I Saw the Walrus

It's been quiet for awfully long. I have even received letters asking if everything's all right. Some have wondered what I've been up to, others have just kicked back and enjoyed the absence.

The questions are many. Inquiring minds want to know. Who is the eggman? Where did the walrus go?

Since time is at a premium these days, I thought it best to prepare the above illustration to explain all that and a bag of chips. I'll try and get back to more verbose writings towards the end of the summer.

Happy days in the meantime. Jaya Blogannatha!

YOU WILL BE ACBSPIMILATED

you will be acbspimilated | resistance is futile
your distinctiveness will be engaged to service us

There's more in common to the Hare Krishnas and the Borg than just the hairdo and the uniform uniform, but that's a topic for another time. Today it's just a picture that tells you the thousand words.

Raganuga.Com Audio Archives

The audio archives of the now retired Raganuga.Com are available for download at The Internet Archive:

Raganuga.Com Audio Archives

The download area contains all materials hosted under the lectures (patha) and songs (kirtana) sections of the site. Most of the materials come from Advaitadas's old source tapes I once cleaned up and uploaded.

The kirtana are recordings of songs primarily from Radha-kunda from over the decades. The patha are Advaitadas's translations of lectures by Pandit Ananta Das Babaji and Pandit Vaishnava Pada Das Babaji.

     

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5, the media can be freely downloaded and shared. A special mention goes to The Internet Archive for their hosting service.

Total download size in MP3 (VBR) format is 1.9 GB. The files are available for download individually in several formats (MP3 64kbps, MP3 VBR, Ogg Vorbis) and in a single zip file.

Raganuga.Com Audio Archives

He built a shrine at Radha-kunda...

Someone was kind enough to remember me with a composite photo of myself and what appears to be a shrine I once inhabited. This is actually the toilet bathroom combo of the house I never really lived in. My actual shrine, rented on the roof of the Manipuri temple (where the below photo of me was taken), was a bit under five square meters in size and came with a 30x30 cm window.

For contrast's sake, let's include a recent shot of where I live at these days. Many have wondered whether I ended up living in the stump of an old tree or something. Who would have guessed just how on the mark their guesses were! Actually I do live in the stump of an old tree. (Solar power and wireless net.) Below you can see me emerging for the hollow of the tree to greet the mid-day sun.

I also have a mantra I chant when I stand at the treetop greeting the heavens, an atma-dhyana or self-contemplation of sorts. The pronunciation and the full merit can only really be obtained by native speakers of a Finno-Ugrean language, even if there are a few foreign masters of vowel harmony and agglutinative morphology too. I may prepare a chanting guide with a recording in the future if there's sufficient interest among the readers.

Korpikuusen kannon alla on Mörri-Möykyn kolo.
Siellä on koti ja siellä on peti ja peikolla pehmoinen olo.
Tiu tau tiu tau tili tali tittan sirkat soittaa salolla,
Pikkuiset peikot ne piilossa pysyy kirkkaalla päivän valolla.
Syksyn tullen sieniä kasvaa karhunkankahalla,
Mörri-Möykky se sateessa istuu kärpässienen alla.

The Dangers of Incoherent Internet Usage

Internet forums and blog comments tend to fill with the obscurest possible attempts at verbal communication. Many posts are so indescribably incoherent that they are rarely intelligible even to the architect of the verbal potpourri himself. It's all fun and games they say, yet few understand the very real dangers writing on the internet in an incoherent state of mind can cause to innocent readers.

Be a responsible internet person — consider the potential psychological and physiological injuries your readers may sustain when exposed to your writings. The following flowchart presents a basic five-point-program to help overcome the urge to post in heightened states of incoherence. If you are an incoherent addict, print it out and and study it whenever you feel the urge to post your productions to a website.

Exercise particular attention when posting to a site you are addicted to, as addictions tend to lower the threshold for emotional and irrational responses. A special word of caution is in place for addicts posting under anonymous aliases on sites they've sworn to never participate at again. While self-control and peer support may help some get over their budding addiction, advanced cases of focused iOCD are best left in the hands of trained professionals.

Gaudiya Repercussions Status

Edit 2009/04/10: The site is now back online.

I've been contacted concerning the ongoing downtime at Gaudiya Repercussions. The issue appears to be with the services of the hosting provider itself, beyond anything I (as consultant admin) can do until a company response is received.

Currently all HTTP and FTP access is offline. That notwithstanding, we now have a current site MySQL backup secured. Whatever happened and happens to the site with what seems like the hosting disaster we had been half fearing and half expecting, no texts will be lost. This might also be a major network issue, but most likely the server's gone totally defunct.

Watch this space and the comments feed for more information as the issue resolves.

Edit 2009/04/09: There seems to also be a software vulnerability in InvisionBoard that allows registered users to abuse the forum system by flooding it with spam comments. A certain comments table we have was filled up with tens of thousands of entries (76,963 to be precise) in 125.1 megabytes... (Turns out this was an unrelated older issue that had gone unnoticed. The database garbage has now been removed as well.)

Edit 2009/04/10: The site is now back online. Turns out the issue was caused by vandalism, as reported here. While any proper hosting datacenter does have redundant connectivity over several independent pipes, in this case a grand total of ten bundles with hundreds of fiber-optic cables were cut down at four separate protected locations, taking down telecom and internet access from some 50,000 subscribers, affecting our server as well.

Star Wars: Cult Derelicts (DP)

Dissociated Press
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Hollywood, USA

The tragicomic saga of Ananda Skywalker, Finnish philosopher and Hare Krishna derelict, recently recognized as the prodigal son of a former cult leader, has finally reached the big screen. Written and directed by George Lucas, the narration is transplanted from the original alien environment into a familiar science fiction universe.

Screenshot with Wader and Skywalker from last week's Cult Derelicts teaser.

Matching expectations from fans worldwide, the long-waited Hollywood rendering of the saga explores the love-hate relationship of young Padawan and Dark Wader in substantial detail. While the juicy revelations do explain a great deal of Wader's obsessive-compulsive disorder towards Skywalker, rumors abound even the director doesn't know what exactly is going on in Wader's head.

Distributed by Warner Bros, the flick is scheduled for global release on April 15th. While heavily criticized by critics, fans have been going nuts with trailers and sneak peeks at SWcultDerelicts.Com. Looks like another box office rattler from George Lucas in the coming, whatever the critics' opinion!