Daehanminguk digicam:The last Gyeonggi-do photos

Pre-appendectomy apparition


Hanguk gothic


The tollgate south of Seoul:
fourteen lanes of fun


The first farewell dinner


Perhaps it would have been better
if we'd been out in the sunshine.


Ain't tryin' to hear it
from the boys
across the room


Poo!


Children in the chess bang
[video of same]


Transition


Antics


Departure


This was the previous daehan digi post.

Orion above Iran

"On January 25th, [Babak Tafreshi captured] this dreamlike landscape looking across the rugged, snow-covered peaks of the Alborz Mountain Range in northern Iran. The stunning sky is filled with stars, including the yellow-tinged Betelgeuse at the shoulder of Orion. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major and the brightest star in planet Earth's night, stands above and left of picture center."

You know how I am about Orion...

Indigenous cultures in crisis[and what their loss means to us]

A Klassy lady sent me a link to the video presentation described below:

"National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, many of which are disappearing, as ancestral land is lost and languages die. ["Celebrates" doesn't seem to be the proper word to use then, y'know? --Ed.]

"Against a backdrop of extraordinary photos and stories that ignite the imagination, Davis argues that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere, but also the 'ethnosphere,' which he describes as 'the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.'

"An anthropologist and botanist by training, Davis has traveled the world, living among indigenous cultures. He's written several books, including The Serpent and The Rainbow and Light at the Edge of The World."

See "Cultures on the Edge" and the documentary "Fire on the Mountain," also.

Daehanminguk digicam:The last Sunday in South Korea

My Lady Friend and I are scheduled to depart on the 17th.


Precious little things


Everything must go...
into two big bags


Yeoju bus terminal snack shop
[1111 px version]


The winter-withered farms
of Gyeonggi province


Many countries' currency
at an Itaewon optical shop
[1111 px version]


Seoul express bus terminal spaceport


A produce seller outside
of one of the underground
market entrances


Venus in the twilight
above the Namhan River
[1111 px version]


Sirius rebar


This was the previous 'daehan digi' post.

Part of me will always be in Korea...

...because I had to have my appendix removed 10 days ago.

Arranging crystals in the Rainbow Bridge

"Tor travels along the Rainbow Serpent ley line from Glastonbury, the Earth Heart Chakra, to Uluru (Ayers Rock), the Earth Solar Plexus Chakra, and back to Glastonbury, capturing all the crazy synchronicities and presenting it with beat-style poetry."

"Never mind the Marines.I've got to work the medicine."

In November 2005, about a year after enlisting and shortly before he was to be deployed to Iraq, Ronnie Tallman says he discovered — quite unexpectedly — a gift as a special type of medicine man known as a "hand trembler."

Such status is rare and deeply revered by the Navajo (Dine') tribe. Tallman says by tradition, his status as a healer rendered him unable to kill or harm, or even think negative thoughts, thereby making him unfit to continue with his commitment to the military.

Tallman decided not to return to his base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., and was deemed on "unauthorized absence" until he filed his application to be a conscientious objector, based on religious beliefs, in January 2006.

Months before his spiritual experience, during bootcamp, Tallman recalled how he felt when he heard chants that ended with new Marines shouting the word, "kill." He remembered being scolded as a boy for saying he would kill an animal, and wondered whether he could continue on with the Marines.

"It was emotionally tearing me apart because I didn't know whether to follow my heart or fill this commitment," he said in a phone interview from the California military base.

In his application to leave the military, Tallman wrote: "I had a very powerful experience where my left hand started to shake, and at the same time, an amazing feeling of calmness came over me ... My heart slowed down, and my breathing, and I felt peaceful.

"My hand kept trembling and I started to notice the energy in the people around me and I started to know things about them that I could never have known, things about their lives and what made them sick or in pain," he wrote.

Since his spiritual experience, Tallman has been sanctified as a hand trembler in a ceremony conducted by his uncle and grandfather. He then became a certified medicine man with the Dine Hataalii Association, a group of medicine men.

Tallman's mother, Nora, said she's proud of her son for standing up for his beliefs and looks forward to him joining other hand tremblers on the reservation.

"Our medicine men, some of them are getting too old, and some have gone," she said. "And we do need medicine men to help people. ... It's a good thing that he got this gift."

Let's be serious.

"'The implications of global warming over the coming decades for our industrial economy, water supplies, agriculture, biological diversity and even geopolitics are massive,' said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program. 'This new report should spur policymakers to get off the fence and put strong and effective policies in place to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.”

[Meanwhile, in Washington: The EPA has been closing its research libraries and destroying archived materials on pollution, chemicals and climate... And the US gov't wanted this UN climate report to include a proposal in which giant space mirrors or high-altitude sulfate droplets (more pollutants) could be used to reflect sunlight away from the planet in case greenhouse-gas reductions (that the US hasn't yet committed to) didn't work.]

"The warming and other climate shifts will be highly variable around the world, with the Arctic particularly seeing much higher temperatures, said Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the team writing the summary and the section of the I.P.C.C. report on basic science. She is an atmospheric scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The kinds of vulnerabilities are very much dependent on where you are, Dr. Solomon said in a telephone interview. 'If you’re living in parts of tropics and they’re getting drier and you’re a farmer there are some very acute issues associated with even small changes in rainfall — changes we’re already seeing are significant,' she said. 'If you are an Inuit and you’re seeing your sea ice retreating already that’s affecting your lifestyle and culture.'

The 20-page summary is a sketch of the findings that are most germane to the public and world leaders.

The full I.P.C.C. report, thousands of pages of technical background, will be released in four sections through the year — the first on basic science, then sections on impacts and options for limiting emissions and limiting inevitable harms, and finally a synthesis of all of the findings near year's end."