You can expect to find, as usual, delicious food and high quality music from live performers and DJs. There will also be regular trips to the local onsens, and of course the mountains are in one of their most beautiful phases: early spring, with blossoming bushes and trees, and a myriad of hues of green.
to be paid for using EarthlingZ Money, which you can buy upon entry. We request you to buy a minimum of 2500 円 worth, which should cover dinner and breakfast.
このイベントをサポートするために食事と飲み物を販売していますので、食べ物と飲み物の持ち込みをしないで下さい。その他、お酒や薬物の使用はグリーンハ ウスで禁止されていますので、ご注意下さい。 Please do not bring your own food and beverages, as it is the sale of these that supports these events.
Please note also that alcohol and stimulant drugs are not allowed at The Greenhouse.
ONCE A YEAR OR SO, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town. Saturday morning, 9 to 12, a steady stream of people show up to sort out their plastics (No. 1, No. 2, etc.), their corrugated cardboard (flattened, please), their glass (and their returnable glass, which goes to benefit the elementary school), their Styrofoam peanuts, their paper, their cans. It's quite satisfying—everything in its place.
But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. For one, a town of 550 sure generates a lot—a trailer load every couple of weeks. Sometimes you have to put a kid into the bin and tell her to jump up and down so the lid can close.
More than that, though, so much of it seems utterly unnecessary. Not just waste, but wasteful. Plastic water bottles, one after another—80 million of them get tossed every day. The ones I'm stomping down are being "recycled," but so what? In a country where almost everyone has access to clean drinking water, they define waste to begin with. I mean, you don't have a mug? In fact, once you start thinking about it, the category of "waste" begins to expand, until it includes an alarming percentage of our economy. Let's do some intellectual sorting:
There's old-fashioned waste, the dangerous, sooty kind. You're making something useful, but you're not using the latest technology, and so you're spewing: particulates into the air, or maybe sewage into the water. You wish to keep doing it, because it's cheap, and you block any regulation that might interfere with your right to spew. This is the kind of waste that's easy to attack; it's obvious and obnoxious and a lot of it falls under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and so on. There's actually less of this kind of waste than there used to be—that's why we can swim in most of our rivers again.
There's waste that comes from everything operating as it should, only too much so. If carbon monoxide (carbon with one oxygen atom) exemplifies pollution of the first type, then carbon dioxide (carbon with two oxygen atoms) typifies the second. Carbon monoxide poisons you in your garage and turns Beijing's air brown, but if you put a catalytic converter on your tailpipe it all but disappears. Carbon dioxide doesn't do anything to you directly—a clean-burning engine used to be defined as one that released only CO2 and water vapor—but in sufficient quantity it melts the ice caps, converts grassland into desert, and turns every coastal city into New Orleans.
There's waste that comes from doing something that manifestly doesn't need doing. A hundred million trees are cut every year just to satisfy the junk-mail industry. You can argue about cutting trees for newspapers, or magazines, or Bibles, or symphony scores—but the cascade of stuffporn that arrives daily in our mailboxes? It wastes forests, and also our time. Which, actually, is precious—we each get about 30,000 days, and it makes one a little sick to calculate how many of them have been spent opening credit card offers.
Or think about what we've done with cars. From 1975 to 1985, fuel efficiency for the average new car improved from 14 to 28 miles per gallon. Then we stopped worrying about oil and put all that engineering talent to work on torque. In the mid-1980s, the typical car accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in 14.5 seconds. Today's average (even though vehicles are much heavier) is 9.5 seconds. But it's barely legal to accelerate like that, and it makes you look like an idiot, or a teenager.
Then there's the waste that comes with doing something maybe perhaps vaguely useful when you could be doing something actually useful instead. For instance: Congress is being lobbied really, really hard to fork over billions of dollars to the nuclear industry, on the premise that it will fight global warming. There is, of course, that little matter of nuclear waste—but lay that aside (in Nevada or someplace). The greater problem is the wasted opportunity: That money could go to improving efficiency, which can produce the same carbon reductions for about a fifth of the price.
Our wasteful habits wouldn't matter much if there were just a few of us—a Neanderthal hunting band could have discarded six plastic water bottles apiece every day with no real effect except someday puzzling anthropologists. But the volumes we manage are something else. Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, "Running the Numbers," uses exquisite images to show the 106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the 1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the 2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the 426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the 60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, or the 170,000 Energizer batteries produced every 15 minutes. The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.)
Would you like me to go on? Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream. We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean. And—oh, forget it.
These kinds of numbers get in the way of figuring out how much we really waste. In recent years, for instance, 40 percent of Harvard graduates have gone into finance, consulting, and business. They had just spent four years with the world's greatest library, some of its finest museum collections, an unparalleled assemblage of Nobel-quality scholars, and all they wanted to do was go to lower Manhattan and stare into computer screens. What a waste! And when they got to Wall Street, of course, they figured out extravagant ways to waste the life savings of millions of Americans, which in turn required the waste of taxpayer dollars to bail them out, money that could have been spent on completely useful things: trains to get us where we want to go—say, new national parks.
Perhaps the only kind of waste we've gotten good at cutting is the kind we least needed to eliminate: An entire industry of consultants survives on telling companies how to get rid of inefficiencies—which generally means people. And an entire class of politicians survives by railing about government waste, which also ends up meaning programs for people: Health care for poor children, what a boondoggle.
Want to talk about government waste? We're going to end up spending north of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, which will go down as one of the larger wastes of money—and lives—in our history. But we spend more than half a trillion a year on the military anyway, more than the next 10 nations combined. That almost defines profligacy.
We've gotten away with all of this for a long time because we had margin, all kinds of margin. Money, for sure—we were the richest nation on Earth, and when we wanted more we just borrowed it from China. But margin in other ways as well: We landed on a continent with topsoil more than a foot thick across its vast interior, so the fact that we immediately started to waste it with inefficient plowing hardly mattered. We inherited an atmosphere that could buffer our emissions for the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution. We somehow got away with wasting the talents of black people and women and gay folks.
But our margin is gone. We're out of cash, we're out of atmosphere, we're out of luck. The current economic carnage is what happens when you waste—when the CEO of Merrill Lynch thinks he needs a $35,000 commode, when the CEO of Tyco thinks it would be fun to spend a million dollars on his wife's birthday party, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David peeing vodka. The melted Arctic ice cap is what you get when everyone in America thinks he requires the kind of vehicle that might make sense for a forest ranger.
Getting out of the fix we're in—if it's still possible—requires in part that we relearn some very old lessons. We were once famously thrifty: Yankee frugality, straightening bent nails, saving string. We used to have a holiday, Thrift Week, which began on Ben Franklin's birthday: "Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship," said he. We disapproved of frippery, couldn't imagine wasting money on ourselves, made do or did without. It took a mighty effort to make us what we are today—in fact, it took a mighty industry, advertising, which soaks up plenty more of those Harvard grads and represents an almost total waste.
In the end, we built an economy that depended on waste, and boundless waste is what it has produced. And the really sad part is, it felt that way, too. Making enough money to build houses with rooms we never used, and cars with engines we had no need of, meant wasting endless hours at work. Which meant that we had, on average, one-third fewer friends than our parents' generation. What waste that! "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," wrote Wordsworth. We can't say we weren't warned.
The economic mess now transfixing us will mean some kind of change. We can try to hang on to the status quo—living a Wal-Mart life so we can buy cheaply enough to keep the stream of stuff coming. Or we can say uncle. There are all kinds of experiments in postwaste living springing up: Freecycling, and Craigslisting, and dumpster diving, and car sharing (those unoccupied seats in your vehicle—what a waste!), and open sourcing. We're sharing buses, and going to the library in greater numbers. Economists keep hoping we'll figure out a way to revert—that we'll waste a little more, and pull us out of the economic doldrums. But the psychological tide suddenly runs the other way.
We may have waited too long—we may have wasted our last good chance. It's possible the planet will keep warming and the economy keep sinking no matter what. But perhaps not—and we seem ready to shoot for something nobler than the hyperconsumerism that's wasted so much of the last few decades. Barack Obama said he would "call out" the nation's mayors if they wasted their stimulus money. That's the mood we're in, and it's about time.
Another aspect of this party:---we want to discuss with friends and Greenhouse supporters the plans outlined here:
Of the many consequences to be expected from the current collapse of various systems, one of the more obvious is global food shortages. Now is a good time even for people who have not thought before about gardening to consider at least learning techniques of growing food on a local scale.
This year at The Greenhouse we intend to experiment with growing vegetables and herbs in ...well, greenhouses, or vinyl houses, as they are called in Japan. We have discovered some new technology that will allow creating thriving low-maintenance greenhouses automatically watered without constant checking or electricity.
We are inviting people who would like to experiment and learn along with us to come and spend time at The Greenhouse exploring these areas. Working during the day (with music), eating well (with music( and hanging out in the evenings (with music). Accommodation, food and facilities will be payable with work, or with a combination of hours and cash
Spring seems again to be here (the last time being in mid-February) , and we will have a musical gathering at The Greenhouse from March 20th (a National Holiday) through the 22nd
VEGETARIAN OISHIMONO: Indian and Thai curries Italian pasta dishes Muffins, Giant pancakes Cheesecake, Pies & other baked goodies Herbal teas and other beverages SHOP: ASTRALBODYSHOP
to be paid for using EarthlingZ Money, which you can buy upon entry. We request you to buy a minimum of 2500 円 worth, which should cover dinner and breakfast.
ACCESS & CONTACT INFO このイベントをサポートするために食事と飲み物を販売していますので、食べ物と飲み物の持ち込みをしないで下さい。その他、お酒や薬物の使用はグリーンハ ウスで禁止されていますので、ご注意下さい。
Please do not bring your own food and beverages, as it is the sale of these that supports these events. Please note also that alcohol and stimulant drugs are not allowed at The Greenhouse.
Spring seems again to be here (the last time being in mid-February) , and we will have a musical gathering at The Greenhouse from March 20th (a National Holiday) through the 22nd
VEGETARIAN OISHIMONO: Indian and Thai curries Italian pasta dishes Muffins, Giant pancakes Cheesecake, Pies & other baked goodies Herbal teas and other beverages SHOP: ASTRALBODYSHOP
to be paid for using EarthlingZ Money, which you can buy upon entry. We request you to buy a minimum of 2500 円 worth, which should cover dinner and breakfast.
ACCESS & CONTACT INFO このイベントをサポートするために食事と飲み物を販売していますので、食べ物と飲み物の持ち込みをしないで下さい。その他、お酒や薬物の使用はグリーンハ ウスで禁止されていますので、ご注意下さい。
Please do not bring your own food and beverages, as it is the sale of these that supports these events. Please note also that alcohol and stimulant drugs are not allowed at The Greenhouse.
VEGETARIAN OISHIMONO: Indian and Thai curries Italian pasta dishes Muffins, Giant pancakes Cheesecake, Pies & other baked goodies Herbal teas and other beverages SHOP: ASTRALBODYSHOP COSTS:
to be paid for using EarthlingZ Money, which you can buy upon entry. We request you to buy a minimum of 2500 円 worth, which should cover dinner and breakfast.
ACCESS & CONTACT INFO このイベントをサポートするために食事と飲み物を販売していますので、食べ物と飲み物の持ち込みをしないで下さい。その他、お酒や薬物の使用はグリーンハ ウスで禁止されていますので、ご注意下さい。
Please do not bring your own food and beverages, as it is the sale of these that supports these events. Please note also that alcohol and stimulant drugs are not allowed at The Greenhouse.
to be paid for using EarthlingZ Money, which you can buy upon entry. We request you to buy a minimum of 2500 円 worth, which should cover dinner and breakfast.
ACCESS & CONTACT INFO このイベントをサポートするために食事と飲み物を販売していますので、食べ物と飲み物の持ち込みをしないで下さい。その他、お酒や薬物の使用はグリーンハ ウスで禁止されていますので、ご注意下さい。
Please do not bring your own food and beverages, as it is the sale of these that supports these events. Please note also that alcohol and stimulant drugs are not allowed at The Greenhouse.
If you like Old School trance, here's a mix of my favourite tracks from the classic Rising High label, known for its quality once described as "astral melancholy"
For some reason, the order of tracks has become mixed up, so it doesn't run as a continuous mix, but...
It's certainly pleasant to sit upstairs in The Greenhouse and listen to the rain on the roof. Sometimes it's a drop here and there, perhaps falling off the overhanging trees. At times it patters softly, punctuating the music with ambient randomness, and at others it drums steadily. And then from time to time the sun comes out and mist rises , exposing the soft greens of the hills.
It's a great place to be when it rains, and I'm imagining it might be raining this weekend as well. I know some friends will be going to outdoor dance parties during the long weekend, but those of you who would enjoy a few shanti days in the dry comfort of The Greenhouse, I renew the invitation to come and hang out at the free party, enjoying what's made in the music room and the kitchen, and strolling in the outdoors when the weather is dry. We'll be chilling out here through Sunday evening, so come late if you can't come early!
From the 14th through the 16th we'll have a FREE OPEN HOUSE at The Greenhouse. Sat night we'll turn a French cupcake upside-down with a candle in it for Zlatina, and Umi-No-Hi can be celebrated by those who explore The Sea of Consciousness. 14日から16日にかけてグリーンハウスはフリー・オープン･ハウスになります。土曜日の夜はTinaの誕生日のお祝いでフレンチカップケーキをアップサイドダウンにします。海の日は「意識の海」を探検する人々のお祝いになれます。
There will be no charge for attendance, but we ask people not to bring their own food and drinks, and to buy them from The Greenhouse kitchen. There will be delicious vegetarian meals and snacks. 入場料金がありませんが、食べ物や飲み物の持ち込みをしないで、グリーンハウスのキッチンで購入することをお願いします。おいしいベジタリアンの食事やスナックを準備します。 Performers will not be paid money, but as many know, we have other ways of rewarding contributions and participation. So if you'd like to participate in that way, get in touch. 出演者には謝礼金がありませんが、多くの方のご存知の通り、パーテイーへの貢献や参加はその他の方法で報酬することができます。 It'll be a laid back long summer weekend, with lots of ambient and downtempo music. Bring your swimming suit, in case it's hot enough to visit the lake nearby. アンビエントやダウンテンポ音楽一杯ののんびりした夏の3連休になると思います。暑かったら、近くの湖に行くかもしれないので、水着を持ってきてください。 INFO & ACCESS: THE GREENHOUSE
We are from another galaxy in the process of joining with the Milky Way. The Milky Way is actually not our parent galaxy. The mystery of why the Milky Way has always been sideways in the night sky has never been answered -- until now.
"...George Hefner...built a two-story 'treehouse' that stands on the ground between two leafy maples.He imagined his children fixing it up, sleeping there.But 10-year-old Paul cannot remember the last time he played in the little house. 'Animals live out there, you know,' he told his mother one day. His older sister Sarah, 16, admits that she has never set foot in it. 'What would I do in a treehouse?' she asked..."
In the weeks since the Golden Week Party at The Greenhouse, Shen Flindell, who played tabla with many other instrumentalists at the event, has been here at The Greenhouse editing the recordings we made of the live performances, as well as helping to improve the recording facilities.
Soon he leaves for a series of gigs in Kansai and elsewhere, so we're having a sort of farewell party here this weekend. I'm sorry to give such short notice, but if you are free this weekend and would like to hang out with Shen and whoever else may come to play, please pay us a visit any time between Friday night and Sunday night. Admission is Y1000, plus the purchase of EarthlingZ money for food and drinks. More info HERE
In the time between now and then, we will be broadcasting the edited recordings made at the last gathering, as well as many other recordings by Shen and other members of EthnoSuperLounge, which is the extensive network of musicians in Japan, Australia and India with whom Shen collaborates during his regular trips around the Southeastern quadrant of the globe. Tune in any time at http://WEZR.NET and listen, and then come out this weekend to enjoy the peace and beauty of the valley as it rapidly turns many shades of green.
AS you may know, the yearly Golden Week Gathering at The Greenhouse will be happening again, this time from 30 April until the 4th or 5th of May (depending on whether people want to continue until the weekend.) ご存知の方もいると思いますが、グリーンハウスのゴールデンウィークギャザリングは今年も行います。今年は4月30日から5月4日～5日ですが、終わりの 日は皆さんの希望によって決めます。
I hope you can find the time to attend. Already we have lined up many Indian music performers, including Kenji Sakasegawa and Shen Flindell on tablas, Taka Kurihara on Sitar and Tim Hoffman playing Indian music on shakuhachi and koto, And, as usual, there will probably be quite a few people attending who will DJ at one time or another. 是非今年も参加することを期待しています。タブラ の逆瀬川健二さんやフリンデル・シェンさん、栗原崇 (シタール), 尺八や琴でインド音楽の演奏をするホフマン・チ ムさんを含め、インド音楽の出演者はすでにラインアップしています。また、いつもと同じ様に、未定のスケジュールでＤＪするゲストがいると思います。
We will also have some great dance performances: Flamenco by the Yamaquito Family and Balinese Legong dance by Mia & Miki. また、Yamaquito家族のフラメンコ・パフォーマンスとMia&Mikiのバリ島レゴングダンス、素敵なダンス・パフォーマンスーを予定しています
Admission will be 1000 yen for one night, 1500 for two nights, and we will ask you to buy at least 2500 yen's worth of EarthlingZ money, which you can use for meals and drinks. 入場料は一晩１０００円、二晩１５００円でそれに少なくても２５００円のアースリングマネーを買ってもらいます。それは食事、飲み物に使えま す。
Please do not bring your own food and drink, nor any of those drugs that make people dim or egotistical -- for good musical and personal communication, it helps to be even more conscious than usual.. 自分の食べ物、飲み物または鈍く自分勝手になるドラッグは持ち込まないで下さいー音楽によるコミュニケーション、また個人のコミュニケーションはもっと意 識的になるでしょう。
If you are a musician who wishes to participate, please contact chris@chichibu.com (0494-78-0177) or and state which day(s) you would like to attend, and what kind of instrument and music you would expect to perform, and we will inform you of whether there will be room for you in the lineup. Please also give us any URL for information about you, and do this in plenty of time for us to publicise the event and to send you a copy of the actual announcement or flier.
The Wonderland Experience - psychedelic trance movie shot in Goa
Synopsis: During a trip to India to visit his father, a young man wakes up on a sun-drenched beach, unsure of where he is or how he got there. Before long he finds himself on an extraordinary journey meeting a series of ever more peculiar characters...
Any EarthlingZ remember Duncan? A few years ago he spent many months at The Greenhouse, and helped set up the computer network there, as well as VJing at one of our parties. He's planning a return trip to Japan in the autumn... Here's a great flash animation I found on his MySpace page. Click on it to enlarge the facet that's showing...
Once upon a time in the 20th century, a number of poets, painters, musicians and...umm.. philosophers, most of whom had known each other at Cambridge, moved to London and all lived on several floors of 101 Cromwell Road. Before long, a guy named Michael Hollingshead arrived from the US, where he had been involved with Timothy Leary in his experiments with LSD. Before long, 101 became a major center of acidheads, among whom were several of the people who soon formed Pink Floyd. It was at this time that my good friend Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon made this short film, about which he offers this comment:
"When I was at film school in London in 1966 I used to take an 8mm camera with me everywhere and if there was anything worth filming, I shot it.
I was visiting friends in Cambridge in the Summer and I had taken several LSD trips with me to share with them all. We decided to trip at our old childhood haunt in the chalk pits at the Roman Woods in the Gog Magog Hills just east of Cambridge. We took the acid and as soon as it kicked in I started filming and, for some reason, which I cannot remember now, I focused in on Syd Barrett and let him become the subject of my film that day.
The film as it is viewable now is still as I shot it in the camera in 1966. Pure. The material has never been edited. It works well as it is and has a Barrett-like childish innocence about it, which I really like."
Nigel can be seen in the latter half of the film, shot at 101. He's the guy with no shirt on the balcony.
If you have been here before, you may know of the small viewing structure (looking like a Nepali chaishop) a few minutes walk up the opposite hill from The Greenhouse. During this gathering we plan to serve brunch there, so you can drink your chai and eat your breakfast looking out over the wide view of forested hills. Be sure to bring your cameras... ここに前来たならグリーンハウスから反対の丘を数分上って行った所にある小 さな見晴し台、小屋を（ネパールのチャイ屋の雰囲気）知ってるかしれません。この集いの時にそこでブランチを とる予定なので眼の前に広がる景色を見ながらチャイを飲んで朝食がとれます。
In 2006, the Moon will not be a hindrance.Although certain parts of the world are favoured for intense activity this year, i encourage people everywhere to watch the sky on Nov. 19th. The Leonids might surprise us... Predicted outbursts might fizzle, and activity could surge at unexpected times.
2006 Leonid Forecasts
THE PLACE
THE TIME
THE FORECAST (ZHR)
Hawaii
Nov. 19
--
Australia, Indonesia, Japan, east Asia
Nov. 19
30 per hour +
Europe
Nov. 19, 4:44 UT
80 per hour +
Americas
---
--
Table notes: UT is Universal Time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time or GMT. UT values above refer to Nov. 17th. Because of the international date line, observers in Asian countries will see their Leonids before dawn on Nov. 19th local time.
With the Leonids there are no guarantees. Any morning between November 16-20 would be a good bet to watch for Leonids. Unless exceptional activity is predicted, Leonid watches should start at about 2am and continue until morning twilight, as the radiant is at a satisfactory altitude during these hours. Fortunatly, the Moon will not interfere this year , the near New Moon will set by the time of the peak for most of the UK . The shower's parent comet, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle had returned to its perihelion in 1998, should mean 2006 will see a continuing decline in activity. However, in 2003 and 2004 activity was slightly above the background level with ZHRs of 60 and 28 respectively.
No matter, the coming shower will surely send some sky watchers home with life-long memories. "I'll never forget the night of Nov 19th," they might recall years from now -- One thing is certain: if you stay indoors you won't see anything!
A vision of the future from the prizewinning entry in the Beyond Peak contest: **************
In the fifty years since we joined the land, we've seen much happiness, and much sadness.
Most of the rest of the world has crumbled into insurrection and resource wars. The recessions of 2006, 2011, and 2015 were interspersed by wildly optimistic growth, which only used up the fuel even faster. Then the big one hit in late 2019, when the stock market lost 2/3rds of its value, and fully half of employed people in the US and Canada lost their jobs.
Europe and Japan fared somewhat better, but they and China were dragged down by the huge loss of market in North America. Half the people were no longer able to buy cheap plastic crap from 20,000 kilometers away, and the other half were terrified to let go of their money, too-late saving for a future that had been uncertain for far longer than they had imagined.
Then came the Chinese invasion. Although it was not a "traditional" invasion, in the form of tanks and bombs, it was no less deadly, and did involve an army of sorts. China held countless trillions of dollars of US debt, and simply called in the notes in the form of real estate purchases after the land price collapse that came with the 2019 depression. The Chinese government filled empty cargo ships with their poor, underprivileged, and politically incorrect, and shipped them off to work the huge collective farms that they had purchased in the US, sending the food back to feed an increasingly unhappy and politically unstable middle class. Americans reacted with violence, killing hundreds of thousands of landed Chinese in random acts of violence, and by 2023, the Chinese immigrants had armed themselves, and began retribution.
But people were hungry in America, too. The television networks and news outlets had largely placated the US middle class, through losing an entire generation to resource wars, and losing their personal liberties to "protection from terrorism". But hunger was another matter, and it required a more powerful response from the moneyed classes.
No one can say for sure how it happened, or who was responsible -- all those who might have had a story to tell are either in prison, or have been executed. But the nuclear holocaust at the Super Bowl gave the neo-cons all that they needed to impose totalitarian martial law. The people are still hungry, but at least they're safe from terrorism from abroad -- if no longer safe from terrorism from within.
The historians and economists looked backwards, and noted that it took ten years before there was much recovery from the 1929 Depression, but the waited-for recovery never took place, and by 2039, over 1/3rd of the North American population had succumbed to insurrection, starvation, exposure, or disease. The Chinese Flu pandemic of 2036 was particularly gruesome, taking nearly 80% of those infected -- nearly a quarter billion perishing world-wide -- and making the flu pandemic of 1918 look like a bad case of sniffles in comparison.
The natural gas rationing that had begun a decade before now meant that only the very rich had winter heat in much of North America's urban areas. The cities emptied onto the land like a swarm of locusts, cutting down anything they could burn for heat. It was said that there was not a single tree standing within 50 miles of New York City.
But we'll never really know how many died, nor how many are dying, because during these dark times, the infrastructure of the world began to crumble. Rolling blackouts became a permanent fixture throughout most of the world lucky enough to still have electricity. What was left of the transportation industry crawled to a stop as long-distance highways became impassible. The last commercial airline flight landed in 2032. The telephone system, utterly dependent on reliable electricity, fractured into regional systems. And the Internet, once viewed as the hope for civilization, devolved into regional internets, with some intercontinental email traffic getting through on a sporadic basis.
Large countries, unwillingly led by the US, Russia, and China, began to split into rival regions. Internecine warfare broke out between Southern and Northern Calfornia, New England and the Midwest, and most of all, between the not-quite-poor and the newly poor. This last conflict became especially deadly, and the rich supplied both sides with plenty of handguns and small arms, stoking the fires of class warfare while retreating into increasingly isolated bunkers and fortresses.
By the early '40's, feudalism returned with a vengeance. Anyone who survived the property crash of 2019 could hire armies of starving laborers for a pittance. Anyone who had mortgages in 2019 lost their land in the next few years. The US Supreme Court gave its blessing to indentured servitude way back in 2022, Chief Justice Roberts wryly noting, "at least they're not slaves." (In a lone dissenting opinion, Justice Alieto argued that the court did not go far enough; many of the founding fathers owned slaves, and therefore, slavery actually was constitutional.)
Debtors' prisons, not seen since Dickensonian England, returned for a while, since all the for-profit prisons built between 1992 and 2008 were emptied by disease. The US began forced conscription from the prison population in 2023, and a docile public said, "it's either them, or us" and acquiesced. The best anyone in the habit of maxed-out credit card debt in the early century could hope for by mid-century was three meals and a place to sleep in exchange for work -- they could see those who were unable to work being loaded into trains on the way to the biofuel plants.
But also in the '40's, there was a pause, and the world appeared to try to catch its breath. The growing ecovillage movement meshed nicely with the collapse of large countries into regions. Communities of "freemen" used the laws that kept the rich in power to keep themselves out of bondage -- and supplied with healthy food and natural health care remedies. In 2042, the Free State of Cascadia declared independence from what was left of the US and Canadian governments, and held its first constitutional convention in Vancouver. Canada
With the broad passage of "Single Transferrable Voting" systems in all provinces except Alberta, the Green party began to flourish, and Canadians actually implemented not only the Kyoto Protocol, but the 2016 Hague Protocol that finally did away with fossil fuel subsidies, replacing them with renewable energy credits.
Boosted by energy exports to the south and decreasing national debt, the Canadian and US Dollars reached parity way back in 2006, and never looked back. Canada re-instated the gold standard in 2019, and by 2039, you could buy a truckload of US $100,000 notes for a single Maple Leaf coin -- not that anyone in their right mind would want to.
So used to following the US lead on many fronts, Canadians revolted and began valuing their cultural heritage. You no longer had to "go south" to get respect at home, in fact, those who crossed over to try to make a quick buck were greeted with derision upon return.
Although the Liberals tried to gut the health care system in the first decade of the century, it had been restored by the time the pandemics hit North America, and Canada (second to Norway again, damn it!) had among the world's lowest death rate.
Quebec finally seceded during the 2020 Depression, and the Maritimes and the Prairies followed, forming a loose federation of independent states, still known as "Canada", but no longer sending much money to Ottawa.
The annexation of 2039 was more a joke that anything serious. The US immediately seized the Alberta energy resources, and were able to draft a few thousand young people from Toronto to send off to resource wars in the Middle East. But the reach of the once mighty empire had become limited, following the collapse of communication and transportation infrastructure; they could still wage war across the planet, but the US could no longer count draft-aged men in Moose Jaw -- nor those on Salt Spring Island.
What kind of party it becomes is up to the people who come. We encourage you to bring your instruments and, if you DJ, your best downtempo trance and ambient.
どんな楽しいパーティーになるかは自由な想像のカタチ次第です。
また、私たちは、みんなが表現手段として楽器や音楽をもってくることを楽しみにしています。
We will charge only 1000 yen per day (which will help to keep the place warm everywhere), and ask that you eat only from our cafeteria-style kitchen, not bringing your own food. There will be tasty meals and homebaked snacks available throughout the party.
You will be asked on entry to buy at least 2000 yen's worth of EarthlingZ money to use for food and drink purchases -- the usual routine.
There comes a point when the relentless march of the sunrise and the sunset stops and after 2 or 3 days the sun starts moving back along the horizon.
That point is called the solstice. The word means literally 'the sun stands still.' That's what Stonehenge was built to celebrate. The shamans of the day would have called the most important community leaders to a ritual to celebrate the continuing cycles of nature.
'We're going round one more time. There will be a spring. There will be a sowing. There will be a harvest, life will go on."
I'm not in the publicity business, but I must tell you that another great album is about to be released by Bluetech, whose recent double album was probably the best downtempo work since Shpongle and Shulman.
You can listen to a streaming sampler of it here: Read about it here
DJs:
Italian pasta dishes 
Cheesecake,Muffins
,
& other baked goodies 
COSTS: 
& other baked goodies 
and other beverages
