Our Namibian Air Tour 2008

http://www.prohousing.co.za/blogspot/namibia and botswana air tour part 1.pdf

I am not responsible for ...

I am not responsible for ...

P.K.Odendaal - 9 September 2011

I was born without any responsibility, so how can you say that I am responsible for this trouble we are in.

I do not even think that I know what responsibility means - and when was this responsibility passed onto me? Whatever happened - it is not my fault. Someone else must have made a mistake. It has got nothing to do with me. I did not even know that it happened.

And that is the reason for the state we are in !!! Nobody accepts any responsibility, nobody is guilty, nobody makes a commitment, nobody cares - and we are all affected by this. So how come nobody knew or tried to prevent it or did something?

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done

And this is also the history of the world since man first set his foot on this planet. There is the classical story from the Bible about Adam and Eve :

Gen 3:11  And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? v:12  And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. v:13  And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

I wonder what excuse the serpent would have made, had he been given the opportunity to speak.

And then on the other hand - the world has had so many leaders, statesmen, writes, scientists, philosophers and other gurus who knew what would happen and who warned mankind about it, but Nobody heeded them.

We all have this wonderfully successful ploy. As soon as things come our side, we think of the most ingenious excuses. We might know that we were the direct cause of this problem, but we will never in a million years admit it.

And still - it is so easy to acknowledge guilt and fix it. All it takes is a little humility - but who has got it ?

Let's hear Mac Davis sing it:

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
when you're perfect in every way.
I can't wait to look in the mirror
'cos I get better looking each day

to know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man.
O Lord it's hard to be humble
but I'm doing the best that I can.

I used to have a girlfriend
but I guess she just could'n't complete
with all of these lovestarved women
who keep clamouring at my feet.

Well I probably find me another
but I guess they're all in awe of me
who cares I never get lonesome
cause I treasure my own company.

I guess you can say I'm a loner
a cowboy outlaw tough and proud
Well, I could have lots of friends if I wanted
but then I wouldn't stand out from the drowd

some folks say that I'm 'egotistical'
well I don't even know what that means
I guess it has something to do with the
way that I fill out my skintight blue jeans.

Even better - listen to it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-07_2DWfEmQ

To be continued ..... in a humbler moment ... should that ever happen.

My travel blog 2011-2

Travelblog 2011-2

Humanism is for the birds - by P.K.Odendaal - 28 July 2011.

Continuing my travelogue in Canada and the USA - July 2011. See Travelblog 2011-1 for first part.

I slept over at Alpena in Michigan - a town on the western shore of Lake Huron. At one of the many ports along this shore I noticed some black objects in the water forming a row. A person standing on the shore told me that it was buoys holding up the fishing nets, so I told him that they would never get away with that in South Africa. Lake Huron is so wide here that you cannot see the other shore - it looks like a sea and has an international boundary running in the middle of this sea. One can easily take a motorboat and travel from somewhere on the shore of Michigan to somewhere on the shore of Ontario. As the customs officials will not like this, I wonder how they are going to stop it other than getting some buoys to float them at the point where the imaginary boundary cuts through the water. I bet they will not have much time or inclination to search all my bags as they did at Port Huron - hanging in the water like that.

My travel blog 2011-3

My travel blog  2011-3 - by P.K.Odendaal 1 Augusust 2011

... about InHumanity and .... InArt - or - I've got a little list.

I am presently in Ottawa (pronounced awddewha in Canadian - a language distantly related to English). But more of the travel side a bit later. I first need to come clean from my previous blog.

When writing the last part of my previous blog, I got so upset about the Inhumanity of us humans, that I stopped it short in order to recover my pose ... and to recover my normal aloofness. In fact I have decided to go to the other extreme and recomposed myself into a lighter mood to address Inhumanity. This is a normal reaction when one feels that one becomes emotionally involved ... a very bad omen ... so one throws a smokescreen and addresses the opposite  notion.

Alaska 2011

My Travel Blog 2011-5.

by P.K.Odendaal.

So we started off quite well - myself taking the co-pilot seat and Gerry, our other travel partner taking the backseat - although not driving from that position as most road travellers usually do.

But as usual - all then begins well ends badly.

It was quickly evident that a democratic process was needed to keep this trip enjoyable and intact.

The first difference of opinion occurred when, after about an hour's flying, the air got rough and Gerry asked that we climb into stiller air. Paul (the aircraft commander) felt that he wanted to stay at this lower altitude and I felt that as well, as I could take better photos so near to the ground. So, we took a quick vote on the issue and we stayed at that altitude. Gerry, however felt that the yaw of the aircraft in rough air was worse at the back and that he was unnecessarily discriminated against. I, on the other hand felt that I got dished out too many indiscriminate and unnecessary trivial tasks at the behest of Paul to suit his idiosyncratic take on the journey - very much the same as the Bellman in the Hunting of the Snark.

The Importance of Nothing

The Importance of Nothing.
Revised 7 September 2011

In this blog I wish to pursue Nothing, no not nothing, Nothing the noun or more descriptively No-thing.

If Everything is Something then Nothing does not exist at all - a conclusion I reached when writing this blog. If it does not exist, we cannot even talk about it, although I know some people (including myself) who can talk about nothing for hours.

In the first blog I have dwelt on our own insignificance - and now I need to look at what is really important - as if that was not important.

I promised in my blog blurb that I would write satirically about what is not important, so, as this is important, it will not be a satire. If we, however, delve into it more deeply - as we should - we will find it to be satirical too, because we do not understand it quite well and also have to speculate a bit or a lot.

You might ask where do I get this notion from, or this fascination with Nothing (if it should ultimately turn out to be something), I must refer you to Creation itself. As we know today and according to the Bible, the whole of Creation was created from one Big Bang explosion of very high energy light, which became gas when it cooled, and planets and stars when it superheated, exploded and cooled again.

The million dollar question then is - What was this void creation was created in, before it was filled with creation ? Was it Nothing ? And if it was Nothing - what is Nothing ? Is such a thing as Nothing something or is it just Nothing ? Is it possible for Nothing to exist at all, or is it just a figment of the human mind.

This blog, therefore, is an excursion into the realm of meta physics for readers who do not know what either meta or physics means - and for the others as well.

We begin with God - as everything should begin and end with. Can God only create Something or can He create Nothing as well? Generally one can conclude that God can create Anything - so then he would be able to create Nothing.

Whether He would do such a thing is however debatable on the following premises :

1. God is the creator of life and the act of creating Nothing, a thing which is void and lifeless or dead, is not part of his repertoire.

2. We regard a void as being Nothing, but maybe we are wrong - maybe it is Something. A void could be Something we just do not see or understand, and may therefore contain wonderful elements with wonderful properties.

3. Although God can do anything, there are things that he just would not do - or could not do. For instance He cannot tell a lie and He cannot sleep. The injunction is therefore that He cannot create Nothing.

An alternative approach to finding Nothing is to approach it from its opposite side. Nothing is the opposite of Something - so, if we can only find out what Something means and we can find out what Opposite means, then we might get to the meaning of Nothing, but unfortunately we do not know what either means presently.

But we need to start at Something and work our way up (or down) to Nothing.

Not understanding it properly, I might write satirically about it, although I do not wish to scoff at it, being such a serious and heavy subject. In fact, I would not know how to contribute something tangible on this subject, other than classifying it. The reason for my present excursion into this, in the first place, was that I know so little of Nothing !!!!!!!!! By investigating it from different angles, viewpoints and perspectives, I feel I might touch some truths and realities about it.

Something can be anything - it can even be numbers - and this is where my journey starts - and more specifically it will start at the number 1 - a very easy number to remember indeed. Whether it is a round number I do not know, but it certainly is a prime number and in the first instance it is a rational number and further it is an integer.

Our forefathers held themselves busy with the discovery of numbers before they entered the arena of mathematics. It is still unknown whether numbers exist or whether it is something, but certainly the whole of creation was based on the uniqueness of numbers.

Integers include all whole numbers, positive, negative or zero. Wait .... ZERO ???? - I did not know it was a number - how can it be ? We are also told that integers are rational numbers.

More satirically, for those who are mathematically challenged, for whom this blog is meant, I will make it easier and speak of persons. It is like adding the numbers 1 and 2 together. It might help us to think in terms of apples and adding 1 apple to 2 apples is more understandable than the pure mathematical idea.

So we have this 1 person. If he is a zero person he will still be rational, and if he is a negative person he will still be rational. So my deduction is necessarily that all persons are rational. My further deduction is that a person who does not exist, like a Zero person is also rational.

Even a person who is only half (1/2 - also called a vulgar fraction) - such a person is also rational. So one can be vulgar (not meant to be vulgar in another sense of the word) and rational !!!

There are maybe more insights in the above statements that one might imagine.

Now we need to find out what is irrational then. Irrational is a number which cannot be expressed as a fraction - a number like Pi=3.14159265 .... (to infinite decimals) is one. So if Pi is a person, he cannot be rational - and he cannot be vulgar, but indeed he will be positive. There is hope for some of us then. Going around the world without being vulgar (in the other sense of the word) but being irrational and positive is also something to be jealous about.

Sorry for my digression into things which are Something. I had to do it to address Nothing.

To temper the ambience, I wish to digress further into things more mundane.
Things that gets bad, gets worse even quicker that we think - adage concocted by myself.

There are negative numbers and the negative numbers are integers and real numbers. If we apply our simplification to persons here, it turns out to be quite interesting.

In the first place - say we have an easy reckoning sum. What is 1 person + 3 persons + 5 persons. The answer is easy - it is 9 persons. If you got another answer we ignored some persons - which is not a very nice thing to do. One cannot ever make a correct assumption if one ignores certain persons.

Secondly. If a bus has 4 persons on it, and at the next stop 8 persons gets out. How many persons are left in the bus? Minus 4 persons of course - don't blink - negative persons do exist (if negative numbers exist), as we have already agreed on that). So we need to get 4 positive persons on board at the next stop to have an empty bus.

If this argument is wrong, then my assumption of taking apples instead of pure numbers is wrong - an eventuality I do not wish to contemplate - as it will lead me to doubt my own existence, whilst this blog is meant to define my own existence. So why do you want me to define myself out of existence.

Thirdly. Things turn out really complicated when we talk or say something. If we meet someone, we normally say less than what we could, specially when we like them. Is what which we did not say then the unsaid part - and does it exist ?

Now suppose we meet somebody whom we do not like, and say things we should not have said - as we mostly do. Will we be able to unsay that later? - and will that unsaid part have the same qualities as the unsaid part of the first example.

Back to basics.

Now we need to look at opposites. This is an even more slippery slope. Is the opposite of Something a non-something, or an un-something or an anti-something - like in - Is unhappy the opposite of happy? Maybe - then un-Something should be Nothing.

The word anti seems to be a good candidate for the simple reason that for anything in the universe there is normally an anti-thing. For millenia scientists thought that matter was matter, and that if it was not matter it was Nothing. These days however anti-matter has been discovered - weird as it may seem. So it is not unthinkable that anti-Something will also be discovered one day. If that is discovered, then Nothing will not be able to exist anymore. Will the mere discovery of anti-something all at once annihilate or destruct all Nothing?

I have no other option than to conclude that nothing is Nothing, but that anything is Something.

So far I have only looked at real numbers, but there are unreal, also called imaginary numbers, as well. An example of one such a number is the square root of minus 1. Our forefathers thought that this imaginary number cannot exist, but it does exist. We use it everyday when we calculte the voltages and currents in alternating currents. The way we solve this dilemma is by squaring it, because by squaring the square root of -1 we get -1 which is a real and rational number.

Can we not solve some of our other imaginary problems by squaring them?

Who am I - Part 2 - The Duality of Life

Who am I - Part 2 - The Duality of Life.
by P.K.Odendaal - 21 August 2011

Are we and our planet (the only) reality?

One thing I know, and that is that this is a half world we live in, a half reality and a half truth. Because we do not know the other half we hide our heads in the sand and pretend there is none other.

Life consists not only of earth, but of the whole universe - not of only ourselves, but of many other creatures - not of only the physical, but also of the meta physical - not only of darkness, but also of light - not only of sin, but also of righteousness - not only of the carnal, but also of the spiritual - not only of the earthy, but also of the sublime. To disregard or ignore the one side is to ignore the total or to live in a fool's paradise.

Travel blog 2011-1

I am as violent as the society I live in. Written by P.K.Odendaal 27 July 2011

This is a strange name for a travel blog, but bear in mind that all my travels are also travels of the mind and the soul and the self - not necessarily on the same path or the same direction - but nonetheless travelling to that Haven of the soul where peace, joy and love abound.

Take a person living in a violent, brutal and inhumane society like Witbank, South Africa -  take him to any beautiful place and take him alone - yes - take him to that beautiful garden state called Michigan, USA  - play him some Country and Western music over the rental card radio from a station such as Western Ontario Radio -  and play his favourite song called Solitaire - play it loudly until all hear, see and other carnal senses vanish and he enters some never never land. Tell the muse to grab him by his collar and stop his car and drag him to some nearby restaurant and inspire him to write what he feels.

Who shoves whom around ....

Who shoves whom around the dance floor - the idea of free will.

So we have this invitation to the dance, be it in the form of a marriage, a relationship, a compact with God to serve Him, as member of a sports or task team or just going on a trip with one or more people.

All these activities are interspersed with the dynamics of human interaction which leaves the door wide open for manipulation, domination and coercion to sway, rule or prevail, and we find ourselves often on the side of the oppressed if we are not offensive enough to let our way and our will prevail.

Afterwards we would say there is nothing like free will - it does not exist, because we cannot and will not (and should not) exert ourselves.
When I look at two dedicated and even trained dancers, I get no feeling of the one prevailing over the other or shoving the other party around - in fact - one gets the notion of a very special form of free will, cooperation, harmony and unity of form and function, that it becomes impossible to say who shoves whom around.

We start off by saying both parties are there by their own free will, looking forward to the excitement of a relationship - be it then only a dancing relationship, but one that is full of romance, excitement, respect, expectation, pleasure and satisfaction.

This metaphorical dance of us, like a real dance, has little to do with physical exercise - it has as its added benefits a strange new world of feeling and spiritual experience far beyond the needs or senses of the flesh and the carnal. In fact, the less one thinks about the physical experience, the more one experiences the emotional, psychological and spiritual effects, and this is exacly where I wish to move to on the level of relationships.

If we are only in the relationships for the physical satisfaction, one misses the whole object of the exercise, where almost imperceptible nuances of style, emotion, feeling, sight and sound takes us to new levels of experience and satisfication.

Although one might think that in a perfectly choreographed dance, there is no leading or direction giving , one makes the grave mistake of missing the cues of nuance previously mentioned. It is only when those nuances become imperceptible that one moves on to a feeling of peace, free will and enjoyment.

Why are we then shoved around the dance floor against our will whilst we await - so to speak - the music of the night. Why are we standing as wallflowers in some of our relationships, whilst our partner is off filling his glass with some other elixir.
We need to stay on the dance floor and concentrate on the music, in this case the wonderful melody of life itself.

It is only when free will comes to complete surrender, that it means something for us and/or our partner. Peace can only come when you surrender - from Sunset Boulevard
Let us then surrender ourselves in this relationship - if we think it worthwhile, so that we can taste the fruits of it on other levels.
And, what if we are the ones who shove someone around this dance floor? Shame on us, because we have not learnt the basic tenet of free will, love and understanding. With our role of leading man/lady in this dance, comes the responsibility to maximise the enjoyment of our partner and not of ourselves, because our own enjoyment is really seated in the fullness of the enjoyment of our partner, similar to the situaiton where we cannot alone enjoy beauty - we need someone to enjoy it with us. Let us then be even more sensitive to our actions and keep it to the toned down nuances resting in a touch or a look.

A dialogue between Moses and Aristotle - Part 2

A dialogue between Moses (1392 - 1272 B.C.) and Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) - from Transcripts of their debate.

Written by P.K.Odendaal - 16 Feb. 2011

PART 2

The Logical proof system.

Moses :   And what are your theories and observations ?

Aristotle: Man is the crown and centre piece of the universe and thus his position must be in the middle. And what is more - anybody can see that the stars,sun and moon moves around the earth.

Moses:    Wow !! You invented Logic, which was used for the next 2 200 years, and you tell me that you made these important and wild statements without the scientific and mathematical process of your own Logic. Your notions for the centrality of earth will not cut the mustard in any intellectual argument being, as you term it, an irrelevant conclusion.

Aristotle: No, the system is quite easy, although I did not apply it to my 'wild statements' as you allege. I did use one of my irrelevant conclusions to prove that one. But the Logical process is like this :