Craig Berry

Despite my lingering head cold, it was a fun and active weekend.  Saturday evening, I had some friends over to watch Dark Star, John Carpenter's first film (it started out as his film-school project before being remade as a feature film).  Dark Star is a wonderfully bleak comedy about four bitter, bored astronauts who've spent far too many years cooped up together in a malfunctioning starship.  I'm not going to drop any spoilers, but any amateur (or professional) philosophers among my readers must see this movie.

The on Sunday I headed up to LVX to celebrate Mass with the lovely ardras156 .  Attendance was light, but I was in the mood for a cozy little Mass, so that worked out nicely.  And the ceremony itself was wonderful -- it was the first time she and I had worked together, after about a year of meaning to do so, and the wait was well worth it.  I even forgot I had a cold for that hour.

Now I need to turn my attention to preparing for Kaaba in Ogden this coming weekend.  I could use some rest, but that seems not to be in the cards.  Ah, well, at least I don't get bored. :)

 

On Saturday evening at LVX Lodge, one era ended and another began.  After more than five years of exemplary service, magdalena_lvx stepped down as Lodge Master, with scorpio111 taking her place.  The transition ceremony was quite moving...there were few dry eyes in the house, and I had trouble getting some of my lines out around the lump in my throat.

Congratulations to the Past and Present Masters!

The other evening I taught my segment of LVX's "Ceremonial Magick 101" class series, "The Language of Astrology".  During the class one of the attendees asked me to explain a trick I had surprised her with a few months earlier; to my own surprise, the entire class was flabbergasted and delighted with the trick, and spent most of the rest of the evening playing with it.

I realized as I tried to explain how to do it that my own technique relies on being able to rotate one wheel against another mentally and visualize the new relationships, which not everyone can do.  So I've developed a way to do it numerically.  So, by request and without further ado, may I present....

LA area folks, the LVX Lodge ad for our upcoming "Ceremonial Magick 101" class started running in today's issue of the LA Weekly. It's just a text ad, but it's prominently listed in the events bulletin board section, one of just four items in the "workshops and seminars" category. I'm really looking forward to seeing how well this works.

I saw this issue at lunchtime, when I was out at an optometry appointment. This was with a new doctor (my old optometry office having closed last year). As many of you know, my eyes are extremely weird...so weird that most optometrists and ophthalmologists don't even know that the syndrome exists. So the poor unsuspecting guy shakes my hand and asks "So, how are your eyes doing?" And I reply "Strangely, as usual" and launch into the tale.

He turns out to be a very engaging and curious guy, so we proceed to tick off the four patients waiting behind me while he takes his time checking my eyes. His first look at my eyes through a magnifier literally made him gasp. He rapidly established that none of his automated optometry gear even recognized my eyes as being eyes, and we regressed to the tried-and-true "eye chart and flippy lens experimentation" technique to determine my prescription, and the "thumbs pressing closed eyelids" to gauge my ocular pressure. I admire adaptability like that. Everything looks good; he was even able to correct my prescription for reading to nearly 20/60, better than my usual 20/80.

As he came to appreciate how weird my eyes really are, he asked who had done my early treatments, which included hormone therapy and surgery. I replied "A specialist named Doctor Fine in San Francisco", and he looked stunned, and remarked that Fine was regarded as a demigod within the profession, author of several standard reference works, and mentor to a large fraction of the current leading eye specialists. Then I replied that my memories of him from early childhood were of a very small, very funny guy who would always answer my questions patiently.

He nearly fell over. "Fine examined you himself? That's -- that's like saying Albert Einstein came over to fix your light switch!" Apparently demigods more commonly leave examinations to their associates, but I was too unusual for him to pass up the chance to see me personally.

I called my mom afterward to share this story, and she told me she physically picked Dr. Fine up and swung him around in the air, whooping, when he reported that I had developed a pupil (and with it some vision) when I was six months old. It's not often you get to do that to a living legend. :)

First things first: anubis75, please email me; the address I have for you is bouncing.

My class at LVX Lodge last night on "Creative Destruction" went pretty well, I thought. I found myself wanting to read poetry the whole time; it's one of those subjects that seems to be best approached via art. But I limited myself to a couple of poems each at the beginning and the end of the class, with the middle devoted to such seemingly disconnected topics as the evolutionary origin and reproductive strategy of grass, the relative merits of capitalist and socialist economies, and the Kubler-Ross model of grief. I'm pretty sure there was a narrative thread in there somewhere.

I've had many requests for class notes from the LVX Tuesday night series. There are a few ancient examples on the site, but in general we've been completely ignoring this issue. I'm planning to solicit notes from presenters for inclusion on the site more often from now on, with my own notes from last night leading the way once I've cleaned them up a bit (e.g., adding titles and authors to the poetry selections).

Yesterday evening's Gnostic Boot Camp at LVX Lodge was well attended and a lot of fun. We were doing a "Meet the Saints" night featuring Osiris, Charlemagne, and Valentinus. All three were great presentations that provoked boisterous and insightful conversations, along with some welcome silliness. I was in a bad mood most of yesterday, but by the time I was on my way home last night I felt wonderful.

I think one of the best things about getting older is that you can recognize a Golden Age when it's actually happening. Ten years from now, it's guaranteed that the magical chemistry of the current LVX crew will be gone. A whole succession of other things will have replaced it, some painful, some good in different ways, but none of them exactly what we have now.

When you are young, you think everything is eternal, and thus don't know how much you should savor times like this as they are happening. Only after losing a few Golden Ages do you learn to spot them when you're in them, and to understand how transient they are. Like the Aztecs, I am learning to find that most beautiful which is most fragile. The Aztec idiom for supreme beauty translates as "flowers and song", two of the most ephemeral pleasures in the world. I can't think of a better description for what I feel right now.

I love having interests that cause me to receive emails with titles like "The Snake Hemipenis in Mesoamerican Art".  (Is that a hemipenis on your ritual apron, or are you just slightly glad to see me?)

Initiations at LVX Lodge went beautifully on Saturday.  Along with a great batch of candidates and a stellar set of officers, the Lodge's cantankerous air conditioning system met the challenge of a Valley summer day quite well.  This is in marked contrast to last summer, when we nearly killed most of Grand Lodge by hosting their annual meeting in our space during 120-degree, high-humidity weather at a time when the air conditioning was just barely moving air, much less chilling it.

Meanwhile, I've managed to learn enough about VB.Net to untangle the Premiere Psychics site.  This is a relatively new business started by a friend, and they got started on the wrong foot with their website.  It's nice being able to combine helping them out with learning a new set of technologies.

I went into this project prejudiced against Microsoft and all its works, but I resolved to keep an open mind and see if perhaps the common wisdom in the Java community was mistaken.  I have concluded that no, the common wisdom is spot on.  While .Net does some things much better than any Java toolkit (e.g., "hot" deployment of code updates to a running server), the only IDE choice you have is Visual Studio, and Visual Studio works extremely hard to force you into bad design and coding practices.  I routinely have to override its default choices to make things work the way a web application should.  Now that I've worked out how to do such overrides, I can make it behave without much effort, but I shudder to think of all the bad code being generated by less experienced developers.  Oh, and the server side engine (ASP.Net) takes valid markup (under HTML 4.01 Transitional) and rewrites it to make it invalid.  That completely ticks me off.

Last night's LVX class ended up with a group of five of us there, none of whom had a car.  The other four were going to start an arduous bus-subway-lightrail-bus trek homeward, but I couldn't do that, as the only bus that goes anywhere near my house stops running at 9.  Since that meant I needed a cab, I suggested w all share a cab; that would save them a 45-minute bus ride to the Red Line station, which is more or less on my way home from LVX.

So I ordered a cab from my usual cab company, and specified we had five people and thus needed a van.  They told me it would be 15 to 30 minutes.

Time passed (rather pleasantly, given the company).  No call, no cab in the lot.  40 minutes later I called.  They hadn't even located a van for us yet, much less dispatched it.

To make a long story short, it took 90 minutes to get us all on the road, and that was in two separate cabs, as they still couldn't get a van to come for us.

Now, stuff like this happens.  Maybe all the taxi vans in the Valley were eaten by aliens earlier in the day.  Maybe a convention of van afficionados was in town.  I could definitely accept that there might be circumstances that made it hard for them to meet our needs.

What blows me away (and had me very pissed off) was the attitude.  Did they call me when they couldn't meet the 30 minute deadline?  No.  Did they apologize when I called them?  No.  Did they call me when another 20 minutes went by without the dispatch happening?  No, I had to keep calling them.  And each time I called them, they sounded annoyed that I was bothering them.

Oh, and they kept getting our address wrong, and then sounding annoyed when I corrected them.  When I'd finally had enough, I snapped "You people really need to get your act together," in reply to which I was told that I was getting angry at the wrong person.  I immediately asked to be connected to the right person.  He claimed no supervisor was there.

What very few customer service people seem to understand is that, when they are on the phone with a customer, they are the entire company they work for with respect to that customer.  There's no sense of pride, or even responsibility.  I don't know how you can work somewhere and not feel at least some sense of honor in your work.  But apparently I'm out of tune with reality.  Again.

In any case, we all eventually made it home.  My apologies to my brothers and sisters whom I misled into missing their bus ride home in favor of my crazy scheme.

I just got an email to my webmaster@oto-usa.org address which begins as follows:

I recently came across your site and found it to be relevant to our Seattle ticket site - Seattle Ticket Finder.

I would dearly love to get a peek at the algorithm that decided that the United States Grand Lodge of Ordo Templi Orientis.is relevant to locating local-event tickets in Seattle.  Maybe we have a fundraising project I haven't heard about?

Speaking of algorithms, I have been having an amazing week at work.  I've spent years studying the "patterns" model of software design, which attempts to reduce various meso-scale components of software design and implementation to a manageable set of stereotypical interaction patterns.  I've gotten good at using (and thinking in) the language of patterns, but never really hit that payoff moment when it made my life (and my code) noticeably better -- until this week.  I suddenly saw a way to apply the Visitor and Decorator patterns to our most memory-hungry process -- one that is threatening to make our application unusable -- in a way that almost completely eliminates the need for large intermediate data structures; and it was those large structures that were causing most of our problems.  What's more, the resulting code is cleaner, clearer, more maintainable, and more extensible.  Life at the day job is very good indeed right now.

Last night I taught my class on the symbolism of directions and locations at LVX; it went very well, I thought.  I had two tiny notebook pages of scribbled notes, as is my usual pattern; also as usual, I was still on the first page when we took our halfway-point break.  Attendees were in a boisterous and talkative mood, which always makes me happy; I much prefer discussions to lectures.  Now I need to get cracking on scheduling classes for June.  As my proposed unofficial LVX motto puts it: The fun never stops.

fraterviao is rapidly becoming one of my favorite poets. I'm lucky enough to be able to attend his live performances at LVX Lodge. His poetry and his delivery both harken back to the Beat poets, but with his own special sardonic twist. When he gets on a roll it comes out as something between recitation and chanting; you find yourself tapping your foot to his rhythm. If you're ever in LA on a night when LVXpresso Cafe is happening, be there to catch his mojo.

But even if you can't see him live, you can now enjoy his poetry. His book Fall from Prescopia is finally available; my copy arrived last week. I've been delaying mentioning it here, because I wanted to do a full review. But it's not looking like I'll have time for that, so I'll boil my planned review down into its two essential points:

1. Wow!
2. Go buy this, right now.

That makes two published authors in LVX Lodge, by the way. who's next?

Various remarks and updates, in their original chaotic state, straight from my neurons to yours.

• Saturday's workshop at LVX did something deep and weird and wonderful to me. I'm still waiting for a coherent picture to emerge of what happened. I have the sense of a fault breaking, miles below the surface, and I'm waiting for the shock waves to reach the epicenter.
• I got SRS working on the GL mail server, with only moderate loss of sanity. Now I'm breaking RFC 821 like all the other hip kids.
• I'm continuing to make my way veeeerrry sloooowly through Malory. "Pelleas and Ettard" ticked me off; everybody behaved like boorish idiots except Pelleas, who behaved like a masochistic obsessive idiot. And I'm getting a little tired of Merlin and the Lady of the Lake wandering into the story to either impose a deus ex machina ending, mess with peoples' heads, or both. I picture them in a tavern somewhere laughing their asses off as they trade stories about what they each did to various unsuspecting knights that day. However, I loved the beginning of "The Knight of the Cart"; first we get the source material for "The Lusty Month of May" from the musical Camelot, and then we're treated to a rant about those danged modern kids not having a clue about Real Love, like it was in the good old days (e.g., when Malory was a kid).
• We're having cubicles installed in the dev room at work tomorrow. But the Exchange calendar item for this reads "Cublice installation". I'm not sure I want cublice installed, thank you very much.
• laurellady and I stumbled across The Moderns on Showtime last night. I had seen it before, on contentlove's recommendation, but she had not. She loved it, as did I. This film contains one of my favorite noir-esque exchanges of dialog, between an old flame and our hero: "Do you want me to leave?" "You're good at that."

The whole family headed over to LVX Lodge for the New Year's Eve Mass-and-party last night. It was great having laurellady along; with her health issues, it's been a long time since she made it to an OTO event, and she sure picked a good one for her re-entry. krishnahermes did such a great job of DJ-ing that we danced far more than old decrepit folks like us should. :) We even got madelineusher out on the floor a few times.

The Mass was great as well; fraterviao acquitted himself admirably in his first turn as Deacon, and magdalena_lvx and scorpio111 were stellar. I can think of few better ways to put an exclamation point on the end of the year.

Now I can't resist posting my results from the "auto-resolutions" meme. ( Be it resolved... )

The good: My friend Merri's "Wicca in One Easy Lesson" class at LVX last night went very well. People who were expecting fluffy-bunny-ness were blown away; I guess they didn't listen when I mentioned that one of her craft names is "Sister Napalm". :)

The bad: My family is still sick with the lingering flu that's going around. I've avoided it so far, but it's hard watching them trying to slog through life with that dragging them down.

The ugly: I'm watching several people I respect (or have, in the past, respected) doing embarrassing and stupid things before a wide audience. I have no real way to intervene; nor can I bring myself to look away. So instead I'm stuck on the sidelines, cringing and shaking my head.

But back to good: This morning madelineusher made an offhand remark, mostly to herself, in Japanese, and I understood it immediately. I was rewarded with a patronizing "Very good!"; she omitted patting me on the head, but just barely. It's fun being a language sponge. It's one of my favorite parts of my father's genetic legacy.

Last night's "Astronomology 2" class went quite well. We had a few newbies, which was nice to see. And people seemed to be getting the material reasonably well. In part 1 we discussed and then acted out the qualitative aspects of relative planetary motion -- basically, giving people a gut feeling for what aspects, retrograde motion, and the like actually mean out in the real solar system. Part 2 was frankly too crowded, covering the quantitative side of aspects (which dragged in ecliptic longitude), the relationship between the ecliptic and the celestial equator, the idea of topocentric coordinates, how ecliptic coordinates project onto topocentric coordinates, how house systems arise from different ways of doing that projection, the basics of how to read a chart wheel, and (as a rushed 10pm coda) an overview of how to construct the astrological signs from combinations of elements and natures (cardinal, fixed, mutable) with a few worked examples.

Phew. I think next year there will be an Astronomology 3 so I don't have to rush so much.

I had a chart-wheel handout showing the situation at LVX's location as of 9pm last night, right before our mid-class break. My pattern is to teach people how to read a chart before the break, then at 9pm take them outside, point to the sky, and cry "Behold!" as they see whatever naked-eye objects happen to be in the sky at the time, just as the chart shows them. Last night, almost the entire naked-eye-visible solar system was below the horizon at 9pm; fortunately, the waxing crescent moon was high in the western sky, so what my demonstration lacked in variety, it made up for in simplicity. :)

My main goal with this class series is to get people to understand viscerally that the terminology used in astrology actually connects to real-life objects and processes, many of which are easily tracked with the naked eye. My homework assignment to those present was to get out into the deep desert at night in late March or early April, when the bright zodiacal constellations from Taurus to Virgo are arched overhead, making it trivial to visualize the ecliptic, and the belt of Orion and Sirius off to its east make it equally easy to see the celestial equator. I'm wondering how many of them will do it.

My "Astronomology Part 1" class at LVX Lodge went pretty well last night. Attendance was light, but those who showed up were enthusiastic and bubbling over with good questions. More important, they were extremely eager to wander around in circles holding red and blue balls while I aimed a flashlight here and there, pointing out various alignments and motions of astronomical or astrological significance.

The tough part of this class for me is the on-the-fly choreography. The greatest challenge last night was a three-pass outer planet return, which required my inner and outer planet walkers to start in just the right place and walk at just the right speeds, thus making retrograde motion appear at exactly the right point to line up with a reference "star" (once again ably portrayed by the lovely and talented Dylanus, the Pickle Star) three times in quick succession during the prograde-retrograde-prograde sequence. In previous years I've had to fudge this one heavily; last night it came out perfectly on the second try, and again when an encore was demanded.

Between that and Kaaba last weekend, I'm on a real teaching high right now. There are few things in the world more wonderful than the "Aha!" expression of someone suddenly understanding a new idea. I've seen that expression on a lot of faces over the past half week.

It's been a busy week. Work is going like gangbusters; we're poised to either succeed or fail over the next six months, there being no credible way to maintain the status quo. We interviewed a candidate for my development team today who looks really promising, and I have a couple more in the queue. Then lady_saffir and I had a very pleasant dinner at CPK, giving us both a chance to unload various accumulated emotional tension over a fine bottle of Pinot Grigio. And dinner. And a shared brownie sundae. Emotional tension unloading works better with wine and ice cream, I've found.

Meanwhile, I'm gradually inching out of a couple of closets I've constructed entirely on my own over the years. The long-expected horrible reactions have ranged from "so?" to "cool!", which shouldn't be as surprising or gratifying as it is. Suffice it to say that both my friends and my religion rock.

I'm set to teach Astronomology at LVX Lodge late in November, which I'm looking forward to quite a lot. The "wandering around in the dark with balls" portion of the two-part class, in which students act out the motions of planets in the solar system (with respect to the fixed reference point of the Pickle Star at our last such class), is always both fun and rewarding. There are few experiences more pleasant than seeing that "oh, now I see it!" expression on someone's face as they suddenly understand something they thought they never would, and Astronomology tends to trigger such expressions more reliably than any of my other classes.

The equinox celebration at LVX Lodge Friday evening was especially beautiful. I took a few pictures of the central altar with my horrible 640x480 cellphone camera; after some aggressive photoshopping they came out reasonably well if you don't look too closely at them. I need to get a phone with a better camera, or alternatively a camera small enough to carry around in my bag without crowding out other essentials.

While we're on the subject of the equinox, congratulations to z111 and the AHBH gang on their successful performance of the same rite! It does my heart good to spread this fine old tradition.

We had a very successful evening of music and poetry at last night's LVXpresso Cafe.  anubis75 has posted a nice summary of the evening's entertainment.  People seemed to like my sestina, which was a huge relief; I've been tinkering with the damned thing so long I have lost all perspective on whether it actually works as a poem or not.  For the record: Sestinas are absurdly hard to write.  As I said last night, I seem to enjoy writing poetry in bondage, and apparently Elizabethan sonnets just aren't restrictive enough anymore.  The other poem I read was in an equally rigid metrical framework, but not one of the name brands; sometimes I invent my own straitjackets.

We're going to try to get onto a steady rhythm of doing these once every two months.  I'm already looking forward to the next one!

Despite the continuing siege of my immune system by a low-grade but annoying flu, class at LVX went quite well last night.  Attendance was better than I'd expected; the topic "Holy Books" didn't seem to have the pizzazz of, say, "The Myths of Quetzalcoatl" or even "Astronomology", but I've learned I am incapable of predicting how popular my classes will be.  People seemed happy (and, better, curious) at the end of this one, so I'll score it as a win.  Having braums show up was a nice bonus (he's in town on a business trip this week).

I think I may be feeling a little better today.  I hope so, because I have a very full weekend planned.

Teaching class last night had the desired effect; I got onto the speaker-buzz wave and surfed along nicely.  I wasn't quite as mentally nimble as I like to be, probably because I was starting from such a low; on the bus ride up there, I was beginning to wonder if I was getting physically ill.  But a long, brisk walk to the Oasis and the aforementioned buzz fixed me up reasonably well.  I really have to remember to walk around more often, since it always improves my mood.  Today I did a mile-long meander through the neighborhood behind my office building in the middle of the afternoon, and came back full of ideas and energy, where before I'd been in zombie mode. 

I also think I'm overdoing caffeine, a suspicion which was reinforced when I thought "hey, a Penguin or three would be good right now" after lunch, decided not to have them as an experiment, and discovered that this same thought kept reoccurring to me about every 30 seconds ad infinitem.  That's generally called "addiction".  So I'm doing one of my periodic caffeine reduction regimens.  One cup of coffee with breakfast, one more around 10am, and nothing more.  I'll have a headache in the late afternoon for a few days, but it will let my body clean itself out so I actually feel the effect of a reasonable amount of caffeine again.

One funny aspect of class last night was that, because it was among the more advanced-level public classes offered at the Oasis, Murphy ensured that we had three newbies show up.  I tried to figure out how to make it work better for them on the fly, but finally gave up and talked to them during the break about other classes that might work better for newcomers.  Fortunately, they seemed excited rather than put off by starting off in the deep end of the pool.

Tonight I am going to wander up to Third Street to pick up a book or two, and possibly get a Creative Zen Nano Plus if they're still on sale at Circuit City.  With the amount of time I spend sitting on buses (and the fraction of that time when the light isn't right for reading), it's silly that I don't have an MP3 player.  Heck, maybe I'll even start listening to TCTC again to find out what I've done wrong this week. :)