I found a way cool tutorial on making a cool photo "in the round".  I'd like to do a Bakersfield in the round using the most notable buildings in town.   So tell me, what do YOU think are the buildings I need to take photos of, that say "Bakersfield"...?

On my list so far is, the Fox Theatre and of course the Bakersfield sign, the Kern County Museum including the clock tower.   What else?

Can you all help me with more please....?  Of course I'll post the picture here when I get it done.

"Transcendental social" is a phrase used in the article I found yesterday from New Scientist.  Because we are such social beings, we have developed religion out of a need for camaraderie and to share our imaginations.

This is something I didn't need a scientist to tell me. But at least it explains how and when we developed these skills of using our imaginations.

I've always said to my kids, that other people talk about God and an afterlife, well what about other lifeforms. Where's their God, where's their afterlife? These are the weird things I think about when I look at my dog, Ginger. She's not worried about what's going to happen to her when she dies. She just lives for today. But she doesn't have an imagination.

People practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imaginations.  From the article:

Maurice Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.

At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication the "transcendental social".

Just the word "transcendental" means  anything "without outflows," ie, free of the three marks of greed, anger and delusion.   Which I find kind of funny, considering how I feel about the delusion of religion. 

I "get" so many people need religion, it gives them great comfort.  I'm still against children being indoctrinated into something they have no choice to follow when they're children.  Kids can't make informed decisions about these things.  They'll root for Daddy's favorite football team, because that's what daddy likes.  They don't have a clue on why they like that team. Geez, why not let  your kids make stock picks for you.  Or pick a lawyer.  They just aren't informed enough to make those decisions.  But they can be lead blindly into religion with no choice, except  to follow their parents imaginations. 

Has anyone heard about this? A tomb has been found, believed to be Knights Templar, but it could possibly hold the body of Mary Magdalene.

The tomb is in the mountains of the Languedoc region of southwest France. This may help substantiate the existence of a Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene bloodline.

The chamber holds a mummified corpse on a rose-colored plinth under a shroud bearing the distinctive red cross of the Knights Templar, and is surrounded by wooden chests, revealing a cache of gold chalices and coins.

Here's a link to a photo from inside the tomb.

Anyway, I heard about this, this morning, from my dog walking partner. He has a producer friend who knows someone involved with this new documentary movie, BLOODLINE, coming out this May. It'll be in Los Angeles May 16th.

"After the Crusades, it was rumored that the Templars had discovered treasure underneath the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem that could debunk the Catholic Church's doctrine," said Bruce Burgess, of the unprecedented discovery of what appears to be an intact Knights Templar tomb. "This treasure was believed to be priceless relics -- documents, the Holy Grail, even the embalmed remains of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene -- which was then brought to southern France, and hidden."

The team was able to take some hair strands from the woman's corpse and do a mitochondrial DNA test. "We were able to determine a Middle Eastern maternal origin of the individual based on haplotyping information. After we found out where this hair sample came from, we realized the significance of this work."

The rare find will be further examined at a Monday, May 5 news conference at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

This'll be VERY interesting to see how this plays out. Will it shake The Vatican to it's core?   We'll just have to see.

What a lovely afternoon.  My husband had the day off and we went for lunch at a downtown cafe.  He had the French Dip, and me, I had the curry chicken sandwich on a croissant.  We both enjoyed sitting outside, with a nice breeze, shooting the breeze.

After lunch,  we went to a local antique shop and browsed around.  The older gentleman inside the shop, who's been here his whole life, shared with us something quite interesting and downright made me *gasp* outloud.  He said a woman had come in recently with some "artifacts".  Those consisted of a few old postcard type pictures and a full white outfit, including a "pointy hat".  He said the arm of the "outfit" had been torn off at the elbow, and he said he could only imagine what the story behind that might be.   He then reached into a drawer and pulled out  some of the photos along with a KKK statue about 6 inches high and showed them to us.

I don't really know why he felt it was okay to bring these things out and show US, but we looked at the postcard type photos  from 1924.  The first one I saw was a parade showing a KKK float, YES, A  KKK PARADE FLOAT going down, downtown Bakersfield. Next was the whole "gang" dressed in their  KKK outfits.  I was standing there with my mouth wide open, disgusted and horrified. The little KKK statue was of a man made of bronze standing there pointing at us.  UGH!

I came home and thought about "The Grapes of Wrath" after Googling:  1920  Ku Klux Klan Bakersfield.  I found  this (link)  and it's small blurb from a book about our checkered past.  And, how funny is this, my OWN blog popped up in there on Google too, thanks to Hardliner4Freedom's comment on my Dolphin post from October '07. 

This excerpt is from the NewYorkTimes link above:

The Klan's allure in Kern County and other parts of Southern California lay as much in clever marketing as in its traditional message of racial hatred. The group pitched itself as a Christian fraternity that could combat the frontier corruption plaguing Bakersfield and other cities of the era. As such, it was able to attract not only avowed racists, but also ordinary members of the community who had tired of the open culture of vice--and who were willing to tolerate the Klan's brutality if it meant cleaning up the streets, trading one form of crime for another. The KKK in Kern County billed itself as the scourge of immorality, but it simply recruited the corrupt, rather than combat them, then launched its own brand of terrorism and thuggery on dissenters of every race

Anyway,  I'm flabbergasted.  Mostly  from the pictuire of the KKK float.  And the fact Bakersfield was like this in the early part of the Twentieth Century, with it's mirroring the Deep South.  I had a history lesson about this town today and it's past.  I need to get the book " The Grapes of Wrath" out and re read it.   Bakersfield has quite the colored (no pun intended) past, and I'm not feeling too proud of this town right now.  Call me naive, if you will, but I can't stand that anything like this still happens in today's world.