places America can still innovate in the world.

Outside of the internet / IT sector that is.... Some people I follow, like Mr. Pinchbeck suggest that agriculture, water reclamation, energy (including renewables), and health are the areas where Americans can still innovate and pioneer new ground.

These things allow us to imaging a few possibilities for working towards a more sustainable future, if that is something you choose to do. These things can be approached from a for profit, close source, open source, not for profit etc.

Aloe Vera Gel for Teeth (via Dr Weil's blog)

Aloe vera gel can soothe burned skin, take the itch out of bug bites and help treat rashes from poisonous plants. It also appears to be good for your teeth. A study published in the May/June 2009 issue of General Dentistry found that aloe vera gel worked as well as regular toothpaste to clean teeth and eliminate cavity-causing bacteria. What’s more, the study showed that the gel isn't as hard on the teeth as abrasive toothpastes so may be better for folks with sensitive teeth or gums. However, one of the authors of the study warned that not all aloe vera gel will work - you need the kind that contains the stabilized gel located in the center of the aloe vera plant and that hasn’t been treated with excessive heat or filtered during manufacturing. One of the study authors notes that such processing destroys or reduces the effects of some essential enzymes and polysaccharides. To find a good aloe vera tooth gel, the researchers suggested checking with the International Aloe Science Council to review the products that have received its seal of quality.

link to original article

next steps

I have been thinking a lot lately about what is next for me. My current living situation is ending soon, which I'm grateful for. The last year has been lived in a state of high activity mixed with mucho limbo. It wasn't really going anywhere, and seemed like I was just existing from one perspective.

From another angle, I have been helpful to the evolver movement, breathwork in Boston and a few other things along the way. With all of these things stacked up, it does make me feel as if I had some trajectory. What else could I be involved with to make my creative output more meaningful.

So as for things that may be next. I'm thinking a few options. I tend towards hedonism to start... so I'm thinking Park City Utah wouldn't be a bad place to explore that. Explore the snow and Evolver / Transition town people in that region. Then I'm considering doing web design and various sorts of IT consulting for a while while there.

After that... maybe hook up with the transition town folks on a more committed basis? They have an intensive training program in the UK and I think that may be a great thing to attend in the Spring. This would be one of the more committing things I could do in regards to working towards making a good dent in pressing enviro issues.

Overall seems like a good path to me... I stand to lose some health insurance, but picking this up on my own may not be too bad.... This is my blogger acct turning into live journal...

peace

http://evolver.net
http://transitionus.org

Beer me

So I made beer recently. Use some brown ale malt extract and some Munton's dark malt dme.
Cascade hops, and some assorted grains we found lying around.
Here are some pics. Beer is in the second stage of fermentation now in a different container than the first carboy. We'll bottle next week, hopefully tuesday, and have beer ready in 2-4 weeks after that.
Quite excited... what next.


Malt

DME

Cascade Hops Pellets

Wort

Jack

Hold together, Jack, pass through everything, and everything is one dream,
one appearance, one flash, one sad eye, one crystal lucid mystery, one word-
Hold still, man, regain your love of life and go down from this mountain and
simply be-be-be the infinite fertilities of the mind of infinity, make no
comments, complaints, criticisms, appraisals, avowals, sayings, shooting
stars of thought, just flow, flow, be you all, be you what it is, it is only
what it always is- Hope is a word like a snow-drift- This is the Great
Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is Voidness- so shut up, live, travel,
adventure, bless and don't be sorry- Prunes, prune eat your prunes- And you
have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of
your foot on innocent cupboard doors is only the Void pretending to be a man
pretending not to know the Void." Kerouac

Bonnaroo recap - woooooooooo!

Super fun trip to Bonaroo. I was so tired for a week after this trip, that I even had to go home sick once for fear of actually getting sick.
Incredible venue, and I'll certainly do it again. The best part was really seeing how happy everyone was to be around others who were into the music, shopping, drinking, learning about eco-stuff, and just overall having a good time.

Triumph the insult comic dog really did his thing well there. Love him, lol. He was trolling the porta potties when I saw him trolling around. So funny.

Sleep deprivation was really how the trip went for me, drank 2 beers the whole time which seem kind of lame to me, but there was no way I could have pulled off what I did while drinking/partying. Stayed up till 4am after only like 3 hrs of sleep the night before and 2-4 hours of sleep the following night. Really beat the shit out of myself that way, but the shows + awesome acts were worth it.

Highlights included coheed and cambria, mars volta, wailing souls, random freakshows, bare feet, minimal sunburn, and the spontaneous art that poped up everywhere.

Disapointments included: Bruce Sprinsteen and MGMT (especially bummed that they didn't meet my expectations). MGMT was actually the primary reason I wanted to go.

Phish was good, but the Fenway (Boston) set I got to see was so much better that it didn't really seem to compare.

I'm certainly going to return, but I'll tie it into a rock climbing trip and a longer vacation next time. Maybe I'll hook up with some existing "CAMP" to make the experience cooler/weirder.

Only time will tell.

Bonnaroo line up list.

Wailing Souls
Bon Iver
Booker T
Of Montreal
Wilco
David Grisman Quintet
The Mars Volta
Bruce Springsteen
Lovell Sisters
Everest
MGMT
Moe
Decemberists
Citizen Cope
Erika Badu
Andrew Bird
Mearle Haggard
Coheed and Cambria
Neko Case
PHISH
Yea Sayers

Bonnaroo 2009 - Dreddy Pharo Jazz flute dance

intro to permaculture

So, I'm leading a group meeting tomorrow on Permaculture, and I needed to catch up on what it is and why it is important. This is for the up and coming Evolver Boston group, that I'm helping to get rolling in the area.

One of the co-founders of it is Bill Mollison, I did a youtube search for him and found tons of stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=bill+mollison&aq=f

Some of the other videos I watched complemented the wikipedia article nicely.

Temperate Permaculture Strategies - Pt1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ0r_yklrDI

What is permaculture - 8 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X0H7V6dDi8&NR=1
Urban/suburban permaculture, informative - 5 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3_RbgtDnQE

Hope you find permaculture as interesting as I do. These are forest garden systems that you can leave alone for multiple months in a row... fantastic stuff.

I want to start you all off with pics of flowers, and remember to come back to the flowers after you see the pics. I'll post a youtube clip of the mess below the flowers. Hope you come out ok on the other side!

Peace.

Picasa

Podcasting

Podcasting is a funny thing. To me, it seems to be one of the most crucial media outlets we have today. It may not be as popular as twitter and other social media outlets, but it does allow for newly generated content to be distributed in new and interesting ways.
Its an incredibly democratizing factor for media at a time when the world needs it the most.

Why I podcast, is something I've been trying to figure out for a while now. At first, I think it was to get a chance to talk to people in the occult world, and try to figure out what the hell they were talking about. My education was oriented towards western philosophy and eastern mysticism/philosophy. Coming into this western world of magic and alchemy, I was pretty confused and wanted to figure it out. The second part, was to try to meet people in the real world doing the work, and connect with them on a few levels that I wasn't connecting with my friends on. Education and connection, I suppose were my primary goals. Offering this content to the general public seems to me to be a necessary side effect of my desire to connect with authors and semi prolific personalities in the field.

Goals... Its funny that I haven't thought formally of a goal for my show until over a year into it. Recently when I was interviewed for the Occult of Personality podcast, I came up with "getting people to challenge their belief systems" as an answer. This is cliche but acceptable, if I really mean it. Not sure if I do, but it seems like a worth goal.

In the next few weeks, I'll try to come up with some sort of answer for myself on why I podcast and goals I have for the show.

looks like dishwashers are greener than hand washing overall.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/built-in-dishwasher-vs-hand-washing-which-greener.php?page=2

SAAB FAIL

The SAAB failed inspection because of a broken headlight. I bought a new car instead of sticking with this one. There were a few other things that needed to be repaired. It was going to cost alot.

I'm going to send the guy in the painting to take care of him.

Beer photo from NYE

Check this out. Really cool MACRO photo of my home brew called Sherpa Pale Ale. Look at the head on it. Click it for high res.

Advanced Enochian Magick

Last night I ran a great interview with Frater W.I.T. who is a thelemic magician with a long history. He just released his second book, Advanced Enochian Magick, and during the interview we speak about his book, group work, history of enochian magick, and dispell some of the myths surrounding it. This should be up in a week or so on my podcast site. www.occultsentinel.com

Wordpress comments issues

On one of my wordpress blogs, I ran into an issue where there were 4000 plus comments that were all spam, and I couldn't get rid of them due to time constraints. I had this issue for months. Then I finally loaded the builtin spam filter, and when I tried to run it, it crashed because it couldn't handle that much spam. Weeks went by and finally last night while watching Cloverfield, I realized that I knew how to use myPhpAdmin, a mySQL administrative tool. We learned all about mySQL in college. So after figuring out which DB mapped to which blog, I then browsed the comments and found the stash of 4000 spam comments.

The sql browser enabled me to set the view to 1000 or more entries at a time, so I chose 1000 and began deleting everything after post 50. I killed them all but 500 and let the spam filter do the rest.

RIP SPAM.

I may do a tutorial with screenshots eventually because I can't be the first person to have this problem.