Glad that's sorted.

I find that wrapping my head with a really tight scarf, as if to "choke" off the blood flow really helps. It's a family secret since a bunch of us get migraines often. I heard somewhere that headaches have to do with the speed of blood flow in your vessels but who knows if that's true.

How about a kind 21 that signals a Happy Birthday, with many returns, I mean, zaps :)

Great. I will add 85 to my equation :)

I relate

True. It is a case of the blind leading the

blind. Too much of that going round lately.

Q is here? I wouldn't know, I only had an L. It was a need to know situation.

Wait. Is that a python that ate an elephant in Braille?

Wouldn't we all...

I recognize a fellow navel-gazer when I see

one, but only when I finally look up ;)

On second thought, I think I didn't read it somewhere. I believe it was a throwaway line in the movie Phantom Thread, Daniel Day Lewis's swan song. Our favorite method actor. If you haven't seen it, enjoy.

On Style #It'sOn

I once read somewhere that having a large budget or abundant access to the latest fashion counterintuitively leads to a decline in tase or sense of style. Apparently, the very act of having to do more with less, devise a "look" or make-do with last year's staples requires an out-of-the-box thinking and level of creativity that leads to an interminable sense of style. Very reassuring stuff, if you ask me. As someone who can't easily afford designer clothes, let alone be willing to partake in consumer-driven fast fashion trends, I patted myself on the back for having a great sense of fashion out of necessity, not mandate. Did you catch that, dear reader? I was being a bit sarcastic there, but only just a tad. I mean, really. Who declares oneself stylish? Who but a madman or madwoman insists they are a tastemaker? Isn't the proof of the pudding, in is its eating? Don't people have to compliment your presentation or even emulate it before you can announce your arrival as an influencer? Not to brag, but I did have a certified imitator at work once. She would literally go out and buy the same top I wore from H&M albeit in a different color. Black, if memory serves me correctly. I bet she would've worn the same color I wore, white, if the store still had it, so shameless she was about copying me. My then-husband bought me as a gift, a grey suede kitten heel from my favorite shop in London, a one-off designer who makes her shoes by hand. Not to worry, not only did she find a similar shoe on the web no doubt, but proceeded to parade it around the office as if I might have been the one copying her! So obscure a fashion note that was, it was obvious to anyone who cared to look what she was doing. No one said or did anything about her pathology. I began to suspect she had a crush on my boss, a handsome but firmly married man with children. She kept asking me questions about him as if I was his harem’s keeper. For some bizarre reason she must have thought her way to his heart was through my style. I started calling her "single Indian female" in my head, only because she was a first-generation American, with parents from the country of India. Which is sad because we started off being friends, I even ate her mom's homemade samosas, and played a game of tennis on her home grounds. In the end, I had to keep my distance after she began her campaign of terror, trying to supplant me through my clothes. Instead I fell ill and lost my job, almost my life. Scary stuff. There is diminishing returns to "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". Anyways, let's move on to lighter fare, shall we. I meant to share a bit of gossip to go along with that story. When Selma Hayek married the owner of the French luxury brand LVMH, she, all of a sudden, had access to a dizzying array of wardrobe receptacles such that she became a fixture on the worst-dressed lists in the fashion magazines. Can you believe that? A woman who can actually pull off a potato sack if she wanted to, is all of a sudden advertised as the epitome of what not to wear. Any yet, it was true. The fashion press was ruthless; maybe they were jealous. I don't know, I can't say. I still think Selma can wear just about anything, ma'sh'allah, as we say in Arabic. It translates as "as God willed it to be".  Wouldn't want anything to happen to her on my account. Besides, she, like me, is a dog lover. She told the funniest story on the Graham Norton show, on how she admitted to her husband that she had an affair with her hot co-star on a movie set, all made up, of course. She was hoping to distract him from the fact that she had brought home more strays after promising him not to. He was not phased at all and cooly responded the new dogs need to go after her theatrical admission . Now, that's what I call style. The French do have it. My ex-husband did as well. Fear not, dear reader. I am not advocating for designer clothes courtesy of Coco Chanel to capture that sense of "je ne sais quoi". In fact, the opposite is true. Those of us with money or even over-the-top beauty have it the hardest when it comes to style. It can easily breach the domain of the obscene, if you are not too careful. Wearing the latest must-haves and donning the most desirable items of the season is a sucker's game. All it says about you is how captured you are, or how much you are willing to pay a premium to signal to the world, or the fairer sex, you are sexy. So not sexy. What you should do instead is know thyself, as Socrates advocates. The path to true sex appeal is inward and endogenous, not outward or exogenous. Who are you? The Cheshire cat asked Alice when she found herself in the Wonderland. What moves you? What topics do you want to explore? What turns you on? For me, it is Bitcoin. In a way, it has always been Bitcoin before it was discovered. I wanted to know when the future is exactly. Do tell, I asked my Dad at the ripe old age of 5, when he flippantly dismissed me with the typical Arabic response, “in the future”, after asking for something I wanted, most likely a toy? I count that as my very first existential crisis. What do you mean there’s something called the future and I have to wait for it to materialize? I had a very high time preference as a child. Then I wanted to know how things actually worked so I took apart our VCR and put it back together, minus a few screws which I couldn't quite remember where they went. The VCR still worked. Phew, my parents won't kill me; at least not today. When it comes to the screws in my head, I can't be quite so sure. Just like style, you will have to show me. My most vexing question was also to my Dad who worked in the field of international development, when I asked him with a straight face when development? Why hasn't Africa industrialized yet so we can finally go home? I didn't get a satisfying answer, and my Dad died in 1997. His heart gave out on the streets of Nairobi, just hours shy of Valentine's Day. I would like to believe that his heart was in the right place, even if his profession might not have been. Inevitably, I will ask the uncomfortable question, make the obvious gaffe, say the wrong thing. Was it something I said? I find myself asking that question more often than not but thankfully not all the time. Did I do that? Most likely I did, Urkel, and family does matter. I am missing the iconicly over-hiked up suspenders though, just not the suspense. Just in case a normie is reading this, I most definitely do like fashion, fashion magazines, beauty editors and fashion insiders. I have a timechain composed of not Bitcoin, otherwise I could have become a nauseating imbecile already, dressed head-to-toe in Gucci driving an Audi R8. Just kidding, Tom Ford is no longer head designer and I lost that sexy feeling. Rather, I have glossies from most of the countries I have lived in or visited, spanning many years, documenting my life's journey. I almost lost it all during my move from my previous apartment when I was a married woman, to my current abode, a half-way house where I subsist as a divorcee. Other priceless items of my life were permanently lost, including memorabilia from my childhood, mostly of my late father’s. One thing is for sure, I do like a distinct, ever playful, arty-farty even child-like type of style. That's the kind of person I am. Can you tell? That I am my father's daughter. Buyer beware.

GM plebs. If it is not posted on Nostr, has it ever existed?

I thought that Signature bank did not fail.

My understanding is it was solvent but was "choked" by force because it serviced the "crypto" industry. Still, cool post. I spotted my local bank in WI, Norwest, which was bought up by Wells Fargo in the mid-nineties. I still bank with WF. Thank god for Bitcoin.

Thanks for sharing. I wonder if this was the poem that Boris Johnson was supposedly muttering under his breath when he was Britain's prime minister 🤔

Whoa! That's some simulation at work. The way I was taught that saying is "war is bad but exciting. Peace is good but dull". It puts a whole new spin to it, right?

word

Good thing you are channeling your art into the right medium.

On Creative Destruction #It'sOn

Dear reader, did you know that the Eiffel tower has outstayed its welcome? It has committed the mortal sin of not exiting gracefully. To the French, that is such a "faux pas" and yet there it stands bright eyed, bushy tailed in the middle of the city of light. Sacre Bleu! A previous boyfriend of mine, a Quebecois, which in my book doubles as a Frenchman, albeit a reformed one, alerted me to the importance of graceful exits with an amused look on his face. As my other half-Quebecois, half-French childhood friend told me with a straight face when we ran into each other serendipitously after decades have passed, in the center of London, wearing the very same coat, in the very same color, when was I ever cool? I don't do graceful exits; I am not French. Besides, if Paris can withstand the idea of keeping a has-been exhibit from the 1889 world fair, built to be a transient architectural marvel for the momentary pleasure of the revelers, so can I. I must say, European destinations are chock full of buildings shamelessly exhibiting physical manifestations of ornamental beauty. In Florence, you can be forgiven for being paralyzed into a state of transcendence before the presence of the Duomo in Florence, like a bad case of Stendhal syndrome. Lest you think this post is about celebrating Western societies, it isn't. In the far east, Tibetan monks construct mandalas which are works of art using colored sand, solemnly building it with painstaking precision to reach a set outer limit, only to destroy it with a sweep of the hand in one fell swoop. It is as if they want to say life is cruel, finite, easily extinguishable. Such is the miracle of life; not that we are actually alive in the first place, but that we manage to make it from one second to the next unscathed. We humans are prone to disrepair. We forget the lessons of history, we repeat the same mistakes. Thankfully, the passage of time is infinite and we can be fooled into believing we will meet with the same results like we did last time. We are unable to grasp intuitively the forces at play shaping our survival, or sowing the seeds of impending destruction. Until we arrive at the appointed hour and confront our fate, there's no way to know ahead of time of the happy accidents or the looming disaster. Only time will tell. But also time heals. Lest we forget, because we are guaranteed to. Clues of our collective hallucinations exist as deja-vue. The memories hidden deep within us are resuscitated back to life having tripped over a stimuli, replaying a movie reel from years past or perhaps ages ago. The senses are in constant search for prior glory, honing in on a signal to help us find the way home. A place where the scent of Madelines filled the air bathing our very being with mother's love. A parting of the clouds, letting in magical light beams sent direct to squinting eyes with shining wonder. A heavenly sound reverberating through your skin, past the organs, immersing your soul with divine healing. I am convinced this phenomena is real. It must have once lived. I have its imprint dating my carbon rings with ancient wisdom. I must be the creation of entropy, the harbinger of knowledge. I just know it and sometimes I feel it. It is just within my grasp. I reach for it desperately with all my power, my inner core. I guide it in with urgent desire, unrelenting and body crushing. I need it. I want to be made whole. One bit at a time. Until I am all one. A satisfying state of unity infinitum. And then it begins again.

On Time #It'sOn

Time is money, money is time. In math, this interplay is known as the commutative property. In this case, I would like to coin the operation of Bitcoin as the commutative property of time. It is a timechain holding money in its asymptotic vector trajectory. Money is time denominated in Bitcoin blocks. For instance, the time now is Block Height 827, 866. The money is forever 21 million Bitcoin. Understanding the concept of time, like Bitcoin, is a tour de force of so many threads. Let's hope it doesn't get unwieldy. As you probably know, we believe that time is relative. It is a function of the space-time continuum. We can't know precisely where we stand in the universe, it is so vast and never-ending. We can barely go beyond our neighboring planets, let alone our home galaxy, the milky way. Instead, we use our star, the Sun, to set our watches, give structure to our days and define our lifetimes. It is just a reference, give or take a few minutes. Who cares? In fact, Cal Tech does. They have a bunch of time engineers way down in their basement, measuring time down to infinitesimal decimal points based on the atomic model of matter. These guys are not satisfied with the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), a dividing line in the sands, so to speak, between arbitrary time zones. In a bit worthy of divine comedy, a watchmaker was the one who finally figured out how best to measure longitudes, GMT being one of them, after many failed attempts by astronomers and mathematicians, to map it. The problem was opened up to the general public as a competition, with an actual bounty, such was the failure of the experts. Reminds me of someone called Satoshi Nakamoto who discovered how to do perfect money with all the failure of the banks. Satoshi gave us a whole new clock, a conceptualization of existence that is in relation to immutable blocks of money transactions instead of the stars. Thank goodness because we were lost in space. We thought we were flying towards the horizon but in reality we were bound to crash and ended up on the ocean floor. Our flying instruments are off, the sensors do not work. We celebrate the winter and summer solstices on the wrong days and are none the wiser. Google and the observatories aimed at the sky tell us it is October 21st and June 21st. The heavens beg to differ; it's actually January 3rd and September 3rd. The Golden Gate bridge has missed its rendez-vous with the heavens. It was left wanting after promises of grandeur to meet with its cosmic fate, it's raison d'etre. The bridge has travelled expectantly around the sun to find the door closed to the space horizon. How is it that we the creatures of the earth live on despite undoing time's Hermetic polarity? Shouldn't we be extinct, so at odds are we with the laws of nature? Can the universe be that generous to excuse our wayward ways? Why haven't they sent us an emissary to set us straight and put us back on course, in keeping with the hands of time? Will we have to wake up the dead to remember our true destiny in the stars? The ancients knew how to tell time just by looking up. They figured out the earth did a quirky little dance around its axis every 26,000 years just because. Maybe precession is a reminder to the people to pay attention, recalibrate their internal clocks, be humble about their place in the universe. Now, our overloads, the government, impose a meaningless daylight savings time. The heavens weep at our stupidity. The ancients gave us milestones as keepers of the memories. They erected monuments to align with the planets in the form of pyramids. They built a yardstick for the world to know its boundaries. From the great pyramid of Giza, to the humble-sized but thousands of years more ancient Nubian pyramids in northern Sudan, to the  Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey which is even more ancient, we are transported back to a time period well over 12,000 years before the birth of Christ in human ingenuity and civilization. Nature itself lent a helping hand, sending great floods into the South western American plains, marking its presence forever in the grooves, peaks, valleys and dried out riverbeds to document antiquity. And yet, we ignore it. We forgot it. Our children barely look at the night sky and wonder about the distance of the stars. Our schools do not teach astronomy. Our best teachers can't point out the little and big dipper. They can't animate the bull of Orion. We abdicated that to Hollywood. We have lost that magical feeling. Our history is no longer nourishing, it beats us down with its emphasis on human darkness, made up of half-truth and outlandish lies to assuage the egos of the dominant and powerful. We are left to pick up the pieces of our forgotten past like breadcrumbs left in the time machine. Our TVs when they were analog reminded us it is capturing the very distant but real light and sound waves who began their journey 14 billion years before. They are hurling  towards us at unbearable speeds from the beginning of time, marking the big bang. The waves are on a mission; they are intent on expanding the net of existence to its breaking limit, triggering a tsunami that will drown us whole, the likes of which we can never fathom. Shakespeare memorialized our tragic condition in a fateful tale, formulating turns of phrases in a manner that only he can. He called our lives “a walking shadow. A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Macbeth is indeed dark stuff. Did I scare you, dear reader? Don't fret. Focus on the light. It is Bitcoin. We are only a brief history of time. A teenage wasteland.