Flotsam from the Week That Was

Photo:  Sean Gallup/Getty

Has President Obama at last sensed a cold blast heading his way from what he likes to call "his base", where once only balmy (not to mention barmy) breezes blew? It reminds me of some of Bob Dylan's lyrics in To Make You Feel My Love (recently brought up to date by Adele)-

The storms are raging on the rolling sea
And on the highway of regret
The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain't seen nothing like me yet...

The President has been talking a good talk on at least four topics since the midterm elections early this month: climate change agreement (in principle) with China; immigration reform (announced on Thursday evening that he will use his executive powers to prevent deportation of certain classes of undocumented immigrants); Keystone XL Pipeline (the Senate voted against it on Tuesday, relieving President of any further action - for now); and net neutrality - pending.

Will President Obama reveal, at this late date, what some die-hard Democrat fans, and a mixed bunch of Republican right wing and Tea Party nut cases still like to believe or hope, is "the real Obama"...a closet leftist with Marxist roots, ready to stand up and fight for what in his heart of hearts he knows to be right or or rather left? I wish I could believe that.

A good piece by John Grant at "This Can't be Happening", also at Counterpunch relates.
Is Lame Duck Obama Ready to fight?

A British actor with a multi-syllabic name, Benedict Cumberbatch (on right in photograph), has been doing the publicity rounds promoting the movie The Imitation Game, in which he plays the lead part of Alan Turing (left in photograph). Turing helped to shorten World War II by cracking the "unbreakable" German Enigma Code. After the war, he was arrested for homosexual activities.
Turing's natal chart with a nutshell size explanation is at astrologer Bob Marks' website HERE.

Interpreting Mona Lisa - by a group of youngsters in a local art class. Husband noticed these on display in the lobby at our local concert hall and snapped 'em. He now wishes he'd stopped to take closer shots of each.

It's not hard, even in this small size (click on it to see a slightly bigger version) to identify seminal rebels among this group of young artists.

Tweet from "God" this week:
It's funny how nearly all the people who believe global warming is a myth also believe I'm not.

 From 9GAG.COM 

We watched the 1960 film version of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine on Turner Classic Movie channel, Thursday evening. I'd seen it more than once before, and read the book long ago, in my youth. I count the tale as one of the best of its genre, especially as it was first published in 1895.

A refreshers from Wikipedia

Social class was a theme in Wells's The Time Machine in which the Time Traveller speaks of the future world, with its two races, as having evolved from the gradual widening of the present (19th century) merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer ... Even now, does not an East-end (of London) worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth? Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people ... is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion.

Wells has this very same Time Traveller, reflecting his own socialist leanings, refer in a tongue-in-cheek manner to an imagined world of stark class division as "perfect" and with no social problem unsolved. His Time Traveller thus highlights how strict class division leads to the eventual downfall of the human race:

"Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved."

More from another page of Wikipedia on the two ways H.G. Wells imagined humans had evolved in the far distant future:

By the year 802,701 CE, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are the child-like, frail group, living a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi. Each class evolved and degenerated from humans. The novel suggests that the separation of species may have been the result of a widening split between different social classes, a theme that reflects Wells' sociopolitical opinions.

The main difference from their earlier ruler-worker state is that, while the Morlocks continue to support the world's infrastructure and serve the Eloi, the Eloi have undergone significant physical and mental deterioration. Having solved all problems that required strength, intelligence, or virtue, they have slowly become dissolute and naive. They are described as being smaller than modern humans, having shoulder-length curly hair, chins that ran to a point, large eyes, small ears, and small mouths with bright red thin lips. They are of sub-human intelligence, though apparently intelligent enough to speak, and they have a primitive language.

While one initially has the impression that the Eloi people live a life of play and toil-less abundance, it is revealed that the Morlocks are attending to the Eloi's needs for the same reason a farmer tends cattle; the Morlocks use the Eloi for food.

More on H.G. Wells and his natal chart at an archived post HERE.

A Weekend Cyber Ramble ~ Cables & Earplugs & Eloi - Oh my! (No astro).

Come with me on a cyber ramble.

There is available at Amazon a set of speaker cables (makes a change from Wikileaks cables about which trillions of words are being written as I type) for the knock-down price of $6,800 “eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime.” Ye gods! For that price I'd expect the cables to be delivered within hours by helicopter, landed on the front yard, brought to the front door by Sam Elliott.

Simple souls, like me, will be thinking, what could cause cables to cost so much?

“Dielectric Bias System (DBS) (US patent 7,126,055): Greatly improved performance is made possible by a constant 72 volt charge on all K2’s insulation. Similar to how the earth’s magnetic field makes all compasses point north, the AQ DBS system creates an electrostatic field which causes the molecules of the insulation to all point in the same direction. This minimizes the multiple nonlinear time-delays. Sound appears from a surprisingly black background with unexpected detail and dynamic contrast.”

Clear?
What is to be found in a review of said cables is the gem in this though. It was posted by "Patrick" and is too good to be buried in the Caverns of Amazon. It warrants inclusion in a book of science fiction mini-stories!

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long... I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.

Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.

No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out... oh, god, the screaming... the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!

WHY CAN'T I FORGET THE WORDS???

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

Do not use the cables!.

Wonderful! Thanks "Patrick" wherever you are.
If we ramble on a little further, there's more.

On the forum, (Making Light),where I had somehow run into Patrick's tale, a comment followed it:

"Somewhere in our brave new century, somebody actually pays nearly $1,000 a foot for speaker cable. And somewhere else, people toil anonymously to write things like that review. One can see the rough emerging outlines of Eloi and Morlocks—but not which is which."

This led me to refresh my memory of H.G.Wells' great novel The Time Machine.
Wikipedia

By the year 802,701 CE, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are the child-like, frail group, living a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi. Each class evolved and degenerated from humans. The novel suggests that the separation of species may have been the result of a widening split between different social classes, a theme that reflects Wells' sociopolitical opinions.

The main difference from their earlier ruler-worker state is that, while the Morlocks continue to support the world's infrastructure and serve the Eloi, the Eloi have undergone significant physical and mental deterioration. Having solved all problems that required strength, intelligence, or virtue, they have slowly become dissolute and naive. They are described as being smaller than modern humans, having shoulder-length curly hair, chins that ran to a point, large eyes, small ears, and small mouths with bright red thin lips. They are of sub-human intelligence, though apparently intelligent enough to speak, and they have a primitive language.

While one initially has the impression that the Eloi people live a life of play and toil-less abundance, it is revealed that the Morlocks are attending to the Eloi's needs for the same reason a farmer tends cattle; the Morlocks use the Eloi for food.

And I thought ........ Mr. Wells over-estimated that date at 802,701 CE. We seem to be heading rapidly in the direction of the outer reaches of what he described, even now as we come to the end of 2010. It's fun to decide who will, eventually, be the eater and who the eaten.

Future, Future Everywhere & H.G. Wells

This week several unconnected items with a common theme: The Future have lined up for my attention. George Friedman's current book "The Next Hundred Years" (Monday's post), the movie "Knowing" (Thursday's post), blog friend Robert Phoenix's piece about a possible New World Order. Then, on Thursday evening, what should appear on TCM but the classic movie from 1936 "Things to Come". The film is based on H.G. Wells' novel "The Shape of Things To Come". The author's ideas of how the world might develop during the hundred years from 1936 to 2036 haven't, so far, come to pass exactly as presented, but there is evidence of sharp insight to be found, watching from our 2009 perspective.


It's odd how these things clustered together this week, unplanned, unlooked for.

In my "Knowing" post I mentioned that Virgo seemed an unlikely sign to bring forth sci-fi, horror and fantasy novelists, or movie directors in those genres(Alex Proyas for example). Then I recalled that Stephen King was born 21 September, with Sun in Virgo. H.G. Wells was also born 21 September. Interesting!

A quick look at Wells' chart to see what else might link to the subjects which most fascinated him, as a writer. Born 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, England. Chart set for 12 noon. Astrotheme and Astrodatabank both give 4.30pm as time of birth and Aquarius rising. Astrodatabank states that this is a rectified time. I feel it's just a teeny bit too convenient, and feel wary of it. I prefer to look at a 12 noon chart, which offers more than enough information for my purposes.



Sun and Mercury in Virgo - Virgo is ruled by Mercury, so writing is second nature to most people with this sign emphasised in their charts. Wells' Moon would have been in Aquarius whatever time of day he was born - here's the first clue as to his avid interest in all things future. Aquarius' modern ruler Uranus is conjunct Mars - symbolically adding energy and further emphasis to all that Uranus signifies: new technology, future development, the unexpected, change. Saturn and Venus are conjunct in Scorpio, and in harmonious trine with Mars/Uranus. Saturn in trine with its symbolic opposite, Uranus, carries a hint that H.G. Wells, though fascinated by future potentialities, had fairly rigid attitudes, believed in structure rather than randomness. This would blend well with his Sun/Mercury in discerning nitpicking Virgo. He was actually a bit of an enigma, certainly a different animal from the much later Aquarius-hippie stereotype. More evidence of Wells' stability and general common sense comes from a Grand Trine in Earth linking Jupiter, Pluto and Sun/Mercury.


Two H.G. Wells' novels, "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds" were the first "grown-up" books I read. In those days I probably didn't fully appreciate everything the books contain, but was still absolutely fascinated by them. It turns out that H.G. Wells was a socialist and a pacifist - a guy after my own heart. How could I not enjoy his ideas?