My home computer died.  I’m at my daughter’s at the moment, and I’ll be here daily trying to keep everything running until I can buy a new computer.

AAAARRRGGGHHHH….    What else can go wro…. no wait… I don’t wanna know.  forget I even asked.

I am an independent art-yarn dyer.  Sales have been steadily decreasing for the last 5-6 months. I’m over 3 months behind on the rent, and virtually everything else is overdue as well. It’s becoming harder and harder to hang on. I’m not in a position to go out and get a job (at least not as readily as those with a car or near a bus-line to actually get to a live-able job), so I’m required to make as much money as I can on my own, at least for now. The long-term goal is to increase the yarn sales and/or create additional streams of income. In the meantime, I need to stir up some fast cash, or at least have cash expected to flow with various commissions, paid monthly or quarterly.

Most of what I sell is my own hand-dyed yarn, and most of that is custom-ordered. You can see all the options for that over at Knitivity.  (and right now all new hand-dyed socks and lace orders are $3.00 off per skein!)

I’ve also starting selling the first of my designs on T-shirts, totes, and other goods. You can find them at my various online shops:

Cafepress - Knitivity (knitting related)

Cafepress - Way of Ray (general topics)

Cafepress - Snarkable (snarky stuff)

Spreadshirt. (products with “The Will to Live” mandala)

And now, because I really need the money, I am selling some of my fathers vintage jewelry, mostly from the 1960s and before. First come, first served, just email me the names of the items you want, as shown in the titles ABOVE each picture. I will send you a PayPal invoice for each item(s) — please note, each item INCLUDES $2.00 shipping. I will only ship within the U.S. for this particular auction.

Most pictures have a quarter and penny shown for size comparison. Coins are NOT included in the sale! Also, some pictures have multiple images, shown for different angles, but there is only one pair or set per item listing.

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Cufflinks - Dice! – SOLD

Tiny minature dice, can be removed so you can show your favorite combination or lucky numbers! The dice are yellowed with age, but solid and functional. Gold-tone fittings. $27.50

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Cufflinks - Aces!

A pair of Cloisonne-styled cufflinks, each featuring four Aces. A super set of cuflinks for your favorite Poker player! With today’s new interest in Poker, you can’t go wrong with this unique vintage jewelry set. $27.50

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Cufflinks - Polished Geode Stones

A pair of hand-crafted cufflinks; Mother bought these for Dad from an artist at the famous Sabado y Domingo Art Show, held each weekend along Cabrillo Boulevard in Santa Barbara during the 1960s. If you know a hiker or nature enthusiast, who sometimes needs to dress up, you can be sure he or she will be happy to take the love of the outdoors into any stodgy boardmeeting! $19.50

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Cufflinks - Tie bar set

Another vintage dressy set, mostly gold-tone, excellent for period costuming or modern dress-up. $27.50

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Cufflinks - Wraparounds

A lovely pair of silver-toned wrap-around cufflinks, designed to embrace the edge of the French cuff in subtle elegance. $25.00

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Cuff-links - Dots!

A pair of cufflinks, mostly silver-toned, with a off-center black stone, scrumbled bezel edge and satin concave field. Another great period pair, from the 1950s/60s era. $22.50

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Tie-bar - Thermometer!

A classy novelty tie bar, the thermometer actualliy does work! This is at least 50 years old, probably older, from my dad’s collection. Mostly goldtone casing, with secure spring clip to hold your tie to your shirt neatly and firmly. $27.50

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Hat-Pin - Pewter Rose  SOLD

This is from my own collection, purchased in the mid-1990’s; this is a heavy pewter pin, with 2 press-pins on the back to securely attach this to a leather vest, a hat, or denim jacket. $19.50

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Heart-Pin

From my own collection, a gold-toned pin, perfect for attaching to a leather hat or vest, or denim jacket. Good for making a solid statement. $17.50

O’course, if you don’t need vintage jewelry, or totes, or T-shirts…. you can always just pitch in with a PayPal gift for an artist trying to make it until the economy improves — just send it through Paypal.com to ray@raywhiting.com and designate it as a personal gift so they don’t take out business transaction fees. Anything that helps me cover the bills and pay down the rent will help enormously. Tacky? Perhaps, but I’m genuinely hurting and would rather sell things than take handouts, and I refuse to sign up for foodstamps or live on the government dole. I have supremely generous landlords and I’ve failed them, so I’ll do whatever I need to do until business picks up again.

Thanks!

I’m debating whether to leave the title on it, or leave it blank…. thoughts?

And there are people asking for prayer, declaring a faith in God’s all-might plan, and blah blah blah.

It is not my place to educate these people.  They are expressing their grief in their own ways, and I have no need or desire to be cruel in their time of pain.   I wish them every avenue of peace and comfort in their time of loss.

The reality is that everyone will eventually die.  Jesus isn’t coming to rescue anyone out of here.  Jesus doesn’t even exist, and probably never did.   There is no known “afterlife” to which we will ascent or transform into.  All our consciousness and awareness is a function of the chemicals and electrical activity in the physical brain.  When the brain is physically dead, there is nothing left.  There is no evidence of a soul that continues to be conscious in some other realm.

This is the only life we are sure of.  It really bothers me that so many expect some great reward or blessing after this life is over.   They waste their entire lives looking forward to a time or place for which we have no viable evidence.  There is no rational reason to expect to find some sort of “afterlife”.

Nobody is waiting for you on the “other side”.  There is no “other side” to go to.   When your body dies, you are dead.  Completely.  You do not “live on”.   The only sense in which you might live on would be in the memories of those you touched while in this lifetime.  They will remember you for whatever good or bad you’ve done.

When you die there is no ultimate judgment for your life here.   It’s over.   The ONLY rewards or punishments available are the ones you get while you are here.

And, if you think about it, that’s not such a bad thing.   I lets us realize that we are responsible for whatever we do here.   It is up to us, here and now, to live a life that will be well-remembered.   it is up to us to do those things that make life better for others even after we have died.

Being dead is no big deal, although the process of dying isn’t always comfortable.   Ultimately, the body systems shut down, your sensory receptors stop functioning, and your consciousness stops.   I assume it is very similar to what happens when you go into surgery and they put you to sleep.   You wake up after a while and it’s all over, but you generally have no consciousness of what happens while you were ‘out’.    Except when you die you don’t regain consciousness.   Ever.   It’s over.

You won’t be coming back here, and you won’t be going someplace else.  it does not matter what this or that holy book might promise.  All the holy books of all the world are just make-believe wishes.  They aren’t real true accounts of reality.  They are fiction.

So, if you are thinking about the inevitable process of death and dying, and you are looking forward to something better on the other side … get over it.   Wake up, and enjoy THIS life for all you can, because this is all there is.

This is my own artwork.  If you’d like to have this image on a tote bag, go visit my CafePress shop:  More importantly, if you have an idea for a design that would do well on a tote bag or t-shirt or something, let me know and I’ll see if I can create something for next month’s image.

Seriously, times are hard, and not everyone wants or needs my yarns but you already make more money than I do, and buying a tote would help me significant to stay in my house and continue working on my own. In another couple months, utility bills will go back down and yarn sales will pick up as people starting their holiday gift-making season.   In the meantime, I need some money.  O’course if you don’t need a tote or t-shirt, you can always just drop $5 or $10 into my PayPal account.  :-)       (yeah… blatant begging is so very unbecoming!  But’s it’s still better than living under the bridge or turning tricks … I mean, at my age, can you imagine???)   hahahahaha

Thanks!

In all of history, no word has cause more death and destruction than the word of God.

Indeed.

One of our local news stations is on Facebook and posted yet another thread about the “Ground Zero Mosque” — this is the fault of idiot media continuing to call the Park 51 Islamic Community Center the “Ground Zero Mosque”.     Seriously, it is NOT a mosque and it isn’t at Ground Zero.

But there’s no convincing America’s idiots.   One person kept trying to say that building the ‘mosque’ is ‘morally wrong’, but I pressed him 3 times to explain HOW it is morally wrong.  Finally he pointed me to an interview with Rudy Gulliani who made the same mistake everyone else is making:   the families directly affected by the 9/11 attacks are hurting and therefore everyone needs to “respect their feelings”.

BULLSHIT.    American Muslims did NOT perpetrate the 9/11 attack.   American Muslims did not kill 3,000 people.   American Muslims did not fly jetliners into the Twin Towers.

YES, families continue to hurt.   Their loved ones were killed.   But they were not killed by American Muslims.  They were not even killed by the majority of Muslims, most of whom just want to live their lives in peace and they really don’t give a fiddler’s flying fuck what other people do… as long as they are left alone.  Blocking the community center under the guise of “respecting the feelings of the families” is NOT rational, because their pain was not cause by American Muslims.

I’ve used this analogy in several FB threads:

If my family were all killed in a car crash by a drunken idiot driving a Jeep, I would not starting hating on all Jeep drivers.  That would be irrational and insane.  Taking action to stop drunk driving is a rational response and that makes sense.   Religious extremists, of any flavor, do not represent all the people of a religion.   They are simply using this or that religion as a vehicle to propel their hatred.  Don’t blame the vehicle; blame the driver.   Duhhhh!!!!

A brilliant comment I read along the way:  “If you hate Muslims because Muslim Terrorists attacked America, of that you are focusing on the wrong word.”

i found this image on Facebook (I think it belongs to Mark A. Schmidt): (click to embiggen so you can read it)

There is NO rational reason to block building the community center.  NONE.     Like the picture says, if you hate the people outside the little red circle, YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.   And note:   there are less than 10,000 Al Qaeda, but about 1.37 billion Muslims around the world.   Muslim extremists and Al Qaeda terrorists do not represent all of Islam.   They don’t even represent 0.1% of Muslims.

Someone kept saying 69% of Americans oppose it.    SO FUCKING WHAT?   80% of Americans probably oppose strip joints or public nudity or whatever.   But constitutional rights that are not up for a popular vote.

And then somene, after all the rest of the discussion, piped up with a comment so insane I had to do a screen capture to prove it was actually there, and I didn’t make it up:

The poster above me there is from the bustling metropolis of Clute, TX.    What an idiot!    I guess in Clute, TX they don’t have Jews or Muslims or Blacks or Buddhists or Gays or Atheists or … <*gasp*> Catholics.

We have come so far in so many ways in America, but if the media and the politicians continue to promote the current anti-Islamic sentiment, or even the “non-Christian is unAmerican” nonsense, I fear for the future of this country.  I continue to be embarrassed that so many people do not understand that Muslims worship the exact same god as Christians and Jews.  They all worship the God of Abraham.  And in Indonesia and other predominately Muslim areas, Christians use the name Allah to refer to their God — even their Bibles are printed with the word Allah instead of God.

Americans continue to prove how ill-educated and ignorant they are.   And it embarrasses me to hear them spout their bullshit.

I’m not pro-Islamic, just anti-bigotry.   In fact, I’m generally anti-religion, and ONE of the reasons for that is because the greatest function of religion seems to be hating on all the other religions, and this is no more greatly exemplified than the current hoo-haw over the renovation of the old Burlington Coat Factory into the “Park 51″ Muslim community center.

There’s simply no rational reason for it to be denied, but people continue to talk about how the area is “hallowed ground” and it needs to be preserved and held sacred.  Puh-leeeze!

Daryl Lang went to explore that area and took some pictures.   (Note:  ALL photos are the property of Daryl Lang and linked from that Website, shown here in miniature for examples only).  Here’s a couple activities on this “hallowed ground”:

or how about this one:

Yeah…. ummm…   not real “hallowed” after all, huh?

Follow the link above to see the rest of his pictures of the area.

Or go to the subsequent post to get a map of where these pictures were taken, and just how far from Ground Zero the community center actually is, as well as read some feedback from his photos.

Here’s the map itself:

You’ll notice that from the proposed Park 51 site, there are two city blocks blocking the view of the World Trade Center/Ground Zero site.

As shown by Keith Olberbmann, there’s just no way this facility will have any impact on people visiting Ground Zero.

Muslim Americans living and working in Lower Manhattan have every right to build their center wherever they want.   They were planning it before 9/11 happened, and ended up selecting a destroyed building to buy that NOBODY ELSE HAS BOTHERED WITH FOR NINE FRIGGIN’ YEARS.  They want to demolish it and build a new structure, bringing new life to the area.

There is no rational reason to block this project.  Someone posted on FB, “Even if they CAN build it, doesn’t mean they should.”   But nobody has said why they shouldn’t!    It’s just a lot of ignorant fools wrapping themselves in the American Flag and pretending only Christians have a right to function under the full scope of the Constitution.   After all, we’re talking about AMERICAN-Muslims wanting to do for themselves EXACTLY what other Americans are doing all across the country — building a facility to enhance their community and culture.   But because they are Muslims, people are all superstitious and fearful about it.  What nonsense.

The reality, of course, is that there has never EVER been a genuine miracle occur in the entire course of human history.  Virtually EVERY natural phenomenon has a perfectly natural explanation.   No gods are necessary for understanding this world.

I do not understand everything.  I don’t need to.   I have access to some of the most brilliant scientific minds who DO understand a lot more than I, and piece by piece they can explain things to me in language I understand.  (There’s a marvelous invention called “The Internet” where rational scientific explanations can be found for practically everything in the natural world!  Try it sometime!)  I don’t need to invent supernatural explanations, or borrow other people’s superstitions.

If people feel better with the idea that there’s some supernatural being looking out for them, if it helps them cope with the real world better, well that’s their own choice.  But in order for anyone else to take a superstition seriously, it must have evidence to back it up.

This interesting video puts it into a different light.  If you believe in divine protection, please view this short clip, and then ask yourself if you REALLY believe in divine protection… or maybe you just wish you could.