Pattern Recognition.



Noted a bit ago that this one looked an awful lot like something in those film strips we had to watch in Health Class back when they'd separate us into boy and girl groups for a few days each year.

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!



I might actually need to go out and shovel and salt tonight. Imagine that.

Texas Lynx.

Been to so many library sales recently that the memory of them is somewhat of a blur. Anyhow, at one of them, Pavel picked up a copy of Audubon's Quadrupeds of America, something neither of us knew existed.

What he liked to do, and what set him apart at the time, was to show animals in their natural settings, doing their own thing. In most cases, it ennobles the subject. In others, not so much.



Kind of leads one to wonder how many examples he caught in the act before shooting. (At least they died doing what they loved, anyway.)

***

Snort: Pavel's got the cat on his desktop with this running in the background. Great.

Happy First Day of Summer!



(Pavel reveling at America's Stonehenge.)

My tax dollars went to France and all I got was this lousy pocket calendar.





Wonder how much Kerviel's bosses got?

Then there was the Coffee Hour in the yew tree downstairs.

A Reminder:

Be sure to watch your backs today.

Pattern Recognition.

Hard to stomach, but just try to sit through this one:



After the creeped-outedness wore off, a realization struck. Doesn't it sound an awful lot like this?:



(Thanks, Pablo.)

Morning in Asia.

Half awake, enjoying the first sip of coffee and the last bit of calm of the day, I was greeted by Pavel:

"You know, Ronald Reagan said that in 1980 it was Morning in America Again. Today, it's Morning in Asia."



Those crazy French, putting their perfume in the least apparent of places. Had the choice between "Asian Morning" and "Caribbean Breeze." The stockperson said that he had to live with large quantities of both and could discern no difference between the two.

The Curse of the Hope.

It took some time, but eventually even Harry Winston got his own.

Learned a fun expression in French today:

Mettre la charrue avant le boeuf.

Idiomatically, it means to put the cart before the horse.

This came in response to the Frenchie's proposal to maybe go to Copenhagen or Venice for the holiday. I was all like, okay, but first I have to get a flight to where you are and before that, I have to finish school. Let's not put the plow before the ox, d'accord?

Wednesday Night is Shakespeare Night.

Only, since the group's read through all the plays, they were reading other things last night. Chuck read from The Hobbit and a text he had on the magic associated with metallurgy in West African societies*. Pavel read from Judges, Lovecraft and Mark Twain. I read from the opening paragraphs from my current Hofstadter essay on the Spoilsmen:

"When Collis P. Huntington wrote to a political agent concerning some of his bribery for the Southern Pacific:

If you have to pay money to have the right thing done, it is only just and fair to do it...If a man has the power to do great evil and won't do right unless he is bribed to do it, I think the time spent will be gained when it is a man's duty to go up and bribe the judge. A man that will cry out against them himself will also do these things himself. If there was none for it, I would not hesitate--

he was not being a sanctimonious hypocrite; he was merely expressing his passionate American conviction that he had every honest right to come into his own, and it is doubtful that many tycoons of his time would have difered in principle. To imagine that such men did not sleep the sleep of the just would be romantic sentimentalism. In the Gilded Age even the angels sang for them..."**

Chuck almost fell out of his chair laughing. How little things have changed over time! The only difference between then and now, however, is the lack of a populist sort of movement. I mean: the Democrats aren't for The People, as aren't the Republicans. The Populist Party is long gone. Unions? Bah. Unions are only in the business of self-perpetuation nowadays, workers be d@mned. I can't see the Libertarian 'movin' on up' from its ghetto - especially not with their last presidential pick, either.

What other options are we not thinking of (reform for any of the above movements aside? Don't see much of that in the horizon.) here?

***

* Chuck's a blacksmith with a serious background in art history. He's my lifeline for all things academic in that realm. The reading on African metallurgy was in response to a rather weird comment I got on one of my shorter papers for Western Civilization. I'd analyzed an excerpt of a letter from Pope Gregory to one of his missionaries in the Anglo Saxon territories regarding his very pragmatic change of heart about the destruction of pagan temples. At the end, I'd put a footnote in about interesting pockets of celtic culture that exist today, such as the burning of John Barleycorn in the UK, la 'parade des geants' in Germanic northern France, and mumming in the Baltics. The response was, "but where does it stop (or should it)? Is killing chickens ritually by African Christians OK because that is what they did before conversion?"

**The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. Richard Hofstadter; pp. 214-215. For what it's worth, I cannot recommend this book enough. In fact: if you'd like a copy, I have an extra. Will send it to you. Seriously.

I don't think that the problem here is so much being American as being an idiot. Idiocy generally isn't cool anywhere, even in Europe.

Contradictions.



"Your race! If you are antiamerican, you're racist now!"

Funny how these things work out. I'll give the "goodwill" a week, tops.

Last night after the debate, wanted to take a walk. On the way back home, heard a bit of a conversation between some pretty young Somerville things about McCain's VP pick:

"Like, I hate Sarah Palin anyway, but, like, tonight I hate her even more because, like, everybody was watching the stupid debate because of her and, like nobody came in and I lost something like $100 in tips."

Pablo was furious. "Yeah, Palin planned it that way to keep women down. Should've just scheduled Biden to pontificate for an hour and a half all by himself, because then nobody'd watch and she wouldn't have lost her #$%& tip money. Of course it couldn't be that she didn't make any money because she's bad at her job, now, could it?"

Started throwing out ideas on how to limit the electorate to 'worthwhile' people like the Founding Fathers did: suggested that only property owners vote. I mentioned that that would bar me from voting, for example. Decided that literacy/intelligence tests wouldn't work, as around here, there are plenty of people who can read and who are educated, but who are dumb as a post anyway.

Just told him to be happy that it was Palin who was the VP pick and the Valley Girl transplant who was the waitress and not the other way around.

Obama's teleprompter lays down the law.

Someone asked me how long I'd been working where I'd worked until today. Had to think, as it became unimportant after I'd become vested. Well, my start date was July 23, 2001. Told the curious coworker that the mirror broke on the 22nd and that I was only just getting over it now.

"When angry, count four; when very angry, swear."

-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

Idle Hands Are the Devil's Tools.



Thanks for the inspiration, Simon. Really. (snort)

Guess I'm not the only one to have been dreaming of this matchup (or even a debate between the two).