The Growth of My Astral World

My life drawing prof asked us what the last movie that changed our lives was. Now I love movies but I really couldn't come up with a satisfying answer while in class. Today however, my life was changed. It wasn't a movie per se, but a video I saw on the internet. Apparently it's a teaser for a full-length documentary called "Mystic Ball." It's about the game of chinlone, otherwise known as cane ball. Take a tiny soccer ball (they don't use cane balls anymore) and mix it with hackey-sack-style play and then times it by a thousand and you have chinlone. It's like real-life "Shaolin Soccer." This stuff totally blew my mind. That there are things in this world far beyond what I know is not news to me, but to see it illustrated so vividly really hit home. Check out the video HERE (high) or HERE (less high) and see if it doesn't open your eyes.

"Mystic Ball" by the way is playing at the Hotdocs Film Festival. The festival goes from 28th April - 7th May. "Mystic Ball" is playing on the 1st and 7th of May. Check the Hotdocs site for details. Maybe I'll see you there.

In following with this new sense of discovery, I found an article in an issue of Popular Science that piqued my interest. Ever wonder what exactly you're gonna do with your body when you die? C'mon! Burial and cremation are so cliche. Being shot out into space? Not bad. But here are a couple of alternatives that you may want to consider. I sure am.

Environmentally conscious? Burial is like making yourself human garbage in a plot-sized, single-serving landfill. Cremation reduces your remains to pointless ashes. How about "promession" instead? Your "body [gets] put in a container and dipped in a vat of liquid nitrogen cooled to -321F, which dehydrates it and makes it so brittle that a jolt of vibration 'shatters' it into heaps of powder." This powder disintegrates in less than a year and provides rich nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. How does being plant food sound to you?

Not liking that one? How about this. They cremate your body, but rather than storing you in an urn on the mantle or scattering you to the wind, they extract the pure carbon from your ashes and put it in a press that exerts intense 2200F heat and 50000 atmostphere pressures on you for a couple of days. Presto! You're a freaking diamond. After some cutting and polishing, you're an attractive 1 carat mystical, haunted artifact. Sounds kind of cool to me.

Think about it...