bsmall2 https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/ Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:52:47 +0000 Why this Covid-19 reaction? https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/why-this-covid-19-reaction <![CDATA[Why this Covid-19 reaction? In a Radical Fun article (1) Sean Michael Wilson wonders why Covid-19 is getting so much more attention, such a larger reaction, than deadlier threats like driving, boozing, and smoking. Sean asks good questions and reminded me of recent thoughts. I am around fifty years old. It seems like new diseases emerge more frequently. In the 1980s it was AIDS, the first new disease that made an impression on me. For decades, AIDS was the only new disease to worry about. For the most part, with a little care and attention you though you could avoid AIDS. People bought condoms, they were not sold out. Toilet paper did not disappear from shelves. The new diseases don't have to be viruses. After AIDS, it was a long time before we heard of diseases like MRSA, bacterial infections that can't be controlled by anti-biotics. And even if the bacterial disease to evolve soon after AIDS, the infections killed people who were already sick and in the hospital. Healthy consumers didn't seem to need to be too concerned for themselves. Unconsciously maybe people think that since the over-use of anti-biotics keeps bacon cheap, losing premature deaths among the already weakened in hospitals and old age homes are worth it. Maybe we share values with Madeleine Alright: she said that the cost was worth it when asked about sanctions that caused the deaths of Iraqi children. Control of oil in the Middle East helps keep bacon cheap too. But all the chemical colors and additives in bacon contribute to cancer. !--more-- Cancer was already old news in the 80s and 90s. And it seemed like it was mostly old people died of cancer. Again, like MRSA, healthy consumers do not have to be too concerned. A construction worker uncle said that in the old days people just died, now they die of something. It may have just been the 80s, or maybe adolescents and young people tend to be oblivious, but it seemed like when you got old, you had to die of something. Unconsciously it was easy to believe that people died of cancer because they were living longer. With general impressions of progress, the unexamined feeling that wealth and health were increasing, it was easy to imagine that more people died of cancer because more people got old enough to die of this particular something. It's a shame we don't spend more time reading and remembering Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Murray Bookchin's Our Synthetic Environment so that we contain and mitigate the occurrence of cancer by controlling chemical manufacture and use. So, like Sean asks, why is there such a large reaction to Covid-19 when we seem to accept the greater death tolls from cars, cancers and bacteria. Even among the viruses ebola and influenza kill more people every year. But the poor people in Africa dying of ebola are not able to get on planes and cruise ships to share it with the rest of the world. Sales people do not convene in African countries for seminars before going to ski resorts in France to share ebola with all of Europe. Influenza travels well, but there are vaccines to buy, a lot of us have built up immunity. Again, like MRSA and cancer, the flu seems to kill mostly the weak: people who are already sick, or old and aren't rich enough for fabulous health care. There isn't the same personal stake for the healthy consumer. The salaried consumer and potential voter can maintain a healthy lifestyle, obtain a decent healthplan and imagine he is relatively immune to a lot of dangers. He can be diligent with his seatbelt and driving. He can avoid alcoholism and nicotine addiction. A lot of people do, people are health conscious. And as great as the death toll is, we get the feeling, at least in the United States and Japan, that smoking and traffic deaths are decreasing. People are aware of alcoholism and the liver. It's easy to believe that risks are decreasing, as they did with cholera, smallpox, the measles. We are making progress, life is getting better. But life is not getting better, death is coming sooner. In the United States two young guys made the documentary King Corn after hearing that their generation would not live as long as that of their parents. In Japan too, it seems like the 60 and 70 year olds are not doing much better than the 90 year olds. Progress brought us processed food and high fructose corn syrup: cancer and diabetes. Cancer is helped along by all the factories and vehicles that deliver fast packaged meals&#x2026; But with some thought and effort we think we can avoid deaths from illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Maybe we can look away from premature death thinking "personal responsibility." A certain percent of the population is going to be susceptible to the advertising strategies and addicting qualities of damaging foods and smokes. But the healthy consumer should be able to avoid these ills. But these new ills. It seems like you have a lot more leeway to be conscientious with a condom than with a mask. People tend to be more aware of what they are touching in situations that put them at risk for AIDS. But the new flus and SARS, we don't think about touching steel handles and plastic countertops, we are not conscious of touching our faces as often as we do. The healthy consumer has less confidence in avoiding these new diseases. And the new diseases kill quicker. They don't kill as quickly as fast cars, but they kill much quicker than AIDS and cancer. You can imagine having the time to prepare and die with dignity, or even choose, how to suffer and die with the older diseases. Gasping to death with pneumonia a few weeks after somebody coughs on you. Where's the free will and dignity in that? The risk of going out with a bang charging a car could have a certain primordial allure to it. Like back when the man were courageously disposable, protecting the women and children by charging out to get eaten by large carnivores. That seems like the opposite of bringing a little virus into the home so that the family also gets a chance to suffocate to death. A great number of healthy consumers seem to enjoy buying big, quick, shiny carnivores. Recent cars seem like they are designed in the image of powerful animals. Transportation options have been limited, so it's hard to get by without a car. We have to justify, or ignore, our contributions to the mayhem of traffic fatalities and injuries. And, with AIDS: the condom shopping is responsible, risk-reducing. We have ways to take a bit of control over the risk, we put on our seatbelts we keep around condoms. Traffic fatalities, for healthy consumers in the "developed" world are decreasing. AIDS is decreasing. But the new diseases are increasing in frequency. Maybe the greater attention to Covid-19 is a reaction to this increasing frequency. We are evolving new risks at a faster rate, and devolving the ability to manage those risks. In the USA and Japan Covid-19 shows us that politicians are more interesting in subsidizing the systems that produce the new diseases. Maybe more of us are staring to realize that it is the large-scale corporations and world-wide system that produce and transport these diseases. Laura Spinney and Mike Davis help us to see how industrial-scale farming and Victorian-style poverty threaten the health of the healthy consumer too. By healthy consumer I mean a person that is not bodily sick at the moment and can go shopping. If our greatest reaction to the most recent pandemic is panicked toilet paper hoarding we are probably mentally sick. We need something more than retail therapy. Though this may be a good time to join Rose George(5) and buy washlet additions to our toilets, we really have to fix the world system. Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin wrote about how chemicals in small amounts seem less harmful, but we don't know how they interact. We are immensely burdened by synthetic chemicals. I wonder if maintaining immunity to all these new diseases will prove to be another burden. The classics, Silent Spring? and Our Synthetic Environment may help us think about what to do about all these threats to our health. We need to work for a global ecology of health, a sane world. As Rachel Carson criticized the use of pesticides for being costly temporary solutions: profitable for manufacturers but catastrophic for ecologies. We are ecologies among ecologies so stupid poisonous solutions are dangerous for us too, it's not just the birds and the old and the poor. Hopefully we are learning to look for wise healthy approaches to our safety and health. For this wisdom we need to look to the health of the entire earth ecology. Covid-19 probably came from bats and other forest animals that were forced to mingle with pigs and industrial people. Perhaps, on the scale of the earth we have "to look for permanent solutions that preserve and strengthen the natural relations in the forest."(Rachel Carson, Silent Spring) Subsidizing the corporations that destory the forest and the earth's ecology in general is going to make pandemics more frequent, the way catastrophic weather is getting more frequent. We need a world system that doesn't destroy earth ecology. background links, quotes (1) Coronavirus: why such a huge reaction? (2) D\ post: factory farming, globalised industry and rapid urbanisation Laura Spinney in The Guardian: political and economic production of viruses But to understand why the emergence of such zoonoses – human infections of animal origin – has accelerated in recent decades, you have to understand the forces putting those viruses in our path. They are political and economic. They have to do with the rise of industrial-scale farming concerns in China and the resulting marginalisation of millions of smallholder farmers. (3) influenza is an important paradigm for infectious disease TD: I want to take just a brief side trip. The book you wrote before Planet of Slums was The Monster at Our Door on the avian flu and I realize, as we talk, that it's thematically linked to Planet of Slums because it's also about a kind of planetary slumification &#x2013; of agriculture. Davis: A Dickensian world of Victorian poverty is being recreated, but on a scale that would have staggered the Victorians. So, naturally, you wonder whether the preoccupation of the Victorian middle classes with the diseases of the poor isn't returning as well. Their first reaction to epidemics was to move to Hampstead, to flee the city, to try to separate from the poor. Only when it was obvious that cholera was sweeping from the slums into middle-class areas anyway, did you get some investment in minimum sanitation and the public-health infrastructure. The illusion today, as in the 19th century, is that we can somehow separate ourselves, or wall ourselves off, or take flight from the diseases of the poor. I don't think most of us realize the huge, literally explosive concentrations for potential disease that exist. More than twenty years ago, the leading infectious disease researchers in a series of volumes warned about new and reemerging diseases. Globalization, they observed, was causing planetary environmental instability and ecological change likely to shift the balance between humans and their microbes in a way that could bring about new plagues. They warned as well of the failure to create a disease-monitoring or public-health infrastructure commensurate with globalization. In my book, I looked at the relationship between the pervasive global slum, everywhere associated with sanitation disasters, with classical conditions favoring the rapid movement of disease through human populations; and on the other side, I focused on how the transformation of livestock production was creating entirely new conditions for the emergence of diseases among animals and their transmission to humans. (4) Mask Humor Pandemic 2009 "You should have seen Mexico City," ERRE replies. "I was down there for the Zona Maco Art Fair when the flu pandemonium started. At first it was just a big joke. Everyone was decorating their face masks with Salvador Dali mustaches or big teeth like Bugs Bunny. On mine, I wrote 'Ay cabrón, qué gripón traigo!' ['Oh shit, what a terrible flu I've got!'] "Then the famous archeologist Felipe Solis suddenly died. He was the director of the National Anthropology Museum and the previous week had given Obama a tour of Aztec treasures. There were rumors that he had swine flu. [This was subsequently denied by medical authorities.] That chilled the whole scene. People didn't know what to expect. It was like the Camus novel [The Plague]. Best friends were afraid to give each other an abrazo or a kiss on the cheek. &#x2014; Mike Davis and ERRE (5) D\ Post EXPERTS believe we would be better off ditching toilet paper completely. — (2) “In the bidet v toilet paper matchup, the nod goes to the bidet. Bidets are healthier than toilet paper. They provide better personal hygiene,” says the US urologist Dr Philip Buffington. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, a book about the “unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters”, is blunter: “I think only using toilet paper to wipe is pretty filthy, and it’s quite an achievement of the toilet paper industry to have persuaded us that we are clean. My Toto Washlet travel bidet has just broken and I’m bereft.” https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2018/feb/11/the-bottom-line-why-its-time-the-bidet-made-a-comeback Comments/Conversation possible through Diaspora* #Covid-19 #pandemic #influenza #MikeDavis #RachelCarson #MurrayBookchin #RoseGeorge #flu #LauraSpinney]]> Why this Covid-19 reaction?

In a Radical Fun article (1) Sean Michael Wilson wonders why Covid-19 is getting so much more attention, such a larger reaction, than deadlier threats like driving, boozing, and smoking. Sean asks good questions and reminded me of recent thoughts.

I am around fifty years old. It seems like new diseases emerge more frequently. In the 1980s it was AIDS, the first new disease that made an impression on me. For decades, AIDS was the only new disease to worry about. For the most part, with a little care and attention you though you could avoid AIDS. People bought condoms, they were not sold out. Toilet paper did not disappear from shelves. The new diseases don't have to be viruses. After AIDS, it was a long time before we heard of diseases like MRSA, bacterial infections that can't be controlled by anti-biotics. And even if the bacterial disease to evolve soon after AIDS, the infections killed people who were already sick and in the hospital. Healthy consumers didn't seem to need to be too concerned for themselves. Unconsciously maybe people think that since the over-use of anti-biotics keeps bacon cheap, losing premature deaths among the already weakened in hospitals and old age homes are worth it. Maybe we share values with Madeleine Alright: she said that the cost was worth it when asked about sanctions that caused the deaths of Iraqi children. Control of oil in the Middle East helps keep bacon cheap too. But all the chemical colors and additives in bacon contribute to cancer.

Cancer was already old news in the 80s and 90s. And it seemed like it was mostly old people died of cancer. Again, like MRSA, healthy consumers do not have to be too concerned. A construction worker uncle said that in the old days people just died, now they die of something. It may have just been the 80s, or maybe adolescents and young people tend to be oblivious, but it seemed like when you got old, you had to die of something. Unconsciously it was easy to believe that people died of cancer because they were living longer. With general impressions of progress, the unexamined feeling that wealth and health were increasing, it was easy to imagine that more people died of cancer because more people got old enough to die of this particular something. It's a shame we don't spend more time reading and remembering Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Murray Bookchin's Our Synthetic Environment so that we contain and mitigate the occurrence of cancer by controlling chemical manufacture and use.

So, like Sean asks, why is there such a large reaction to Covid-19 when we seem to accept the greater death tolls from cars, cancers and bacteria. Even among the viruses ebola and influenza kill more people every year. But the poor people in Africa dying of ebola are not able to get on planes and cruise ships to share it with the rest of the world. Sales people do not convene in African countries for seminars before going to ski resorts in France to share ebola with all of Europe. Influenza travels well, but there are vaccines to buy, a lot of us have built up immunity. Again, like MRSA and cancer, the flu seems to kill mostly the weak: people who are already sick, or old and aren't rich enough for fabulous health care. There isn't the same personal stake for the healthy consumer.

The salaried consumer and potential voter can maintain a healthy lifestyle, obtain a decent healthplan and imagine he is relatively immune to a lot of dangers. He can be diligent with his seatbelt and driving. He can avoid alcoholism and nicotine addiction. A lot of people do, people are health conscious.

And as great as the death toll is, we get the feeling, at least in the United States and Japan, that smoking and traffic deaths are decreasing. People are aware of alcoholism and the liver. It's easy to believe that risks are decreasing, as they did with cholera, smallpox, the measles. We are making progress, life is getting better.

But life is not getting better, death is coming sooner. In the United States two young guys made the documentary King Corn after hearing that their generation would not live as long as that of their parents. In Japan too, it seems like the 60 and 70 year olds are not doing much better than the 90 year olds. Progress brought us processed food and high fructose corn syrup: cancer and diabetes. Cancer is helped along by all the factories and vehicles that deliver fast packaged meals… But with some thought and effort we think we can avoid deaths from illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Maybe we can look away from premature death thinking “personal responsibility.” A certain percent of the population is going to be susceptible to the advertising strategies and addicting qualities of damaging foods and smokes. But the healthy consumer should be able to avoid these ills.

But these new ills. It seems like you have a lot more leeway to be conscientious with a condom than with a mask. People tend to be more aware of what they are touching in situations that put them at risk for AIDS. But the new flus and SARS, we don't think about touching steel handles and plastic countertops, we are not conscious of touching our faces as often as we do. The healthy consumer has less confidence in avoiding these new diseases.

And the new diseases kill quicker. They don't kill as quickly as fast cars, but they kill much quicker than AIDS and cancer. You can imagine having the time to prepare and die with dignity, or even choose, how to suffer and die with the older diseases. Gasping to death with pneumonia a few weeks after somebody coughs on you. Where's the free will and dignity in that? The risk of going out with a bang charging a car could have a certain primordial allure to it. Like back when the man were courageously disposable, protecting the women and children by charging out to get eaten by large carnivores. That seems like the opposite of bringing a little virus into the home so that the family also gets a chance to suffocate to death.

A great number of healthy consumers seem to enjoy buying big, quick, shiny carnivores. Recent cars seem like they are designed in the image of powerful animals. Transportation options have been limited, so it's hard to get by without a car. We have to justify, or ignore, our contributions to the mayhem of traffic fatalities and injuries. And, with AIDS: the condom shopping is responsible, risk-reducing. We have ways to take a bit of control over the risk, we put on our seatbelts we keep around condoms. Traffic fatalities, for healthy consumers in the “developed” world are decreasing. AIDS is decreasing.

But the new diseases are increasing in frequency. Maybe the greater attention to Covid-19 is a reaction to this increasing frequency. We are evolving new risks at a faster rate, and devolving the ability to manage those risks. In the USA and Japan Covid-19 shows us that politicians are more interesting in subsidizing the systems that produce the new diseases. Maybe more of us are staring to realize that it is the large-scale corporations and world-wide system that produce and transport these diseases. Laura Spinney and Mike Davis help us to see how industrial-scale farming and Victorian-style poverty threaten the health of the healthy consumer too. By healthy consumer I mean a person that is not bodily sick at the moment and can go shopping. If our greatest reaction to the most recent pandemic is panicked toilet paper hoarding we are probably mentally sick. We need something more than retail therapy. Though this may be a good time to join Rose George(5) and buy washlet additions to our toilets, we really have to fix the world system.

Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin wrote about how chemicals in small amounts seem less harmful, but we don't know how they interact. We are immensely burdened by synthetic chemicals. I wonder if maintaining immunity to all these new diseases will prove to be another burden. The classics, Silent Spring? and Our Synthetic Environment may help us think about what to do about all these threats to our health. We need to work for a global ecology of health, a sane world. As Rachel Carson criticized the use of pesticides for being costly temporary solutions: profitable for manufacturers but catastrophic for ecologies. We are ecologies among ecologies so stupid poisonous solutions are dangerous for us too, it's not just the birds and the old and the poor. Hopefully we are learning to look for wise healthy approaches to our safety and health. For this wisdom we need to look to the health of the entire earth ecology. Covid-19 probably came from bats and other forest animals that were forced to mingle with pigs and industrial people. Perhaps, on the scale of the earth we have “to look for permanent solutions that preserve and strengthen the natural relations in the forest.”(Rachel Carson, Silent Spring) Subsidizing the corporations that destory the forest and the earth's ecology in general is going to make pandemics more frequent, the way catastrophic weather is getting more frequent. We need a world system that doesn't destroy earth ecology.

But to understand why the emergence of such zoonoses – human infections of animal origin – has accelerated in recent decades, you have to understand the forces putting those viruses in our path. They are political and economic. They have to do with the rise of industrial-scale farming concerns in China and the resulting marginalisation of millions of smallholder farmers.

TD: I want to take just a brief side trip. The book you wrote before Planet of Slums was The Monster at Our Door on the avian flu and I realize, as we talk, that it's thematically linked to Planet of Slums because it's also about a kind of planetary slumification – of agriculture.

Davis: A Dickensian world of Victorian poverty is being recreated, but on a scale that would have staggered the Victorians. So, naturally, you wonder whether the preoccupation of the Victorian middle classes with the diseases of the poor isn't returning as well. Their first reaction to epidemics was to move to Hampstead, to flee the city, to try to separate from the poor. Only when it was obvious that cholera was sweeping from the slums into middle-class areas anyway, did you get some investment in minimum sanitation and the public-health infrastructure. The illusion today, as in the 19th century, is that we can somehow separate ourselves, or wall ourselves off, or take flight from the diseases of the poor. I don't think most of us realize the huge, literally explosive concentrations for potential disease that exist.

More than twenty years ago, the leading infectious disease researchers in a series of volumes warned about new and reemerging diseases. Globalization, they observed, was causing planetary environmental instability and ecological change likely to shift the balance between humans and their microbes in a way that could bring about new plagues. They warned as well of the failure to create a disease-monitoring or public-health infrastructure commensurate with globalization.

In my book, I looked at the relationship between the pervasive global slum, everywhere associated with sanitation disasters, with classical conditions favoring the rapid movement of disease through human populations; and on the other side, I focused on how the transformation of livestock production was creating entirely new conditions for the emergence of diseases among animals and their transmission to humans.

“You should have seen Mexico City,” ERRE replies. “I was down there for the Zona Maco Art Fair when the flu pandemonium started. At first it was just a big joke. Everyone was decorating their face masks with Salvador Dali mustaches or big teeth like Bugs Bunny. On mine, I wrote 'Ay cabrón, qué gripón traigo!' ['Oh shit, what a terrible flu I've got!']

“Then the famous archeologist Felipe Solis suddenly died. He was the director of the National Anthropology Museum and the previous week had given Obama a tour of Aztec treasures. There were rumors that he had swine flu. [This was subsequently denied by medical authorities.] That chilled the whole scene. People didn't know what to expect. It was like the Camus novel [The Plague]. Best friends were afraid to give each other an abrazo or a kiss on the cheek. — Mike Davis and ERRE

EXPERTS believe we would be better off ditching toilet paper completely. — (2)

“In the bidet v toilet paper matchup, the nod goes to the bidet. Bidets are healthier than toilet paper. They provide better personal hygiene,” says the US urologist Dr Philip Buffington. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, a book about the “unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters”, is blunter: “I think only using toilet paper to wipe is pretty filthy, and it’s quite an achievement of the toilet paper industry to have persuaded us that we are clean. My Toto Washlet travel bidet has just broken and I’m bereft.”

#Covid-19 #pandemic #influenza #MikeDavis #RachelCarson #MurrayBookchin #RoseGeorge #flu #LauraSpinney

]]> https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/why-this-covid-19-reaction Mon, 30 Mar 2020 14:56:28 +0000 A Suzume Bachi https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/a-suzume-bachi <![CDATA[This is a test/example. これはスズメバチです. SuzumeBachi1 Hornet Japanese Hornet やれうつな蠅も手をする、足をする. --- 小林一世 fly haiku 俳句 Hornet Fly]]> This is a test/example.

これはスズメバチです.

SuzumeBachi1

  • Hornet
  • Japanese Hornet

やれうつな蠅も手をする、足をする. —– 小林一世

  1. fly
  2. haiku 俳句
]]> https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/a-suzume-bachi Fri, 26 Apr 2019 05:04:13 +0000 Hot Baths and Life https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/hot-baths-and-life <![CDATA[It was a surprise to find myself thinking of Goemon Ishikawa while reading Simone Weil's Iliad or The Poem of Force: !--more-- The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero's head no washed out halo of patriotism descends. His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades, Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and its vigour. Still more poignant - so painful is the contrast - is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the faraway, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him. She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle. Foolish woman ! Already he lay, far from hot baths, Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm. Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. &#x2014; Simone Weil In Japan, while Nobunaga Oda and Hideyoshi Toyotomi were in force, death and affliction also took place in hot baths. A large iron kettle-shaped bathtub is now called a goemonburo ("Goemon bath"). &#x2014; (fn:1) Execution of Ishikawa Goemon") Sometimes these old baths, big iron cauldrons are left around old houses. People use them to collect trash and make the cauldrons even harder to dispose of. A historic home in the neighborhood has an intact Goemon bath. OguraTei Bath, Mimata, Miyazaki Nice older ladies visiting Toroku explained the name's origin. At first I thought they said "HoeMon." Since "Hoeru"吠える is to howl it made sense that a cauldron bath used to boil a person to death would be named after his howling. Eventually someone told me I was saying the name wrong and let me discover Goemon Ishikawa. Which of these stories comes closest to what happened, or maybe they all happened but are a combination of what happened to a few different people&#x2026; He was sentenced to death by being boiled alive in an iron cauldron along with his very young son, but was able to save his son by holding him above his head. His son was then forgiven. He was executed on October 8 along with his whole family by being boiled alive. Goemon at first tried to save his son from the heat by holding him high above, but then suddenly plunged him deep into the bottom of the cauldron to kill him as quickly as possible. Then he stood with the body of the boy held high in the air in defiance of his enemies, until he eventually succumbed to pain and injuries and sank into the pot. — (fn:1) But usually, Japanese baths are great places to ponder human life and all the life we depend from. Energy and water are saved as people wash and rinse by the side of the bath, keeping the hot water clean for whoever comes in later. After a couple people share the heat from one bath, the washer machine can suck the water up to clean clothes. Modern Bath in Japan A lot of the gas and electric heat baths are automated now. But some people still heat Goemon baths with chopped wood. Chopping wood is great exercise, a relatively harmless use of the ax. (fn:1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_Goemon #SimoneWeil #Iliad #Goemon #Japan #Bath ]]> It was a surprise to find myself thinking of Goemon Ishikawa while reading Simone Weil's Iliad or The Poem of Force:

The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero's head no washed out halo of patriotism descends.

His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades, 
Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and its vigour.

Still more poignant – so painful is the contrast – is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the faraway, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.

 She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
 To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
 A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
 Foolish woman ! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
 Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.

Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. — Simone Weil

In Japan, while Nobunaga Oda and Hideyoshi Toyotomi were in force, death and affliction also took place in hot baths.

A large iron kettle-shaped bathtub is now called a goemonburo (“Goemon bath”). — (fn:1)

Execution of Ishikawa Goemon

Sometimes these old baths, big iron cauldrons are left around old houses. People use them to collect trash and make the cauldrons even harder to dispose of. A historic home in the neighborhood has an intact Goemon bath.

OguraTei Bath, Mimata, Miyazaki

Nice older ladies visiting Toroku explained the name's origin. At first I thought they said “HoeMon.” Since “Hoeru”吠える is to howl it made sense that a cauldron bath used to boil a person to death would be named after his howling. Eventually someone told me I was saying the name wrong and let me discover Goemon Ishikawa. Which of these stories comes closest to what happened, or maybe they all happened but are a combination of what happened to a few different people…

He was sentenced to death by being boiled alive in an iron cauldron along with his very young son, but was able to save his son by holding him above his head. His son was then forgiven.

He was executed on October 8 along with his whole family by being boiled alive.

Goemon at first tried to save his son from the heat by holding him high above, but then suddenly plunged him deep into the bottom of the cauldron to kill him as quickly as possible. Then he stood with the body of the boy held high in the air in defiance of his enemies, until he eventually succumbed to pain and injuries and sank into the pot. — (fn:1)

But usually, Japanese baths are great places to ponder human life and all the life we depend from. Energy and water are saved as people wash and rinse by the side of the bath, keeping the hot water clean for whoever comes in later. After a couple people share the heat from one bath, the washer machine can suck the water up to clean clothes.

Modern Bath in Japan

A lot of the gas and electric heat baths are automated now. But some people still heat Goemon baths with chopped wood. Chopping wood is great exercise, a relatively harmless use of the ax.

#SimoneWeil #Iliad #Goemon #Japan #Bath

]]> https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/hot-baths-and-life Sat, 02 Feb 2019 12:28:40 +0000 Sunny Winter Garden Pictures https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/sunny-winter-garden-pictures <![CDATA[A new (to me) type of wildflower, a green bug on curly mustard leaf, and a little spider in the sun. A First Notice New Wild Flower in February !--more-- Green Insect on Curly Mustard Green Bug on Brassica Leaf Spider in the Sun Little Spider in the Sun PixelFed Trying the experimental ui on PixelFed let me set the order of pictures in a post. Until now it was a matter of luck to get the best picture as starting picture in a post. I like to give more than one view of what I photograph. This urge I got from reading John Berger's Understanding a Photograph. Which essay influenced me to offer more than one view of any one thing, I don't remember but it is a good book. PixelFed Provided Pictures for this WriteFreely Post Flower: https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/36531 Insect: https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/36535 Spider: https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/36527 #wildflower #insect #spider #PixelFed]]> A new (to me) type of wildflower, a green bug on curly mustard leaf, and a little spider in the sun.

A First Notice

New Wild Flower in February

Green Insect on Curly Mustard

Green Bug on Brassica Leaf

Spider in the Sun

Little Spider in the Sun

PixelFed

Trying the experimental ui on PixelFed let me set the order of pictures in a post. Until now it was a matter of luck to get the best picture as starting picture in a post. I like to give more than one view of what I photograph. This urge I got from reading John Berger's Understanding a Photograph. Which essay influenced me to offer more than one view of any one thing, I don't remember but it is a good book.

#wildflower #insect #spider #PixelFed

]]> https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/sunny-winter-garden-pictures Fri, 01 Feb 2019 15:01:15 +0000 Local Deities by Bamboo-covered slope https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/local-deities-by-bamboo-covered-slope <![CDATA[Rice Field God up close 田の神 One day somebody will tell me about these gods. I wonder who painted this one? It reminds me of the Ebisu deities in Minamata. (fn:1) !--more-- Water God? 水の神 https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/32140 (fn:1) Modo Ebisu Modo Port's Ebisu Yudo Ebisu Yudo port's Ebisu #LocalDeities #田の神 #水の神 #RiceFieldGod #WaterGod]]> Rice Field God up close 田の神

One day somebody will tell me about these gods. I wonder who painted this one? It reminds me of the Ebisu deities in Minamata. (fn:1)

Water God? 水の神

  1. (fn:1)

Modo Port's Ebisu

– Yudo Ebisu

Yudo port's Ebisu

#LocalDeities #田の神 #水の神 #RiceFieldGod #WaterGod

]]> https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/local-deities-by-bamboo-covered-slope Wed, 16 Jan 2019 14:15:25 +0000 Winter Rain on berries flowers leaves https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/winter-rain-on-berries-flowers-leaves <![CDATA[Rain came last night for the first time in a while. Water on the berries, flowers, and leaves lets you appreciate the beauty in a new way. Berries Rain on Berries 1 !--more-- Rain on Berries 2 Flowers Rain Drops on Sasanqua Rain Drops on Tsubaki (Camellia Japonica) Leaves Norabouna Leaves Rain Drops on Reddish Norabouna Leaf Rain Drops on Green Norabouna Leaf Other Green Leaves Rain Drops on Bean Leaf with Tendril Ruccola and Curly Leaf Mustard Ladybug on Grean Leaf The pictures in this post are from PixelFeed posts: https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/31489 https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/31491 https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/31498 I've been working with a Diaspora account for over two years and it has been great. Markdown is great for on-line posts. Diaspora is great for conversations and being "excellent to each other". I like the minimalist, distraction free environment of WriteFreely too. And the ability to edit posts, and the default to post a Draft anonymously before going public could make WriteFreely a great tool for composition. I think Barry Lane has a book on writing that is about the importance of re-writing. Maybe I should write my Diaspora posts here on WriteFreely, as drafts and the blog posts. After catching all the mistaken word typos and the awkward sentences, then maybe I should upload to Diaspora... https://ruhrspora.de/u/bsmall2 My feeling is that WriteFreely could be useful for writing or composition classes.... There could be a fediverse education program waiting to be discovered #Garden #Raindrops #Norabouna #のらぼう菜 #MyGarden #ladybug #PixelFeed #myphoto #fediverse #Diaspora* #WriteFreely #Composition #Education #facdev ]]> Rain came last night for the first time in a while.

Water on the berries, flowers, and leaves lets you appreciate the beauty in a new way.

Berries

Rain on Berries 1

Rain on Berries 2

Flowers

Rain Drops on Sasanqua

Rain Drops on Tsubaki (Camellia Japonica)

Leaves

Norabouna Leaves

Rain Drops on Reddish Norabouna Leaf

Rain Drops on Green Norabouna Leaf

Other Green Leaves

Rain Drops on Bean Leaf with Tendril

Ruccola and Curly Leaf Mustard

Ladybug on Grean Leaf

The pictures in this post are from PixelFeed posts: – https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/31489 – https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/31491 – https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/31498

I've been working with a Diaspora* account for over two years and it has been great. Markdown is great for on-line posts. Diaspora* is great for conversations and being “excellent to each other”. I like the minimalist, distraction free environment of WriteFreely too. And the ability to edit posts, and the default to post a Draft anonymously before going public could make WriteFreely a great tool for composition. I think Barry Lane has a book on writing that is about the importance of re-writing. Maybe I should write my Diaspora* posts here on WriteFreely, as drafts and the blog posts. After catching all the mistaken word typos and the awkward sentences, then maybe I should upload to Diaspora*... – https://ruhrspora.de/u/bsmall2

My feeling is that WriteFreely could be useful for writing or composition classes.... There could be a fediverse education program waiting to be discovered

#Garden #Raindrops #Norabouna #のらぼう菜 #MyGarden #ladybug #PixelFeed #myphoto #fediverse #Diaspora* #WriteFreely #Composition #Education #facdev

]]> https://wordsmith.social/bsmall2/winter-rain-on-berries-flowers-leaves Sat, 12 Jan 2019 14:33:43 +0000