How To Sharpen Your Philishave

Science without guidance is doubly madness.
Baltasar Gracian, The Science Of Success And The Art Of Prudence, Sec. 16

The Oracle of Ottawa is discovering that his "Thinking About Thinking" project was one of the wisest little undertakings that the Oracle of Ottawa has ever undertaken. It is an ever ongoing project where by the Oracle of Ottawa is seeking wisdom, methods and algorithms to solve any big and/or small problem. It has been quiet useful with some big problems and much to the Oracles surprise it also works very well on the little aggravating problems.

Philishave - 1962, and yes you can sharpen the heads!!

If there is one thing that the Oracle of Ottawa truly loves, it has to be quality. There is hardly anything left in the Oracles secure bunker remaining that is made in China. It has all been replaced with the best domestic made goods. Sometimes these can only be replaced by a very careful search at the local thrift stores. When was the last time that you owned a really good can opener that was stamped Made in the USA?

With personal use items the Oracle of Ottawa is even more obsessive. The Oracle only uses the best he can buy and he uses them forever. As I pound this little missive the Oracle has realized that he has used the same hairbrush daily since about 1975! I paid nearly ten bucks for the darn thing, Made in Germany, and the bristles are still as stiff as the day of purchase. Even more amazing is that the Oracle still has roughly the same amount of hair to daily pull the brush through!

It was about two weeks ago that the Oracle noticed that his wonderful Philishave was starting to miss some hair on the craggy places of my neck. It is a 3000 series rotary three head, that is going into at least it's second decade. Although money is no object the Oracle realized that the parts have probably been long discontinued. Then the "Thinking about Thinking" lessons kicked in. Let the Oracle of Ottawa share the solution with you Dear Reader...

It is common knowledge that the steel in the Philishave rotary heads is the best. The damn things last forever. Top quality. It would be a shame to throw it out, it just needs a strop! If I could just get some fine scouring agent into the heads for a minute the Oracle was sure that the problem would be solved. Then the Oracle spotted the tube of Crest toothpaste on the counter! That is all there is to it Dear Reader. Take a small blob of toothpaste and place it in the center of the three rotors. Then with your finger rub it directly into the separate rotary heads, as it is running. (No awkward dis-assembly required...)  Then wet your finger and gradually apply water until the toothpaste foams up. Rinse the heads and then dry.

And it works like a charm! Why the Oracle of Ottawa totally shocked himself. It is all just critical thinking and logic applied left to right, and sometimes right to left. Results will vary, but the Oracle of Ottawa is very pleased that he will be keeping his Philishave for at least another couple of decades...   

Discovering Thomas Piketty

It is obvious that lack of adequate investment in training can exclude entire social groups from the benefits of economic growth.
Thomas Piketty, CAPITAL in the Twenty - First Century, p. 22

The Oracle of Ottawa first came across Thomas Piketty at his local Chapters retailer. There was a dozen  brand new hard cover copies of Capital in the philosophy section. Go figure, the Oracle of Ottawa can only surmise that Heather Reisman does not want what is between the covers to become common knowledge in Canada. The book is beautifully printed by the same publisher that published the works of John Rawls, Harvard Press. At just under 700 pages it could also hold up a pretty large window or stop a very large door.

Thomas Piketty at Cambridge...

The Oracle knows that the main push of the book is about economic inequality, but the Oracle of Ottawa bought the book for the insights into the actual mechanics of capitalism itself. As an avid stock picker you can't know too much about the actual workings of capitalism.The writing style is very easy to read and absorb.The two laws of capitalism are worth the price of the book.

At the time of this writing Capital is number two in Amazons Top 100 Books list! It was number one until just recently. It has come up in the Province of Ontario election already. Which is not hard to understand, since Kathleen Wynne is no doubt an avid reader. The NDP were too busy singing Koom By Ya and the Conservatives never read books at any time, hence Kathleen Wynne has a pretty big edge with this monster tome under her belt.

This Thomas Piketty lad has learned all about academia very young. He got his Phd. at the age of twenty two! He was awarded the prize for the most promising young economist in France in 2002. Just come up with a theory that cannot be entirely proved or disproved. You get to be a legend by default. Just like Sigmund Freud. Whatever works....

The Oracle of Ottawa's favorite economists are John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx, as all my many international readers already know. They too were fascinated with wealth and inequality. They were also obsessed with how wealth was created. And to study the acquisition of wealth they actually tried it themselves. Especially John Maynard Keynes. He got so good at it that his original portfolio is still compounding in timeless bliss at Cambridge. There was never any doubt about Keynes, he had a ton of his own skin in the game all his life. Thomas Piketty should try that, maybe his next book will be about as long as The General Theory instead of the length of Das Kapital Buch Ein....

Sheeple - You Gotta Love Them

The Bible invariably uses the sheep as the typical apocalyptic or ideal animal. I suggested in one of my books that the reason for that is that sheep societies are perhaps more like human societies than those of any other animal: because the sheep is gregarious, stupid, and easily stampeded.
Northrop Frye, Symbolism In The Bible, Lecture 4, p. 47

Well Dear Reader, it is that time of year again in the Western World. The coming end of the year holidays known as Christmas And New Years. This used to be the time of the year that the Sheeple used to drive the Oracle of Ottawa just crazy. You know the standard aggravations. Joe the Chinese peasant that tries to back into his parking spot at the mall and takes the doors and mirrors off your brand new car. Or some pathetic trot that whips out a debit card to buy a newspaper and a pack of gum. The Oracle of Ottawa could go on and on, but he won't.

Sheeple - Learn to love them....

It was just recently that the Oracle of Ottawa has had another bit of profit from his ongoing thinking about thinking project, and that is that you must come to learn to love the Sheeple. There is simply no percentage in getting all Agent Smith with them. Yes they are a disease, a virus, and they do have a lingering odor, that can really get on your nerves. But the Sheeple at the end of the day have many very important qualities. The most important of them is that Sheeple constantly want things, and there is no way to reason with them is there?

Sheeple - Wallyus Simplicus

And if you are a very smart and shrewd person, you will learn to be very interested in what the Sheeple as a herd want next. Especially if you own a ton of common stocks. When the herd of Sheeple move as a group, shit, they can really move a stock, even a once sure as hell soon to be dead and gone stock. Just ask anyone that works for Apple! Now the Sheeple don't know why they want certain things, all they know is that they want what the other Sheeple want, and they will darn near do anything to be good Sheeple to have exactly what the other guy Sheeple wants and / or already has.

The thing that the Oracle of Ottawa has learned is that the Sheeple can make you really stinking rich. You just have to be able to guess somewhat closely what you think they might possibly want in the near future. This means that you must always have a nice inventory of common stocks that in any way could be possibly affected by the Sheeples herd mentality. Just remember that once one of those stocks goes off and turns a ten to fifteen bagger, be smart enough to get rid of it right away to some other sucker, preferably one of the Sheeple who thinks that he is smarter then you.  

Now the average Sheeple come in four common varieties. The Preps, The Wally's, The Trots, and the most common and dangerous, the skidmarks. Now the Preps are at the appex, the Wallys just like the Dilbert cartoon character fills up over 85% of all corporate cubicals at the time of this writing. The Trots are like specs in a Brownian motion, they just smile and hope to get along, somehow.  The skidmarks are the largest, most powerful and certainly the most dangerous of all the Sheeple. They seem to come from all levels of society. There is no understanding them on an individual basis, mostly because most of them don't even know they are alive. And if you investigate into the situation, they really couldn't care less. But when they want something, look out, they can move stock markets around the world, and just as quickly forget about it when they stray on to something more desirable that they had no idea that they wanted....    

Rene Girard - Who IS This Guy?

Yet for all that the table continues to be that common everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity it is changed into something transcendent.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 82

Rene Girard at the time of this writing is nearly ninety years old. He is the greatest philosopher and Christian alive today that you probably never heard of. The Oracle of Ottawa discovered him on You Tube, quiet by accident while doing up the Richard D. Wolff piece on the best introductory lectures on Marxian thought. Once I heard the famous theory of mimetic desire spelled out, the Oracle of Ottawa was completely hooked. It basically states that all our desires are borrowed from other people. All conflict arises from mimetic desire, and this of course leads to the eventual sure as Sunday scapegoat mechanism.

Rene Girard - Immortal (richly deserved...)

As the "thinking about thinking project" has been progressing, the Oracle of Ottawa kept coming to the same realization over and over; I am missing something really elementary here but I can't put my finger on it. Well Dear Reader, after you become familiar with the basic ideas of Rene Girard, you will soon realize that you have finally discovered the missing and key piece to damn near every thing.  Religion, language, politics, economics and history in the big.

The Oracle of Ottawa quickly realized that this guy must be really dangerous, since it is damn near impossible to find his books or any anyone who has even heard of him. When you happen onto a an actor under these circumstances, you know that you are probably on to something powerful and very valuable. The clincher was when it provided the final and complete piece to my common stock algorithm, which I have deemed the Midas Algorithm For a Portfolio of Common Stocks. Weird how useful and universal a basic idea can be, isn't it?

Among the many advantages of the theory of mimetic desire is that it provides the center idea to understanding many weird books that you know are important but just can't seem to get into. The Oracle of Ottawa will list a few:

1. The Bible - any version...

2. John Milton - Paradise Lost

3. Karl Marx - Capital and most all of his other works.

4. Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

5. Arnold J. Toynbee - A Study of History...

6. James George Frazer - The Golden Bough

Once you have even an elementary grasp of mimetic desire you will be able to plow through the above mentioned works with ease and greatly enjoy them at the same time, much unlike the usual crop of ordinary undergraduates...

Now Rene Girard should have won the Nobel Prize by now, but alas he hasn't. He has won something even better than a Nobel, he is an Immortal in the Academy of France! From what the Oracle of Ottawa can find out about this gig it is way better than a Nobel any day. The French People are pretty smart to have something like this, that elevates the best and the brightest, always keeping the spiral in an upward direction, they should all be very proud of this. In Canada and the United States at the present time we are on a downward  Wall - Mart spiral of spend less, live better, which all in only teaches you one thing; You only get what you pay for...

Thomas Hobbes - A Mortal Flaw Discovered

I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to his Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authourise all his Actions in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one person, is called a COMMON - WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverntly) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XVII, p. 120 

It was just this Sunday morning past Dear Reader when the Oracle of Ottawa read the above passage from Thomas Hobbe's Leviathan, published in 1651, which is to this day considered to be the foundational work that describes the origin and construction of our contemporary societal institutions. Immediately the Oracle felt uncomfortable, that something was wrong, so wrong, in this key passage. He reread the passage again very slowly, and then it dawned on him in a flash!

Leviathan - Mortally flawed??

 Like a nuclear explosion going off in the Oracle of Ottawa's head he realized the serious fatal error within this key passage. It appears that the awesome passage of Hobbes which is the basis for most all societies of the world is most flawed since it breaks two of the Ten Commandments! Not not just any two of the ten but rather the first and second commandments! This is so critical as Hobbes uses scripture as an allegory and a metaphor to build the description of the body of the Leviathan!

 For all of the Oracles Dear Readers that need a little refresher, the first commandment states: I am the Lord thy God. The second commandment is: Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. The above passage, one of the key passages of Leviathan breaks the first commandment in spirit and it breaks the second commandment to the point of outright blasphemy! Now all the really sharp Readers out in the world, especially those in Germany, know that when an error is planted deep into a foundational construction or a set of measurements, the error will propagate slowly (i.e. in a linear fashion) at first and then it will propagate much later in a non-linear fashion.   

Once you come to terms with the monumental discovery you can rapidly understand the cause of all wars, calamities and other atrocities of history various. (Since two buried opposing powers cannot grind against themselves forever.)  All of a sudden Adam Smith and especially Karl Marx are all starting to come in ever so much more clearly. Buried deep within the constructs of our present societies, which all originate from Leviathan, there is buried an ever repeating time bomb, due to a misconstruction of logic that periodically goes off over the course of history. The humble blue collar Oracle of Ottawa has done his life's duty in discovering it and pointing it to you... Now work it! 

Andrew Feinstein - The Shadow World

The arms industry and its powerful political friends have forged a parallel political universe that largely insulates itself against the influence or judgement of others by invoking national security. This is the shadow world.
Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World, p. xxvii

The Oracle of Ottawa has some good news and some bad news. First, the good news; the world that we now live in is not so bad, the bad news is that it is all so much worse than you could possibly imagine. Andrew Feinstein was once an elected MP in the new South Africa, until he ran into the full force of  the shadow world. The Oracle of Ottawa was very fortunate to capture a hard cover first American edition out of a remainder bin for a very good price at his local Chapters store in Ottawa.

The currency of the Shadow World...

The book is very attractively designed, and printed to the highest standards, as is to be expected by Farrar, Straus And Giroux out of New York. It is of a very comfortable octavo size, with the posh, bright clay paper, that gives it that comforting weight in hand . The typographic design is the highest contemporary example of what remains of American craftsmanship.

What immediately engaged the Oracle of Ottawa was not so much all the details of the arms deals, but rather all the dirt and detail on how it is all brought off. How everyone in the decision chain is tracked, filed, cataloged and ultimately corrupted. The Oracle of Ottawa found this very interesting indeed. The Shadow World is a lot like a bag of Frito Lay potato chips, bet you can't read just one page! And that fact that Andrew Feinstein can write like Tom Clancy, and yet relate an even better story that is all true, cited and referenced is to the Oracle of Ottawa one hell of a feat.

Once the Oracle of Ottawa got right into it, a cold realization came upon him. This is not just a book about the shadow world arms trade, it is really an unofficial New World Order playbook! The Oracle of Ottawa was shocked and very appalled  at all the names of the great and good that popped up over and over in the text. Not to give anything away the Oracle will relate a few things that were found most interesting.

page xxviii - how the bank of American Presidents in Washington D.C. was used to send the 9/11 bombers their monthly allowance from a princess in the Royal Saudi family. (9/11 truthers will love this book...)

page 53 - how the Roman Catholic Church through the auspices of the Vatican Bank, accepted cash money, hand delivered by a Saudi Prince to throw an election in Italy.

page 205 - the name of a once very important Canadian MP and figure skater who is up to his neck in the shadow world.

page 223 - why Olaf Palme was really murdered.

page 264 - a most interesting story about Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands otherwise known as the co-founder of the Bilderberg Group! Yes Dear Reader, the shadow world is a strange house of many twisted rooms.

page 283 - the very weird and scary fingerprints of the Carlyle Group in and around the shadow world.

page 505 - how Pat Robertson was a good buddy of a certain third world dictator who lobbied for his interests in America in a hoped for return of a gold mine concession in Liberia! Praise the Lord and pass the ammo!

 All in, the Oracle of Ottawa couldn't put this book down. And it is a keeper at arms length for future reference. It has also occurred to the Oracle of Ottawa that Andrew Feinstein might not only have one hell of a good book, but rather, he may have given birth to a whole new juicy franchise! Could it be that Andrew Feinstein is the founder of the Jane's of New World Order dirt and filth? The Oracle of Ottawa can hardly wait for the next updated installment!  

Rammstein - Waiting For The Opera

Even if my pencil doesn't do justice to the model, my intention always does.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, IV, 58

It would probably come as a great shock to most of my Dear Readers that if you asked the Oracle of Ottawa who was the greatest rock band in the world today at the time of this writing, the Oracle would have to reply instantly; Rammstein! Even though the Oracle of Ottawa is six years older than Till Lindemann, and has seen very many of the most awesome rock bands of all time in his misspent youth, including the first seven tours of Canada's greatest rock band Rush, the Oracle stands by his choice.

Till Lindemann

Rammstein was in Canada in the recent past, out on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. The Oracle of Ottawa seriously considered attending, one last big blowout in honour of his misspent youth. But alas, age and the serious misgivings of my significant other forced me to change my plans. It was a good thing too. The weather of the night of the concert was still over 85 degrees. When the Oracle saw the clips on You Tube and on the CBC of the actual blow out event he was relieved that he wasn't there. It was insanely hot and the Oracle at his advanced age would have surely wilted as a delicate flower.

The Oracle always tells anyone who will listen that Rammstein is much, much more than just a flashy rock band. Many of their works are going to be standards of German classical Leid in the centuries to come. You should see the strange looks the Oracle gets when he lets that one off in public! Although you can't even easily buy a Rammstein CD and it is impossible to get the concert DVD's in North America the Oracle strongly believes that we haven't seen nothing yet. 

What impresses the Oracle the most is the utter commitment of the members of Rammstein to their art. They will undergo any discomfort and social moral restraint to get the desired effect across. All of the members at some point have suffered personal injury in their performances that would put many of today's Rock and Roll Hall of Famers out of commission for ever. But again the Oracle of Ottawa strongly believes that there is much greater stuff to come. Like a full and serious Wagnerian style opera. The Oracle strongly believes it is in Till to bring us a stunning modern German opera in the greatest classical German tradition. The Oracle feels that the subject matter will pretain to ancient German archetype with the effects of the New World Order on the fate of the world....

Postscript: Could you imagine Geddy Lee or Mick Jagger going this far out on a limb for their art? Till can make the baddest Academy Award winning Joker look like a harmless cub scout! Now that is true art...

Vince Gilligan Interview With Charlie Rose

Things acquire the status of being good or evil only if someone - anyone - cares about them one way or the other.
Richard Taylor, Good And Evil, p.31

It is deep into the dog days of summer. The Oracle of Ottawa has been on his usual baseball watching binge, and enjoying every moment of it. Why today the Oracle got in three complete games! As the last west coast game ended, the Oracle of Ottawa flipped to PBS Watertown in the hope of catching something interesting and was quiet surprised to find that Charlie Rose was on. The interview was with the creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, on stage, live, at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.

Vince Gilligan(left) - Aaron Paul(right) - who got it from Ep. 1 

The Oracle of Ottawa was intrigued. At last, the man himself! And it being the last and final season of Breaking Bad, the Oracle of Ottawa was hoping for the sincere, so obvious, explanation of what Breaking Bad was really about. There was nothing to lose now, the last eight episodes are in the can, and there is nothing left to lose by explaining the truth to the complacent American audience what the whole epic was really about. To hear the words right out the mouth of the mind that created it all. Or so I thought. What the Oracle witnessed was bizarre, surreal and completely raving American Psycho!  

Much to my amazement and shock, the Oracle of Ottawa had to come to the flooring realization that Vince Gilligan is in essence an idiot savant! Through the whole interview he stuck to his "awe shucks" marketing routine, choosing his words carefully, fully pondering there future possible impact on his further possible projects! He truly has not or ever had a clue to the impact of the prophetic epic that he has been allowed to tell, and its real meaning! At the time of this writing the Oracle of Ottawa is still reeling...

The first episode of Breaking Bad was one of the most powerful works of television that the Oracle has ever experienced. A brilliant chemist ends up teaching high school chemistry somewhere in a Southern US state. It is no doubt a "right to work" state, the money is lousy, there is no union, there is a handicapped child, and to add insult to injury, there is the insane American class burden of Walter having to portray to society that he is indeed middle class and is yet left by contemporary American society to some how pay for it all with nothing. Then there comes the cancer diagnosis! To this viewer in Canada, one could tell right away that Walter has no medical insurance to cover this catastrophic illness. Forced to the wall Walter abandons his morals and makes a monstrous conscious decision to survive long enough to provide for his family after his demise.

Contrast this with a Canadian high school chemistry teacher in Ontario, Canada  with Walters credentials. This teacher makes $70,000 - $130,000 a year, minimum. He is a senior department head, he might even teach a class or two a week. If this man comes a downer with a cancer diagnosis, it is just another life hurdle, certainly not a death sentence. He will have government and private additional insurance. He will be given sick leave at full pay, or very nearly, for as long as it takes. His chance of a full remission and recovery is astoundingly high. Not like Walter...

What Breaking Bad is really about is the death of the American Dream. It is a prophetic epic of the future of America. It is a symbolic tale of the death of America. A republic and a dream built on an outmoded frontier mentality that peaked on a battle ship deck in a Japanese harbour sometime in 1945. Now the European Union is the biggest economy on Earth. The standard world currency is not the American dollar, it is the Euro. The grand cities that were once the arsenals of democracy rot in bankruptcy. We are told that it is all creative destruction. Everybody got the destruction, and it seems that the creative ability was also destroyed in the process also...

Ponder the carnage created by Walter White. Ponder the vast amount of state resources it takes to search him out and possibly stop him. Ponder the global social costs around the world. Walter White is (was?) just one ordinary man forced to abandon his society, the great Leviathan, and in turn it is more than just one life that becomes nasty, brutish and short. What will be our fate when the Walters start coming out of the woodwork in their thousands?

Postscript: The Oracle of Ottawa was shocked by Vince Gilligan when he could not explain Walter Smith's street name of Heisenberg, it is no doubt a tribute to Werner Heisenberg who unlike Walter Smith was able and allowed to make great contributions to the world as the father Quantum Mechanics.
Bryan Cranston in the character of Walter Smith always exudes the aura that he too could have done great things if something as mundane as an IPO had not gotten in the way. Werner Heisenberg was also the father of the Uncertainty Principle, do you get it now?

Paradox Of The Spread

If you do know that here is the hand, we'll grant you all the rest.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Section 1

In the Province of Ontario there is a game called Point - Spread offered up by the folks at Ontario Lottery and Gaming. It is offered in baseball (MLB), hockey (NHL) and football; both NFL and CFL! The "authority" assigns a value or a handicap figure to the perceived favorite of a matchup and you the punter simply have to decide if the team in question can win by more than a half point, a full point, and so on, or not. You can select from two to twelve games. The prize for picking the spread right for twelve consecutive games is one thousand times the wager. In Ontario at the time of this writing you can wager from two to one hundred dollars on one ticket. Imagine! Turning a two-ney into two thousand dollars!

Probability, even simple probability is very weird...

And in Canada it gets even better, the winnings are tax free! Provided of course that you are not doing it as a business, but only as a hobby. (If you are employing fifteen "runners" to place your tickets, odds are that you will be declared a business, so one must be careful.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 It is now on the verge of July. And everyone knows that July and August are nearly the two most important months of the MLB baseball season. Along with April, May, and June, not forgetting of course, September and October.... Again the Oracle of Ottawa is contemplating the fine points and eternal mysteries of the "spread". How hard can it be? Picking the correct result of the spread in a mere two games pays two times money. Two dollars becomes four dollars. There are games every day, why a really sharp person could own the world! Two events, with only two possible outcomes, Bust or Cover, gives the punter a one in four chance of doubling his money. That is like flipping two heads in a row, or hitting cold on two babes and getting their phone numbers one right after the other, stuff that the Oracle of Ottawa has done over and over in his long life with total ease. But sub in the words point spread and it might as well be infinity.   

The cold hard odds of picking the spread on twelve consecutive games is a mere 1 in 4096. Close inspection will reveal that that is one of the fairest props going. And it is fair. We are not talking soccer or cricket here. What keeps the Oracle of Ottawa up late in these summer nights is the certain knowledge that he has done far better at events with much, much higher odds. Take for example a twelve question test where there are four possible answers for each question. We now go from 1 in 4096 to 1 in 16,777,216! That is on a twelve question multiple choice quiz with four possible answers for each question, there are 16, 777, 216 ways to answer! And 531, 441 ways in which you can answer all twelve questions wrong! 

The paradox to the Oracle of Ottawa is that he can remember far more than one instance in his long life where by he has aced a twelve question multiple choice test with four choices offered for each question...Yet for the sheer life of me at the time of this writing, the Oracle still has yet to cash out on a three gamer point spread ticket. Which has the hard odds of 1 in 8, and which pays five times money. 

P.S.

Friday last there were 13 MLB games on the list. The Oracle of Ottawa focused for one more try and doped up all the days games. Then in fear that he might be becoming a problem gambler at two dollars a throw per day, put away the list in revulsion. The plan was to play two twelve gamer tickets one starting from the top and the other from the bottom of the list. Yesterday the Oracle decided to teach himself a lesson once and for all and check the results. There is no way on Earth that anyone can pick the spread results for thirteen games! Well Dear Reader you are right, I only picked 11 out of the possible 13!! If the Oracle would have played the two long shot tickets, he would have had two tickets that had 10/12 correct results, which pays 10 times money! My high stakes of $4.00 would have become $40.00... The Oracle is sure there is a moral to this story, but he just can't put his finger on it....

Frankenstein - The Best Modern Edition

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume I, Chapter IV

Frankenstein is simply one of the most enduring archetype tales of Western Civilization. The Oracle of Ottawa has come to it a number of times in his lifetime. The first time as a child, when I read it in Classics Illustrated, No. 26. At that time the Oracle of Ottawa enjoyed it as a story of a crazy doctor that patched together his very own home made man. How twisted weird is that? And just a hell of a good story. Later on in life the Oracle of Ottawa read the actual novel, and still took it as a great ghost story, and began to ponder the utter intricate detail, and its ability to draw you in. The third time the Oracle of Ottawa, much older and wiser now, came upon the Belknap Harvard annotated edition in hard cover. Now the Oracle of Ottawa realizes that it is all more than just a superficial story. It is all so much deeper than that.

Belknap - Harvard edition

The Annotated Frankenstein is a masterpiece of American printing. It warms the Oracle's soul that Americans still print books in the actual United States of America, right down to the silk like end papers! The margins are as wide as Texas, and the annotations are very scholarly and deep. Which will provide many searches on Wikipedia, that will take you to post graduate depth in no time. Just follow the links. And best of all it is cheap! Or in a more sophisticated phrase; represents excellent value. This is the most definitive edition, that balances content perfectly with artistic craft and beauty. And all that detail, will still bring the goose bumps to you just like the first time you read it when you were a little kid. Well actually with all the background thrown in, it actually makes the book even more scary!

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster

 As the Oracle of Ottawa came to Frankenstein for the third time in his life, he realized that this is much more than a scary story. It is a masterpiece, a damming indictment of a system that the author observed being born in her lifetime, but as of yet, did not have a name for. It is the story of a mere mortal of a man that thought he could cheat God so to speak. He would use all the methods that had recently been discovered, and combine them in his own selfish way that would create something greater than the sum of its parts. But as you have no doubt noticed in earlier readings he did not ponder the effects of his creation on the greater common good, and, of course, the results were monstrous.

On top of the text of Frankenstein, there is included a ton of fascinating information. The Oracle of Ottawa found the chronology just fascinating. And I won't give anything away. But the editors did miss one or two interesting dates. For example, in 1776, was the publication date of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations! And in 1818 the first edition of Frankenstein was published, the same year as the birth of Karl Marx...              

Herman Melville - The Meaning Of The Whale

We live in a world that has got along without us for billions of years, and could still get along without us, in fact still may.
Northrop Frye, On Education, p.148

It has been many years ago now, that the Oracle of Ottawa has read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The Oracle found it a deep, dark, masterpiece that goes very deeply into many of the remotest recesses of the human mind. The best edition to read is the one that was illustrated  by Rockwell Kent. Today if you can discover a first edition of Moby Dick in the orange or slate blue cloth, it would be worth about $60,000 to $100,000.00 dollars! Which is all pretty ironic because it was all but a busted flush in Melville's lifetime. It is widely known that poor old Herman only made $556.37 from the American edition in his lifetime and the book never sold out its first 3000 copies in his lifetime. It was the same with Karl Marx with Das Kapital, and it was the same with Henry David Thoreau and Walden. The nut of the story is don't expect anyone to get it while you are still alive, normal people are such a drag aren't they?

Herman Melville

As with all classics of English literature, Moby Dick goes down a lot easier if you know your Bible and have a good grounding in the rudimentary facts of the classics. The Oracle of Ottawa would just like to touch briefly on some points that he found passing weird. Many of the characters have Biblical names, this is all real important, and the Oracle of Ottawa suspects that some of these names could have Islamic references, it is very surprising that no one has went there yet, so to speak. The theology is grounded in the Old Testament, and possibly the early Prophet. Moby Dick is the gayest, queerist, raging fag novel in all of American literature. Note that there are no women characters, or any mention of the feminine at all through out the greatest American novel. But this is very important to what the novel and especially what the whale is all about.

Moby Dick - Americas gayest novel...

Another aid that will help the modern reader get the most out of Moby Dick is a copy DSM IV. You will soon discover that he majority of the characters of Moby Dick are lightly touched to outright certifiable! How long do you think the character Ahab would last in modern society? If you read right through to the end you will be very well versed in the symptoms of all the major obsessive disorders. And if you are very perceptive you will soon realize that the whole book is about the pursuit of raw naked power. You can delve deeper into this by reading Arthur Schopenhauer in his Will And Idea. It all can't be helped really.

The whale is the ultimate homo erotic phallic symbol. The monster beast that plows the deeps. Just about what America has always been about isn't it? The whale is the symbol of raw naked power and the joys that come with it. Domination, degradation and humiliation. Moby Dick, the ultimate representation of the real American experience. Any questions?

Skidmark TV - The New Genre

You can't get away from TV. It is everywhere. The hog is in the tunnel.
Hunter S. Thompson, Generation Of Swine, p. 44

The Oracle of Ottawa is old enough to remember when television sets came in fine wood cabinets, with retractable curtains. There were only the possible twelve channels. Channel two to thirteen. All programming ended before midnight, leaving the viewer to either go to bed, or to ponder the image of a very folksy Native American until programming resumed at a decent hour sometime tomorrow. TV back then seemed to have a higher purpose for the greater common good. The first stations of course, in Canada anyway, were opened and run by governments. If memory serves correctly, it took quite a while before the corporate whore greed heads got tuned in to the possibilities. 

RCA Indian Head Test Pattern - when TV was awesome...

Back then of course, it was all a different world. TV was the medium of the greater common good. Programing was either pure entertainment, and / or educational and uplifting. It was all so civilized and respectful. The unspoken mantra was to treat the audience and the medium with respect. This pattern continued for many years. It all really started to take off in the 1970's with the introduction of channels like TV Ontario. There were no corporate charities, no in screen marketing. The purpose was high and clear, as a matter of fact it was never even questioned. TV was a medium for mass education and the uplifting of the masses, regardless of social or economic standing. It seemed that society was wide open back then, things would always continue to get even better, the sky was the limit. Money was way down on the list.

Then along came cable television and color televisions! The Just Society was under construction. The Liberal Party of Canada ruled and would continue to rule forever. It was simply the natural course of things. The people of the Laurentian consensus were simply doing their ordained duty to God and Country. Then in the 1980's and the 1990's came the first "specialty channels" in the awesome one hundred channel universe. There was a great effort by the first pioneers to continue with the algorithm that had always worked for so many years, so well and profitably.  

Canada -  Minister of Heritage

 Then something snapped at the end of the twentieth century and continued with a vengeance into the dawn of the twenty first century, to the time of this writing. We experienced the digital revolution, and the advent of 1080HD, you would have thought that all that would have started a another golden age. But somehow much to the amazement of the Oracle of Ottawa something ugly started to emerge. Like a different life form that hatched from an egg, and then began a predatory life cycle of never ending strangeness, TV started to get uglier and even more uglier, containing a thousand slimy and crawling things.

The old paradigm of the greater common good and the unquestioned mission of uplifting the masses turned in on it self. Now television is predatory, with a very strong element of degradation and humiliation. The premise is now of profiting off the misfortune of others seems to have been deemed a growth industry. Maybe this what the corporate whores, greed heads, spin doctors and fart catchers decided, but the Oracle of Ottawa put down the remote, save and except for television of the old paradigm. The Oracle of Ottawa is watching less and less now a days.

In Canada we are under the temporary sway of a nasty right wing fascist conservative government. They constantly preach to us that capitalism in raw tooth and claw is the best thing for everyone. But as of late there have been noises from the pig of the man that is now the Minister of Canadian Heritage that we simply cannot continue to see the beloved CBC continue in its old role and mission. This is well received and heartily promoted by lowlife western Canadian media outfits, that have all but turned the Oracle of Ottawa from television forever. It has crossed the Oracle of Ottawa's mind to even cancel all the extra packages that he now pays for and never watches.

Perhaps this is the message that the media empires only understand. If the Oracle of Ottawa can order a pay for view sporting event from his remote and digital box, the Oracle of Ottawa simply can't understand why he can't buy just the channels that he actually wants! The corporate whores of the so called media empires better get on with it, before they are broadcasting to themselves... 

George Jones - Someday My Day Will Come

I'll be the one I want to be
Someday my day will come...
George Jones, Still The Same Ole Me, 1981

It was with great surprise that the Oracle of Ottawa heard of the passing of George Jones. What surprised the Oracle of Ottawa even more was that he died cared for, and in bed, and that he lived to be 81 years old. It is a hell of a long way from Saratoga, Texas to being a pillar of Western Popular Culture. Many readers are no doubt surprised that the Oracle even knows who George Jones was, but the Oracle must come clean and freely admit that between the most excellent rock concerts of my fondly misspent youth, the Oracle would always crank up the radio when a George Jones song came on in the car. And growing up in the Ottawa Valley we had one of the first FM Classic Country stations, CKCY. and everyone up the valley tuned in, and back in those days it was all Classic Country, and if you listened you were very familiar with George Jones.

George Jones strikes a wicked Hunter S. Thompson pose
and see's it all to the end.

The Oracle of Ottawa comes from a generation that can very easily remember the sound of the Grand Old Opry coming in through an AM radio on a Saturday night in the 1960's. And of course we all heard the stories of George as he became more and more famous and his life careened more and more out of control. And in recent years as more and more details availed themselves from George himself, the Oracle of Ottawa was forced to realize that Keith Richards was really just a ribald amateur compared to George Jones!

The excess was legendary. The Oracle can't help but comparing the similarities of the lives of Hunter S. Thompson and George Jones. Both were equally famous in their craft at very nearly the same time in American cultural history. One in the printed word and the other in song. One survived it all and one did not. There are some very important lessons here. The first is that is very hard to kill a Marine, and George Jones was a Marine. And the second lesson is that a man will survive most anything if he does not give up on his God(s). And the Oracle was always impressed with the Possum's deep underlying faith. So much for Fredrich Nietzsche...

Some Thoughts On Laminar Flow

There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 87

Laminar flow is one of the physical phenomena, with the most striking demonstrations, that we seem to know the least about. The Oracle of Ottawa has started coming across it over and over lately, while carrying on the "thinking about thinking" project. One of the most powerful demonstrations of it can usually be observed in water fountains that are in public buildings such as shopping malls and airports. There is one in Ottawa, at the Orleans shopping mall, where a laminar flow column of water goes nearly a hundred feet high in a perfect tube of water. Once you see it, you never forget it. Especially when it is surrounded by columns of water in turbulent flow.

Laminar flow(a) - Turbulent flow(b)

How this trick is achieved with water is strikingly easy. They insert a tube of tubes in the pipe of the laminar flow column. The Oracle of Ottawa finds it cosmically ironic that making the water (fluid) flow through what you would think be a constrictive construct would actually make the water flow super smooth, go figure, God does not only play dice, He / She has a morbid sense of humor to top it all off.

Even more weird is that if you look up laminar flow in a university physics text, even the extended version, laminar flow gets all of less than two of the texts one thousand plus pages! Laminar flow occurs in all liquids and in any fluid mechanics text, air is considered a fluid. The Oracle of Ottawa checked in some of the texts that he has on heat engines, and even in the newer texts, the authors admit that not much is known about laminar flow inside a heat engine of any type! The Oracle of Ottawa cannot help but think that there is a huge field of research here. And huge opportunities for major improvements in performance and efficiency with little up front cost. The Oracle of Ottawa may discuss a few these ideas in later posts...

All this weirdness was opened up by two Englishman of the nineteenth century; George Stokes and Osborne Reynolds. Now this Reynolds guy put all the magic of laminar flow in an equation that gives up the value of the Reynolds number. He also wrote a very weird book called The Sub-Mechanics of the Universe. And that is one read that the Oracle of Ottawa will have a look at in PDF format. He had some very out there ideas that would probably be very useful in the "thinking about thinking" project. The Oracle of Ottawa also finds it ironic that Reynolds life overlapped that of Karl Marx... Hmmm. There will be more on this insanely esoteric subject in the near future...

The Bible - A Reading Plan That Works

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code, p. xviii

The Oracle of Ottawa still can't believe that he finally read the whole thing! It was all in and done on Thursday last. All 2180 pages of it. (Oy!)  The Oracle of Ottawa could never read as fast as Harold Bloom at 400 pages per hour in his prime! The Oracle of Ottawa doesn't think he can break the 40 page an hour barrier, but never the less, he gets it done.

The "Red Brick" This is what you want, exactly...

It was all started by watching Northrop Frye on TVO's show Big Ideas. They found a whole wack of video tapes of the great Northrop Frye lecturing at Victoria College and they ran one on the Introduction to The Bible course that was very popular back in the 1980's, when even then, Northrop Frye was all but a legend in his own time. The Oracle of Ottawa was fascinated with the approach, and vouched safe the fact that you will never get through Milton if you don't know your Bible. But the thing that got me sucked in was the realization that the Oracle of Ottawa had never read the Apocrypha!  

That was how it all started about three months ago. This will be a piece of cake the Oracle thought. There were several editions and translations on hand in the secured bunker. But, much to the surprise and chagrin of the Oracle, he only had one version of the Bible that contained the Apocrypha! And that turned out to be The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, in the Augmented Third Edition of the New Revised Standard Version. College Edition, An Ecumenical Study Bible. ( Did you know that in the time of the King James Version, around 1611, that it was against the law to print a Bible without the Apocrypha?) The fluke of circumstance turned out to be a Godsend. Read on and the Oracle will explain...

It is all about the covenants. If you can grasp that little idea you have the job wacked. And the perfect place to start is at the Apocrypha, the period between the old covenant(s) and the new covenant(s). The Oracle found it all most interesting reading. Especially the Book of Ruth! What a Babe! This has to be some of the earliest feminine literature there is. And it was hot X rated stuff, it made the Oracle all tingly several times. Glass ceiling my ass... Any way as you read on into the Maccabees, you realize that the world at that time was changing rapidly, the old ways were not working like the past and there is a detected longing and hope for something better. Soon you will have read right through, and there will be a lot to ponder.

Now after reading the Apocrypha, read all the essays that are located after the New Testament. This stuff is utterly fascinating gold. Did you know that a talent weighed 75 pounds? After this section you will certainly know the difference between a Philistine and a Pharisee! And the Oracle surely enjoyed the essay on the work of Northrop Frye! The words in the words and the importance of the words in the right order, you will eat this stuff up.

Now after the Essays section, start the New Testament, yah! Put a first bookmark right there. Now with your second bookmark place it at the beginning of the last book of the Old Testament, which of course is Malachi, the last of the minor prophets. Now place your third bookmark at the book of Genesis. Now everyday start at the New Testament for as long as you can, then get in a few pages from the last of the Old Testament. Then try to get one page or two from Genesis.

Since the text of the New Testament is more modern and familiar, you will finish these books of the New Covenant before the Old Testament. When you have wacked, or rather finished reading the New Testament, take that first bookmark and place it at the start of the second book of the Old Testament, after Genesis. Now when you have read Malachi proceed to the next unread book at the end of the Old Testament. Now what you will see happening is that you are working into the middle. And the shorter books at the end of the minor prophets will spur you to continue.

With dogged determination, you should have the whole project end at around the prophet Jeremiah. Individual results will vary of course due to native pig headedness, desire and level of intelligence. When you get it  in and all done, you will think differently and understand the incredible haul of the development of what we call Western Civilization. And you will certainly be able to proclaim that you lived up fully to the promise and potential of your baptism, as you damn well should!    

Blogging - Safe As Houses

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
1 Corinthians, 15:36, NRSV

Of course, a lot of people have said to the Oracle of Ottawa, that they think he should shut the blog down, and that it is way too dangerous a thing to do today. With all the touchy issues that the Oracle of Ottawa touches upon, this cannot be good for a long and otherwise boring life. Some people have even warned that the Oracle certainly runs the risk of extraordinary rendition, to a secret location, where I will be reprogrammed by a steady diet of Fox News. The Oracle of Ottawa always responds that the United States is nice to visit at any time of the year. 

Blogging - Safe as houses...

What the these caring people do not understand is that blogging makes the Oracle of Ottawa feel real good. It is the Oracles greatest hope that one or maybe two of his created memes will catch on and cause the creation of a better, and all around, more equitable world. We must, after all, live in hope. Then the Oracle of Ottawa explains that this stupid blog is the one creation of my whole life that will probably live on the longest after the Oracle is gone. Like they say, once it is on the net, it is there forever. And who knows? Maybe some crazy publisher in a distant left wing country in the European Union will publish it, and it will become the gospel and bible of a new and better world order.

The safety issues were explained to the Oracle of Ottawa by his favorite niece, nothing to worry about Uncky Oracle, the words are way too big, and even worse than that, you sometimes discuss math and numerical mathematical concepts. Result; no conservative of any stripe will be able to get through the opening  epigraph of the post. See? Blogging; safe as houses...  

Here is a Blog Checker from the Conservative Party of Canada, located in Ducks Ass, Alberta. Nothing to fear but the unavailability of free birth control and the morning after pill....

Volcanating At The Vatican

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
John, 1:5, NRSV

The Oracle of Ottawa can't help but compare the retired Popes exit to that of Richard Milhous Nixon, all those years ago. The big white elephant of a chopper lifting the powerful into a one time trip to oblivion. It is all so strange and smacking of weirdness. Rumors abound, the internet and social media explode in the search of the most likely causes. Well, the Oracle of Ottawa is not being led astray in the least. It all has nothing to do with prophecy, or strange goings on with the altar boys, which you have to admit is all a welcome change. The Oracle of Ottawa strongly suspects that it all has to do with power and money, mostly the money.  

Cardinal Reinhard Marx the long shot...

Has some large derivative trade gone terribly askew? Did the Popes barber stock tipping finally tank? What is it all really about? The Oracle of Ottawa wonders and wonders. Anyone who knows anything about papal conclaves, is that it surely is something that is impossible to rig. With such a large number of electors, with such diverse goals and backgrounds, you always are nearly sure of the best worst possible choice. The Oracle of Ottawa just has to refer the reader to the guy who today caught his last helo out of Rome. His Holiness must have felt like Mike "The Puffster" Duffy being the last journalist out of Hanoi! And rumor has it that the reason the CBC got him back after all was that the Vietcong paid the CBC an amount to take him back that was just too great to refuse.

Karl Marx had a lot of relatives?

Now the buzz in Canada is that some right wing wack-ball from Quebec is all getting hyped that surely he will be next. The Oracle of Ottawa hardly thinks so. It just isn't going to happen. It will all be very interesting, of that, the Oracle of Ottawa has no doubt. We really need an unexpected Dark Horse to blow everything up so to speak. And of course the Oracle of Ottawa has discovered his long shot favorite. He has deep ties to the actual creator(s) of the left! Why he may even be related, and therefore be rabinical in his recent background. All the way to the House of David. It all could be a real crimp in the Curia...  

The World could use a good steward of the vineyard about now. The more the Oracle of Ottawa see's, the more he likes Cardinal Reinhard Marx. I mean how many Cardinals have been known to don motorcycle leather and lead the annual "run"! The one thing that the Oracle of Ottawa would like to know is; Harley or BMW? Please leave a comment below....

New High Density Power Source - Wait For It...

The future often seems improbable until it happens.
William Greider, One World, Ready Or Not, p.91

One of the most important requirements for Western Civilization is a source of cheap power. The biggest problem today is that we have maxed out all the available old sources. We really need a new super source of cheap, clean, unlimited electrical power. In another moment of dangerous reflection the Oracle of Ottawa was pondering that time long ago when he first attempted to become a digital man. Yes, with my first notebook and a dial-up internet connection, the Oracle of Ottawa explored the brave new world that lay before him. One of the fun things that the Oracle of Ottawa used to love to do for a hearty laugh was go to You-Tube and watch the free energy videos. It was insane and just pathetic. At this time the Oracle of Ottawa was a very cynical young man, who knew that there was and never will be such a thing or break through...

Thomas Edison - Method! What Method?

 In this same recent moment of dangerous self reflection, the Oracle of Ottawa had a realization that several of the most important developments that we enjoy today were not discovered by the correct use of the scientific method and an extensive knowledge of the theory that was actually at work. They were discovered by accident! There are now even books that catalog these serendipity discoveries! And it is not as thin a book as you would think! Two of these greatest inventions (accidents?) are Viagra and the light bulb! 

The Oracle of Ottawa has always found the story of the light bulb the most interesting. The first practical light bulb was "invented" by Thomas Edison. The company that he founded still exists today, it is called General Electric! Now Thomas Edison had all of three months of formal education! Why even Jethro Bodine got to the dizzy heights of the sixth grade! Thomas Edison never even heard of the scientific method, let alone used it. Thomas Edison was the proponent of the simple brute force method of discovery. My favorite story is that while working on the light bulb he got stumped by what kind of wire or filament, that thing that glows inside the bulb, to use.  He simply made up a very long list of all the available candidates and tried every one of them and there combinations until he found the one that worked! The tungsten filament. The rest is just history now... You can still see that actual list that he used and made up. I think it is in the Smithsonian or the Edison Museum. 

The nut of the matter is that science doesn't always work the best in all situations. The Oracle of Ottawa now realizes that in certain kinds of problems that the You-Tube development lab method of seeing what the other guy is doing and then adding to it or taking some part of it away is very powerful indeed. Why the Oracle of Ottawa predicts that the next big energy breakthrough will happen and be developed by some guy, some where on Earth in a garage or a bedroom will be the next to launch tomorrows power technology. Now the Oracle of Ottawa knows that there are certain laws of physics that cannot be broken, but thinking about all the great inventions of the past, the idea is how to bend these laws, to get to the required goal.... 

Zero unity power, free power, unlimited power. That is all crazy talk, isn't it?