When Star-Trek premiered on Sept 8th, 1966, star date 1513.1 on NBC, no one knew it would trigger a chain reaction that would ripple through time, transporting several generations through endless syndication, a total of seven hundred episodes, ten movies and countless novels. Now we have phasers set on high stun as the 2009 interpretation of the franchise hits theaters the first week of May.

In recent years, the cancellation of  Enterprise, the last of the Star Trek television series after a four-year run marked a decline in the popularity of the forty year saga, a bit time-worn, partially due to the speed at which technology is moving in the real world, so much so that it’s hard to imagine anything more advanced than the transporter, Hollow Deck, or the touch tap control panels of the Enterprise 1701-D.

The new film brings J.J. Abrams to the helm of the franchise in an attempt to resuscitate the flailing saga by exploring the formative experiences of the original crew of the Federation Flagship, Enterprise 1701, filling in some of the gaps in the relationships that generated the popularity of the series that explored the final frontier. Abrams is noted for his direction of Mission Impossible 3, co-creator of Alias, Lost, and executive producer of Fringe. His icon is Stephen Spielberg and his favorite TV program of all time is The Twilight Zone. Mr. Abrams excels by exploring the inner nature of the hero and the background stories that made their journey extraordinary. There is no one better suited to present for your consideration a rein-visioned Star-Trek. Let us hope he is successful in his attempt.

My review of the film will be posted as soon as I am able to see the film.

Seeing The Future In Psychedelic Color

There is nothing worse than an omelet with egg shells in what should be a wonderful mix of variety: mushrooms, onions, peppers or cheese gently cradled within the perfect enclosure. Perhaps the French had an esoteric understanding when they invented a variation, La Crepe, in the specially designed pan to insure the thinnest pancake. A delicate balance of getting it heated properly and using the right amount of butter or substitute and the proper utensil to fill with the batter to ensure uniform consistency. Culinary historians might say the Chinese invented Crepes first, but it was the French that popularized it just as spaghetti was by the Italians.

There is also an art to cracking an egg open, yielding its nourishing contents, vividly portrayed in literature with great focus in Jonathan Swifts’ classic political satire “Gulliver’s Travels“. In the 1960 adaptation of The Three Worlds Of Gulliver, war is waged based on which side the egg should be cracked (the right side).

The ritual when depicted in cinema is often a mesmerizing event filled with audience anticipation. Imagine Angelina Jolie cooking breakfast, intensely gazing at the egg in one hand, with fork in the other, puckered lips, taking a second or two, thinking “What is the best way to crack it?” In fact I can’t think of ever being distracted or semi conscious when preparing to open one. The answer that usually comes to me, “Any way you can to avoid getting the shell mixed in with the eggs.”

Bon Appetit!

References
- Mastering The Art Of French Cooking by Julia Child
- Sophia Loren’s Recipes & Memories

Although not well versed in the Bible except the comic book and cinematic versions, to me, its words have always seemed less important than the imagery they conveyed. Parables of morality and its counter balance, immorality.

Many stories begin with an ordinary person who faces unanticipated challenges that test faith and self-confidence to inspire action or foster procrastination, either elevating them to another level or down into a fiery abyss of ignorant redundancy, perhaps evil. An example of the struggle between our dual nature.

Courage is more about acting in the presence of fear or the unknown without being paralyzed, rather than moving with certainty. Add hope and we have the basis of myth.

Tales, all of which describing a string of tests of human nature and personal morality ingrained within fundamental values, evolved individually and culturally. A Shakespeare play, ornately written with the tribulations of characters facing desperate odds or nature’s folly, also plagued with personal flaws, struggling, the hand of destiny divinely inspired to an unknown fate while providing a co-measured sense of what all people can identify with and relate in their own lives.

As Moses led the Hebrews down the path revealed by the parting of the Red Sea, I wonder how the water on either side must have looked.

Perhaps the way Cecil B. DeMille depicted it in his biblical epic film: The Ten Commandments (1956). Walking briskly along the moist seabed littered with gasping fish that sacrificed their lives to point the path to cross. Looking left then right, seeing all the aquatic life floating behind the halted sea walls, alive and held in place, watching all of us passing by, also waiting for it all to be over.

Looking back, seeing the chariots of angry Egyptians following the path into the land between the water, a cloud of dust created by the moving army pressing ever closer. All held by the force and control of the sea, parted according to biblical text, by divine intervention.

Most caught in this situation, especially those faint of heart, would probably have feared that the water would collapse at any time and result in imminent death from its crushing force, the walls rippling its weight, towering all on the path. The sky, dark with low clouds, strong wind, thunder and lightening, blasting above by He who has no name.

Others might recognize the opportunity to transcend personal concerns and strengthen the focus of inner surrender and peace to whatever happens, especially in a chaotic situation such as this, looking forward to becoming one with the sea.

Either way, if you are in the middle of all this, chances are you have no control over the event, nor of the outcome, so why not just relax and enjoy the view, a milieu of turbulent experience while humming a somber tune or a transcendental AUM, perhaps in the presence of a miracle, without ever getting wet.

To all those parents out there who thought Comic Books were useless pieces of trash - including my mother who threw out my box of treasured DC classics, this original page from a 1988 Batman story, “The Killing Joke”, reported in a New York Times article dated June 30th, 2008, sold for over $31,000 at auction.

Ha Ha Ha, The Joke(r)’s On You!

On Kandor, The Lost City Of Krypton

Sima Quan, son of Sima Tan, was born near Hancheng, Shaanxi, during the Han Dynasty (approximately 100 BC) into a family of historians, following in his fathers footsteps to the successors of Emperor Wu as Prefect of the Grand Scribes. A student of Confusious Kong Anguo and Dong Zhongshu, his major contribution was the Shiji which included detailed biographies of emperors, royal houses, defining aristocrats, time lines as well as essays on various contemporary issues.

Traveling throughout China, he began to accumulate a rich historical record of early Chinese History including the lives of notables, extracting discoveries from ancient monuments and records kept throughout the land. He explored rumors and myths, encountering the facts within legend and becoming well respected among his contemporaries and succeeding academics, influencing prose in Chinese literature. He compiled an impressive complement to his father’s major work, Annals Of Spring And Autumn, the first chronicle of Chinese Literature, when his father lay dying summoning Quan to his deathbed, expressing his wish that he complete his work.

Sima Quan began his epic with Yellow Emperor Huangdi (2697 BC to 2598 BC), establishing credible records, reliable interpretations of facts in an objective and scholarly manner revealing the life of the emperor who would create the foundation for Ancient Chinese Medicine and emerged as the chief deity of Taoism.

He became embroiled in the Li Ling Affair, a conflict between two military officers of the emperor Han Wudi against the Xiongnu (present day Mongolians), defending Li Ling when he was condemned. The emperor interpreted his defense as a personal attack on the royal house, sentencing Sima to imprisonment and death if he did not pay money to have his sentence commuted.

When he was released three years later, he completed his work, refusing to commit suicide as was custom. His record of the event describes: “The losses he [Li Ling] had formerly inflicted on the enemy were such that his renown filled the Empire! After his disgrace, I was ordered to give my opinion. I extolled his merits, hoping the Emperor would take a wider view, but in the end it was decided I was guilty of trying to mislead the Emperor.”

“I had not the funds to pay a fine in lieu of my punishment and my colleagues and associates spoke not a word in my behalf. Had I chosen suicide, no one would have credited me with dying for a principle. Rather, they would have thought the severity of my offense allowed no other way out. It was my obligation to my father to finish his historical work which made me submit to the knife. If I had done otherwise, how could I have ever had the face to visit the graves of my parents?”

A moral dilemma, struggle of ethics, political intrigue and sacrifice. A sweeping story of life set in the culturally rich history of ancient China, entailing consequences for son of Sima Tan - Prefect Of The Grand Scribes Of Emperor Wu.

Nostradamus:

“Ennosigée feu du centre de terre
Fera trembler au tour de cité neufve:
Deux grands rochiers long temps feront la guerre
Puis Arethusa rougira nouveau fleuve.”

The Final Book Of Nostradamus, presented on the History Channel, gives a compelling account of the story of its recent discovery, lost for centuries in The National Library of Rome, misidentified in it’s Acquisition Registry. A text that includes water color drawings to illustrate future events including the time given for “the end of the world.”

Symbolically presented in sketch, similar to cards, containing overt and hidden meanings open to interpretation. No more or less analogous than numbers or letters, used to represent concepts, words and sentences. Left to a world to consider the significance of its representations focused through the lens of the current geo-political and environmental reality, possibly to exert free will and change prophecy.

Controversy will always surround the writings of Nostradamus, a notorious figure for any century. The hierarchy of the Church would have been threatened by anyone who exhibited powers of divination outside its authority. The prophecies he scripted in his book, once authenticated, also raise a number of issues including the plausibility of prognostication.

Still relegated to the Occultists and Mystics, divination remains more akin to divine revelation, associated with supernatural forces that the laws of Science and Physics cannot explain. Verifying a prediction is impossible when it is made, without the duration of time to verify or dispute its claim. However the timely occurrance of any prognostication will effect belief and faith that something foretold from the past has come true allowing future “speculations” to be more or less palatable.

Inventors have the ability to tap into a stream of consciousness of “idea potential”, bring them back into physical form by some unknown process before anyone else. Perhaps prediction comes from a current within the same stream.

The Nostradamus Code

Interpreting The Final Prophecy Of Nostradamus

Understanding Prophecy

I regained consciousness

It had been a difficult journey as I stepped through the doorway to a place thought unreal - distorted images of projected light and darkness, incongruent concepts, vivid surreal colors paradoxically connected. I traveled through a non-descript passage, revealed by using the great symbol of Ottomaga. The incandescent emanations of the path only revealed when the pattern of the letters were properly pronounced in the presence of the drawn symbol.

It began one day when I had been visiting Strands Bookstore on 12th street in New York City, just south of Union Square. A curiosity shop for old, used and rare books, where I discovered an original signed edition of The Mystic Test Book, by Olney H. Richmand. The text, used as a source for The Sacred Symbols Of The Ancients by Edith Randall, a book known to me for years. This led to the discovery of The Book Of Vishanti, mislabeled in the Misc section. By chance, I noticed the name OTTOMAGA, an Anagram of AGAMOTTO, under an odd symbol, while reading the text. The book, without an author, was hand-written and difficult to read, filled with confusing notes and odd image scribbling that proved challenging to decipher.

Noticing the connection with Dr. Strange, well known in the Marvel Pantheon of fantasy as the supreme Magi of the planet earth, keeper of the eye of Agamotto, whose basis, I later discovered when I began my research, bears striking similarity to North and Hindu mythology. Wikipedia references “the three beneficent eternal Vishanti – Oshtur, Hoggoth, Agamotto, who comprise the most powerful entities in the Marvel Universe who bestow Occult knowledge and abilities upon those who invoke their names.” But I thought this was all a fictional creation of co-writer Stan Lee as his attempt to invent allusions to real world spiritual terminology.

I had no idea such a book existed until I found it. The text revealed that “the knowledge is given only to those that uncover the significance of the symbol without being told, and utter its name in proper alphabetic sequence and tonality”. What exactly the mysterious knowledge was remained a puzzle for months as I pondered the various meanings of the symbols yielded by the Book of Vishanti. My interest had been stimulated by this unanticipated discovery. Yet I still did not understand what I had found.

For the days that followed, repetitive dreams were replete with anything but the book and symbols, impressions of my conscious self, flying through the image into previously unperceived locations. Could this be possible, or had I reached the edge of sanity in the obsessive search for truth? If I could only understand how to say the name properly in waking life. Yet memory often plays tricks on the subconscious mind when what is real is weaved into what is not.

Everything I encountered seemed implausible in a world based on fact, observation and the usual scientific laws of Physics I had come to rely upon as the basis for my reality. Yet all the complexities I would come to encounter made logical sense in this upside down place, a hybrid of what is and what could be. But where had I put the book ? In what place did it exist as I scoured my shelves, nervously wondering if it was lost somewhere between the hundreds of obscured or misfiled texts often misplaced by my erroneous spelling, or under the various piles of essays cluttering my forgotten library.

I woke up.

In a small hole near a stream lived a very old ant, Antocretes. His wisdom was known far across the land, beyond the river, across the forest and field where his reputation grew. Some say that he was born from the illustrious Queen Antonia, known throughout the ant and animal kingdom as a direct descendant of Lady Bug-Antdromedea I, who came from the sky. Little is known about her, except that she had great power and could assume the form of any living creature with wings, and those that lived upon the ground. She had many children amongst the wild. It is through this connection, it is said, that the power Anotcretes, the wise, was inherited. He had the ability to communicate with all things, even the trees.

His dearest friend was the old willow who he often sought refuge from when a storm filled his ant hole and made it quite impossible to live. It was he who gave the butterfly the courage to flap his wings and awaken the fair Princess who had no name. Calling her Harmony, for her love of all things in the forest, who, because of her presence, would overcome their nature and join in common community. He also wept with the willow at the death of the brave butterfly who sacrificed his life to awaken Princess Harmony.

There were many tales about the princess who had no name. Perhaps she was also a descendant of LadyBug-Antromedea who became human only once. No one really knows whether this be true of fable, but one thing was agreed upon. There was a kinship between Antocretes and the fair Princess destined to inherit the throne and become Queen of all the land and tree. Winged creatures borne amongst the wind would also beckon to her call. As did the willow who always worried about her and wept frequently if she missed a day in the forest.

Harmony spoke very little, as her smile and golden hair with flowers of white and lavender sat upon her head as a crown of her nobility, strength and gentleness with all the most fragile of creatures that came towards her with no fear in their hearts.

Maybe she is a daughter of LadyBug-Antromedea, but tales never tell the whole story. Even if it were true, it is doubtful Harmony knew. The only one with the wisdom to see this was Antocretes, the wise.

As I continue my research at the Vatican Archives into the life of The Late Contessa Llwaxanna Loveless Von Bralispth, it becomes increasingly clear that she resonates with self-confidence, curiosity, and mystical depth that earns her a reputation with the people she encounters. A Margret Meade, Julia Child, Samantha Stevens of her time.

Anthropologist, cook with a flair for the mystic, she loved three eyed cats while the scent of lavender always kept alive the presence of her mother, the late Esmeralda Lucinda Goochie Von Bogg Stuppor. Then there was the mysterious red coat that she got from The Old Lady Of The Tree.

The current letter I am reviewing begins after her marriage to count Igor (pronounced eyegore) Alexandru Octavian Peter Gabriel Cristof Loveless Von Bralispth. She writes:

We took our vows at the “Manastirea Putna” in the province of Bukovyna near the tomb of Stephen III. Great Grand Mama Zwzanna died last night. She left me her cup, the one she used to read tea leaves. On her deathbed, her last breadth she whispered: “Llwaxanna, there is great need for you in Paris. You have much to learn from the French.” I did not know of what she meant. This was my last guidance by her. We married the next day, left to spend our honeymoon in Paris.

All roads that led to the city showed much poverty, and the peasants we saw died one by one as they lay on the roadside. A large number still remain, and to each of them what was possible to dole out, the least scrap of bread. We only possessed enough for those who would otherwise die. Choosing caused me great pain. The staple dish here consisted of mice, which the inhabitants hunted, so desperate are they from hunger. They devour roots which the animals cannot eat; one can, in fact, not put into words the things one sees.

This poor country is a horrible sight; it is stripped of everything. The soldiers take possession of the farms and have the corn threshed, but will not give a single grain to the owners who beg it as an alms. It is impossible to plough. There are no more horses; all have been carried off. The peasants are reduced to sleeping in the woods and are thankful to have them as a refuge from murderers. And if they only had enough bread to half satisfy their hunger, they would indeed count themselves happy.

She ends the letter, “Although I know now why Zana told me go to France, I struggle with what I may do.”