Bodhi Day, a miscellany

This and that. As usual, click images to view full size.

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Today I received four books via Bookmooch, the book exchange network. Membership is free. You add to inventory books you're willing to give away. As other members request these books from you (and you mail them out), you obtain credits which you can use to mooch books from others. What's remarkable today isn't so much four books at one time (all of them novels by Anthony Trollope), but the arrival of two barely-used ones -- one hardbound the other a quality paper edition -- from a member in Lisbon, Portugal. She spent 7.45 Euro to get them to me; mailed Nov. 28, they took only 9 days to arrive. Within the US books are sent Media Mail which costs a bit more than 2 bucks for most books and usually takes longer than that. I'm so impressed with her generosity (and, needless to say, appropriately grateful).

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A member of my family is an admirer of Marilyn Monroe: her photos, her career, her mytique. So this caught my eye:



It can be seen on the photoblog called Shorpy: Hollywood, February 1947. "Movie starlet Marilyn Monroe.", photograph by J.R. Eyerman for Life magazine.

A commenter mentions some other interesting shots from the same time: Youtube: Marilyn Monroe "the army blanket photos 1947". Here's the comment: Marilyn's face, submitted by Charlene on Sun, 12/07/2008 - 11:35pm.

Her face changes between 1947 and 1950; her nose narrows, her cheeks become more defined, and her chin evens out. Check out her Army blanket photos for a view of Marilyn at this age without makeup. Her face is startlingly androgynous at this point - but not three years later, when she has much more stereotypically feminine features.

So this absolutely, heart-stoppingly gorgeous woman still isn't good enough for someone, and has to be changed to be acceptable. You have to ask yourself what they were thinking.

. A couple other comments on the same blog post: A Real Beauty and Transformation

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Odetta Holmes, known simply as Odetta, dies on Dec. 2 in New York City at 77 from heart failure.


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Spiegel has a piece about the perils of ocean yacht racing -- not the ordinary ones: Ocean Race Goes on Despite Pirates, by Rob Schoof


The Puma yacht arrives off the coast of Cape Town on Nov. 2.

PHOTO GALLERY: VOLVO OCEAN RACE 2008

The author says:

In addition to the world's most treacherous seas, the eight teams competing in the Volvo Ocean Race this year could face off against another threat: pirates.

The organizers of the Volvo Ocean Race around the world are continually monitoring the movements of the fleet of eight boats from its headquarters in southern England. Somewhere along the route, there is always a chance the yachts may fall prey to pirates.

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There's a blog post on Scholars & Rogues about Howe and Bauerlein, about whom I wrote the other day: The “dumbest generation”: sloppy thinking, maybe, but it’s put-up-or-shut-up time for Gen X.

The author says: "Howe has Millennial children and thinks incredibly highly of them and their contemporaries (this is his point, directly paraphrased from Millennials Rising, not mine). Certainly the verve with which he goes after Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (the jumping-off point for his column) suggests that he’s had enough Mill-bashing. ... The most disturbing part for me was this: 'And today, as midlife parents, they have become ultra-protective of their own teenage kids and ultra-demanding of their kids’ schools, as if to make double-certain it won’t happen again.'"

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Today is Bodhi Day

The tree:


A sermon: Bodhi Day, Celebrating the Buddha's Awakening, by Ryuei Michael McCormick.
extract: "As the morning approached, Siddhartha contemplated the vast network of cause and effect itself. He saw how all beings were intimately connected to one another in this vast network of mutual influence and creation. Like a vast net of jewels reflecting each others' light and beauty he saw how all beings arose as part of an unending process of mutual creation. He also saw how ignorance of the true nature of reality was the cause of all the selfish craving which led to suffering, and he saw that this suffering could be ended."



Interestingly, there's a blog called Buddhist Military Sangha, which has a post on this day: Bodhi Day!.