First of all, congrats to the Spelling Bee winner, Arvind Mahankali. However, ESPN followed a long Western tradition of exploiting underage brown-skinned people by showing the Spelling Bee on TV but not compensating the participants at the usual actor’s/professional athlete’s pay scale.
Way to go, ESPN! You rock…not.
Thanks to our host at Wolf Mountain Winery, we learned that some of the best Arabica seeds are used in Community Coffee.
Thanks to Samantha at Walmart.
But an extra special thanks to my wife and Fay for making a dinner of country ham, pole beans, mashed potatoes, biscuits and strawberries.
What does an M.D., his wife and friends do when it’s pouring rain outside? Watch episodes of Doc Martin, of course!
When I was a kid, my parents’ house had those sliding wooden doors that recessed into doorframes.
You had to manually slide the door out by hand, though.
Of course, as an adult, my wife and I installed the “Star Trek” style doors in our house.
Whenever I go to friends’ houses, it’s so strange to wave my hand in the air or walk up to a door and it not open/close automatically.
I blame the “Star Trek” franchise for spoiling me and hating my technologically-challenged friends!
Poor Hillary. She keeps riding the coattails of scandalous clowns who pretended to be powerful. Such a bad judge of character she is, eh?
But Bill G is right — playing games with politicians is too easy because they don’t make anything tangible.
How ’bout an H2G2 history lesson to divert our attention, instead?
With the raccoons flushed out of the attic, courtesy of oil-based insecticide spray, I spent part of the afternoon stapling wire mesh over the chewed-up holes of the eaves of the house.
I also sent a message to the folks at Dragon-X to expedite their development of human transportation devices for ISS ferrying duties so we can dump the Russian Soyuz tin can now that we’ve sung a song about it.
I’m tired of waiting on political idiots, who can be handed a set of keys to a car, told it contains the fingerprints and identifying motives/means of a murderers, but think the issue is the shape the keychain makes when thrown into a cup of tea leaves.
Pardon my French, but do these morons have their heads so far up their asses they can’t think straight?
They definitely need a butt light because they must’ve been drinking way too many Bud Lights at FBI buddy hangouts or political hack backwaters.
Fly me to the moon…please. Otherwise, I’ll keep playing with my yo-yo because, as you know, I’ve got the world on the string.
A nod to Branson’s flight attendant duties, Bill’s weepy remembrances of Steve and Jolie’s mastodon-sized story of a mastectomy.
As the Barack mobile grinds to a screeching halt, what are we going to do to keep the masses happy? Don’t forget the big picture despite the circus freak sideshows.
When is an egg not an egg?
When is a chicken not a chicken?
Why did King Tut have a beard?
Why would Artemis Gordon side with me, not Commissioner Gordon?
Guinevere wants me to write about her.
Other characters wait their turn.
Words fail me today, my fast-food-sized menu of a vocabulary and grammaticalarianiamistically-challenged phrases.
The hallowed echoes of a hollow hall, where eight enthusiastic faces sang dressed in black not madrigals, regaled us with their ringing voices last night.
The sanctuary of church has only one purpose for me — meditation upon the infinite.
How you anthropomorphise the infinite is your concern, not mine.
Rather, your concern interferes with my meditation.
A cathedral ceiling should reflect the echoes of pipe organs and windpipes.
Sermons are for those without a voice of their own.
Church was once the social sewing machine that stitched subcultures together at the family and community levels.
Now that recorded music and other aspects of church life are available on a pick-and-choose-at-your-convenience at your local convenience store where wafers (leavened and unblessed) meet your bodily needs, the reasons that some went to church are met away from the edifice.
My thoughts are my sanctuary, my heaven and hell. An author is quoted as saying, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.,” allegedly C.S. Lewis the entertainer.
Last night, the Huntsville Collegium Musicum invited the community to hear early choral music in Covenant Presbyterian Church at 7:30 p.m., an invitation I found at 6:30 p.m. while looking online at al.com for events to attend and get me out of a house whose cathedral ceiling echoed with the sounds of recorded television shows.
Grumpily, my wife agreed to go with me, sans (le) dîner.
Happily, I drove her there.
The program consisted of religious and secular music.
There were no church social calendar announcements, no children’s Bible lesson, no Karaoke Jesus, no cappuccino and Christ, and no sermon.
It was heaven on Earth!
I closed my eyes and felt the soundwaves bounce against me (my wife saw colours and emotions dancing when her eyes were closed).
I opened my eyes and watched the physical manifestation of joy on the singers’ faces flow through their bodies and out of their mouths which changed shape to shape musical notes and sung words.
This is the one and only purpose for a church. All the rest — the Sunday school lessons, the social outreach, the weekend retreats — has no meaning to me.
[Except for the one small detail that my wife of 26+ years I met at summer camp (Holston Presbytery Camp in Banner Elk, NC) when we were 12 years old so, yeah, I owe a debt of gratitude to the whole social environment of religion (co-ed summer campers in the woods reading the Bible and sharing sleeping bags? how disgraceful!) that put us two together (but don’t worry, Church Lady, we didn’t kiss until after my wife turned 19).]
After my wife and I ate at a VERY LOUD restaurant called Drake’s, which killed any reverent mood we were in but filled our bellies, we returned home, suffered through many a lame skit on SNL for a few good laughs and turned on the main computer in the living room to play early choral music and listen to the echoes bouncing off the cathedral ceiling.
Some of my neighbours still get up on Sunday mornings to gather socially at whatever version of church they prefer.
This here, in front of a computer screen, is my church, the litanies composed in my thoughts rolled out in the holy text of a limited vocabulary, my wife sleeping with our cats at the other end of our country cabin of a house in the woods, within miles of native American burial mounds and hallowed cemeteries.
To last night’s singers, I salute you.
You make the long, lonely, expensive trip to celestial bodies worth the effort.
Which reminds me, if killing eliminating others cleanses my soul, what am I going to do if I’m the only living soul on Mars whose zest for living — his savoir–faire, his je ne sais quoi, his fly in the coffee of his petit dejeuner — is so strong that snuffing out Earth-based lifeforms will be his only salvation?
Will you survive to read the next blog entry?
And if you do, will you serve as a humorous aside, hero amidst tragedy, lone wolf , space pioneer, Bright, ascetic, or salt of the earth?
Thanks to Abby, Hannah and cooks!
For a brief moment, I was a kid again.
Yesterday, in preparation for watching a film at the cinema about a cartoon character known as Iron Man, I scrolled through websites detailing a few storylines that encompass worlds and universes in one comic book series or another.
Although I was never geeky enough to keep track of comic drawing styles, character bios or inside jokes, I knew enough about the fantasy lives of fellow classmates who did that I could briefly carry on a conversation with those who read not only comic books and watched Saturday morning cartoons but who also consumed novelisations and books containing specifications of spaceships, weaponry and superhero powers.
A few of them transitioned to board games like Dungeons & Dragons — I detailed those people in a previous novel or blog entry and won’t repeat myself here — because fantasy and science fiction computer games didn’t exist, unless you can stretch your imagination and say that Pong was a game between gods sending universes back and forth across matter/antimatter timelines.
For the most part, our schoolyard games were either cowboy-and-Indian or space cowboy-vs-evil alien shoot ’em ups and chases.
2001: A Space Odyssey was released when we were too young to care and Star Wars arrived in our high school years when most of us already had well-established hobbies to occupy our thoughts. Star Trek was an after-school show that, along with Batman and Wild Wild West, captured the attention of the average nerd in our early teens.
Now that I’m a middle-aged white guy who’s more likely to die of suicide than a car wreck, I can either further regress into a childhood I never really had or I can progress into an elderly adult I haven’t yet been, avoiding the mental illness pitfalls that lead to premature death.
To end today’s blog entry, I’ll provide an untraceable source of a quote by a semi-famous author:
“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Falsely yours,
Henry Charles Bukowski”
Earlier today the SEC and ESPN announced an agreement that exploitation of college athletes is their bread and butter for at least the next 20 years, pushing the importance of academics in the SE United States further back into the 20th century.
treetrunkdings 