Welcome to my Home Page
Another Complete Waste of Time
Of late I've been updating the site to comply with more up-to-date web standards, mostly HTML 4.01 Strict. I'll probably take the opportunity to add or update photos and other stuff as well.
I've also made a lot of the fonts on the pages larger... to help compensate for my reluctance to get bifocals. Ah, middle age.
My vast (well, big anyway - o.k., o.k., let's just say sizable) collection of neat stuff!
I recently received a copy of a book just published in Poland on three of the Buddhist teachers there. To my surprise I learned that they had used a photo of mine for the cover! Unfortunately, there is no version of this book yet in English and I got no written credit for the cover. So much for vast fame.
One of the teachers covered in the book is Myong Oh Sunim, a nun in the Kwan Um School, to whom I'd given the picture as a gift when she visited Cambridge Zen Center. I'd have gotten credit except that she'd forgotten my last name...
Anyway, the photo is from the facade of an Indian stupa built about 2000 years ago and shows Buddha Skakyamuni's footprints. In those days it was considered wrong to actually picture the person of the Buddha (much like Muslims and their attitude towards the Prophet Mohammed) so usually all that was shown of him were his footprints. BTW, they also printed the picture upside down.
Tasha was a female Maine Coon that we got from Advent Hill Cattery, now in New Hampshire. She was a brown classic tabby and would have been a show quality cat except for the white tip on her tail. Her dad was a movie star (the only apparent bright spot in the recent remake of Great Expectations) and her grandpa's name was Mr. Spock. Sadly, we lost Tasha to lymphatic cancer in 2007. She was 11 years old.
Reach me at: allan_matthews@pobox.com
