Life Stories: October 2005 Archives
We're back from our honeymoon and I don't have a lot of motivation to post at the moment. We had a great time in San Luis Obispo staying at the Madonna Inn's Misty Rock Room, but it's great to be home.
I'm sure I'll get around to posting again soon, but as of right now I'm not even up on the news. Two good pieces I just saw are that the House passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act and the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, both of which aim to limit stupid lawsuits. The Senate apparently passed the former bill also, but supposedly won't have time for the latter.
Anyway, I've got a new wife to attend to. See ya!
Update:
Ok, here's a pic of us from our reception!
The day is finally here! I'm getting married to the most wonderful woman in the world -- perhaps in the whole universe!
In case you didn't know, The Daily Spork and I are getting married this Saturday! Huzzah! Blogging will probably be light for the rest of this week and much of next. I'm planning to repost some of my favorite/most popular posts from the past, so it will still be worth your while to visit periodically.
If you'd like to give us a gift, please use the PayPal button on the right or buy an ad -- it will be much appreciated!
What did I read while eating my steak, potato, and pea stew for lunch?
Black Monday is the name ascribed to Monday October 19, 1987. On that day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6%, the largest one-day decline in recorded stock market history. This one day decline was not confined to the United States, but mirrored all over the world. By the end of October, stock markets in Australia had fallen 41.8%, Canada 22.5%, Hong Kong 45.8%, and the United Kingdom 26.4%.A certain degree of mystery is associated with the 1987 crash. Many have noted that no major news or events occurred prior to the Monday of the crash, the decline seeming to have come from nowhere. Important assumptions concerning human rationality, the efficient market hypothesis, and economic equilibrium were brought into question by the event. Debate as to the cause of the crash still continues many years after the event, no firm conclusions having been reached.
The most immediately striking theme in the Shinto religion is a great love and reverence for nature. Thus, a waterfall, the moon, or just an oddly shaped rock might come to be regarded as a kami; so might charismatic persons or more abstract entities like growth and fertility. As time went by, the original nature-worshipping roots of the religion, while never lost entirely, became attenuated and the kami took on more reified and anthropomorphic forms, with a formidable corpus of myth attached to them. (See also: Japanese mythology.) The kami, though, are not transcendent deities in the usual Western and Indian sense of the word - although divine, they are close to us; they inhabit the same world as we do, make the same mistakes as we do, and feel and think the same way as we do. Those who died would automatically be added to the rank of kami regardless of their human doings. (Though it is thought that one can become a ghost under certain circumstances involving unsettled disputes in life.) Belief is not a central aspect in Shinto, and proper observation of ritual is more important than whether one "truly believes" in the ritual. Thus, even those believing other religions may be venerated as kami after death, if there are Shinto believers who wish them to be.
