David Kerlick - Personal

Profile (Professional)

2008 Edition

These pages are of varying age, and may be outdated. For a fresher look at my current thought and activities, check out my profile and blog as "Artwit" on tribe.net.

On the general topic of webs, see "Websters' New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language" by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi.

The WorldWideWeb is an emergent cybernetic instantiation of the Noosphere:

"When in the future, [hu]mankind harnesses the power of love,
it will have, for the second time,
discovered fire." -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Facets (in VRML) of My World

Quick Picks:

  1. Ancestry and Chronology
  2. Temperament and Spiritual
  3. Travels
  4. Pastimes
  5. Politics and Livelihood
  6. Adult Area for Gay Men Only
  7. Links

Ancestry and Genealogy

and some family trees.
All my known ancestors come from the region of Subcarpathian Ruthenia , in Eastern Europe, that straddles parts of the Ukraine, Poland, and Eastern Slovakia, and settlements in Hungary, Romania and former Yugoslavia.
They call themselves Rusyns . Here is a good, concise history by Dr. Paul R. Magocsi at the University of Toronto. In this country they are members of the Byzantine Catholic Church.
My Father's Father's side of the family (Kirlik) came from the village of Smerekova in present data Ukraine, Zakarpatska Oblast:


Velikiy Beresniy Region.

I visited there in August 1999.

My Father's mother's people came from Cihanivci, present-day Slovak Republic
My Mother's mother's known ancestors came from Seredne, present-day Transcarpathian Ukraine, and Cukalovce, present-day Slovak Republic

A Chronology

of events before and during my lifetime

Temperament

Personality Typology

Myers-Briggs
According to the  Myers-Briggs indicators (MBTI), I am an INTJ (78,88,38,34). 
That is  INTJ: The Mastermind (Rational) and less close to  INFJ: The Counselor (Idealist) Relationships are an Achilles Heel because we expect people to behave rationally... (sigh).
There's another cute personality sorter called Kingdomality In medieval times, I would have been a: Benevolent Ruler ;-)
At a dinner party on 2006-09-24, my guests and I decided on another axis (P-C) for Perky or Curmudgeon. I am a definite C, and hate perky, one reason I detest TV.  So Im an INXJ(C).

Another, less well documented temperament sorter is the Enneagram . Here is another Enneagram site with free test.

I score as 5w4 in both (Investigator w Individualist). It fits!
Religious Belief
Belief-O-Matic Unitarian Universalist is first, Roman Catholic is dead last. But UU is a wild card!
Pick your circle of Hell
Dante's Inferno Circle - First Circle with the cool pagan philosophers
Pick your Tarot Card
Quizilla.com says I am Strength (Lust), which is the source of inner power.  I guess the strength  stays pretty much inner, as very few lust objects seem fungible!
My Stars and Planets (sorry,  Pluto !)
I agree with David Hilbert's assessment of Astrology:
"If I made a list of the ten most stupid professions, Astrologer would be the only one on it."
Nevertheless, the descripta on a personals DB derived from a birthdate of 24 June 1949 at 11:22 AM EDT put me as
See Chart and Description. They claim the stars predict some combination of romanticism and rhetorical excess. You may judge the latter by this page.

Spiritual

"Christianity is an Eastern religion that has been misunderstood in the West."-- Fr. John Lucas.
Until they begin to understand it better, and distinguish it from its twin ancient prejudices PATRIARCHY (male-only power and slave-ownership of women and children by men, and truculent militarism) and SEXISM. Witness, alas, the way the J2P2 has disgraced himself on the matter of women in the priesthood. He personally DISMISSED a friend of a friend who was studying at the Pontifical Gregorian Institute -- because she was a woman!  And Maledict XVI / Ratzinger deserves an international criminal tribunal for LYING about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV. COndoms are a thret to male property, so must be suppressed!

Thomas Jefferson's method of reading the New Testament: Cross out everything except that spoken by Jesus! In this way one arrives at something that is perhaps closer to real Christianity, as opposed to the sexist, woman-hating, anti-sexual, and stoic version that we have from the Misanthrope of Tarsus. While I may be a Christian, but I object to being a "Pauline." There's a telling scene in "The Lat Temptation of Christ" where Jesus introduces himself to Paul, who in effect says, "I don't care who you are. I'm starting a religion here."

I consider myself also a Buddhist and a Pagan, though not in any sectarian sense. I don't believe in reincarnation or bodiless spooks, much as I might like Rilke's poetic take on angels. I try simply to spend twenty minutes each weekday morning sitting quietly. Eventually one comes to an appreciation of the common mystical basis of all world religions. I do not accept the Hindu-Buddhist conception of reincarnation any more than I accept the Catholic Heaven and Hell. J2P2 said hell may be empty. Progress!

I really dislike "New Age" stuff. It is politically reactionary (poor people "create their own poverty," not the capitalists who exploit them), ad nauseum. Some of it (channeling, crystal healing, and the like) is just plain silly superstition.

Psychedelics have served from time to time as a "spiritual laxative." Here is a Zen Limerick. A liberal American Buddhist magazine, Tricycle, gives some 1998 perspectives on the subject 30-some years later.

Fight the "Christian Right!" They are neither christian nor right. They wear brown shirts under their religious trappings. The Nazis were as self-righteous and moralistic a group as you ever would see. See what they did. These religious political extremists are uncomfortably similar. As Bishop Swing of California once remarked at SF Gay Day, "Fundamentalism is to Christianity as paint by numbers is to Art." Amen. [Of course, the fundies despise artists, too...] 

[More...] 
.
Travels
I have always enjoyed traveling to distant lands, and meeting new people. I can travel a lot more now that I have retired.  Fact is, I can also find more dates outside the Hollywood-Twink orbit.  The latest count of countries is 56 on six continents, I think. Here is a mostly complete list .

Some highlights are:

Pastimes

Musical and Singing

Classical mostly, lately singing with Seattle Pro Musica. Here is a list of choirs with which I have sung over the years since 1962.

I also a soft spot for psychedelic and speed metal instrumental rock.go figure. Maybe it's those lycra shorts and the sexual moves of the longhaired guitarists. Most rock lyrics suck. Can't stand: country, disco, hip-hop.

Poetic

I love Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke, read A. R. Ammons  and Allen Ginsberg, and used to browse the American Poetry Review. 

Prosaic

(No, not the antidepressant) Last book read: "Gaudy Night" by Dorothy L. Sayers. Placet-ne magister?

Recently actually read "Moby Dick" and less recently William Least Heat-Moon's memoir "River Horse" of travel across the lower 48 by water.

I like the experimental covels of Pynchon, Pavic, Calvino, Eco and La Disparition by Georges Perec of "Ou Li Po." Other notable books: "My Name is Red" (Orhan Pamuk), "Te Road" (Cormac McCarthy),
Anne Rice Vampires, Gore Vidal Palimpsest, Pynchon Mason and Dixon, Cold Mountain.

Home and Garden

Here is a pic of a stained glass window I commisioned from Ken Tomilson in Vancouver, Canada in 2007.

(click for larger .jpg)
 
Is Martha Stewart living? I am starting to dig the dirt in my new home in W. Seattle, have had a deck built (1997-06-20), and had plans for a Gazebo based on the 7/2-gon and Schwartz's surface (but, not enough room!).
(click for larger .jpg )
Here's a VRML of the proposed Seven Chakra Gazebo. Here's a Tri-tetrahedron


Food
Half-done: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill - when it’s still crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the the difference between life and death. You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop. Say to the man, Let me have a nice half-done. Worth the trouble, wasn’t it?
- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy’s Guide to Yiddish"

Geometry and the Imagination

Read the book by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen, and anything by H.S.M. Coxeter (not a G&S operetta).
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)
One of the greatest things since sliced bread. There is a repository, and a new browser called CosmoPlayer. My other computer is a Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality! To this mix we can now add Java3D.
Regular Polyhedra
The Pavilion of Polyhedreality (and a lot of VRML).
"Stellatio"
The 59 Stellations of the Icosahedron are available from the Minnesota Geometry Center, and can be viewed in 3D with your favorite VRML browser. Sadly, of the 358,833,072 stellations of the rhombic triacontahedron only the 226 fully supported ones are available on the Web.
More Geometry
Also check out the Buckminster Fuller pages and the Geometry Junkyard.

Politics

There's Identity politics, which is overemphasized, and class-labor politics which is underemphasized today.  I am not fond of Hillary (but may have to hold my nose and vote for her): she VOTED FOR THE IRAQ WAR, was on the board of Sweatshop Wal-Mart, did zip for labor, has a union-busting consultant Mark Penn on staff, takes money from lobbyists, and Chelsea works for a tax-evading hedge fund.  My early pick was Bill Richardson, who is in second tier, but wants to get out of Iraq TODAY. No progress will happen until we leave.
In order for "identity politics" to succeed, economic justice is required. "Angry white males" should not be angry at women and blacks who need to work, too, but at the billionaire hedge fund operators who pay zero tax, and bankroll both political parties. This "Kountry Klub Klass" of business owners destroys jobs by automation, exports jobs to sweatshops overseas, and keep the results of increased productivity entirely to themselves (the "capitalists take all" society). A 30,000 percent markup on sweatshop Nike to support Phil Knight's personal $5.3 Billion? I'd rather not...  

There's More...

The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Know your rights. Protect the rights of others. There is no "corporate profit exemption" to human rights, much as our (corporate, military, republican, country club) power elites, Sweatshop Nike, and the WTO, and the Scalito partisan Supreme Court would like to have you believe.

Livelihood

I breathe a sigh of relief as I bid the military-industrial complex adieu.
I was always conflicted about working in aerospace, having felt backed into it by economic circumstances. Boeing, especially after being bought by McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing's money, is deeply entrenched in the death-dealing ways of the National Security State, supports Bush fascism and wars of aggression. Human rights in China? "There's plenty of money to be made there!"
Reagan zeroed out all work for physicists that wasn't war related, and Bill Clinton has done zilch to restore it. Now science and reason itself is under attack by the hacks and stooges of the Bushists.
Work for the Evil Empire of Bill Gates, who makes crummy overpriced software, and who treats all workers as "temps?" When he was the richest man in the world, he fired all his receptionists, and offered to hire them back at their old jobs with NO vacation or benefits. Thanks, coach.

(Search for) Right Relationship

A very big struggle of my life has been to find a compatible life partner. Trying to reconcile the sexual attraction (irrational, self-defeating, hooked on looks) with the emotional qualities (compassion, support) has led up many a blind alley. I'm terrible at the bar scene, avoid eye contact, being shy and an intellectual introvert. Expecting (based on experience) a high rejection rate, I have given up trying to make contact in such venues.
As a stopgap measure, I have put the search for a partner on hold, and try to find compatible playmates, with slightly greater success, but quite often they are often only one night stands, rather than ongoing.

For gay men only, more detail about the "adult" sexual in the adult area.  

In the gay subculture, there is precious little support for those who don't pass the bar on youth, looks, weight, and beauty. I had my heart broken in 1980 by a cad who rejected me for not being 6'2" blond and slender. Pity was I loved him...  The half-life of theat broken heart is about four years, so I'm down to a few percent perhaps...

 I get really riffed at the term "overweight." Do we call tall people "overheight?" My dad and granddad were about the same weight as me, in spite of lifelong work at physical labor. Can you spell DNA? The science is coming round to my view, but even knowing the science, people still cling to their prejudices and cast blame.  And now we're an "epidemic," a disease that you can catch by having fat friends (!!!!!) And "heroin chic" is back as the model for men's fashion bodies.

Links

Organizations I support

and links to my enthusiasms.

Holiday Greetings And Sermons on the Evils of Corporate Capitalism and Militarism for 2007, '03, '02, '01, '00, and Previous years.

Antique Unsorted Links

A whole directory full whither I have surfed.


Send me Mail

if you've enjoyed my little half acre of Web!

Back to Kerlick Eskimo Welcome

Spinning this Weblet

Dr. G. David Kerlick
6342 34th Av SW
Seattle WA 98126-3148
telephone: (206) WEst 5-7762
email: davidk at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~davidk/
Copyright �© G David Kerlick
$Date: 2008-03-13 $