Luxury

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I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized
'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an apeman

In man's evolution he's created the city and the motor traffic rumble
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes
And living in the jungle
'Cause the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in a coconut tree
Oh what a life of luxury to be like an apeman…

Full lyrics HERE.

The Fan

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In an interview with H. Allen Smith, recounted in his book Low Man On A Totem Pole, ©1941, Sally Rand said she invented the Fan Dance as a way to skirt obscenity laws.  Nudity was allowed on stage as long as the person was motionless, but nude dancing was prohibited.  Her plan was to conceal herself as she danced, then periodically strike a pose with the fans open- "vogueing" sixty years before Madonna.

For the most part the police weren't concerned with the finer points of the law, so she was still arrested pretty regularly.

(In this clip she is wearing a swimsuit, so nobody should be scandalized.)

Britishers

Another excerpt from newsman H. Allen Smith’s autobiography Low Man On A Totem Pole, ©1941:

During the years I've been in New York I've interviewed many Britishers.  Once I went to a small luncheon for H.G. Wells and chiseled into a chair two seats removed from the great man.  I sat in rapt silence, scarcely daring to lift a fork for fear I would miss a few words of his casual discourse.  All through that luncheon he spoke of only one thing.  He said he didn't like green peas; he could not remember ever having liked green peas and he was confident he would go to his grave disliking green peas.

I don't like green peas, either.  It's nice to have something in common with H.G. Wells.

I looked up the word "Britishers," and it's a real word.  It used to be pejorative, but now it's considered jocular.  It's probably safer not to use it, in case the person you are talking with is old-school and takes it the wrong way.

Approaching

“Think of your life not as a disappearing horizon, but as an approaching hope.”  ~Bangambiki Habyarimana (via)

Fear and Loathing in America

One candidate reduces to the second coming of Richard Nixon (favors “covert” wars, admires Henry Kissinger, has a mania for secrecy), and the other candidate won widespread support with a campaign based entirely on anger.

I really don’t think everything is going to be all right this time.

You Really Don't

"When I used to eat corn on the cob, I was really having butter and salt.  Now I eat corn on the cob and it's the sweetest thing I ever put in my mouth.  Lay off salt and butter for three weeks.  You think you know what green beans taste like, but you really don't.  It will blow your fucking mind."  ~Penn Jillette, in Men's Health November 2016

Some, others...

"Most of the world is like a mental hospital. Some persons are sick with jealousy, others with anger, hatred, passion. They are victims of their habits and emotions. But you can make your home a place of peace."  ~Paramahansa Yogananda

Miss Dietrich, If You're Nasty

An excerpt from newsman H. Allen Smith's autobiography Low Man On A Totem Pole, ©1941:

One evening I went to interview Marlene Dietrich.  I walked into her apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria, and there she stood, poured into an evening gown, more beautiful than she had ever been on the screen.  Even the surroundings were beautiful, and for a moment I was whipped.  I was overwhelmed by beauty, and my brain wouldn't give me anything to say.  Then I took hold of myself.  It was utterly necessary that I bring this situation down to earth.  She sat down, and I sat down and I said:

"Miss Dietrich, what would you say if I asked you to pull up your dress and let me see your legs?"

She didn't bat an eye.

"Why don't you ask me?" she said.

"All right," I said, "pull up your dress and let me see your legs."

"No."

Mr. Smith, Miss Dietrich eats punks like you for breakfast.

Yogi of Traffic Jams

"Don’t worship a bearded man in the sky, or a graven image in a book. Worship the in-breath and the out-breath, the winter breeze caressing your face, the morning rush on the Underground, the simple feeling of being alive, never knowing what is to come. See God in the eyes of a stranger, Heaven in the broken and the ordinary. Worship the ground on which you stand. Make each day a dance, with tears in your eyes, as you behold the divine in every moment, see the absolute in all things relative, and let them call you crazy. Let them laugh and point. You are a yogi of traffic jams and discarded apple cores, aloneness and impossibly blue winter skies, a yogi of broken dreams, mad with truth and devotion and inexplicable joy, and you cannot be saved now."  ~Jeff Foster

Birth

"Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced.  Tune your (analog) television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.  The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."  ~Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything ©2003

And just like that, static becomes fascinating.

How I wish, How I wish...

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Full lyrics HERE.

Radical

"Every bomb that is dropped by Russia and the Assad regime is radicalizing more and more people." ~Secretary of State John Kerry (source).

I'm not surprised.  If you drop a bomb on somebody, they're likely to want to drop a bomb on you.  I wouldn't characterize that as "radical," I'd day that's human nature.

There's a story in the bible, Matthew 7:3-5, that might apply here:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, "Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye"; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?  Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Kerry claims to be Christian, but to be fair the bible is a really, really long book so he might not have gotten to this part yet. Give him time, he'll get there.

Out of Tune

The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

 

He wrote this in 1802.

He'd never make it today.

If

"It will be important, if the Democratic party succumbs to Wall Street domination, to have a new party to let the people of the world know that those who believe in peace and understanding still have some means of expression... It would provide evidence that the United States has not gone completely imperialistic and psychopathic."  ~Henry A. Wallace, 1947

Say the Old Folks

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At the age of 90, Chuck Berry has just released his first album in 38 years (LINK).

I don't think he can top this song, but you never can tell.

Full lyrics HERE.

1948

"We must make it clear to the administration that we, as progressives, would prefer the election of an out-and-out reactionary like Taft in 1948, to a luke-warm liberal.  We want this to be a genuine two-party country and not a country operated by a fake one-party system under the guise of a bi-partisan bloc."  ~Henry A. Wallace

If Henry Wallace were alive today, he'd be fighting the same fight.

90

"If you treat people right they will treat you right — ninety percent of the time."  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt  (source)

I like the little disclaimer at the end.  :)

Tea

Mona got me the little manatee tea diffuser.  He’s a cool little guy.

I always thought a manatee would be the ideal animal to be reincarnated as.  They have no natural predators, they just spend their lives floating in the warm water, munching on sea grass and getting fat.

Mona also got me the mug.

You’d like Mona, you really would.  :-)

Soldiers and Fans

"When we treat politics like sport or war, then we treat ourselves as fans or soldiers, cheering or booing or following orders.  When we treat politics like that, then those who hold differing views from us are not wrong, they are evil. They are not mistaken, they are enemies."  ~Jennifer Mercieca, Historian of political rhetoric (source)

Remember this one?

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Not Actually a Thing

In this excerpt from Mostly Harmless ©1992, Douglas Adams explains the concept of Parallel Universes:

The first thing to realize about parallel universes… is that they are not parallel.

It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you don’t try to realize that until a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash.  The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel.  It doesn’t mean anything.  You can slice the Whle Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.

There's something about this that does ring true.

Barnum and Roosevelt

Excerpted from  American Dreamer by John C. Culver and John Hyde ©2000:

The war made national unity imperative, and Roosevelt felt he must appear to be above politics.  To that end he decided he had to be drafted by the Democratic convention.  The call must be spontaneous, and, if possible, unanimous.

I guess reality has never had a place in politics.

I do not think that is a good thing.

Calmly Played

He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.

I love the way Douglas Adams has the ocean playing with the birds, and not the other way around.  :)

See

In this excerpt from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams ©1985, John Watson, also known as "Wonko the Sane," discusses the scientific method:

I’m not trying to prove anything, by the way. I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that… So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool.

It reminded me of this quote by Leo Buscaglia:

I don't mind it when people call me "Kooky Buscaglia."  I find it gives me a lot of leeway with my behavior.

(That was an aside.)

Inexplicably Explicable

In this excerpt from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish ©1985, Arthur Dent and his girlfriend Fenchurch have learned to fly, and use their new-found ability to have sex on the wing of a passing passenger jet:

Mrs. E. Kapelson of Boston, Massachusetts, was an elderly lady; indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.

With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shade and looked over the wing.

At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought, no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.

By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.

She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.

If you are not familiar with Douglas Adams’ books, a trip to the library is in order.

Here. Now.

“It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.”  ~George Harrison

Paper or Plastic?

Hillary Clinton on Assange "Can't we just drone this guy" -- report https://t.co/S7tPrl2QCZ pic.twitter.com/qy2EQBa48y

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 3, 2016

(LINK)

So if you've done something illegal, and you don't want anyone to find out, just kill the messenger. Literally.

This is why I don't really see a greater and lesser evil this election.  It's more like two different flavors of evil.

Continual Wrenching

Excerpt from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams, © 1985:

They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain.  There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.

The night seemed like an alive thing to him at this moment, the dark Earth around him a being in which he was rooted.

He could feel like a tingle on distant nerve ends the flood of a far river, the roll of invisible hills, the knot of heavy rain clouds parked somewhere away to the south.

He could sense, too, the thrill of being a tree, which was something he hadn't expected.  He knew that if felt good to curl your toes in the earth, but he'd never realized it could feel quite as good as that.  He could sense an almost unseemly wave of pleasure reaching at him all the way from the New Forest.  He must try this summer, he thought, to see what having leaves felt like…

Douglas Adams was known as a comedic writer, but his prose could be quite lovely when the scene required it.

Pleas

You would never plead "Guilty, but with a good excuse"- but that's how most people plan to get into heaven.

— aka Thomas (@AbbiesTreeHouse) October 2, 2016

Awaiting on You All

1. [singular] y’all


2. [plural] all y’all


3. [alternate plural] all'a y'all


4. [possessive pronoun] y’all’s


5. [future tense] y’all’ll

(via)

The One

He fiddled with a book, and then tossed it away.  It was the one he'd read before.  (Excerpt from Life, the Universe, and Everything)

Douglas Adams' books are kind of like Laugh In:  There may be a hint of a theme tying everything together, but it isn't really all that important.

Revealing

October is about
trees revealing
colors they've
hidden all year.

People have
an october
as well.

~Jm Storm

Sphinx

I found this beautiful little Sphinx Moth hanging out on my front porch.

Trains

"Liberals would like to rebuild the station while the trains are running; radicals prefer to blow up the station and forgo service until the new structure is built."  ~Rex Tugwell, 1935

I suppose that puts me more in the "radical" camp.