No Kings Day

The No Kings 3.0 uprising (demonstration, protest) has not happened yet in Portland, and exactly what my day will be like is unclear given I'm coordinating with others and their plans are only starting to gel as well. Likely public transportation will be involved. Left to my own devices, I'd likely head into town on the Max from the Hollywood station, looking to join the throng near the Steel, as I did recently (one week ago) for the cherry blossom experience.

However, having arisen early, as is my custom, I did spend a couple hours doing some deep cleaning, in the bathroom and kitchen. My meditation was along the lines of: No Kings means a lifestyle with no servants, no court, no sycophants. One might contract with assistants for sure, as when needing an appliance repaired or installed, or even housecleaning by professionals, but there’s no sense in which these companies are necessarily socially lower on the totem pole. No ranking is required. No proof is social station is involved. More like Food Not Bombs.

The American Dream does not involve “winning the lottery” and retiring to some tasteless McMansion with lots of servants, for a life of partying and superficial pursuits. That’s more the antithesis of the American Dream of you ask me. Americans would like to live in a world where none are oppressed on their behalf. On the contrary, Americans would love to be of net benefit to this world. That’s the dream anyway. The reality is a lot of people feel they represent the Americans and set up in offices pretending as much. At least they’re not kings or queens (or other royalty), except on floats or in the theater.

I shared this same picture (above) on my Meta timeline, and in the comments section went somewhat deeper into the Jesse Jackson story. I was involved with his campaign in 1984 as well, especially after he dropped out after the primaries, and we could use his picture to help motivate people to vote from whomever remained. 

As usual, Dems did their bait and switch, to make sure only middle of the roaders would enter the final contest — leading to my Vote for Nobody pin, popular during the Occupy movement, in which I was active (and no, I was not and am not connected to “Antifa” the nebulous organization — Portland has a more imaginative resistance scene than most stereotypes allow for).

Project Hail Mary (movie review)

As I do somewhat often, I deliberately avoided any opinion pieces (aka reviews) regarding this movie, but had seen the previews. However I’d stereotyped the type of film somewhat inaccurately. The film proved somewhat surprising in other words, such as by including a song number, a female vocalist (and main character) hearkening back to those noirs of the 1930s-1950s I’ve been sampling.

I’d expected more of a special effects high action movie, with a lot of kinetics, and this film had that, but its axis of emotional depth as well as intellectual depth was more than that of many comic book derivatives I associate with this genre. I haven’t read the novel behind it, which explains a lot of my cluelessness, which I was fine with (I’m clueless about a lotta stuff).

The smart part is its juxtaposition of high school biology with phenomena of an astrophysical scale, condensing solar systems to Petri dish ecosystems model-able in the lab. Suns are dying because of an infection, and antibodies must be sought. The humans push their technology, leveraging the very biohazard they’re fighting, and the one guy at the tip of the human spear encounters a counterpart with the same objective, so they form an alliance.

As we were leaving the theater I overhead one viewer saying “I didn’t expect it would be that funny” which well-encapsulates my own sense of surprise as well. 

A Hamlet Rendering

For some readers, "rendering" may have a negative connotation, perhaps associated with something a butcher might do vs-a-vs meat. In my namespace, it's a softer meaning: ray-tracings, renderings into visible vistas of mathematical objects ("making the invisible visible"), as in "render farms". 

However, as an English speaker and as someone into Shakespeare, as well as Norman O. Brown, I can't claim to control all the connotations. Misreadings are ever possible, and are not even discouraged.

With that opening for context, let me say Johnny Stallings knows how to render Hamlet effectively, as a read performance, presented at a podium, but with props, a mini-play. He actually dons hand-puppets when he gets to the play-within-a-play (a big part of Hamlet is the play staged in its interior), and when we get to the Alas Poor Yorick part, he pulls out Budget Skull from its box.

The Yorick part got me off on a tangent later as I associate that scene with a performance by one Andrius Kulikauskas in my backyard, with a bubble-head named Zoltar, an homunculus. Hence the selfie (one of the embedded slides), as even though Andrius was the principal actor, we're talking about my memories.

The setting for this rendering was also a big part of the experience: a maze of rooms in a gigantic space, a Presbyterian Church that has creatively morphed into a dual-purpose community center named Taborspace (it's on the northwest slope of Mt. Tabor). 

Until one of the other invitees pointed it out, I hadn't realized there was a literal labyrinth just outside our Artspace window.

Speaking of the other invitees, this was a very hip-to-Hamlet crowd. One guy immediately noticed Johnny's version omitted some famous concluding lines. However Johnny's pithy densification of a four-hour plus marathon is told from Hamlet's viewpoint, and since he's dead by this scene, it makes no sense to include it.

You'll find Johnny appearing throughout these blogs over the years, not only in association with Shakespeare, but Walt Whitman as well. I have Nick Consoletti to thank for cluing me into the Stallings namespace lo these many years ago, when I saw him do King Lear as a one man show.

Spring Equinox

Today is officially (per Google search) the Spring Equinox. My wife had a small business called Turning the Wheel that was about passing on Celtic (mostly) traditions around the eight holidays, the four solstice-equinox orbit points, marking seasonal changes, and the four additional points between those four points. You might picture two squares, superimposed, at 45 degrees to one another, resulting in eight equally spaced points around a circle. 360//8 == 45 (per Python).

Depicted above: a scalable recipe I usually use because it’s nutritious and vegan. It goes under savory versus sweet and is basically lentils with nuanced flavors added by molasses and soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, some flavor of oil. Spices (cloves, ginger, and what we call allspice, which is not a curry).

This recipe came to me through a couple, Joe and Teresina, who moved to Portland in their senior years and who started overlapping study groups my wife and I would attend, Teresina’s on Buddhism and Joe’s on Economics. They were a vital component of our Quaker Meetings (Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) in North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM).

Portland has two main unprogrammed Meetings (not called churches, nor temples). I’m much more proximal to one of them, within walking distance, whereas the other is adjacent to Reed College. Fittingly because College Park, a place in California, is a name from our Beanite past, referring to a family that went west from Iowa or someplace in the Midwest. We don’t usually get into the details. Quakers are full of schisms going back to the Hicksites and such, and only a few of us bother to memorize a lotta details about these developments. In geek world, branching and forking are taken for granted.

In Asylum District, a business moniker for our neighborhood, the Friends on Stark Street, the closer-to-me meeting (I can drive to Reedwood in a few minutes, where Bridge City Friends just had a newcomers gathering), have a shared history with Linus and Ava Helen Pauling through a mutual benefactor: Electro-Scientific Instruments, the owner of the Quakers’ meetinghouse after acquiring it from Jantzen, the swimming suit company. ESI used the Stark Street factory to make electronic instruments and later moved to bigger digs (which burned in a fire on Macadam, necessitating yet bigger digs).

ESI’s founder, Doug Strain, had studied under Linus Pauling at CalTech, plus shared the regional pacifism for which Cascadia has long been known. He helped the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy restore the Linus Pauling boyhood home on Hawthorne Boulevard and make it a center, a hub, of Portland’s cultural vitality. A group calling itself the Wanderers still meets there, thanks to ISEPP (for which my wife had been bookkeeper (she had a lotta nonprofit clients; her Turning the Wheel was a side business)).

Puzzle Pieces

Our family uses the jigsaw puzzle as a source of memes, which I don't suppose is unusual. Many families gather around such a puzzle at family gatherings, ours no exception, even if we’re exceptional in other ways.

The memorial service for Phil Wikelund at Reed College was a well-attended who’s who of a now mature cohort who went through life with Phil, a hub figure in the Pacific Northwest, through his sharp intellect and devotion to helping people pursue their own interests. One podium speaker suggested “edgy but kind” and guessed he typified a specific Scandinavian temperament bespeaking hardship getting to the far west.

Phil owned Great Northwest Books, where Trevor Blake once worked, then near Powells, and getting started on his combined career of bookseller publisher and appraiser. Trevor does the whole pipeline. I just bought his newest book, Does Not Equal. 

I’ve linked to a Perplexity prompt for more of the story regarding Phil. My focus here is to pass along puzzle pieces I’m in a position to provide, not to assemble the whole picture in one blog post.

In driving Don Wardwell to and from his Mt. Tabor campus, and from talking with the other guests at the reception, I was prompted to reminisce about Anthology Books which had been adjacent to the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne, in that same building, set further back from the street, wherein Adorn, the body art studio, is installed today. 

Gary Wilkie owned and ran Anthology Books and had one of the most interesting privately owned for-sale book collections I’d ever seen, which is saying a lot given the competition (Portland is a bookstore town). I bought some obscure Quaker books, like the published journal of a Quaker opera singer around Philadelphia.  

Gary later redesigned his business making it almost purely online. I got invited to a party at Gary’s place once, quite the fun crowd.

Patrick Barton, whom I talked with later, in Fred Meyer (we crossed paths by chance), mentioned he’d helped out with cleanup in the aftermath of the fire, which consumed Great Northwest Books once it had moved into what used to be called Area One, an urban renewal zone in an earlier chapter, wherein Portland was being pulled in a more Robert Moses like direction.

The fire that took Great Northwest Books reminds me of the one which consumed the photography store and studio in the Bay Area, in which a first collection of Columbia Gorge photographs had been collected by their creator.

Phil’s closest friends and family gave us great insights into Phil’s character. As one of about four Wanderers present, counting Lew Frederick, who spoke from the podium, myself, Ron and Don, we know Phil and Gloria from retreats and a few meetups. 

Ron, from the Reed College matrix, knew Phil way better than the rest of us. I was not in close orbit around Phil, but that just means I have a more zoomed out view, now much clarified thanks to a life well-lived. I’ll hope to see Ron and Don again soon as Wanderers will be gathering per our usual schedule.

Reed College was being its usual peaceful self amidst the horrors of our time. This was when the nation-state minded seemed to snap, or however we tell it (I’m self-admittedly esoteric) and all hell broke out in one of the messiest areas (messiest as in “into messiahs n stuff like that” if I may be allowed a pun).

Happy Pi Day while I’m thinking about it, just past. I did my part to celebrate, which doesn’t mean I can’t do Tau Day as well (what some wish to call two pi). Happy St. Patrick’s Day today. I’m also remembering Dawn Wicca, my late wife and life adventure companion.

Geometry for GenZers

https://groups.io/g/synergeo/topic/118308284

Cascadian Synergetica: The Early Days

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 10:09 AM 4D Solutions wrote:

Hi Jim --

I hope you and/or rybo will post summaries of your findings from Lehmanville per your new geometry group. Adderley also has a group with overlapping membership; I've not heard from him lately (he's in Australia, well remembers the heyday when we started up a Synergetics subculture in Cascadia, in Seattle, distinct from the SNEC operation, with its own funding / sponsors).

While on this topic, of booting our Synergetica subculture in Cascadia, the theme of our meetup was Elastic Interval Geometry for the most part, as both Gerald de Jong and Alan Ferguson were present, coders of Struck and Springdance respectively.

Tim Tyler also did an EIG implementation named Springie (he wasn't at this meeting though).

Russ Chu was the main organizer, the same dude who organized the founding of SNEC at that rented house in Washington DC I was mentioning, where Bob Gray, Ed Applewhite, Joe Clinton, CJ, and Yasushi Kajikawa were among those present.

For this earlier meetup, we met at Russ's Seattle house (he would move to DC temporarily in a future chapter, a move having to do with Deb's career). He was by then married to Deb Kasman and they had two kids: Liana and Daniel.

The time frame of our Seattle meetup is pretty easy to triangulate in that Gerald was in the Bay Area for a JavaOne, a kickoff of the new Java language, after which he came by train to Cascadia, and also: the cult named Heaven's Gate had just drunk the kool-aid, the appearance of the comet Hale-Bopp being their X-Day type event (some kind of abduction).

I recall Ed Applewhite phoning me while our meeting was ongoing and joking "they got the wrong Applewhite" or something funny like that (he was a bit of a joker). So this was 1997 I'm thinking.

Gerald went on after coding Struck in Java to developing Darwin@Home and then Pretenst, eventually abandoning Java in favor of Rust, which compiles to WebAssembly or something along those lines.

Alan and Karl Erickson were "lost to followup" eventually (shoptalk from my outcomes research days at CUE / CORE), meaning I lost touch with both of them. Jon Braley passed away.

These were long distance friends of Peter Adderley and he hoped I could help him re-establish contact, but I wasn't able to. I have maintained contact with Russell Chu over the years as well as his ex, Deb, and saw them both not so long ago (they're on amicable terms even though they've gone their separate ways). Russ was my best man at my wedding, September 11, 1993 (near Reed College).

In terms of sponsors and donors, special mention to Sam Lanahan, inventor of Flextegrity and former collaborator with Joe Clinton. Sam also was a sidekick for Bucky himself on a trip to the Philippines. He's currently traveling abroad.

Sam helped organize another summit later, in Portland, which included Nick Consoletti, the wandering bard, steeped in lore, and in contacts, and also Trevor Blake, at that point still a Portland resident and inheritor of the Joe Moore archive, the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute I think he called it.

That Joe Moore archive, after being sorted and upgraded by Trevor (a professional archivist), ended up at OSU in Salem, where Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's papers are also housed.

Friday in Hillsdale

I got to hang out with Bradford again yesterday, and return the L. Gordon Plummer book mentioned in the above video, to the Theosophical Society Library. I made sure they knew about this video, as they're included therein, as is Bradford.

Bradford gave me more of a picture of his network. Given we've both been receptive to the Bucky stuff (many if not most are not) we unsurprisingly know or knew many of the same people. 

I told him about the one time I met Bob Gray in person, in Washington DC, at the founding of SNEC (later renamed to Synergetics Collaborative). Yes, Bradford knew who CJ Fearnley was (another friend of Bob's, and mine). Applewhite was there at the SNEC summit, as was Yasushi Kajikawa of Scientific American fame (Japan edition).

Given the pre-emptive attack by President Rubio, of the District, against the Middle East, I was naturally effusive in my distrust and dislike for the Beltway Mafia, entangled with the Las Vegas Mafia historically and contemporaneously. 

DC and LV have a lot of shared personnel and similar mindsets. I understand why Canadians are leery of both (tourism is way down). DC has a bright future as a tourist town, even if we no longer take it seriously as a seat of government, outside being an important part of the Northeast Corridor (Cosmopolis or Gotham). The DC-NYC line, with Princeton in the middle, has long been a part of my consciousness. 

I'd visit CJ in Philly, by train when I lived on the east coast, but also by plane, when NPYM (a west coast Yearly Meeting, RSF) was paying my way to AFSC corporation meetings.

Fortunately for our collective sanity, PDX in Cascadia is not a co-belligerent with the District (or LV) and has its own way of coping with the post-USA neoRoman fascists trying to dominate the world these days i.e. we have the Portland Frogs etcetera (meaning we use a lot of satire and ridicule, other forms of propaganda).

As a veteran of Portland Occupy and Food Not Bombs, I've never been an allie of the neoRomans and their rackets (as Smedley Butler called 'em). I think both Dulles brothers were imperialist fools, as was General MacArthur. These men are not heroes in my version of history.

The Scarlett Pimpernel (movie review)

This was the 1982 version; I hear there’s another one. I’d have to say it’s an early spy story, set after the American Revolution set off the one in France (per some tellings), and wherein the “Bond” character is quite effete, a dancer-prancer type, a flaneur, a fop. But it’s all an affectation (a disguise) as in reality he’s fighting bravely for the crown, against depraved terrorists.

The terrorists in this case are the scary hoi polloi, a Pol Pot style mob some might say, chopping the heads off anyone with eyeglasses or who otherwise looks like they can read or, worse (code): dance the minuet and other courtly numbers. People of culture in other words, not riffraff.

“Chop chop” goes the guillotine, and the crowd roars its approval, “Off with their heads!”.

Our movie audience (the spectators, those for whom this spectacle was made) should be feeling revulsion and disgust by now, mixed with righteous outrage. How is this “Enlightenment” in any meaningful sense? It all seems so cheap and tawdry.

Countering all this madness is the Scarlett Pimpernel, who / which understands the necessity of a strong monarchy to prevent just these kinds of mental illness from spreading virally. 

The SP is somewhat a Society, a peer group (think Three Musketeers) but also is lead by our hero, the faux dandy, so “fake n gay” to sound like Candace.

It’s obviously a spy movie because it’s all about betrayal, defections, switching sides, or at least appearing to, or… unless you’re quite dedicated to puzzling it all out (cut to snoring on the couch) there’s no way to be much besides confused. 

And the disguises, let’s not forget the disguises.

We’re always wondering if SP is sincere in his love for his lady love, as in the first chapter of their relationship he uses their romantic picnic together as another occasion to smuggle another aristocrat out of the looney bin (where the patients now run the show). So he’s using her as a human shield of some kind?

No, he sees her as fighting the same oppressor. At first that is. Then he has reason to doubt. Then he has reason to have faith again. See what I mean? He has his ups and downs. She, meanwhile, is trying to fathom his calculus and is likewise doubtful of his integrity.

Anyway, there’s a superhero superpower coloring to the whole thing, which is of course intentional as that’s what fiction is all about doing, usually:  creating larger-than-life characters who swashbuckle their way through all kinds of obstacle courses in unlikely, sometimes oddball, ways.

Spring Term

I started pitching my Spring Term, given it's March 1 already, the Equinox coming on the 20th.

For those new here, we're talking School of Tomorrow, an umbrella term for a buncha sigs (special interest groups; like edu-sig), study groups, asynchronous threads, Github pages and so on. They criss-cross every which way ala that "Spherical Pinball Machine" I like to go on about.

The right margin here has a lotta links to related social media, where I commit some of my writings. I was always cut out for hypertext, which is why I'm not as popular among print only bookstore types, although you'll find me in acknowledgments (a Historical Dictionary of Wittgenstein's Philosophy by Duncan Richter; Bucky Works by J. Baldwin, which front matter typically nobody reads).