Related Post:
Unpublished Book: Memoirs of a Reluctant Cult Observer (Fiction)
This is a "me too" post inspired by FriendFeed's "25 Things You Don't Know About Me" meme.
The FriendFeed thread is over here.
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- 1. Born in California, LA area.
- 2. Ran wild in Santa Barbara. Chinese Mansion, Banana Road, Mountain Drive!
- 3. Parents went full-bore with rich-widow neo-hippy crazy-artist themes. Fun while it lasted!
- 4. Parents got sucked in to (and spit out by) a Cult (I Am merged into Children of the Light). Mother was a "High Priestess". They had their own branch!
- 5. Witnessed brain washing and "aggressive" therapy, and forced labor, insomnia and fasting. And a melange of beliefs such as Theosiphism, Christianity, Buddhism, and anything else lying around. Everyone had glamorous past lives, and the lucky ones were planning to "ascend" this plane by "transmuting" their "substance" (and leaving no corpse)
- 6. Escaped Cult with parents at 5a.m. unannounced, and traveled across the U.S. then to Europe. One of the nicest people, Anne, never escaped. The photos below are hers.
- 7. Attended Catholic school in a tiny village in Mallorca, Spain, where I learned French and a little Catalan.
- 8. Attended a Community College near Brighton. A Yankee mutt tested well enough for "posh schools", so they placed him in this alternative co-ed school for O-Level prep. 2 hours each way. Invaluable to his spotty education.
- 9. Studied piano in SF with Robert Sheldon, a student of Egon Petri. Petri taught Victor Borge.
- 10. Worked as an ESL and music teacher in Barcelona
- 11. Attended City College of San Francisco, where I started to program computers at the Electronic Music Lab
- 12. Got a job playing piano, then one programming children's games for Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. In "Forth."
- 13. Went on to work and live in the Silly Valley for a few years in the 80s.
- 14. Learned on the job from graduates of SRI, Xerox Parc and Stanford AI Lab
- 15. After long stints at companies in the North Bay, career as a C++ programmer flamed out in the crash of 2000
- 16. Co-inventor of ImagePump, which was sold to several people, even without a patent. Still in use today. People said nice things!
- 17. In 2004 I started working with Robert Elvin to provide music for his indie film "The Savant" released in 2008. People said nice things!
- 18. Started full-time programming again in 2007, this time Eclipse, Java, GWT, GXT, MySql, tomcat
- 19. 2 sisters live in Ireland, one sister lives in Las Vegas
- 20. I'm highly Skeptical, even of these "facts."
- 21. I have a large extended family on my Mother's side, as she had 6 sisters and a brother
- 22. I wrote a "pocket primer" for the "Performing Pianist"
- 23. I prepared my own edition of Isaac Albeniz' Navarra for piano
- 24. I have been known to mess around with multi-track digital audio. Magix Samplitude is my weapon of choice.
- 25. I am a frustrated radio producer, not much of a blogger, and not a journalist either - I like to help journalists, though.
Bumping this back up to the top in Jan. 2009 for Chinese New Year's. It's that good.
After a long search for available music from remote tribes in South China such as the Wa Tribe and Miao People, I was rewarded with the discovery of a CD available from Wind Records in Taiwan.
BLACK PEARLS Product ID：TCD-5232
- Producer：LIU Jian & WANG Xu-dong
- Composer：LIU Jian
- Performers：CHOU Ke-chi & HU Zhi-ping
- Vocal Leaders：CHIANG Deng & LIU Jian
Other Peoples call them the Eastern Indians, but they call themselves Black Pearls. Where the south of China, Burma and Thailand meet, there is this legendary living Wa Tribe that is physically strong, emotionally pure and peculiarly talented in music.
Touched by the myth, Liu Jian blends Wa music with modern ideas to create a mystical, gallant and innovative masterpiece. Tribal vocals, Chinese male and female vocals, various ethnic, Chinese and western instruments all interweave to bring forth a grandeur harmony, a magical charm, and a loving connection of various peoples of the world.
So:
- SF Municipal Railway (SFMuni) will kill you for listening to iPod devices.
- SFMuni won't kill you by accident or by bad drivers.
- If you have hearing impairment, best not leave the house.
I can't just google "SF Muni accident fatalities" and get frightened, can I?
CAN I??????
courtesy San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
See Also: Muni Diaries
No colored bus lines are found, but there are clickable popups on the transit stops. Shows the next two departures, may or may not be hooked in to real-time transit info.
Enable under "More...transit"; Drag the little man for the "street view."
Here's a link to downtown SF, botttom of Market Street.
This one looks much more useful than the "Wikipedia" feature.
I got suckered in to seeing what autism.change.org had to say, from this email:
Change.org Launches 7 New Blogs; Predictions for 2009
We're pleased to announce that today we’re launching seven new blogs to expand our network to 19 blogs covering the most important issues facing our world. Yes ma'am, that's a lot of blogs.The new sites include Autism, Education, Global Health, Health Care, Human Trafficking, Poverty in America, and Sustainable Food. We've hired an amazing team of experts/activists to lead each community, selected from more than 1500 applicants. We hope you'll stop by, check out their take on the issues they’ll be covering, and welcome them to the Change.org community. (As always, you can find the full list of our blogs on our Causes page.)
I'm not saying that Jenny McCarthy is behind some sort of internet witch hunt technology, but just look at what she did:
See Also: What's the Harm? (vaccine denial)
See Also: The anti-MMR mothers who are putting us all in danger (Daily Mail, UK)Despite their widespread beneficial effects, some people deny that vaccines work, or accuse them of causing various side-effects. Read more about vaccine denial
Here are 4,398 people who were harmed by someone not thinking critically.
See Also: Mumps outbreak spreads into Metro Vancouver (CBC News)
