Wanderers 2010.2.2

We're a packed house tonight. The talk is on Spirituality & Religion. I was thinking it was on the Parliament of World Religions, but that will be another time. Milt has just the one slide.

Bill Lightfoot, my uncle, and maritime scholar, is here with me tonight.

Milt Markewitz is our presenter. He's somewhat the Jewish mystic, a Qabalist in some ways.

Bill and I had a good dinner at Bridgeport Alehouse, catching up on family in Bellingham. I talked about my search for a new line. We agreed that I'd likely do best as some kind of teacher. What school would have me though?

We floundered around, sounding a lot like philosophers. Wanderers have some rarefied views. Abraham Lincoln came up a number of times, as our most deeply spiritual president. I am reminded of president Obama's making a connection to that guy (rather deliberately and intelligently I thought, with that bible and all).

I was quite vocal, in my one interjection, in identifying Planet Earth with Israel, as in "promised land". Israel is not some little patch of dirt, a few state rooms on the spaceship. That's ridiculous, no? More PR for the PL. No one disagreed.

Of course my party line is consistent with the "desovereignization" meme. Buckaneers, like pirates of old, take nation-states with a grain of salt. They come and go don't they? Planet Earth, on the other hand, has a relative immutability about it.

Sometimes it pays to look past our superficial differences, especially if we're claiming to some sort of spiritual adeptness. Nationalism is not the highest IQ ism, let's at least be clear on this obvious point.

I spent much of the evening gawking at Bill Sheppard's creation: an 8088 assembly language program for looking at medical imagery. He'd been trying to decode these dcm files, in which lossless JPEGs are embedded, but hadn't found the right open source utilities to decode them.

I was also treated to a Google Widgets Toolkit medical database application. The maintainer, using the Eclipse environment, maintains some clear Java, at which point the GWT machine converts it to Javascript for client-side execution. What I think Wanderers needs to do is start a university of sorts. We have the talent to staff it up pronto, that's for sure.

Happy groundhog day.