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Well worth the eight and a half minutes. Enjoy!

Thanks to Adele for sending us this cartoon.

Twelve years ago today, Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, died at the age of 77, from colon cancer. This may seem like a strange post for Valentine’s Day, but there’re a couple of synchros here that are heart felt.

Schulz drew Peanuts for nearly half a century. That’s a very long time to spend with characters you created, to be involved with their lives, their issues, their relationships. The comic strip was read by 355 million people worldwide, reached readers in 75 countries, in 2,600 newspapers, and 21 languages.  The strip, merchandise, and product endorsements brought in $1.1  billion a year. Schulz is said to have earned between $30 million and $40 million a year, doing what he loved. In nearly 50 years, Schultz drew ore than 18,250 comic strips.

“That’s longer than any epic poem,  any Tolstoy novel, any Wagner opera,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.  Just hours before the last Sunday episode in the saga of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, and Linus ran in the Sunday papers, Schultz passed away.

His wife, Jeannie, said, “He had done everything he wanted.”

Lynn Johnston, a friend of Schuz’s and the creator of a strip called For Better or Worse, told the AP: “It’s amazing that he dies just before his last strip is published…It was as if he’d written it that way.”

While Schulz was in the hospital, Johnston recalled a remark he had made:  You control all these characters and the lives they live. You decide when they get up in the morning, when they’re going to fight with their friends, when they’re going to lose the game. Isn’t it amazing how you have no control over your real life? But, as Johnston said, ”I think, in a way, he did.”

When I was a kid growing up in Venezuela, I remember that every Sunday morning, my dad would turn first to the comic section in the American newspaper, The Daily Journal, or to the Venezuelan paper, and read Peanuts. He would chuckle or laugh out loud and one Sunday I finally asked what the deal was with this comic strip. He thought a moment, then said: “These characters, in any language, are us, we humans.”

Peanuts became a part of our collective consciousness. His creation wasn’t just confined to the comic section of newspapers. There were books, TV specials, commercials, a rock song, a concerto at Carnegie Hall, his work was even shown at the Louvre. The novelist Umberto Eco wrote the introduction to the first Peanuts book translated into Italian.  According to the NY Times, Eco referred to the book as ‘poesie interrompue, or interrupted poetry, “and, using Freud, Beckett, Adler and Thomas Mann to back him up, said, ‘These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters; they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilization.’”

I don’t agree with the monstrous part. But one thing is for sure: Schultz followed his passions, he did what he loved.  As the Times article put it, “Snoopy could always be counted on to nap, fantasize and wonder when his next meal would arrive. Charlie Brown, the round-headed blockhead (named after one of Mr. Schulz’s childhood friends, not after the cartoonist himself), could always be counted on to persevere despite constant failure. He once held onto the string of a kite that was stuck in a tree for eight days running, until the rain made him stop. At the time it was the longest run of immobility for any cartoon character. His first home run came after nearly 43 years of strike outs, on March 30, 1993.”

Really? I mean, who couldn’t love these characters?

So it’s strangely fitting that Charles Schulz passed away on Valentine’s Day. The day before he died, he said, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy . . . how can I ever forget them?

If that isn’t love, what is?

Megan standing in front of one of the Alcatraz cells

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When we were moving our daughter to Orlando, we stopped briefly for a car shuffle. Rob ended up in a car with the two dogs and most of Megan’s stuff, and I ended up driving Megan’s car while she went through a movie magazine, reading excerpts about the new TV shows this season. The two she mentioned that hit my buttons were Touch, which we wrote about, and Alcatraz. We saw the first two episodes of Alcatraz tonight.

I’ m a sucker for these kinds of shows. Give me a riddle, an essential mystery and sympathetic characters and the promise of illumination at the end, and I’ll follow you anywhere. J.J. Abrams, who brought us Lost and Alcatraz, is my  pied piper.

Lost affected me the same way that X-Files did. The terrific stories aside, I felt that I was being prepared for a collective experience, for something big. That’s how I felt when we watched these episodes of Alcatraz.

We visited the rock some years ago, walked through those old cell blocks,  strolled past the barracks where employees and their families were housed. Children were raised on this rock. Books have been written about these kids, their families, the guards, the inmates, the warden. There’s a collective consciousness in this place that you can feel. It seeps into you when you walk around, move through those cell blocks, and try to imagine the lives of the men who lived there.

The place closed in 1963 – the last of the inmates supposedly transferred to other prisons. But were they transferred anywhere? Here are the episodes so far, available on hulu.com

Even thought it’s never mentioned during the first two episodes, this series is about time travel – specifically where nearly 300 inmates and employees went when the place closed in 1963.   And, even more to the point, why are these disappeared returning now? Why have none of them aged? Where have they been all this time?

Echoes of these questions could be seen in the TV show, 4400.

But the bottom line in all these shows is that although speculation is rampant, the bottom line is that we just don’t know. We don’t yet know the extent to which time travel is possible; we don’t yet know for sure who or what is visiting our universe, meddling in human affairs. Even though we hear the voice of synchronicity, we really don’t yet know  what role it actually plays in our lives.On one level we know we are interconnected, that the degrees that separate one human from another are probably fewer than the six percent. We have theories hopes, our personal certainties and worldviews about how stuff works. But like the characters on Alcatraz,  we’re groping in the dark, digging into the mystery.

PS. Now we’ve seen a couple of more episodes. This series may get old quickly. Each episode is about one of these criminals returning. You sense the larger picture, but no one really talks about time travel or how it might be possible. No one talks about who or what may be behind this. It feeds like a gimmick, not an intricate part of the plot.

We recently received an email from a woman who follows our blog. She wished the blog happy third birthday and said she had chosen not to comment publicly because of the way the government now monitors the internet, blogs, website, with greater depth. Here’s the link about it.

“The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Media Monitoring Initiative (MMI) has been expanded to collect and track information from online forums, blogs, public websites, message boards, and social networking sites, as well as gather “personally identifiable information” (PII) on journalists and media writers,” says the article.

Interestingly, we’ve noticed an uptick in the number of hits by military ISPs lately. These hits often come from Arlington, Virginia or from obscure town in Maryland, or from Washington, D.C. The hits from D.C. are sometimes from the State Department or the “District of Columbia government.”

Once, last year, we got a hit from the White House after one of Obama’s speeches. But that doesn’t count in this context because it appeared that someone in the Obama administration was looking for reactions to his speech out here  in blogland.  What counts here, I think, is that the government realizes blogging is a dynamic way of exchanging information, increasing awareness, of changing minds. They also understand that social media is, of course, as witnessed in the Mideast, a way to organize a revolution, a rebellion, or just a protest.

Our friend mentioned that she has seen many blogs simply disappear because bloggers fear they’re being monitored. That’s tragic. The Bush administration’s mantra was,  Be afraid, be very afraid, they’re coming for you, watching you, we’ll protect you….  And in the several years after 9-11, they were successful with their fear message. But as people woke up, they realized Bush was like the wizard in Oz, a small, pathetic man whose power lay in the people around him – Rove, Wolfowitz, Cheney. These guys were the ones who spun the illusions.

If bloggers go silent, if blogs vanish because of fear, if social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook begin to censor, then how are we different from China? South Korea?  Cuba? I emailed the link to several people and one friend who responded  feels that the last remnant of democracy vanished in December …presumably when Obama signed a bill that allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. If you look suspicious, if you act suspiciously, you are basically screwed.

In just the last year, the number of names on the U.S. No-Fly list has doubled. Why? Have we been attacked? Are there new threats? Well, if you watch the new TV show Homeland,   and there’s any semblance of truth to it, then the answer is yes, and the people who guard our security are the most paranoid on the face of the planet.

I can’t imagine what a military information-gathering unit can find in posts about the mysterious, hidden, implicate order from which synchronicities unfold. I can’t imagine what material they would find in in any of the blogs we follow that constitutes a security threat. But hey, maybe while they’re checking out these blogs they run across something that resonates for them. Lights go off in their heads, sirens shriek, they are floored, stunned, and their worldviews shift.  Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?

And that’s why no blogger should retreat in fear. We all have something to contribute to the paradigm shift. We all have wisdom to share.