WW: Disciplinary petting

(I've been taking care of this kitty, and photographing her, for ten years. [First Rusty Ring appearance here.] She's always been headstrong, unwilling to follow rules, primary of which is to stay off the kitchen counter.

So from the beginning, each time she's turned up on the forbidden surface, I've imposed "disciplinary petting", that is, picking her up and cradling her upside down in my arms like a baby while petting and scolding her. Since there's nothing less acceptable to her than confinement, especially with her paws in the air and eyes turned toward the ceiling, being loved and caressed in this fashion amounts to a portable timeout that she instantly resents in the most strenuous terms.

Or she did. Now a decade later she's well into her golden years – so to speak – and as is often the case, has become notably more demonstrative in the affection and physical contact departments. To be precise, she's constantly after me to pick her up and hold her. All day, if she can get it.

If that were all, I could put it down to typical feline old age. Unfortunately, it often develops that simply being held does not in itself suffice. After several minutes in my arms she begins to twist her neck and lay her face flat against my sleeve, as if trying to roll over. This she couldn't actually do without falling, so I've learned to take the hint and turn her over myself.

Like a baby.

So it seems my brilliant disciplinary programme has backfired. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if all these years the whole counter schtick wasn't just a scheme to get punished again.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

A Trip Home For Christmas

Back in 2014 I shared a little one-man Christmas cheer game I indulge in at this time of year, a simple Google search string that fills your screen with seasonal warmth and goodwill from the past. Now I've found another one that does much the same, except now the pictures move.

Basically, you're going to do the same thing we did then, except on YouTube. You'll load the YouTube home page, enter "Christmas" and a year in the search bar, and hit return. And your results page will fill with home movies.

Case in point: "Christmas 1963", above. Under no circumstances miss the little girl dressed to the yuletide nines, demonstrating the Twist. Nor the fact that this footage was shot a month or less after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Terrifying things had happened, yet folks were celebrating the holidays anyway, with unstinting courage.

This life passes so fast. You turn your head, and the Twist is old and tacky, and it always was.

But that's not true. For a day or two, one Christmas long ago, it was fresh and futuristic and something old people should learn about.

And the same thing is happening right now. It'll happen tomorrow too, and the day after that, and we need to pay attention to it every day.

So we can remember how new and bright it was, and we were, when we look it up on YouTube sixty years hence.

Better still, YouTube being what it is, you'll find all kinds of other jaunts home in the margins. Old TV commercials; "hip gifts for 1963" news segments; period holiday music. And you can change up that search string: "Chanukah", "holidays", "Xmas", "New Year's", "December", "winter", and every year you've lived.

If you're a native of the pre-Internet world – that place of sustained attention and short memory – you know how miraculous all of this is.

So get out there and take advantage of it. God knows this new realm is annoying enough; might as well get something out of it while we're up.

The very best of holidays from all of us here at Rusty Ring.

WW: Winter fountain

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

A Bit Too Close To Home

(A meme from Zen Twitter.)

Thanksgiving Recipe

"Gratitude to squelch my anger, and tenacity to overcome the obstacles."

Henry Winkler's recipe for success. Note that the first one is bodhisattva awareness.



(Photo of Yorkshire coble "Gratitude" ["There's Gratitude for you!"] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

In Nerd We Trust

This is a preaching Buddha (not to be confused with a teaching Buddha). As you can see, he's enumerating something on his fingers.

Which makes me smile. I've always been amused by the fixation in my religion with numbered lists.

We're not alone in this, of course. The 99 Names of God; the 10 Commandments; the 7 Deadly Sins; the 285 Rules of Acquisition: didacticism is a hallmark of scripture-based faiths.

But we take the prize. To be precise, we take it to town. Then we get on a ship and take it 'round the world, three or four times. And we're currently working on a way to shoot it into space.

Because we have an astonishing number of numbers. (Though I can't actually report that number here, because – ahem – we've never counted them.)

The impulse is honest, of course. Our insistence on rational analysis and objective experience over revealed truth is, in my opinion, our greatest strength. Several of these lists (the 8 Worldly Dharmas, the 7 Factors of Enlightenment, the 5 Recollections, and certainly, the Eightfold Path and 4 Noble Truths) have made cameos in these pages.

It's true that the power of these teachings is somewhat diffused by our Ancestors' equal passion for the 6 Aspects of Spiciness, the 9 Manifestations of Unrealised Déjà Vu, the 17 Origins of Pre-Supper Sleepiness, and the whole Buddhist canon of catalogues – which somehow exceeds our zeal for verifying whether those things actually exist before we catalogue them.

But if our compulsive Asian bookkeeping does at times get a little precious, it's merely an over-enthusiastic response to a very cogent teaching: that religious practice is for here.

Because if you're really doing a real religion, you're not waiting for some imagined afterlife to see results. Nor do you fabricate evidence of results in this one.

You pay attention. You watch the world turning and you turning with it, and you document daily if and how this crap is working.

And you better believe you count those beans.

Because as any boffin will tell you: in faba veritas.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Teasel

(Back in July I uploaded a photo of an uncanny field of green growing teasel [Dipsacus fullonum], encountered unexpectedly in rural country. Here's a shot of the way we usually see it: sparse, dead, and dry.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.