Two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost




He found himself alone in an enormous warehouse. He was walking on a myriad of glassed in chambers. His shoe almost covered an entire world, a story, people, a microcosm. As he approached the meditation site, he knew his life was about to change forever. As the exercises progressed, he decided to empty his mind, to do as they said. Immediately she was there. She laughed at his surprise. We're psychic, too, she said. Didn't you know? Didn't you believe us? Didn't you know this was what it was all about? She held his hand. What is this place, she asked, looking around the giant empty room, the myriad of dimly lit chambers at their feet, the slime on the walls far off.

Where are we, he asked, what is it all about? Let me show you, she said. Immediately they were floating in infinity, could somehow sense the other worlds, the spirits, if that's what they were. It was a very big place, far bigger than any warehouse, however complex. Shallows and shadows, not here. There was nowhere to hide. The fire was warm at his feet. Could any of this be real? It's here, she said joyously, it's all here. How do you know what to trust, or who to trust? You have to have faith in the munificence of it all, she responded. It's a bounteous place. There isn't any end to the generosity of everything.

He looked up from the asphalt on the street and had never been more messed up. Nothing was contained. He knew there was a better life, somewhere. Time was folding over and over upon itself. The urgent, unashamed desires of the handsome robber weren't going to hold him now. She looked at him, curious. What a weird head he had. She smiled at him, curious, he grimaced back, ruthful. He felt ashamed. He didn't know why, just everything. He had wasted so much. Don't worry about any of it, she said, we're all broken when we get here, we will help you, we will make you whole, we will cure you and make you healthy in head and body. He could see the clouds of worlds spread out. He couldn't deny it any more.

These are are secrets, she said later. We are open, but no one knows what we really are, how advanced we are, here; and there. You can't know unless you've been there yourself. Because it's all madness otherwise, and they dismiss us as eccentric. He smiled, said little, let her talk, the conversion process. He didn't know what had been real. And what was not. As they parted she looked him straight in the eyes, a look which said she knew, she was there, don't pretend. As he walked to the car he thought: what just happened? He had gone there knowing his life would change forever, but what had happened was bewildering. They had seen the giant empty room that was his heart. They had eyed the thousands of dying or extinct stories at his feet, surprised, having never seen anything quite like it.

And then they had shown him something far grander. Far more real. He had been taken there and given a spirit guide. Different, perhaps even in addition to the one which had always been with him. He had approached the meditation site and now he was approaching his car, a not so subtly different person, the seed was there and would evolve. There was nothing to be frightened of. All that hallucinatory literature had served a purpose. He was open to unsettling new worlds. There wasn't going to be an early end to this story. Suddenly he knew he was going to live till he was 95. That the best truly did lay ahead. That the gods were telling him to finish the book. That past mistakes meant nothing, what mattered were the days ahead.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ims-Nj4pVMPxNO_NIjW7m4fvNWOA

Obama slams McCain on return to White House trail

15 hours ago

RENO, Nevada (AFP) — Barack Obama mocked John McCain as an acolyte of unpopular President George W. Bush Saturday as the White House foes waged close combat in western states which are key stepping stones to the presidency.

Just 10 days from election day, Senator McCain meanwhile warned the Democratic nominee, who leads most polls and boasts a big financial edge, was taking victory on November 4 for granted and vowed never to give up.

Obama threw himself back into full-bore campaigning in the swing state of Nevada, less than nine hours after touching down on the US mainland following an emotional visit to Hawaii to be at the side of the gravely ill grandmother who raised him.

He said he was grateful for an outpouring of prayers and flowers for ailing Madelyn Dunham, 85.

"It means a lot," Obama said, before launching a new assault on McCain who is trying to unshackle himself from Bush.

"John McCain is so opposed to George Bush's policies, that he voted with him 90 percent of the time for the past eight years," Senator Obama said.

"That's right, he decided to really stick it to him -- 10 percent of the time."

"John McCain attacking George Bush for his out-of-hand economic policy is like (Vice President) Dick Cheney attacking George Bush for his go-it-alone foreign policy."

"It's like Tonto getting mad at the Lone Ranger," he said, noting that the president cast an early ballot for McCain on Friday.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24552122-5012980,00.html

SUPERMODEL Kristy Hinze is in love and a 35-year age difference with her US billionaire beau hasn't curtailed the excitement over their engagement.

There have been text messages, Facebook postings and even a special sexy photograph.

Queenslander Hinze, 29, advised family and friends in recent days that she was wedding Jim Clark, 64, an internet and property tycoon, probably in April at a venue to be announced.

The couple, who have dated for nearly three years, are this weekend at a secret location, possibly London or Hamburg, shopping for her engagement ring – a bauble many expect to be as big and sparkly as Hinze's beaming smile.

Hinze's close friend, Sydney-based fashion PR agent Tracey Baker, was among those who received a text last week advising of the engagement.

"It read 'We're over the moon' and that really says everything – they're so happy," Ms Baker said.

Others privileged enough to be among Hinze's Facebook "friends" also have been exchanging messages of congratulations.

Many said they were not surprised as Hinze had openly displayed her love for Clark during a fashion shoot for the latest Sportscraft campaign in June.

"At the end of the shoot she said she wanted to do one special shot for Jim," Ms Baker said.

As thousands of supporters cheered, the power supply for the Democrat's microphone cut out, and he joked that a McCain operative must have pulled the plug. "That's a joke guys, there is no evidence of foul play," Obama said.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/specials/science/when-law-is-patent-nonsense/2008/10/24/1224351544031.html

When law is patent nonsense

October 25, 2008

A ban on public laboratories testing for inherited breast cancer shows the pitfalls of selling off the rights to our DNA code to big business, writes Julie Robotham.
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Ron Trent studies the genetics of motor neurone disease. That might appear an impossibly intense and narrow field: the disease affects at most five in 100,000 people, and only a minority of cases run in families. But a breakthrough here could benefit not just patients with the degenerative and fatal condition; it might also offer startling new insights into paraplegia and other neurological disorders.

Trent, the University of Sydney's professor of molecular genetics, has seen science throw out plenty of serendipitous surprises. The most inspiring research, he says, happens when people pursue an unexpected observation out of simple intellectual curiosity.

But such creative leaps increasingly are blocked by large corporations, who have staked out vast swathes of the human genome for their own exclusive use by taking out patents on excerpts of the DNA code that dictates the form of the healthy human body along with its diseases.

"As a researcher, I just innocently keep going," Trent says. He knows, though, that there is a very real possibility he may one day receive a legal letter accusing him of trespassing on someone else's patch.

Human gene patents - awarded in abundance during the 1980s and '90s and only a little more sparingly now - lurk like landmines. They threaten not just basic exploration such as Trent's, but also established diagnostics and treatments already used in hospitals.

From November 6, the Melbourne company Genetic Technologies Ltd is insisting that public hospital laboratories no longer conduct their own testing for the inherited breast cancer gene mutations known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, implicated in up to 10 per cent of cases and associated with a younger age of onset. Instead, the labs will have to send their patients' samples for processing by the company, at $2100 a test.