So many

"We waste so many days waiting for the weekend.  So many nights wanting morning.  Our lust for future comfort is the biggest thief of life."  ~Joshua Glenn Clark

On Silver Wings

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Last night I dreamed our neighbor had big silver Angel wings, and was ascending to heaven in a bright  column of light.  I was waving at her, no sadness, and shouting "Goodbye, Shera!  Thanks for coming!"

I know it wasn't a Vision From on High.  I was thinking of this song and of her before I fell asleep, and my subconscious mind merged the two.

But still, that's not a bad way to think of her.

Unpretentious

From Seymour an Introduction by J.D. Salinger, ©1959:

In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I'm sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn't do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don't shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped-- before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parenthesis: (((()))).

Living in the Moment

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I did a search on "happy songs," and was not disappointed.  :D

If you don't have the time for the song, at least read the lyrics, HERE.  I think you'll like them.

Euthanasia

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May you always do for others
And let others do for you

It's the second line that's the hard one.

I don't know how I feel about euthanasia.  I have a basic reverence for life that screams "No!", but…

Our neighbor across the street is dying.  She's just a shell now; her body lives on, but her spirit has already passed.  She may already be gone as I type this.

I know that if euthanasia was legal and easily obtainable she would have taken the tablets herself six weeks ago.  This isn't how she wanted to go out.

But I've also seen the steady stream of friends and family that have come in to take care of her.  It's an honor and a privilege to be able to care for someone you love.  It will be a comfort for them to know that they did all they could for as long as they could.  That's important.  I wouldn't want to take that away from them.

Which brings me back to: "I don't know how I feel about euthanasia."

(Full lyrics at BobDylan.com, by the way.)

Whoah-ho, what I want to know…

Excerpts from Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels ©1965, chapter 98:

Let’s be like David Dangell¹, let’s pray on our knees in privacy-- Let’s say “O Thinker of all this, be kind”--Let’s entreat him, or it, to be kind in those thoughts-- All he has to do is think kind thoughts, God, and the world is saved-- And every one of us is God-- What else? And what else when we’re praying on our knees in privacy?

•

“What can I do?” I say. “Except advise kindness.”

“O kindness be damned!” yells the world. “Let us have order!" Once order comes, the orders come-- I say “Let us have forgiveness everywhere-- try as hard as you can-- forgive-- forget-- Yes pray on your knees for the power to forgive and forget-- then all will be snowy Heaven.”

¹Psuedonym for Phillip Lamantia

Nice

An excerpt from Seymour Glass's diary in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger, ©1963:

“The announcer had them off on the on the subject of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike-- meaning a long row of identical ‘development’ houses. Zooey said they were ‘nice.’ He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked alike. He said you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look ‘very nice.’”

Going Back

I suddenly realized why the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil makes my heart race.

Leaning

"We all go to Heaven leaning on the arm of someone we helped."  ~Neal Cassady, quoted in Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac ©1965

Bessie

Excerpted from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, ©1961:

It was a very touch-and-go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass's face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes.  Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son)-- where once Bessie Glass's eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn't brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet's marriage was on the rocks.

There's a certain kind of world-weary sadness where everything hits you hard.

Balance

"Staring at a cathode ray tube for hours every day can really throw off the natural balance of your sensory input. One becomes all sight. Internal processing gets all skewed out. The neurological consequences of this are hard to prove but easy to feel: Jagged. Totally externalized. Consider how the sense of sight emphasizes the sep-ar-ate-ness of things– as opposed for instance to the all-enveloping continuums of hearing or smelling."  ~Michael Green, Zen & the Art of the Macintosh ©1986

Serendipitous Accidents

"Creativity, like love, requires a soft focus; an ongoing flirtation with the unknown and the irrational; a state of mind open to the serendipitous accident or the unexpected flight of fancy that can come along and lift you right out of the everyday."  ~Michael Green, Zen & the Art of the Macintosh ©1986

Sunlight

by Vittorio Giardino.

Faith

"My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference."  ~Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter

From The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library:

 There have been many requests for information on how to send a card or note to President or Mrs. Carter. It can be done by mail (not email) Send it to

President Jimmy Carter
The Carter Center
One Copenhill
453 Freedom Parkway
Atlanta, GA 30307

Reminders

Desolate

The voice in Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angles is definitely different than the voice of On The Road or Dharma Bums.  There are passages where he almost sounds like E.E. Cummings (but maybe it's just the parenthesis).

Here, There, and Everywhere

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Full lyrics HERE.

Selfie

If you have a few minutes, click over to the BBC and read The age of the tragic selfie.

It's very well written, and I appreciate that the author talks about the phenomenon without becoming self-righteous or belittling anybody.

Music for a lazy sunday

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Lyrics HERE.

Seminole Wind

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Full lyrics available HERE.  (James Taylor also has a nice version that you can listen to HERE.)

…and sang.

‘morning melody’

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

“I Worried” by Mary Oliver, from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems. © Beacon Press, 2010.  Via Jules of Nature.

H.C.

"That's the thing about girls.  Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.  Girls.  Jesus Christ.  They can drive you crazy.  They really can."  ~Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

It's worth noting that Holden Caulfield is 16.  ;)

Final Three

Using an idea shamelessly stolen from BlueChickenNinja, here are my three favorite final sentences from novels:

1.  "'Excellently observed,' answered Candide, 'but let us cultivate our garden.'"  ~Candide by Voltaire, available for free download from Project Gutenberg


2. "Don't ever tell anybody anything.  If you do, you start missing everybody."  ~The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.  (Technically that's two.  That probably bothers me more than it bothers you.)


3. "P.S.  Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise."  ~Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan  (You have to know the context for this one, and I don't know how to tell you without ruining it.  I've probably already said too much.)

More or Less

Calvin and Hobbes is on the web HERE.

Close the book

“The mind is constantly trying to figure out what page it’s on in the story of itself. Close the book. Burn the bookmark. End of story. Now the dancing begins.” ~Ikko Narasaki

Don't you know?

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The sudden realization in the middle is heartbreaking.

Full lyrics HERE.

Flower Pots

We didn’t set out to collect vases. It was a byproduct of buying flowers.

19th Century Cats

A wallpaper design from 1898, via Windy Poplars Room

Naked

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Sound engineer Geoff Emerick writes in his book Here, There, and Everywhere that, in spite of being in one of the most successful music groups of all time, John Lennon was very insecure about his voice and was constantly looking for overdubs and fuzzy guitars to mask it.

When Paul McCartney had the original tapes stripped down to their essentials for Let It Be… Naked, we got to really hear John’s voice on this song for the first time.

It’s incredible.

2016

I don't think he has an Official Web Page.  Here's his Wikipedia page:  LINK

 

Working Class Heroes

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Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see…

Full lyrics HERE.

We Could Be Heroes

From (of all places) Rotten.com:

In fact, (Jack) Kerouac too styled his friend a hero, specifically the “new American Hero”. Recall that in the 50s and 60s, many young people felt smothered by the American Dream. Adult America was obsessed with living the Good Life, and with protecting the American way of life -- rescued from the teeth of the depression, fought for in World War II -- from communism. The role model they held up to their kids was basically: get a good job, get lots of stuff, impress the neighbors, have kids, drop dead. That was it.

Normal people just weren’t supposed to deviate from this goose-stepping road to nirvana. So it took an abnormal person like Neal Cassady to give young Americans a sense that life could actually be something worth staying awake for. Cassady’s rip, rolling ride through life, following the beat of his own inner impulses (captured in literature in “On The Road”), inspired young people to set aside their inherited mental programming and set out on a path of exploration – first calling themselves the Beat generation, and later the Hippies.

In that light, it's easier to be charitable towards some of their behavior. It's almost always mistake to judge previous generations by current standards.  Abraham Lincoln, considered too progressive on racial issues in his time, would be considered the worst kind of racist today (and would be excoriated on the internet).  So I'm doing my best to keep an open mind.

What still bothers me, though, are passages like this one:

It was horrible to hear Camille sobbing so.  We couldn't stand it and went out to buy beer…

"Camille" was Carolyn Cassady, Neal's then three-months pregnant wife.  It's hard to imagine such calloused indifference, in any generation.

It doesn't seem possible to have an unquenchable lust for life that doesn't also include love for your fellow human beings.

(You will either be delighted or horrified to know that I do have two more Kerouac books on the way- thank you for the recommendations, V. Alarcón-Córdoba!- so there will be more ruminations on the Beats to come.)

Rain Lilies

Rain Lilies are my second-favorite flower, after four-o'clocks.

=

"Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals."  ~Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is one of my favorite teachers.  She has a knack for taking complex ideas and simplifying them.

Still Small Voice

Today I attended the funeral for a peaceful man, and the priest brought up this bible verse:

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:

And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, "What doest thou here, Elijah?"

(1 Kings 19: 11-13)

The more I reflect on it, the more I like it.

 

Lucille

And yet another excerpt from On The Road by Jack Kerouac, ©1955:

I brought Lucille and her sister to the biggest party. When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened-- she sensed the madness they put in me.

"I don't like you when you're with them."

"Ah, it's all right, it's just for kicks. We only live once. We're having a good time.

"No, it's sad and I don't like it."

I've read this book several times, and obviously the book hasn't changed so it must be that something in me has.

This time I agree with Lucille.

Wait: You did what, now?

Another excerpt from On The Road by Jack Kerouac, ©1955:

I went out to the cemetery and climbed a tree.  In the tree I sang “Blue Skies.”  Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes.

There are certain passages in this book that sound like they’re straight out of Zippy the Pinhead.

Lover Man

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Excerpt from On The Road by Jack Kerouac, ©1955:

I huddled in the cold, rainy wind and watched everything across the sad vineyards of October in the valley.  My mind was filled with that great song "Lover Man" as Billie Holiday sings it; I had my own concert in the bushes.  "Someday we'll meet, and you'll dry all my tears, and whisper sweet, little things in my ear, hugging and a-kissing, oh what we've been missing, Lover Man, oh where can you be…"  It's not the words so much as the great harmonic tune and the way Billie sings it, like a woman stroking her man's hair in soft lamp-light.  The winds howled.  I got cold.

(Full song lyrics HERE.)

1-2-3-4

For a long time the message on my answering machine was “To continue, enter your four-digit access code at the tone.”

I’d come home sometimes to dozens of messages, all of them beep-boop-boop-beep as people tried to guess the code.

There was no code.  My friends all knew they could just leave their message after the beep.

Don't let her see a cloudy sky…

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From The Fire Squire:

 

Today’s Georgetune is one highlighted recently on the LFG FB page, here’s the wonderful ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’ performed at the infamous Decca audition, and led by 18-year-old George doing his best Buddy/Elvis/Bobby impression - and crikey, he’s great.

Based on this, I’m surprised Dick Rowe didn’t say “Well I’ll take the singing guitarist with the eyes, but get rid of the other three.” ;-).

 

This song was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and was Bobby Vee's biggest hit single.  Full lyrics HERE.

Hit The Road, Jack

I'm re-reading The Dharma Bums and On The Road, and although I still love the way Jack Kerouac writes I find myself less enchanted by his philosophies.

Depending upon the kindness of strangers for your livelihood and indulging every whim as soon as it arises doesn't sound like freedom and enlightenment.  It sounds like infantilism.

I tell my blues they mustn't show…

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Graham Nash slows it down, and makes it better.

Full lyrics HERE.

Kama Chameleon

I'm reading the Kama Sutra for the first time, and came upon this remarkable little list at the beginning.  Some things are surprising, some made me smile, some are uniquely Indian.  I'll let you read the list for yourself:

The following are the arts to be studied, together with the Kama Sutra:--

1. Singing.


2. Playing on musical instruments.


3. Dancing.


4. Union of dancing, singing, and playing instrumental music.


5. Writing and drawing.


6. Tattooing.


7. Arraying and adorning an idol with rice and flowers.


8. Spreading and arraying beds or couches of flowers, or flowers upon the ground.


9. Colouring the teeth, garments, hair, nails, and bodies, _i.e._, staining, dyeing, colouring and painting the same.


10. Fixing stained glass into a floor.


11. The art of making beds, and spreading out carpets and cushions for reclining.


12. Playing on musical glasses filled with water.


13. Storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns and reservoirs.


14. Picture making, trimming and decorating.


15. Stringing of rosaries, necklaces, garlands and wreaths.


16. Binding of turbans and chaplets, and making crests and top-knots of flowers.


17. Scenic representations. Stage playing.


18. Art of making ear ornaments.


19. Art of preparing perfumes and odours.


20. Proper disposition of jewels and decorations, and adornment in dress.


21. Magic or sorcery.


22. Quickness of hand or manual skill.


23. Culinary art, _i.e._, cooking and cookery.


24. Making lemonades, sherbets, acidulated drinks, and spirituous extracts with proper flavour and colour.


25. Tailor's work and sewing.


26. Making parrots, flowers, tufts, tassels, bunches, bosses, knobs, &c., out of yarn or thread.


27. Solution of riddles, enigmas, covert speeches, verbal puzzles and enigmatical questions.


28. A game, which consisted in repeating verses, and as one person finished, another person had to commence at once, repeating another verse, beginning with the same letter with which the last speaker's verse ended, whoever failed to repeat was considered to have lost, and to be subject to pay a forfeit or stake of some kind.


29. The art of mimicry or imitation.


30. Reading, including chanting and intoning.


31. Study of sentences difficult to pronounce. It is played as a game chiefly by women and children, and consists of a difficult sentence being given, and when repeated quickly, the words are often transposed or badly pronounced.


32. Practice with sword, single stick, quarter staff, and bow and arrow.


33. Drawing inferences, reasoning or inferring.


34. Carpentry, or the work of a carpenter.


35. Architecture, or the art of building.


36. Knowledge about gold and silver coins, and jewels and gems.


37. Chemistry and mineralogy.


38. Colouring jewels, gems and beads.


39. Knowledge of mines and quarries.


40. Gardening; knowledge of treating the diseases of trees and plants, of nourishing them, and determining their ages.


41. Art of cock fighting, quail fighting and ram fighting.


42. Art of teaching parrots and starlings to speak.


43. Art of applying perfumed ointments to the body, and of dressing the hair with unguents and perfumes and braiding it.


44. The art of understanding writing in cypher, and the writing of words in a peculiar way.


45. The art of speaking by changing the forms of words. It is of various kinds. Some speak by changing the beginning and end of words, others by adding unnecessary letters between every syllable of a word, and so on.


46. Knowledge of language and of the vernacular dialects.


47. Art of making flower carriages.


48. Art of framing mystical diagrams, of addressing spells and charms,and binding armlets.


49. Mental exercises, such as completing stanzas or verses on receiving a part of them; or supplying one, two or three lines when the remaining lines are given indiscriminately from different verses, so as to makethe whole an entire verse with regard to its meaning; or arranging the words of a verse written irregularly by separating the vowels from the consonants, or leaving them out altogether; or putting into verse or prose sentences represented by signs or symbols. There are many other such exercises.


50. Composing poems.


51. Knowledge of dictionaries and vocabularies.


52. Knowledge of ways of changing and disguising the appearance of persons.


53. Knowledge of the art of changing the appearance of things, such as making cotton to appear as silk, coarse and common things to appear as fine and good.


54. Various ways of gambling.


55. Art of obtaining possession of the property of others by means of muntras or incantations.


56. Skill in youthful sports.


57. Knowledge of the rules of society, and of how to pay respects and compliments to others.


58. Knowledge of the art of war, of arms, of armies, &c.


59. Knowledge of gymnastics.


60. Art of knowing the character of a man from his features.


61. Knowledge of scanning or constructing verses.


62. Arithmetical recreations.


63. Making artificial flowers.


64. Making figures and images in clay.

A public woman, endowed with a good disposition, beauty and other winning qualities, and also versed in the above arts, obtains the name of a Ganika, or public woman of high quality, and receives a seat of honour in an assemblage of men. She is, moreover, always respected by the king, and praised by learned men, and her favour being sought for by all, she becomes an object of universal regard. The daughter of a king too, as well as the daughter of a minister, being learned in the above arts, can make their husbands favourable to them, even though these may have thousands of other wives besides themselves. And in the same manner, if a wife becomes separated from her husband, and falls into distress, she can support herself easily, even in a foreign country, by means of her knowledge of these arts. Even the bare knowledge of them gives attractiveness to a woman, though the practice of them may be only possible or otherwise according to the circumstances of each case. A man who is versed in these arts, who is loquacious and acquainted with the arts of gallantry, gains very soon the hearts of women, even though he is only acquainted with them for a short time.

 

You can download a free copy of the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg, HERE.

Bangtail Ideas

And yet another excerpt from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, ©1958:

But I had my own little bangtail ideas and they had nothing to do with the "lunatic" part of all this.  I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas.  I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.  To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call "do-nothing."  I didn't want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy's ideas about society (I figured it would be better to just avoid it all together, walk around it) or with any of Alvah's ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.

("Alvah" is Allen Ginsberg; "Japhy" is Gary Snyder.)

Grace

(via)

Everything Smelling of Mint

Another excerpt from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, ©1958:

In Berkeley I was living with Alvah Goldbook in his little rose-covered cottage in the backyard of a bigger house on Milvia Street.  The old rotten porch slanted forward to the ground, among vines, with a nice old rocking chair that I sat in every morning to read my Diamond Sutra.  The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under and meditate on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.  We had a perfect little kitchen with a gas stove, but no icebox, but no matter.  We also had a perfect little bathroom with a tub and hot water, and one main room, covered with pillows and floor mats of straw and mattresses to sleep on, and book, books, hundreds of books everything from Catullus to Pound to Blyth to albums of Back and Beethoven (and even one swinging Ella Fitzgerald album with Clark Terry very interesting on trumpet) and a good three-speed Webcor phonograph that played loud enough to blast the roof off:  and the roof nothing but plywood, the walls too…

This isn't an especially "deep" passage, just a description of his house, but love the way he writes and his use of repetition.

("Alvah Goldbook" is a cunning pseudonym for Allen Ginsberg.)

Strange Unexpected Acts

Excerpt from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, ©1958:

Japhy leaping up:  "I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's that attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new few fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen lunatics who go about writing poems in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and all living creatures…

Love

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“Clair” is a love song from an uncle to a niece.  That’s the real Clair giggling at the very end.

There aren’t a lot of songs about non-romantic love, but there should be.

Let Them Be

"People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds."  ~Carl Rogers

Winter

Winter Morning (1907) by Igor Grabar

Hmmm...

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This seems like a weird song for a newlywed to sing, but it just occurred to me:  maybe his inspiration was his old group, The Crickets, with whom he'd recently parted ways.

Full lyrics HERE.

Not Fade Away

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We all know now how their stories ended, but when this was filmed nobody knew:

This colour clip was shot silent in 1955 in Oklahoma City while Holly and Elvis Presley were working the two bottom slots on a country package tour headlined by Hank Snow — and apparently represents not only the earliest film footage of Holly but that of Elvis as well (he's dressed in a neon-bright green shirt).

Person-Oriented

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."  ~Martin Luther King, Jr. (source)

Colors

The Port, Red Sunset by Paul Signac (via)

Paul Signac died in 1935.

I know it’s stupid, but tend to I think of those times as being muted and pastel.  It’s nice to be reminded that there have always been people who loved bright colors.

 

Bah.

Link:  Olive Garden Is Putting A Tablet At Every Table For Customers To Place Their Order

I hate hate hate this trend.

I don't want to place my own order.  I don't want a steady stream of advertising in my peripheral vision.   I don't want to stare at tiny screens at all.

I have advertising bombarded at me all day long, and part of the pleasure of going out to eat is getting away from it.  When I go out, I want good food and good conversation with my friends and family.

I want to escape the gaudy chaos.

Interrobang

Here in East Texas we get a lot of weird comparison arguments.  Maybe everyone does:

"How can you be concerned about the Cowboy's running back situation when MILLIONS OF BABIES ARE ABORTED EVERY YEAR!?"

How can you be against the wars when OBAMA PLANS TO CONFISCATE THE GUNS OF LAW ABIDING CITIZENS!?"

How can you be upset about a lion in Africa when THERE ARE COMMUNISTS IN THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT!?"

And my response is always the same:  "All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden." (source)

Believable Bad Guy

Bob the Angry Flower is on the web HERE.