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Thursday, June 30, 2016

My First Cover Photo


My first cover photo has just been published, along with two photos inside, an interview and their Inkslinger award. I am so pleased!
Buffalo Almanack – Issue 12. Check it out. It’s a very good read.

Buffalo Almanac June 2016

Observing Sweden - Paper Money Changes Faces


Sweden is changing the faces of their twenty, fifty, and one-hundred kroner bills and  embedded new security codes to prevent counterfeiting. If we do not spend your old kroners by tomorrow, they are no good. You can paper the wall with them. It’s an interesting way to get people to spend money—just sayin.’

You can’t go to the bank to exchange them. Banks here in this town of 90,000 don’t do cash. If you need cash, go to an ATM. Swedes are a very high tech people. They all have cell phones, more than any other country. They’re addicted to them. You see a Swede with a cell phone, watch and see if he or she can stay off it for more than fifteen minutes. They get plane tickets, train tickets, send photographs, log into computers, play with Facebook, pay bills. Checkbooks have become a thing of the past. They do not use cash. I bought a shirt a few weeks back, and paid for it in cash. The clerk was a little bit surprised. “Do Americans still use cash?” he asked with honest curiosity.
“I’m the only one,” I told him. It was probably true. I visit ATMs a lot. I like cash. It seems simpler, more honest somehow. One has an awareness of cost, how much one is spending.
Its an interesting thing to think about. You have this paper in your hand that was worth something, suddenly it is not. What was it ever really worth, other than our believing that it had some value? I don’t remember this happening in the States. The faces on bills have changed over time, but I think a twenty from the fifties is as good now as it ever was.

Dollar 

I have a friend who works with money here, involved in anti counterfeiting work. He tells me most of the counterfeits in the US are dollar bills, not the larger denominations one would expect. “Nobody checks the ones,” he says. Not worth the time and effort. More than half one dollar bills in the US are counterfeit,” he says.
What’s paper money dollars really worth?

When we got off gold standard, things went sideways. Paper money used to actually be worth something—gold. There was gold to back the paper up. It was worth $32 an ounce when I was in my twenties. It got up to around $1,800 four years ago, then took a dive, down to around $900. It’s going up again now. Not surprising with all that’s going on. Gold feels secure, something real that can be used — for more than jewellery, scientific things — high technology and NASA stuff. Gold has always had value. Kennedy wanted to go back to the gold standard. Some think that’s why he was killed. It was a good enough reason.  What would have happened if they suddenly said, ‘We’re going back to the gold standard.’ Paper would suddenly be be worth something. Problem would be that there is far too much paper money that is not worth anything— just promissory notes from someone we can’t be sure of. An ounce of gold would be worth lots of paper—thousands maybe. Some predict that is about to happen for more complicated reasons than my own. Others say just the opposite. One authority on the net recently said gold has no value. “You just believe it does,” he said. Same as the paper money thing. It’s not the same. We’ll never see thirty two bucks an ounce again. You can bet on that.
What if a society goes totally cashless? There will be hackers of course—new age burglars. Money will be damn near invisible to the average person on the street, the working class. It could really get weird. The banks will do well, people not so much.

20 Kron old Selma Lagerlof 
Selma Lagerlöf will be replaced by Astrid Lindgren.

New 20

 *     *     *

50 Krone 
Jenny Lind will be replaced by Evert Taube.

New 50

*     *     *

100 kroner 
Carl von Linnè will be replaced by Greta Garbo.

New 100 Kron
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Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Ellie’s Diary – June 28, 2016





Ellie Looking-Fixed 

The Bruce just got back from Amsterdam and showed me some photos from the Red Light District. I thought you might like to see them.

This first one is a coffee shop kitty. I’m not sure if she is stoned or just relaxed. Most cats are like that. They don’t do much.

Cat 2 

The next photo is a hound of uncertain linage looking out from a bar room window. Looks like he’s wearing a decent coat, but obviously hung over.

Dog - 1 

I don’t know if there are more of these photos, if so they will be posted later when I have some spare time. I’ll be busy training for next few days. Being a show girl is hard work, and I would never even think of drinking beer, I can tell you that.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

First Bat





First Bat

Sri Lanka – 1985


A short flight from Madras
across the Bay of Bengal
to Colombo
then a train to Kandy, in Sri Lanka
climbing skyward through lush jungle
monkeys watch our passing with disinterest.

Hillside not far out of town
a white frame guest house
two floors, four rooms
balcony looks out onto the seeming endlessness below
Mahawa River running through it
palm treed hills of emerald green
and undergrowth.

As evening falls
a single bat appears
to flutter against darkening sky
still light enough to watch it’s path
down river
others follow
more and more
an arithmetical expression into thousands
long black scarf of flight
into the coming dark.

A distant hermit monk chants day’s end mantra
somewhere far below
some others follow
as if in response, but not
their soundings echo timeless beauty
as the moon appears.

How long has this been going on.


Bruce Louis Dodson
June 2016

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Postcard From Ellie



Ellie Talking 
I’m sorry it’s been so long between posts, but I’ve been very busy. Training every day — it’s endless. Stop, and sit, lay down, turn left, turn right. Oy, oy, oy. It’s not easy being a show dog, well, sometimes it easy.  I won two ribbons in last month’s contest. One was for being the best Wheaten Terrier. I had the advantage of being the only Wheaten Terrier.

Ellie 14 May 2016 

The  photo below will give you an idea of what I go through every day. There are treats involved of course, but still….

Ellie Signs 

My third contest is coming up this Saturday, which meant another trip to the hair stylist, of course. I rather enjoy these visits and listening to the other bitches gossip. I learn a lot about what’s going on, Lulu is pregnant again, and stuff like that.

Elliie - Haircut

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Butterfly Effect


Butterfly Effect
Butter 

Edward Norton Lorenz was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1917. He started out as a mathematician, but turned to meteorology during World War II. In an attempt to explain why it’s so difficult to make a long-range weather forecast, he spawned chaos theory, one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary scientific ideas.

Chaos theory is sometimes known as “the butterfly effect,” a term coined by Lorenz in an attempt to explain how small actions in a dynamic system like the atmosphere could trigger vast and unexpected changes. He discovered the effect in the early 1960s while entering values into a computer weather prediction program; instead of entering the number to the full six decimal places, he rounded it to three to save time, and the resulting weather pattern was completely different. He first framed it as the effect a seagull’s wing has on the formation of a hurricane, but he changed it to the more poetic butterfly in his 1972 presentation, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

Though the term dates back to 1972, the concept actually predates Lorenz’s discovery. Science fiction writers had been playing around with the idea for several years in their time-travel stories: usually the hero goes back in time and makes some seemingly insignificant choice that ends up changing the course of history.