to be barking like a chicken. Or any kind of barnyard fowl.

I was about to comment that it occurs to me that blogging is a strange and even lonely passtime, but before I could type the remark I was deafened by the uproar from other computers around 'Mission Control' (there are four live computers and two dead ones, three live printers and two dead ones, plus assorted imaging devices, in the DreamCaft nerve center). Le Tour on a Footy Field was being read ... and if I do say so myself, it's worth a chuckle ... and it's nice to get feedback.

Headcold report: almost gone. The cold, I mean, not Keegan. Keegan is definitely still here.

AQUAMARINE report: I'll start the edit tomorrow. I swear it. Actually, I'm looking forward to it. I was going through old files and drafts on the computer I shut down a few days ago, and discovered a wedge of 'deleted scenes' which didn't make the final cut of the book for reasons of time and file format incompatibility.

When I did the book in 1999, I was working on a borrowed Mac, converting files over from a Windows format, reading from a 3.5" floppy that seemed to have been zapped by x-rays on its way through way too many airports (Adelaide; Sydney; Vancouver; Seattle; Anchorage; Fairbanks). The disk was being a little bastard, and even when I could get the files into the Mac, the only program that would convert them was an email client. Go figure. Time was of the essence (isn't it always?) and I remember just surrendering, in the end, and patching various sections together before they were emailed over to London. They were aimed at Prowler, which at the time had bought out GMP but not yet been bought by Millivres).

Now, if I can remember, clearly, wrestling a Mac to get AQUAMARINE off the disks and into some usable form, in a word processor called Claris Works, why can't I remember the plot which came to me at 2:00am? The human brain is a weird contraption. I recall the sharp sting of the cold outside, and the icicles hanging off the eaves over the back door, while I was working on the book. I'd take a break and go for a walk in the snow ... I'd walk over to the public library to do a little research if the internet was so slow it made a mollusk on valium look like Speedy Gonzales.

Fairbanks is a quite-small town on the edge of the raw, frozen wilderness, but they had (and probably still have) a great library. You walked inside, and the heat and humidity hit you in the face -- that, and the sound of (get this) budgies. As in, real, live budgerigars. (To US folks, think parakeets ... but take it from me, they're native to this neck of the woods, and they're actually called budgies.) The library had a small aviary and an array of tropical plants. And daylight fluoros which gave the illusion of sunshine, while outside the real sun was barely above the rooftops at noon, and the roads were being plowed out. Budgies and tropical plants, now. Just my speed. As you'd imagine, I spent some fair amount of time there.

So, Thursday finds Keegan on a sled/sledge/sleigh (depending on where you're from) ride down a long, cold, white memory lane, and wondering if I need some brain food. I've heard that sardines are good for the brain cells. I'm sure there's a few cans in the pantry ... but I'd rather have a gin and tonic.

The Red Eyes of July

It's the blog post you write when you're not writing a blog post ... because you've caught the Kreeping Krudd and you feel like you're balancing on the thin edge of sudden death. One foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel. The 'krudd' is a virus that's going around here: everyone either has it, has had it, or is coming down with it. I thought I was going to escape ... nope. I was just the last one to come down with it.

(Last week I was making jokes: "Don't to stingy, share your germs around," say I, and kissed the man. Hmmm. In retrospect, one finds just cause to re-examine one's actions. In depth. Well, too late now: bring on the cough drops, and I'll take my tea intravenously. [Croak])

The red eyes cited in the title have, however, nothing much do with the krudd, which is all about glued-together sinuses, sore throats, hacking coughs and the general desire to grab a carving knife and go for any handy major artery.

No, no: the red eyes are all about watching TV at 1:00 and 2:00 in the wee small hours of the morning. It happens at this point every year, and it's unavoidable, since the event organizers refuse to change either the date or the time of the show. For some reason, they feel compelled to hold their race in broad daylight. In France. And, of course, Australia being on the other side of the globe, it's the middle of the night here when the event goes out on live TV. Asking them to schedule it at 2:00am in France invites rude rejoinders; I can't imagine why.

You guessed: it's the Tour de France, or TDF for short. Not that I have too much soul-deep interest in bicycles for their own sake, you understand, nor for sweating while astride them. But the telecast of Le Tour offers two inestimable plesures ... and I leave it to you to decide which order to rank them in. First the video travelog of France is peerless, you get to see the country from air and road, and it's way better than a bus trip. Second, the whole event involves a great number of athletic young men in rainbow-hued spandex and (it's traditional) no underwear.

Well, you asked. I distinctly heard the question, "What the hell is Keegan watching TV for in the middle of the night?"

Now, I need to go and take some pills, or hunt out that carving knife, or SOMETHING, so I'll leave you with the photos I promised to upload, of Seward, Alaska, on a summer's afternoon, when everyone else had the brains to stay battened under hatches and drink something hot and laced, and Keegan, in some curiously finite wisdom, went hiking down the shore of Resurrection Bay...


NOTE: click the picture to get a larger view.