Feb. 22. Cancer was the big winner in the PyeongChang winter games today, according to the updated ZodiOlympics standings.

The crab hauled in 12 medals in the busiest day of the tournament. With two women’s hockey teams and numerous relay races decided, a total of 102 medals were awarded on Thursday, topping the 72 given out the day before. Cancer won one more medal than Gemini, moving it into the tie.

Cancer’s 29 points – tops for the day – allowed it extend its lead based on a weighted basis. Gemini, still tied for the lead on number of medals, was eight points behind on a weighted basis.

Taurus won 13 medals on Thursday, the biggest one-day haul so far in the tournament. That helped move the bull up from seventh place to a tie for fourth. Gemini and Capricorn scooped up 11 medals each, while Sagittarius and Leo brought home 10 each.

The lions are the top rated men, with 23 goals and 50 weighted points. Sagittarius are by far the fastest team with 35 medals in events decided by speed. Cancer has a narrow lead over Taurus and Scorpio in points-based competition (think figure skating and snowboard), while Gemini is ahead in events measured by goals. Also known as hockey.

Feb. 21. Gemini, Cancer and Sagittarius continued to dominate the ZodiOlympics ranking of top astrological teams at the PyeongChang winter games during a busy day of team medals.

A whopping 72 medals were awarded on Wednesday, including 23 distributed to the bronze-winning women’s hockey team. That was the biggest one-day medal haul since the 64 given out on Feb. 12, when team figure skating awards were made.

Sagittarius and Aries each scooped up 10 medals yesterday. The archer captured five medals in team pursuit speed skating and three more in women’s hockey. The ram earned five in hockey, three in team pursuit.

Gemini, with six goals earned, remained at the top of the standing in medal count, one ahead of Sagittarius (which moved up from fourth on Tuesday) and Cancer. But the crab clawed its way to the top of the medal-weighted ranking with 81 points. Cancer hauled in nine gold and six silver.

Aquarius actually brought more in medal-weighted points, 17 to Cancer’s 16, including six gold, six silver and five bronze.

Left on their own, the Pisces men would be right in the thick of, leading points and tied on weighted scoring. But the fish women rank 10^th in points and next to last on weighted scoring.

THIS JUST IN FROM ZODIOLYMPICS.COM

Team Gemini rode a strong showing at the PyeongChang winter games on Feb. 16, climbing to the top spot in the exclusive ZodiOlympics ranking.

Gemini collected five medals – two gold, a silver and two bronze – that brought its cumulative total to 23. On a weighted basis, Gemini leads the league table with 48 points, five ahead of Aquarius, which also ranked second on medal count.

Aires had been at the top of the ranking for several days but seems to be losing its mojo. The sign of the ram won zilch in the most recent day of competition, perhaps reflecting its moodiness and short-tempered nature. Its big haul came back on Feb. 12, when Aires raked in a dozen medals thanks largely to a strong showing in team figure skating, where dozens of awards were given.

Aquarius and Virgo have done well the past few days. Although the shy virgins are still on the outside looking in with 16 points, they ranked fifth on a weighted basis.

Congrats to Aquarius gold-winners Mattias Mayer (Men’s Super-G) and Sungbin Yun (men’s luge skeleton).

FOLLOW ALL THE ACTION AT WWW.ZODIOLYMPICS.COM

 

Check out daily updates on which astrological signs are scoring bigly at the PyeongChang winter games.

http://zodiolympics.com

Here’s the Feb. 14 update:

Valentine’s Day was special for Team Gemini, which scooped up 11 of the 30 medals awarded at the PyeongChang Winter Games.

The big haul lifted Gemini into second place in the cumulative standings based on the birth month of Olympic medal winners.

Thought of as gentle, curious and uncomfortable being alone, the Gemini appropriately picked up six of their 11 Valentine’s Day medals in luge doubles. Social commentators can draw their only conclusions about the fact that it was luge doubles for men. Do they have mixed luge doubles?

Well, they should.

As further proof of the scientific validity of the ZodiOlympic thesis, the co-winners of the men’s luge double are both named Tobias, though Mr. Wendl (right) is 14 days younger than Mr. Arlt (left). But who has the better beard?

 

 

The sign of two fishes scored its first ZodiOlympic wins with two golds and a silver in the second day of competition.

Biathaloner Amd Peiffer and X-countryman Simen Krueger won gold for the Pisces, which tied with Leo for the top score in weighted points for the day.

Their heroic victories put the Pisces — also the sign of the ZodiOlympics founder and chief statistician — in a three-way tie for fith place on a cumulative basis.

Cancer and Aires are tied for first with five total medals after two days.

On a metallurgically-weighted basis, Cancer (11) and Leo (10) are at the top of the heap.

The ZodiOlympics tracks medal wins based on the birthday of the olympians. It’s provided as a free service by the Glimpse Foundation.

The Aries have sprinted out to the early lead, collecting four medals on the first day of the ZodiOlympics.

That’s one more than Sagittarius and Cancer.  Five other signs have picked up one each, while four signs are still shooting blanks.

On a medal weighted basis, Cancer has seven points, with a gold in women’s cross-country sking and two men’s silvers in speed skating and ski-jumping. The weights are three points for gold, two for silver, one for bronze.

The ZodiOlympics is a free service from The Glimpse that strips the quadrennial pageant of nationalism to group the achievements of the athletes according to the more godly and scientific categories of astrological signs.

https://www.facebook.com/GlimpseFoundation

The New Bedford Whaling Museum sponsors a great Moby-Dick read-a-thon in early January every year. I went in 2017 for the first time. Took an overnight Amtrak from Washington, DC, to Providence, RI. Hiked around the city in the wee hours looking for Little Free Libraries where I could leave copies of AutoFlick. [This was my Johnny Appleseed guerilla marketing campaign.]

When I got to the Peter Pan bus depot, they were cancelling busses left and right because a heavy snow storm was bearing down on the area. My bus to New Bedford was the last one out. I honestly wondered how I was going to get back. There were only four of us on the bus. Including the driver.

It started snowing on the ride there and was accumulating pretty good when we got to New Bedford. A blizzard, really. Went to the museum, a marvelous place. The reading started at noon in the huge hall where they have a replica 19th century whaling ship. Some distant relative of Melville starts the thing off.

Across the street in the driving snow to the seaman’s chapel, site of a chapter in Moby-Dick and a place Melville went to church. Back to the museum. Reading along in my heavily annotated copy of Moby, the one made famous by Rockwell Kent images. Lunch in a little Portuguese café. Snow up over the ankles. The read-a-thon plowing on.

As the sun sets, I’m losing speed … hadn’t gotten much sleep on the train. All the restaurants in town are closed. Went to my motel and ordered Chinese take-out. I had to buy stuff I didn’t want just to meet the $10 takeout minimum. Snow getting close to knee level, and the wind blowing hard. I listened to the readathon on my iPad; it’s webcast, although the streaming continuity is a little spurty.

The takeout wasn’t very good. I hung in there on the webcast until midnight but finally drifted away.

Nice complementary breakfast in the motel and then back to the museum for the last five hours of reading. The hardcore are in sleeping bags on the floor. The harbor is covered in snow. An exciting rush through the final chapters. The crowd grows steadily as the morning rolls along.  In the end, the Pequod sinks, as it always does. A hurried walk back to the bus station, where the first bus running after the blizzard takes me back to Providence and then Amtrak home.

I signed up as a reader for this year’s read-a-thon and then had second thoughts about the long train and bus rides and backed out. At the last minute, the area got whacked again by a snowstorm — this one came a day earlier (Friday) and kept many people from getting there. In 2017, most of the people were already in New Bedford when the storm hit.

I listened to this year’s reading on the webcast, kicking myself for not going.

This wraps up the AutoFlick chronology, for now. The story ends on Nov. 2, 2002, and so doth the posts reflecting on each chapter. But 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the year when the AutoFlick story started, so I plan to repost some of the chapter excerpts and add some historical notes.

We gently placed Martine on the bow seat. There was nothing to really secure him there, so Lee put his employer’s hands on the gunwales and looked at me.

“That should work,” I said.

“I run with you,” he answered. I took this to mean that the former long-distance runner for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would more or less keep pace with us by running along the canal towpath.

But before he left, Lee lit a cigar and put it in Martine’s lips.

I grabbed the tow line at the bow and walked backward into the water, sliding the canoe down the gravel until it floated free. It was badly unbalanced until I clamored into the stern.

And so I began paddling upstream into the negligible current of the Delaware River, with the wasted, smoking shell of my friend Vic Martine uncertainly perched in the bow of our family’s canoe, north toward the mountains where men and mules had dug anthracite out of the rocks and shipped it downstream on the canal so genteel folks could light their parlors and heat their homes.

After a bit of paddling, I paused and reached fore, taking the joint from Martine’s face and indulged myself in a puff before throwing it into the river, thinking that I would spend my newfound inheritance in Intel Corp. to take Elizabeth on a long sea cruise aimed at true love.

On my way out of the van, I grabbed the package Lee had given me the day before. When I got to my desk, I unwrapped it and found a dog-eared, clothbound book entitled “Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25. Individual and Group Procedures.” On the inside of the front cover Uncle James had written his name and an address in Vancouver, British Columbia.

I was so happy to have something of his in my hands that it took a moment for me to realize that this had come from Martine’s house. In halting increments of understanding, I realized. They must. Have known. Each other.

The text was heavily annotated; Jimmy underlined all over the place and commented profusely in the margins—using diverse pens and pencils. It had the look of a journal that had been referred to often and annotated over a long period of time.

It was a manual for LSD research. The authors laid out guidelines they had developed through their own work and the work of others for using the drug in psychological and psychiatric therapy. I pictured Uncle James with a white lab coat and this handbook stuffed in the pocket, watching patients rocket around inside their brains, pulling a pencil from behind his ear to scribble something he thought was important.

Jimmy had underlined a passage describing the necessity for a patient to understand that his present state is inadequate and then summon the strength to get through “the difficult and painful process of coming to understand and accept himself.”

Ain’t that the truth.

James had underlined a sentence stating that the therapist cannot do these things for the patient. In the margin, he wrote, “so don’t even try.”

The authors thought there was an underlying factor that would explain the range of experiences people had from the drug. But they acknowledged that, as of 1959, they hadn’t yet come up with an explanation. They thought it had something to do with self-acceptance and the willingness to surrender it.

The LSD manual described six levels of experience with the drug, and James had jotted down initials and dates alongside these descriptions that may have referred to actual sessions he had attended. The sixth level described a richer interpretation of reality and the feeling of complete accord with it.

In the margin, James had written “light.” In myth class, we had discussed the theory that the Eleusian mystery religion of the Greeks, practiced for some 2,000 years, was facilitated by an ergot-infused drink, basically, wine laced with “natural” LSD. On my misguided little trip with Evelyn, I had not stumbled across anything remotely like an epiphany, but that didn’t necessarily mean there hadn’t been one there. Perhaps I was just too damn inexperienced to know one when I saw it. I was neither baptized nor christened, and I didn’t have a college degree. On the plus side, I had a bunch of merit badges and had at least been wedded under the watchful gaze of the holy ghost.