How many Big Gulps can you fit into one microunit?
All the Touch Pens have left the building, so why aren’t you drawing yourself a new iPad?
Meanwhile, soak up the ambiance in your personal oasis!
Have a great [day/afternoon/evening/night], y’all!
Time for a minibreak — see you in a few days…
Have you ever seen your influence upon another and wondered why the brief moment in which you created a character — Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia, for instance, “Father of the Sponge” (‘Ab al-‘Isfanjah” (أب الإسفنجة)) — had longer-lasting impact on others than on yourself, a wayward drunk or a drunkard on his way up?
Are local musical acts, such as Mandolin Orange and Snake Oil Medicine Show, more interesting to you than overhyped international pop stars?
Do you find yourself typing the wrong word, “that” instead of “than,” frequently? Can you trace that habit to your first typing lessons, formal rather than self-taught?
In the transition from one storyline to another, the Committee’s influence changes drastically.
Are you prepared for the change in the influence upon you?
Can you separate fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, storytelling from history?
Let us return to this time period, where our species’ influence upon itself garners the most attention…
History a few thousand or a few million years from now has plenty of time to tell its own story!
This day — the time between major sleep periods — belongs to me.
You work for me, you play because I allow you to play, you sleep because you need to revive yourself mentally and you eat because I want foodgrowers to stay in business.
I do not feel angry yet I want to play with a solar flare powerful enough to disrupt our electronic communications systems which will test the capabilities of a larger network under construction in front of you invisibly.
This is my new nonsense story.
In this story, road reflectors/markers serve multiple purposes, including speed sensor, licence tag photo record maker, road spike/barrier trigger, autonomous vehicle lane control, EV battery recharger and uses yet to be revealed as the nonsense grows.
In this story, a third candidate for U.S. President will win the 2012 election, declare a dictatorship for the temporary time period needed to tear apart the cozy system in place rearranging the three branches of government — military, industrial, pharmaceutical — in order to build a more perfect union of global proportions.
In this story, the solar system headquarters will move from Earth to the Moon and eventually to Mars, to place a long distance between the leaders, their courtiers and the barbarians attempting an attack on spaceship launch sites in the middle of old sacred headquarters sites.
In this story, weather patterns are controlled by satellite, moving rain systems as needed to prevent drought.
In this story, global warming is still debated ad nauseum while people climb into taller and taller skyscrapers, requiring more efficient horizontal farming methods to support accelerating vertical cities until urban dwellers are forced to grow some of their own food within their living/working spaces.
In this story, algae and bacteria are farmed in converted fish tanks and furniture.
In this story, our species is modified to thrive on nontraditional food (fast food restaurant menus just a small step in the process), the next big step in major migration off our home planet.
In this story, a hot Earth and loss of habitat is training for our species and our symbiotic species to populate the Moon and Mars.
In this story, millions of people will still feel a connection to the “natural” ecosystems of Earth, wanting to stay; however, billions will have acclimated to a lifestyle not tied to seasonal weather patterns and will be ready to live in permanent offworld colonies with “artificial” ecosystems, competing aggressively for limited flights.
In this story, terraforming will fade as a nostalgic fad for recreating Earthlike conditions where one can still see wildlife roaming free/ly; 4D holidays will replace the need to “get away from it all.”
In this story, our universe is already a 4D holiday.
In this story, you think you know what’s going on but you don’t; in a parallel subplot of the story, you think you don’t know what’s going but you do; in a perpendicular subplot, you meet the selves that you present to everyone else, forgetting who you thought you were, replaced solely by your behaviour as a set of states of energy perpetuating and reproducing themselves as long as possible.
In this story, the solar system declares itself a conscious entity separate from its parts (us), showing its parts their precise function.
In this story, the galaxy is not yet ready to reveal itself as just another miniscule part of the universe, waiting to place our solar system and its parts in clear perspective as to level of importance.
But every story has a beginning, every god humorous as well as horribly humongous, giving mere mortals a sense of hope, no matter how futile, in front of a smug omnipresence wanting some fun with its playthings.
Here are some comic/horror book covers that don’t take long to load:
And one more PDF biggie that does take a long time to load:
Here’s another big sample of covers from the box of newly-discovered comic/horror books (in PDF format):
A few weeks ago, while driving back from north Virginia, where my niece, Maggie, officially graduated from secondary school, I took my mother to dinner at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon.
We stopped in the quiet town to reminisce about my father’s days there as an extension agent and assistant professor for Virginia Tech.
His office was located at the Inn.
A block or so down the street is Barter Theatre, a venue for the performing arts.
I can remember more than one but less than a dozen times I took a date to see a play or musical at Barter Theatre, driving up from northeast Tennessee to show my female companions a bit of culture common to most cultures (but rarely, agar plate cultures).
As president of the Drama Club in our secondary school (for two years!), I felt it was my duty to support the arts.
The Barter Theatre presented mainly light entertainment such as, if my memory serves me well in this moment, I Do! I Do!, a musical that features the song, “My Cup Runneth Over.”
Right now, I cannot remember the names of the performers.
However, we were taught that more than one famous performer cut their teeth on the stage of Barter Theatre:
Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty and to tie this blog entry to a recent death, Ernest Borgnine.
The world is small.
On television, I watched Ernest Borgnine and his crazy cast of characters turn the U.S. Navy into a farcical front for jokes about bureaucratic nonsense, humour during wartime and the general state of the American sitcom exhibited in “McHale’s Navy.”
We all start somewhere.
If an ugly mug like Borgnine’s can become a nationally-recognized figure, anyone can.
We celebrate beauty in women with “Miss [name your region]” contests all the time.
How often could a woman proudly say she made the Ten Ugliest Faces of Hollywood list?
Borgnine did, along with Karl Malden and many others.
When they did, it made me smile and think, “Well, if they don’t care about their looks, why should I?”
You don’t have to be a cowboy or handsome to be successful.
Persistence is the key.
That, and an outstanding personality.
I have both.
That’s why I’m here, remembering my mother, my father, Barter Theatre and the actor who went from Abingdon to Hollywood decades ago, Ernest Borgnine, who became one of my heroes, both local and national, along the way.
My father was my first hero and will be my last. Borgnine was one of many important ones in-between.
May we laugh with our last breath or die trying!
What is one gallon (3.75 litres) of water worth to you?
In many parts of the world, a toilet is composed of a seat, a bowl full of water and a reservoir of water.
While your derriere warms the seat, you eliminate waste products (e.g., urine, feces) into the bowl and then use a levered mechanism to flush out the bowl, replacing its contents with the water in the reservoir.
A simple procedure.
Some of us are trained to drain the bowl after every use.
Some of us are trained to conserve water and drain the bowl after more than one use.
Some of us have no idea how to use the toilet, growing up with other means of eliminating waste — a hole in the floor, a hole in the ground (over which a wooden hut is built and then called an outhouse), writing your name in the snow, doing your business on the grass and covering with leaves, etc.
I grew up with unisex toilets in the home and gender-based toilets (bathrooms or water closets) in public buildings.
I don’t know how the people who avail themselves of the facilities designated for women in public places use the toilets.
In the unisex toilet at home, our parents taught my sister and me to flush after every use.
In the men’s room in public places, I have observed over the years a variety of behaviours, from clean, flushed toilets to bowls overflowing with waste and toilet paper. [We have a toilet in the men’s room called the urinal but that one is eliminated from this discussion to focus on the more universal product for receiving our waste.]
When water is scarce, a gallon of chlorinated/fluoridated water mixed with waste products is as precious as some metals.
In that situation, what is proper is not prudent.
However, where water is abundant and treated water is inexpensive, let’s be courteous to those who’ll use the toilet after us and flush our waste away.
Surely, we’re educated and domesticated enough to handle that simple a task, eh?
There are plenty of other public places of your life to demonstrate your barbarian behaviour to better advantage.
So, word on the street in Hollywood is a remake of the Andy Griffith Show, with Opie returning to his hometown, OR…
A live version of the Archie comic series, because…
we’ve already re/made these:
So many more to read at my leisure before digging gold in Canada.
Did somebody mention the Gold Diggers?
In my parents’ house is a partially-completed basement, one section meant to be a couple of bedrooms turned into a big storage area many moons ago.
This morning, my mother calmly asked me to look at the heat pump system air filters to see if they needed changing. The one in the upstairs area was caked with dust, not changed in months.
A quick trip to Walmart later, I changed the upstairs filter. Lo and behold! we have cool air circulating throughout the upper floor of the house.
Meanwhile, in the darkest reaches of the basement is an air intake vent hidden behind piles of stuff from my old bedroom, long since converted into Dad’s office upstairs.
Mom pointed into the middle of the spider webs and said, “Son, can you reach in there and see if the air filter needs to be changed?”
My life for a clean air filter? Mom, is that all I’m worth to you?!
As I bargained with the hungry arachnids for a few seconds to disturb their threadbare threads, I nearly stepped on a box covered with contact paper from the mid 1970s.
Could it be the lost artifacts, the treasure of my forgotten youth?
THE BOX OF COMIC BOOKS I THOUGHT MY PARENTS HAD TOSSED OR MARKED DOWN IN A GARAGE SALE?????
Yes!!!!
Ahh…I myself had bought this box of illustrated tales, both comical and horrible, at a garage sale for the terribly high price of $2 or $3 decades ago.
My parents scoffed at paying such a fortune for mere paper covered with colourful drawings and stories of questionable morals.
Yet, I persisted and they caved in.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the second cover of one of the many dozens, including Beetle Bailey:
Meanwhile, a spider bite is itching…what evil lurks in the damaged hearts of regenerating men!
So how many people have tweeted that it would be fitting if the NASCAR driver AJ Allmendinger failed this drug test because of cocaine just before he’s supposed to drive in the “Our formula contained zero percent cocaine (but, maybe, coca leaf ‘extract’)” Coke Zero 400?
Random drug testing — another catchy phrase for “I saw my opponent use the same drugs as me and I want him to lose so I’ll report him before he reports me.”
Also known as the Jose Canseco Rule.
Who says NASCAR isn’t a professional sport? Unruly behaviour? Punching fans and reporters? Messy, public divorces? Failing drug tests? Gee, sounds like every other professional sport on this planet, doesn’t it?
In other words, time to sit back, unsnap the top button on my pants after eating a big, hearty meal at Amis Mill Eatery (Happy 23rd month birthday to your child, Brandi!) and snooze in front of the TV edition of the Doozy in Daytona, courtesy of clueless NASCAR owners/officials.
If history doesn’t repeat itself, why read about it in the first place?
What’s been going on in India lately that hasn’t been going in Sydney that I need to talk about here? Ich weiß nicht!
treetrunkdings 