Dichotomous Rex

The most important dichotomy that humankind has grasped is that between:

DEMOCRACY and THEOCRACY.

Beware of false dichotomies emanating from retrograde booster channels of mass media propulsion systems that can't make it to the stratosphere, let alone beyond.

False dichotomies will ground you would-be astrocats and astrokitties, leaving you carrying crumbs along the great anthill trail.

Riddle me this, trickster:

Question - What the freemason empire?

Answer - It the empire came after the freemason republic, and before the Holy freemason empire.

The house across from my apartment I'd dubbed Uguisu no Yashiro (鶯の社) Palace of the Bush Warbler, is no more

...Please excuse the substantial time lag since the initial post...

Six days after the intial post, my computer was subjected to a viral attack -- even though i use norton 360 -- and i lost a significant amount of data, including photos of the now empty lot across from my apartment that use to accommodate two old houses and many, many trees and other greenery. You can see the empty lot in these photos, and eventually I hope to recover the lost data from the hard drive.

Here we are several years after I posted the above photos, and I have recently found backup copies I made of the earlier photos of the house before demolition. I should take some new photos of what it looks like now.

Suffice it to say that I used to call the place the 鶯の社 ("palace of the bush warblers"), because every spring the birds we know by that name in English would descend on the lush property and grace the neighborhood with their song heralding the arrival of spring. After they destroyed the twenty some odd trees on the property, the birds stopped coming.