movement of c

Well it’s getting very late and I have an early morning tomorrow. I’ve just watched a PBS special on the last few months of Dr. Marin Luther King’s life. I transcribed many of his speeches and also bits of the story that I hadn’t absorbed before. I will be posting these on Sunday, at midnight, in honor of Martin Luther Kind day on Monday. But my real question is, why is MLK Jr. Day in January? Perhaps I will have the answer soon.

For, now since I’m too tired to move my fingers quickly I’ll leave you with a few distractions.

• 1. Eliot having fun with a hard drive.
  (Few or many may have seen this before, but it’s been a while and resurfacing okay.)

• 2. My sister Elizabeth’s first short story, which will be published little by little on this website. Soon a link will appear on my side bar, which is located on the right, with the entire story archived.

  Chapters 1 - 3 of Key to the Future.

• 3. Do you have that kind of dark sense of humor? Really, I’m sorry but this is so funny.

Tonight me and Alison were watching the TV and tuned in to the Cambridge Carnival. We kept asking, where did all of these organized groups of dancers with matching costumes, and masses of drummers playing in sync come from? There must have been 12 groups of chippers. I know that the quick step and krumping pelvis is called chipping because I watched a special about Carnival on the Travel channel.

I saw the Trinidad flag, and started thinking about the ways in which we learn. The first and only lesson I had in the flagship of Trinidad was in 5th grade. We had to draw something that represented our country, I think. I’m not totally sure what the assignment was, but I do know that my classmate Monique drew the Trinidanian flag…that’s where her parents are from. It’s when the flag’s bright color and bold stripes were rooted in my brain, and since then all references ping that day in my mind.

The way in which we absorb information…a beautiful thing!

I have a busy weekend ahead of me that involves a lot of planning, brainstorming, and dancing. These are all good things to be excercising my right to. I’ll be going to a Dance Teacher’s Club of Boston meeting on Sunday morning, but not before planning Summer Dance Camp ~ 2006 with Jaclyn. The 2005 site is still alive, here. This should be updated within the next week. I wouldn’t have had this great website and online registration tool without the help of Eliot, expert in web functioneering.

I’ll also be spending Sunday evening rehearsing the cast of Carousel, and bringing dance and entertainment to a munchkin’s birthday party. I’m glad that I’ll be staying active because I’ve been suffering from rapid atrophy syndrome in my legs. I do a lot of moving in the first half of the week, and often times by Friday evening I’ve been sitting with a computer on my lap for atleast 20 out of the past 48 hours. This hard binary switch from non-stop movement to extreme slothfulness has made my body somewhat uncomfortable. Stretching is the only true solution. Computer land is a beautiful place, but these events have spurred me to move forward with my laptop computer mobility system as soon as possible.

Patent pending, I’d like to build a stand that attaches to the top front section of a treadmill or elliptical. With the right laptop stand, with adjustable heights and angles, friendly users could work, type, click, and read while getting some excercise!

My latest project involves a redesign of my home page, cbear.org. The original site was done about 7 months ago, and since then I’ve acquired some AAA skills that I didn’t have before. The site is in the process of being optimized for Firefox, and still needs a lot of tweaks in IE, so once it’s more exclusive I’ll link to the staging site. For now, please check out the screen shot.If you have any suggestions for the look, fixes, or in general, let me know!

Feeling the pull of moving forward, I’ve got to move on to a new state of conciousness known as sleep.

A tragic hero can become his own human being by his own strength, but not the knight of faith. When a person sets on a tragic hero’s admittedly hard path, there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand. Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.

Inspired by Ari. From Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard.

I caught this thread on Slashdot today. MIT and Harvard scientists are leaning toward the common belief that there are points in the universe from which matter can never return. They call it the Event Horizon: “the existence of a theoretical border around a black hole, a point from beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.”

They deduced this conclusion by examining the common explosion that occurs on the surface of neutron stars. However, when the explosion occurs near a black hole….

…Gas released by a nearby star can accumulate on the hard surface of a neutron star, and it will eventually erupt in a thermonuclear explosion. The more massive compact objects in this study suspected of being black holes appeared to have no surface. Gas falling toward the black hole seems to disappear…

At the last ICORR conference in Chicago, NECAL (neural enginerring center for artifical limbs) presented what they’re calling “the bionic arm”.In an effort to bring humans and robots together as one, they’ve managed to use methods of neuro control, muscle grafting, and super human intelligence. The following description was written in Popular Science.

Electrodes intercept the limb’s residual nerve firings and feed them to a computer embedded in the forearm, which then commands six motors to move the device’s shoulder, elbow and hand in unison.

Even though a limb, such as an arm, may be so severely damaged that amputation is necessary, it’s been found that the control signals for that limb generally remain accessible. By merging these nerves with functional muscles in the chest, the working muscles do the work of contracting (open and closing, picking up etc) and send an electrode signal to the computerized arm. So, while the brain is saying, “close my hand” the signal gets sent down to working muscle –> electrode –> computer closes the hand on the bionic arm. The official bionic arm fact sheet (warning, this is a PDF) says, “The bionic arm, or myoelectric arm, is driven using electrical signals from the muscles of the chest, now activated by the user’s own thought-generated nerve impulses.”

Jesse Sullivan is said to be the only bionic man in several articles, including the Popular Science one. However, I did see some US veterans from Iraq on the east coast recently who also had bionic arms.
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robot cartoon from toothpaste for dinner. thx.

I watched “RIZE” tonight. The movie that opens up Krumping. Tommy, started up doing his thing dancing and clowning and then broke on the circuit with birthday party’s and is Tommy the Clown. Life happens, and he’s got this movement with everybody making their own thing and dancing and releasing. Krump is raw and its just coming from somewhere that’s deep and probably a lot of people don’t know what it feels like. Like Dragon’s Ma said though, “I krump with Christ.”

okay. Really just some thoughts…

1. I want to krump right now, it was inspiring.

2. New things are born out of people but everything old is new again, and its happening simultaneously.

3. There’s so much beauty in the way they move.

The first time dance brought me to tears was a long time ago, maybe 8 years or so. I began to find myself choke up and begin to cry at certain performances. I’ve been crying during the “transition” scene in The Nutcracker for as long as I remember. BalletRox, you took me there. But RIZE did it too, and this time its real.

Basically I want to say that faith is a beautiful thing and revolutions happen everyday.

::: 1 World Krump :::
::: The J-Squad :::
::: Rize - the movie :::

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty, though his dreams have lost some grandeur…Coming true there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty, before the last revolving year is through. And the seasons they go round and round. And the painted ponies go up and down. We’re captive on the carousel of time. We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came. And go round and round and round in the circle game…”

Ever since I was young I’ve known this song. My mother, having the entire Joni Mitchell album collection on vinyl, introduced me to these poetic words at a young age. This is the last of three verses, and as she follows the child from his innocence through his years of joy and struggle she always comes back to the “carousel of time”. But Joni, I’ve got to say that I’m not so sure about the captive part, and I’m not so sure about the time part either.

I have been watching the 1950s musical, “Carousel” over the past two days. Taking notes, and watching the intricate, awe-inspiring choreography inspired by the great Agnes De Mille.

I’m on an Agnes De Mille kick this year. In addition to choreographing “Carousel”, I’m using a medley of Arthur Fiedler orchestrated pieces that are all “American”- orchestrated themes, with a touch of hoe-down, country, even Oklahoma!, the first Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. Basically, Agnes De Mille is a huge iconic figure among modern ballet dancers that are not subject and imprisoned by the confines of classical ballet. Actually, Agnes De Mille once said something to degree of, “Other dancers have kicked higher or turned more, but that’s no substitute for passion!”

When I was young, even though I knew better, I was convinced that my Ballet teacher, Miranda Sugarman, was Agnes De Mille. She came from Russia (Agnes didn’t), and had a wonderful and strong accent. With strict ballet teachers, Russian accents make everything more dramatic. She had the most amazing choreography, and was trained in Character dancing, a mix mash of different Hungarian, Russian, and Czech folk dances that ranged from Czardas (char-dish) which is slow, controlled, 2/4 or 6/8 tempo to other insane fast Russian folk songs that were fashioned after the Trepak dances. So, yes, I thought she was Agnes De Mille in some sort weird way, or atleast, she was my Agnes De Mille.

So I’m taking this knowledge, and trying to learn more to put some fabulous choreography forward starting this week. Carousel is fantastically cheesy, dramatic, and so far my favorite part is when they have the first clam bake of the year….(oh yea, did I mention that the story takes place in “New England” - I think it might be the Cape). Basically, everyone stuffs themselves silly with lobsters and clams, and then they sing a song about it. Click here to listen, it’ll open in a new window.

The Carousel play is different than the movie in detail, but really the driving point throughout both is that time is so precious and we shouldn’t take what we have for granted. Much like a Carousel, we could waste hours going round and round in circles without ever really getting anywhere. However, the Carousel also stands for such positive things like utopian freedom, and carelessness. But, moreso, the issue of time. As of late, time hasn’t seemed to be on anyone’s side.

I started using a cucumber and aloe extract eye gel every morning and night, because I think I might be getting those little crows feet on the corner’s of my eyes. In some kind of effort to be preventative, I started a routine of application, and actually it feels really great, and smooth, and cool on my eyes. My boyfriend Eliot is working so hard at making things happen. And because he’s making things happen, he’s helping to make things happen for other people too. The other night he was setting up the new sprayer backend for 3rdarm.biz, and working with WP 2.0 he ran in to a couple of obstacles with the image upload directory feature and he was able to code hack and make it workable. He posted the fixes on his website, Fleshout.org . My housemate Art has been running back and forth between Connecticut and the East Coast Grille for the past 4 days. Despite the fact he has three arms, he is still almost human, and time doesn’t slow down, even for the IIIs.

More on time in the future. For now, feast your eyes on this.

Last night was New Year’s Eve, and today (as it’s now 2:33 am) is now the day after New Year’s Day. I spent the night with my Cambridge family, Eliot, Art, Ari, and two of Ari’s friends who were mighty fine Boggle players.

After eating pounds of shrimp, buns in the oven (some people call these “pigs in a blanket”, but for some reason ever since I was little that phrase grossed me out), and cheese logs galore, I turned in for a night of subconcious wandering. My dream sequences were all connected in some way, but because I don’t remember the details it’s hard to say. I remember sitting in a diner with someone, and people from my past starting shuffling in. Something big was happening, and I kept looking for someone because there was something so important I had to tell them.

Later on, I remember sitting on a hilly street corner bench with my friend Jamie. Some other people walked by and talked to us, but I was very distracted. It was like there was a sense of urgency throughout the dreams, and I remember distinctly trying really hard to find a certain someone…who, I don’t know. Oh yeah, also there was some kind of shrimp dilemma in a large supermarket.

Now, after a day of making my dad’s new website, eating more cheese log, and playing scrabble, I can’t stop thinking about goats. Don’t ask me why.

Goodnight, and good love!