Welcome to this week’s “zine.”

by Mark M

Excerpts from Sumari BULLetin, an exercise in artistic license, July 1987:

The End of a Funny Story

…and when they got back, they all laughed.

Schematic Portrait

Being only a portrait, one did not knotice that the subject had flat feet…

Gift of the Gaffe

(I’m sorry, there musbe some mistake. Next…)

…

Hi, May I Hinder You?

I create my own reality, so don’t you go screwing things up on me.

Seeming Miracle

Have you had yours to-day?

TV Scream

…

Excuse He While I Accelerate or

Just how fast are tachyons anyway?

wire that feels good and not barbed stuff something’s happening and it’s happening quite now (but you can’t seem it) too many people shitting & pissing (bad quantity control) bonzoidal comboidal paranerd epigram–a short quote, like at the beginning of a book, by a person who is smarter than the book’s author stoopid Dick Shids hangnail cure: fingernail transplant H.M.S. Scietanic Wanted: Dead or Just Injured: John Q. Prudeface gun in heaven every signal one who are the Cincinnati? life in Shameland the Eternal Revenue Service the Magma Carta the right to make bad art Racine County Hysterical Society thou shalt not slay (OK?) eminently unqualified temperature drip Harry and the Five O’clock Shadows the U.S. Maureens express your apathy “Yes,” he said affirmatively gosh damn it anyway dishonestly generous what a penis penis oil glut henchwoman thinking w/Allah my mite dog, cat, and bird poo-up one sunny night drink Wiskie goddam meadeaters waiting for things to get good Arabink numberal new light fammlliarr ssiliennce John Linen’s gon, hegot soul’d justa kidneygardener just a useless pesticulator gayographer gayograffee halt, hom gose ther? one oneders a guy or too(?) Tomothy the name of the gain something to SNEEZE at a poison ivory hardening of the ivories galleons and pints a fine adjest-ment yes, I’m swingle striklee prohitibed keep off my lawn more LSD–enforced illumination; alcohol–enforced stoopidity a crack quack and the Lord asaid, “Let there be lice!” and after that things got to be
mo’ nomal

How Much izzat Goddie inthe Windo (Anyway)?

There’s no business like church business.

NOTE: If you can’t stand our heat, get out, just get out ( ! ).

———=———

Random Universe?

For 10 years or more, I usually play a friend at Scrabble two times per week and about 90% of the time he gets the K and very very often, I get most of the 4 U’s which, unless you have the Q, are rather the bummer vowel.

I will often have 2 or even 3 U’s on my rack of 7 letters and often near the end of the game.

My friend often will have racks with a shortage of vowels, and often my problem is the opposite, a shortage of consonants on my rack.

What I have described happens over and over again.

Statistically speaking, I should get the K just as often as he does and he should have a U problem as often as I do. Same for those lopsided racks of either too many consonants or too many vowels.

But no, those patterns I described repeat and repeat.

It’s not a random universe.

“Now: There is no such thing, basically, as random motion. There is no such thing as chaos. The universe, by whatever name and in whatever manifestation, attains its reality through ordered sequences of significances.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 9, Session 788, September 6, 1976

“ordered sequences of significances” — any number of times with the radio on in the background while reading an e-mail or such, my eyes will alight on a word at the exact same time as the same word is spoken on the radio, mildly startling.

———=———

In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, the author asserts that some Native American tribes, for instance, would drive entire buffalo herds over a cliff.

“According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere.”

But, certainly, I think it’s safe to say, in general, Native Americans got the connection to nature thing far more right than Western civilization with its capitalism destroying nature for profit and so forth. And it seems they kept their numbers in check compared to all those Europeans migrating to the “New World” over centuries.

(On November 15, 2022, the world population is expected to pass 8 billion.)

——–=———

If you go to https://onelook.com/ and type in a common word, say, “jacket,” you get links to the definitions of the word by about 28 on-line dictionaries.

If you type in “kringle,” you only get 4 hits, at present anyway, and, clicking on one, you get “No results found for kringle”! If you have a print dictionary, chances are the word “kringle” is not in it. It’s not in the 6th Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Official Scrabble Players Dictionary which also leaves out four-letter words and racial slurs because they note in the preface that Scrabble is a family game, but it has room for the letters of the Hebrew alphabet such as PE — and QOPH! So, if you make a Scrabble play of KRINGLE with someone from, say, Utah, they might say, “WTF are you trying to pull?”

That’s because, not counting, say, Denmark, kringle is not widely known here in the U.S.

From Wikipedia, which was one of the four hits:

“Racine, Wisconsin has historically been a center of Danish-American culture and kringle-making. A typical Racine–made kringle is a large flat oval measuring approximately 14 inches by 10 inches and weighing about 1.5 pounds….

“Other places where kringle may be found in the United States include the Ballard area of Seattle, Washington; Redmond, Washington; Solvang, California; central Iowa, specifically Story City, IA; Burr Ridge, Illinois; Springfield, Missouri and Watertown, Massachusetts. In 2005, Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, held a Kringle Kontest, which was won by Kirsten’s Danish Bakery in Burr Ridge, Illinois.”

I would be interested in sampling kringle that has a sweetness level on a par with that of a typical scone. Otherwise, I am not much interested in such baked candy.

A note on references one might see to “Webster’s Dictionary”:

The name “Webster” (as in Noah Webster, 1758-1843) is in the public domain. It is seen by a number of dictionary publishers as lending authoritative cachet.

And so we have (partial list):

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary

Webster’s New World College Dictionary

Riverside Webster’s Dictionary

and a number of others.

———=———

It’s just stunning how incredibly hard-working and wildly productive CEOs have gotten over the years compared to the Joe or Jane worker at their corp.

CEO-to-worker pay ratio since 1965…

1965: 20-to-1
1978: 30-to-1
1989: 58-to-1
1995: 121-to-1
2020: 351-to-1
2022: 399-to-1

———=———

Late-stage capitalism:

636 fossil fuel lobbyists swarmed the COP27 Climate Talks.

“Tobacco lobbyists wouldn’t be welcome at health conferences,” said a corporate watchdog coalition. “Those perpetuating the world’s fossil fuel addiction should not be allowed through the doors of a climate conference.”

David Swanson: “…if you’re going to fly government officials to an annual COP meeting, why hold it in an Egyptian dictatorship? Why not hold it on a melting glacier? And given the general failure of all else to end war, why not fly the same government officials the next week to Yemen or Syria, Somalia or Ukraine, and set up viewing stands the way they did at Bull Run / Manassas (or Riotsville), and ask them to look solemnly into the camera and explain how what they’re seeing is creating ‘freedom’ thousands of miles away…”

People like John Kerry who think nuclear power is a climate-friendly solution have no sound plan for storing the waste. Hanford, Washington is the most toxic place in the U.S. Pray it doesn’t explode.

———=———

From

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future

by Cynthia Eller (published by Beacon Press, 2000)

“As I later learned, Gloria Steinem had been speculating about the origins of the patriarchy as early as 1972, when she told the readers of Wonder Woman this story:

“Once upon a time, the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocratic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered, and it was thought … that women bore fruit like trees—when they were ripe. Childbirth was mysterious. It was vital. And it was envied. Women were worshipped because of it, were considered superior because of it…. Men were on the periphery—an interchangeable body of workers for, and worshippers of, the female center, the principle of life.

“The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, the idea of male ownership of children took hold….

“Gynocracy also suffered from the periodic invasions of nomadic tribes…. The conflict between the hunters and the growers was really the conflict between male-dominated and female-dominated cultures.

“… women gradually lost their freedom, mystery, and superior position. For five thousand years or more, the gynocratic age had flowered in peace and productivity. Slowly, in varying stages and in different parts of the world, the social order was painfully reversed. Women became the underclass, marked by their visible differences.”…

Seth: “…it is fashionable to believe that early humans did not understand the connection between intercourse and birth….

“It is the height of idiocy to imagine that because of the time taken in pregnancy, the female could not understand the child’s origin in intercourse….”

Also, little to no division of labor:

“It seems to you that the female always tended to the offspring, for example, nursing them, that she was forced to remain close to home while the male fought off enemies or hunted for food. The ranging male, therefore, appears to have been much more curious and aggressive. There was instead a different kind of situation. Children do not come in litters. The family of the cave people was a far more ‘democratic’ group than you suppose — men and women working side by side, children learning to hunt with both parents, women stopping to nurse a child along the way, the species standing apart from others because it was not ritualized in sexual behavior.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 765

Actually, there is no reason to resort to a mere Seth assertion. If you think about it, at least at the tribal level, reproduction and the notion of paternity would not be that hard for a tribe to figure out, a tribe of heads being better than two benighted copulators.

Say there is an unfortunate woman, disfigured, or with an unsightly birth defect, or, perhaps one with an appalling personality (just as, for that matter, one can imagine some men no woman would let near her), or perhaps mentally ill, or, unfortunately, the opposite of beautiful (again, a man could likewise suffer with any of these) which no man takes a sexual interest in unlike most of the other women who end up giving birth.

After all, a man is “depositing” something into where a baby eventually comes out — except for the unfortunate woman.

Add in the resemblance a child might well have to a particular male and, there you have it, mystery solved.

Technologically-“primitive” people weren’t necessarily stoopid.

Some Eller objections to this myth from Chapter 1 of her book:

“Why then take the time and trouble to critique this myth, especially since it means running the risk of splitting feminist ranks, which are thin enough as it is? Simply put, it is my feminist movement too, and when I see it going down a road which, however inviting, looks like the wrong way to me, I feel an obligation to speak up. Whatever positive effects this myth has on individual women, they must be balanced against the historical and archaeological evidence the myth ignores or misinterprets and the sexist assumptions it leaves undisturbed….

“Women are defined quite narrowly as those who give birth and nurture, who identify themselves in terms of their relationships, and who are closely allied with the body, nature, and sex — usually for unavoidable reasons of their biological makeup….

“…the gendered stereotypes upon which matriarchal myth rests persistently work to flatten out differences among women; to exaggerate differences between women and men; and to hand women an identity that is symbolic, timeless, and archetypal, instead of giving them the freedom to craft identities that suit their individual temperaments, skills, preferences, and moral and political commitments. … [Seth: “You are an individual first and foremost, a member of a gender second.”]

“We know enough about biological sex differences to know that they are neither so striking nor so uniform that we either need to or ought to make our policy decisions in reference to them. And we know that cultures worldwide have demonstrated tremendous variability in constructing and regulating gender, indicating that we have significant freedom in making our own choices about what gender will mean for us….

From p.103ff:

“…feminist matriarchalists almost always posit a form of goddess monotheism for prehistory — though it is rarely called that — and what evidence we have seems to cut the other way. Goddess monotheism has not been documented any place on the globe. Historical religions, from classical antiquity to the present day, are home to many different goddesses if they include female deities at all. In classical Greece, for example, the various goddesses had diverse roles and functions. The Greeks did not regard them as ‘aspects of a unitary goddess.’ …

“Some goddesses are incredibly violent — and not in a way that suggests the benevolent function of watching over the natural cycles of death and rebirth. For example, an Ugaritic text from 1400 BCE Canaan says of the goddess Anat: ‘She is filled with joy as she plunges her knees in the blood of heroes.’ The Sumerian manna is also a goddess of war, and, significantly, neither she nor Anat is portrayed as a mother. Shitala, worshipped today in Bengal, ‘tempts fallible persons, and especially mischievous children, with irresistible delicacies, which then break out on their bodies as horrifying and fatal poxes.’ …

“…goddesses are often known to support patriarchal social customs….

“Goddess worship has been reported for societies rife with misogyny, and at times goddesses even seem to provide justification for beliefs and practices that are antiwoman. Contrariwise, the worship of male gods can coincide with relatively greater power for women. There is simply no one-to-one relationship between goddess worship and high status for women….

“This is a peculiar way of assessing women’s status. Women’s self-esteem, secured through the worship of something female, may be a valuable commodity under harsh patriarchal conditions, but this is not remotely akin to the amelioration of those conditions via goddess worship. ‘Free’ women in classical Greece were lifelong legal minors who were mostly forbidden to leave their homes and who were not even their husbands’ preferred sexual partners. What exactly is the point of celebrating this ancient culture’s goddess worship and contrasting it to our own culture’s lack of the feminine divine? …

“In examining the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, Ena Campbell notes that although Guadalupe “has eclipsed all other male and female religious figures in Mexico,” she is worshipped more by men than women and is used in recompense for women’s ‘actual position in the social scheme.’ Comparing data from Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Campbell concludes that ‘mother goddess worship seems to stand in inverse relationship with high secular female status.'”

From a different author, I thought this interesting:

“The female elements in the Church were always considered suspect, and in the early times of Christianity there was some concern lest the Virgin become a goddess. There were offshoots of Christianity that did not survive, in which this was the case. Parallel developments in religion and government always echo the state of consciousness and its purposes. ‘Pagan’ practices, giving far more leeway to sexual identification and expression, continued well into the 16th century, and the so-called occult underground heretical teachings tried to encourage the development of personal intuition.

[…]

“The Church, however, never really found a suitable method of dealing with its women, or with the intuitive elements of its own beliefs. Its fear of a goddess emerging was renewed each time another apparition of the Virgin appeared in one corner or another of the world.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 773, April 26, 1976

A little further on Gloria from “A Good Life Rule for Leftists: Never Talk to the FBI” by Michael Myerson:

“Back then, Gloria was hardly a celebrity. But she ran the Independent Research Service, which was set up to counter my US Festival Committee, to warn unwitting young folk about the dangers of falling into our communist clutches. Turns out the Independent Research Service was underwritten and formed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Gloria later told me she didn’t know who was funding her, which was a bit surprising since I knew and since she was the one who worked there.”

———=———

At the link is Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon on the election results called “The Right Stuff.“

+ Daniel Horowitz: “A lot of people are saying Republicans underperformed last night, but no party that attempted to violently overthrow the government has done this well in a midterm since the civil war.”

The End.

Next week (subject to change): How the English Language Worx, Volume 1, That U.S. Constitution

Boilerplate: As part of my community project as Racine Writer in Residence, I hereby invite Racine-area people to send me prose or poems of 250 words or less for me to consider for inclusion in my posts as a “guest appearance.” Former Racine Writers in Residence, I want to explicitly include you in this invitation. If you want, also send a photo and a very short “bio.” You will retain the copyright for the material you submit. Send to m.mk at att.net with “Racine WiR” in the subject line. Thank you.

Don’t hide your light under a bushel-sized basket; it is recommended that you let it shine (on like a crazy diamond or something).