The Future Of Cellulose

A robo-Tradescantia-Zebrina drawing water from the Dead Sea.
It appears to be on the west bank...


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Brace Yourselves

Robert Gates

Karl von Clausewitz

Joachim Murat

Paul von Hindenburg

Auguste de Marmont

Erich Ludendorff

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Es War Ein Alter Bauer...

Considering that "baumgartner" means "tree gardener" or someone who had worked in an orchard, there is a sense of irony here.

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Nuke and Note

I had a post entitled Nuke Mandela?

As soon as I wrote it, it reminded me of Note Makote  (mah-KO-tay),  the trumpet player.

Without using Wikipedia nor Google, tell me who Note Makote is, and to whom was he married.

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A Break

 John Locke

I am going to take a break from posting.

I am going to read me some Hegel.

Heck of a break...

My research into Ender's Game has led me to Hegel. Fancy that. Who would have guessed? I mean, why couldn't have been some popular continental philosopher-type? Why not Foucault? Why Hegel?

I remember that I always got Frege and Hegel sort of mixed... not "mixed up", but "mixed together".
"Frege" came out of memory as "Fregel", and "Hegel" was something like "Hege", or - more often - "Hegele", by forcing out the "l" then adding the "e" from "Frege"....,  and Hegele would mean "little Hegel".
That would lead to "Fregele", and before you knew it, Heine, the poet, had morphed into "Heinele".

Referring to some of the greatest minds of Germany as "little so-and-so" with such an extensive use of endearing diminutives led to an unhealthy familiarity with the philosophy of Imannuel (whom I called "Manny") Kant.

I had done the same thing with the English philosophers, and had the unpleasant experience of being abruptly dropped by Locke. He positively gave me the air, and at the next regatta, the seat next to him was taken by Hume.
Once we had been buddies, but no more.
I think Berkeley was the fly in that ointment. He was the jealous type.

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By Chance

Who is Greyson Chance?
Is he real, or is he a fabrication? A Kafka-esque figure constructed to while away our time while we sit on-hold on the telephone, or otherwise lead lives of nastiness, brutishness, and shorthood?

I came across his blog. It is filled with odd bits of pop-speak, like

So, it all started on August 24th when Greyson tweeted that he was on his way to California and in his usual mysterious way chose not to tell anybody what he would be doing...

"Mysterious" Tweets?  Bizarre. Kim and Kanye are so plain spoken and straight forward in their Tweetsmanship, yet young, mysterious Greyson, on the other hand...

I shall have to hear some of his music. He seems to be in grade 9, so music is his forte; too young for quantum mechanics and such. But music is the ticket.
It must be rather good stuff, stuff like the angst of prom date time and sitting by the telephone waiting to call or be called, and that is worse thatn being on-hold.

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The Weather Code

The National Weather Service and Hurricane Center forecasters are presently working without pay. Just how long that will continue, and the unpleasant effects if and when they are forced to seek other employment will be discovered in time.

Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal 
http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2013/10/04/nws-hurricane-center-forecasters-also-working-with-no-pay/

finds appeals within codes within enigmas:

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The Day The Earth Stalled

...so Muhammad (which actually happens to be the name of my mechanic...no lampooning of holy figures here.) gets the Old Blue Terra Cruiser down from the hoist, and walks towards me, wiping the oil off his hands, drying the ocean spray on his hair, and getting the Saharan sand off his Mr. Goodwrench shirt. He is shaking his head in a manner that I have come to associate with bad news.  
Well, I got some good news and some bad news. Which do ya wanna hear first?

Masha'allah, I said, rolling my eyes.  

What model do you got? The 2 billion year old one, or the one that's got just over 6,000 years on her?

Man ya'rif? I said, shrugging. Who knows?  

Ya know, some people bought into the younger model, the Bishop Ussher model, the T four-oh-oh-four. Some got the older model.

I said I thought it was the older model. It had certainly been acting as if it were. (Bishop Ussher was the bloke who said the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.) 

Then there's the designer: was your designer the Big Guy or that Intellygent Designer that's all the rage these days?

While he said this, he did "majnoun" motions; i.e., finger points to temple and implies that some of us were not too tightly wrapped..." mad as hatters" nicely sums it up.

I said I thought it was the Big Lebowski...I don't know why. I mean, there isn't much holy about Jeff Bridges as The Big Lebowski. Or is there? Anyway, long story short, it was going to be flush the system for the next 1,000 years at some phenomenal figure per flush, or...get a new model.

So I'm getting the system flush. It gives me the shivers, sounding way too much like eternal colon cleansing, but she'll be running like new in no time.

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reprint

Between A Rock And A Sax Place

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Eleven-year Old Will Blow Your Mind !!! And More !!!

I dunno... like he wrote an app or something.

Like, I don't care. I try not to get into that hothouse of navel-gazing tech flunkies.

I am glad the young boy experienced the thrill of accomplishment.

Then this was on FaceBook - advice from a divorced guy - and it's. like, exxtremely viral:

 1) Never stop courting. Never stop dating. NEVER EVER take that woman for granted. When you asked her to marry you, you promised to be that man that would OWN HER HEART and to fiercely protect it. This is the most important and sacred treasure you will ever be entrusted with. SHE CHOSE YOU. Never forget that, and NEVER GET LAZY in your love. 

2) PROTECT YOUR OWN HEART. Just as you committed to being the protector of her heart, you must guard your own with the same vigilance. Love yourself fully, love the world openly, but there is a special place in your heart where no one must enter except for your wife. Keep that space always ready to receive her and invite her in, and refuse to let anyone or anything else enter there.

3) FALL IN LOVE OVER and OVER and OVER again. You will constantly change. You’re not the same people you were when you got married, and in five years you will not be the same person you are today. Change will come, and in that you have to re-choose each other every day. SHE DOESN’T HAVE TO STAY WITH YOU, and if you don’t take care of her heart, she may give that heart to someone else or seal you out completely, and you may never be able to get it back. Always fight to win her love just as you did when you were courting her.

He should write an app. 
Tony Robbins better watch out!

I'm going to get my teeth whitened. When this guy goes on Oprah, his teeth will assuredly be white.

The only problem is that words fade faster than attraction... so what really works? Dunno.

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The Theft of Color

Hidden camera record of urban crooks stealing color from a patio. The color was fully 95% removed illegally from the premises.

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Photos And Captions

  

War of the Worlds 1

 

War of the Worlds 2

 Morsi Barada Nikto

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Time Travel

Back in the days when I was Top Dog Roadie for the concert of shows called The Tour - and I think I have written about this: it dealt with religious apparitions, rather like Fatima in its day - I learned a good deal about the world and the flesh. This is a story about the world; the world of physics to be exact.

Most venues required an entire build-up of facilities, from high-tech sound equip to the banal matter of porta-potties. We had contacted local vendors months ahead, and as the hands of time tore off the pages of the calendar, our contacts increased, and we spelled out in excruciating detail our needs: we were an infinite paint-by-numbers-project that had a ravenous appetite, and would their "palette" suffice our needs?
We left nothing to chance.
Actually, we left randomness to chance. We were not aware of that at the time.

As a result, I was not ready for Hessel, Michigan.

Each year, Hessel has a classic boat festival, and it goes back to the time of when the witch king of Angmar was still a jolly good fellow (...and so say all of us!).
Hessel is located in the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan, and it is a small village, and it is not at all the usual venue one might assume desirable for our "concerts", but we "answered to a higher power", and Hessel was one of the places listed on all those t-shirts...

We were there the week after the boat show.

Long story short, during the first evening I get a call from Security that there had been a "skirmish" out yonder by the porta-potties. Details were sketchy, and I thought it best to leave the A/C comfort of my Southern Comfort trailer and wander over to check things out.

We had ordered 15 potty units. We had received 15 units, and we had placed them more or less in a row under the oak trees on the northeast corner of the property. When I arrived in my The Tour Golf Cart © , I could pretty well see what the problem was; there were only 7 potties under the trees. Some of those were tilted at precarious angles.

Eight units had been stolen.
Except Security told me they had been around the area, and if a truck had come and lifted off eight potties, someone would have seen it. No, the potties had vanished. So... like, who wants - or needs - eight porta-potties, laden with their unique chemistry?
Was there a new drug manufactured from the potty chemicals and uric acid and what-all-else is in a porta-potty?

Security directed my attention to a couple small groups of agitated folks. It turns out they had witnessed the whole thing: while their pals and buds were using the porta-potties, everything disappeared in a flash of light. Now their friends were not here.
They wanted to know if this was, like, part of the show, and I assured them it was not. Just then, John Constable, the local sheriff drove up with all lights flashing. As an aside, I always refer to the local cops by nicknames based on the names of English painters. It helps keep me focused. The NYPD was run by a nice guy named Gainsborough, as I recall.

After stories had been taken, I went back to the office, the sheriff following me, and once there I put in a emergency call to Benny's Porta Johns, from whom we had rented these units. Benny had a 24-hour hot line, which was his home phone, and the missus answered on the 10th ring: it was almost 11:00 PM and she sounded as if she were hot, indeed, about being disturbed at that time of night.

I eventually got Benny on the phone.

There was about 10 minutes of fuzzy-wuzzy, sleep-befuddled slapstick we had to wade through to begin our conversation, but he eventually began to get up to speed.

"Oh... I see." he said.
"Good..." I said.
"Porta-Potties..." he said with emphasis.
"Indeed." I said.

There was a pause, a hiatus that extended out through a series of saxophone-like coughs.

He was back. "I thought you said you wanted Portal-Potties...", he said with emphasis.
"What the heck?!" I said with emphasis.

Short story long, it turns out that the potties shipped to us were time portals - future and past... sorta like Star Gate and The Time Machine and what have you - and they were definitely not standard issue porta-potty. Not by a long chalk. Portal-Potties... simple as that.

The sheriff took a while to come around to the new view of the sitch (situation), since he was not as used to the types of other-natural events that came around all the time in my line of Roadie work.
He wanted to know why - exactly! exactly, why! -  terlets (toilets) or potties should be time travel devices, or more important, why should a time machine be made in the shape of a potty?

He had a good point.

I mean, why would anyone want to travel in time while their pants were down? Pants open or down? It would give one a bad rep in whatever time one traveled to, unless, of course, it was one of those rare times when such things were the style, but those eras were few and far between.

Summing it up, John Constable (Yes, he told me. Yes. My Mother named me after the painter.) was not easily persuaded, since, as he put it, he was born at night, but not the immediately previous spell between dark and dawn.

I gave him some coffee, and then started on the computer.
I motioned him over as I Googled "sudden appearances toilets..." and amazingly we found references to events of people floating into a shocked and appalled view while seemingly taking care of "business".
We looked for a historical event we were familiar with, finally finding something in the travels of Lewis and Clark in the area known as the Badlands... something about a mad shaman pelting the explorers with what appeared to a later and wiser age to be blue colored urinal cakes.

John Constable called Benny back.  "Get down here! We gotta get them folks back!... I see... I see... Yes! Yes! Isee... Yeah we gotta do it now, Benny!"
He hung up the phone.
"Can he do it?" I asked.
"Hmm...?" John Constable said.
"Get them back?" I asked.
"Yeah. I think so."
John was silent for a second, mulling over something he had trouble putting into words.
"Benny said he thinks he can do it. Said the portal-potties flush both ways."
I nodded approvingly.

It had been a long day, and it was not over. I wondered about the past... and the future, too! I was sure we'd get a handle (no pseudo-pun by association intended) on it; the evil of the past and future days are sufficient thereto, and need none of our help.

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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

http://www.smbc-comics.com/

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A Dutchman's Pants

Clearing Skies?

My grandfather used to say that the skies would clear when there was visible blue sky and there was enough of such blue sky "to patch a Dutchman's pants."

I like the expression, and wonder if there is enough blue sky yet.

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The Dating Game

She-who-must-be-obeyed was watching TCM's presentation of 1937's Between Two Women, starring Franchot Tone and Maureen O'Sullivan. I was in the kitchen, finishing the last few pages of the novel Bel Canto, standing at the side counter where I usually stand when I am eating and reading.
I thought I heard, "Did I ever tell you I had a date with Franchot Tone?"
I did not know what to do. I mean, she could not have had a date with Franchot Tone, unless she had dated him in his dotage, I suppose. So had I actually heard that? She must have had something important to say, and the best my ears could do was "date with Franchot Tone".
She probably had made an important statement about household affairs, and I had turned it into nonsense.

It turns out that what she had said was, "Did I ever tell you I was supposed to have a blind date with Franchot Tone's son?"

That was a relief, auditory acuity-wise and generally magna cum-a-general-with-it-ness, instead of being out-of-it and daft.

Then I was captivated by it all, the glitter of celebrity.

My attempts:

(1) Did I ever tell you I had a blind date with...     Mary Wicke's daughter?

(2) Did I ever tell you I had a blind date with...     Slim Summerville's granddaughter?

 

The idea is to have a name of a character actor that is somewhat obscure and not right on the top of peoples' minds, causing them to work a little at it. Then, there may be a jolt when they remember the actors or actresses in their funnier moments... and so on.

My personal favorite is

(3) Did I ever tell you I'm going to have a blind date with Elaine Stritch? (Now that's she retiring nearby.)

My mother knew her sister, Sally, back in the day.

Not that they were friends, actually. Sally taught dancing, and my mother was her nemesis...

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Christina's World: Fukushima

Modern day Fukushima:
Corporate and Government in harmony for profit,
ignoring the human costs involved.

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Standing Guard

 

Super Duck Maintains His Lonely Vigil Over Metropolis

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Designers for Fabulous Monsters

Versquatchie,
designer for the Pacific Northwest Sasquatch Community.

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What Do You Think Of Hugo Chavez?

Many opinions, many opinions.

I wrote a good-bye to Mr. Chavez. I consider him to be one of the early leaders of Indigenous Peoples' Socialism.

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