An operetta for our time! Atlanta? You bet. Now if you think this a comment in many way upon our society you just might be right. The comment application is below. Back it up! It tops "I Got the Hookup." [Langauge warning. Social behavior warning. Parental technique warning. No-information voter warning.]
HT: Rodger, Real King of France
UPDATED with commentary from Top Rope Zeus, plus frame by frame audience reaction from Daniggawitdatattoos who notes, "Atlanta, what the fuck? For real? What the fuck is going on in Atlanta? She deserves every piece of that taser. And her kids? They shoulda had little baby tasers…." And then there's analysis provided by The Advise Show on the nature of hood rats and thugs. Illuminating. "That man has the hardest job in America. Like I said, look at Chicago. I call gangs 'domestic terrorism.' They're bred to kill black men.":
Continued...
1.
2.
Here endeth the lesson.
Acquainted with the Blight
I have been one acquainted with the blight.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain,
(And out in rain -- and back in rain,
And out in rain -- and back in rain,
And out in rain -- and .... you get the picture.)
I have been skinsoaked under every city light.
I have looked down every moss-choked city lane.
I have passed drowned dolphins flopping on my lawn,
And splashed them with galoshes unwilling to explain.
I have stood up to my kiester in the ceaseless plop of drops
When overhead a sloshing cloud's deluge
Drenched the houses with a mound of mist,
But not to call me back, but slather me with slops;
And further still at an unearthly height
One more damned raincloud against the sky
Proclaimed Seattle was neither dry nor Right.
I have been one acquainted with the blight.
[Apologies to Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) on the 50th Anniversary of his passing.]
This brings together a great song by Gordon Lightfoot and rare footage. Edited with a clear eye and a large heart it's one of the finest tribute videos I've found of You Tube. Worth your time twice over.
Continued...
Your answers for the inquisitor
In his wine-stained satin lace,
Are as irrelevant as answers
Deduced from deepest space.
Your presence in his universe
Confirms him of your crime.
He seeks to seal all passages
Divined from space and time.
Behind the science of his spectacles
Lives a mind reduced by power.
A gesture from his languid wrists --
All's over in an hour.
"We seek to keep our faithful
Baptized, confirmed and saved
From those dark, unknown questions
That live beyond the grave.
"Hunched within my velvet throne,
My pen controls the door
That opens to the vaults of night
Above the killing floor."
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme....
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
-- Hugh Selwyn Mauberly -- Ezra Pound
Dear LowInfo Citizens, It's been about five years since this was first proposed. It is still something to keep in mind as you hope for change and a better world via magical thinking. You may not be interested in false hopes, but false hopes are interested in you....
People get ready.... Police in India’s Kashmir publish nuclear war survival tips, say notice doesn’t signal concern.... Yeah, right. Duck and cover!
A bomb called Licorne. Fired at 18.30 on July 3, 1970, and yielded 914 kilotons (Think "57 Hiroshimas"). Imagine it being fired next door. Hope that if it is ever fired, it is fired next door.
Sixty-seven years ago : "On Monday, August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged." - Hiroshima
"Little Boy," the aptly named 16 kiloton bomb that took out Hiroshima, was -- in comparison to the nuclear devices in the world's arsenals -- sort of a light field artillery shell. There was, at the time, a second bomb called "Fat Man." Weighing in at 21 kilotons it would put paid to Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. With the erasure of Nagasaki, the world was fresh out of nuclear weapons. It was only a temporary lapse. Today we've got about 25,000 of these little items of discipline scattered about.
The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated in the atmosphere was The Soviet Tsar Bomba , or "Big Ivan" which at 50 Megatons was very harmful to every living think on Novaya Zemlya Island (located above the arctic circle in the Arctic Sea) in October of 1971. Whatever else you might think about them, you can't deny those Soviets dreamed BIG dreams.
No matter what our political feelings, I believe we can all agree that the world is getting just a wee bit too hot for comfort these days, and I don't mean "Global Warming." I mean that people here and there about the globe are getting just a wee bit too hot under the collar. They seem to have forgotten just exactly what comes into play like the force of gravity when whole nations or peoples get really ticked off. Time to refresh our collective memories.
I think we need to have the people of the world focus like a laser on the table stakes of going beyond these little patty-cake wars we are currently diddling around with and look, really look, at what can actually happen with one little slip.
What we need to do this is: "The Live Demo." By this I mean we need to find a small island or deserted space somewhere on the planet and sacrifice it for the greater good by setting off one, just one, low-yield thermonuclear device in the atmosphere for all the world to see.
Think of "The Live Demo" as a remedial educational moment for the entire world; a kind of slap upside the head coupled with a large shout out of: "PAY ATTENTION!"
I believe this "Live Demo" needs to be announced -- in date, time, and place -- to the entire world with something approaching the intensity of the promotion dumped on the Beijing Olympics.
I believe that we should allow any media organization that wishes to to cover this event and provide the infrastructure necessary to film and broadcast it (from a safe distance) to the entire world in all media -- live. I believe we should re-task a satellite to give us a view of the event from space.
No matter what many may think, this event would be the essence of "appointment television" for the people of the world.
I think we should also construct some of those quaint suburbs, villages, and towns that were set up in the ancient Nevada tests to demonstrate just what happens to a family sitting down for an evening snack when the sun is brought -- for one brief shining moment -- to the surface of the Earth. (Those of you who saw the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull probably got some laughs out of this stuff, but it is not really a laughing matter, is it?)
I know that there will be an army of Environmentalists around the world that will bitch and moan about the "harm to the environment" from setting off a single nuclear device in the atmosphere. Those same people need to contemplate instead the "harm to the environment" that comes from setting off several hundred or several thousand of these devices in one very bad afternoon. They need to, for one brief and shining moment, sit down and shut up!
Then there will be those who will carp about "The Test Ban Treaty." They need to take a chill pill, lie down and think of England... or Cleveland... or Tel Aviv... or Tehran.
I can assure you that having the entire world tune in for "The Live Demo" -- and the whole world will tune in -- shall give the entire planet pause. It's not enough for humans to be told about nukes. Every so often, we need to see to believe.
Let's touch off a nuke for world peace next year on August 6. It will be a fitting memorial to Hiroshima. Nothing else we can do will have quite the same... impact.
Lest we forget: Here's 10 minutes about the first "live demo" on a city.
I would imagine that if you repeated those grisly facts to most of the people of the world today they'd express either some polite sadness, a bit of political high dudgeon, or the classic contemporary rejoinder, "Whatever." It's not that they don't know or care, but that -- for the vast majority of the population of the world -- they simply cannot imagine a Hiroshima.
It has been 65 years since the incineration of a city in a second, and we've lost any sense of exactly what happens. The images only survive in black and white films of a long-ago era, films of before (a city) and after (rubble and ash). In black and white images blood is the color of shadows and that's what we have, as a race, of memories about what these weapons can do -- shadows of victims seared into stone at the moment of the blast; the moment the Sun was allow to bloom on the surface of the Earth.
"Police say they have only the public's safety at heart which is why this happens at night. They want us to tell you, again, it is just a military training exercise."
Look at it this way: In the camps we won’t have to worry about obesity.
[HT: Blur Brain]
UPDATE: Houston's in on the act too. Do you see or hear helicopters? Army training exercise happening on Houston's south side | abc13.com HT: Don Sensing
So remember, like they say in Houston: "If you see the helicopters or hear gunfire, it’s only a drill."
"Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time. And I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations."
If Obamaspew be the food of fools, BRINGETH IT ON!
Give ALL excess of Him, that, surfeiting,
The Obamatrons may sicken, and so die.
That Hope and Change again! it had a dying poll fall:
O, his valved voice slurps o'er my ear like the sweet drool,
That cackles over another bank bailout,
Stealing my money while flatulating! Enough; no more;
His words sound not so sweet now as before.
O Story of O! how tired and boring art thou,
That, notwithstanding his venal verbosity,
Deceiveth as the devil, nought truth enters there,
Of what no validity soe'er,
But falls into debasement and low approval,
Even in a joint session bleat: so full of shapes is his fancy
That he alone is high and fantastical.
One of the many seemingly throw-away moments in Mad Men; moments that shine a brief light on a mystery.
Here's its an ancient couple in a brief cameo. They've come through the years to a mystery that is only known to them. Like many marriages that survive, it runs on the trivial that lives in the deep:
"Did you get pears?" "We'll discuss it inside."
There's a novel or a sermon or a life hidden in that. Few will get to read or hear it. Fewer still will live it.
For some it will seem banal, but others will hear it,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Perhaps that is what Don hears as he pauses. Or maybe it is what we hear.
Or maybe it is what Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach,
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Which is just a poet's way of saying, "Did you get pears?"
What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! -- Hamlet Act II. Scene II.
And to start it off with a bigger bang than she's had in decades, I've designed this special bumper sticker that carries her message to a grateful nation!
It's been a nasty decade or so for Kodak. In the last two years alone the company's "highlights" have been "lowlights:"
In December 2010, Standard & Poor's removed Kodak from its S&P 500 index. In January 2009, Kodak posted a $137 million fourth-quarter loss and announced plans to cut up to 4,500 jobs. On June 22, 2009, Eastman Kodak Co announced that it will retire Kodachrome color film by the end of 2009, ending its 74-year run after a dramatic decline in sales. On December 4, 2009, Eastman Kodak Co sold its Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) business unit to LG Electronics which resulted in the laying off of 60 people, which includes research engineers, technicians and interns. - Eastman KodakBack in September of 2011 :Bottom Line - Kodak struggles to reinvent itself for digital age
Eastman Kodak appears to be staying clear of bankruptcy proceedings for now, but time is clearly running out for the 130-year old industrial icon to reinvent itself for a digital century.But that was just blowing smoke because in January of 2012, Eastman Kodak Company and Its U.S. Subsidiaries Commence Voluntary Chapter 11 Business Reorganization And now, a year later, it seems as if it is getting a pulse, or at least a pacemaker: The Daily Docket: Judge Approves $843.7M Kodak Financing Deal - Bankruptcy Beat - WSJ
So it would seem that Kodak is getting a new lease on life, if not a renewed interest in creativity and innovation. For that it would have to go back to the future past.
If the company that calls itself Kodak today had a brain, it would copy the "Instamatic 100" from Kodak's greatest hits, drop a first rate lens in it, add some great chips, a view screen as big as the back of the camera, and rebrand it as the “Kodak Digimatic 100.” Instant win.
An Apple design from before Apple was Apple
They’ll never be cool enough to do it....
Continued...Looking back at 2013.
All the Water on Earth:
Continued...It's chill but I've been down the hill looking for a couple of items I don't really need and failing to find them. Fine by me. Back at the house I'm relieved to discover that the postman seems to have had no junk mail to bring me today. Fine by me. The stores are full but traffic seems strangely light.
Later at Ken's, the market up the block and around the corner, I am buying a few modest items for a modest Monday dinner when the checker asks me, "Are you having a nice long weekend?"
Without thinking I reply, "Well, all my weekends are long these days."
"Good for you," she says and then it hits me.
"I'm sorry. Today was a holiday, wasn't it?"
She nods. I try to think of something to say to recover from what must be, to the clueless young, a clear gaffe, but I've got nothing. Since the morning I'd completely forgotten the status of this new holy day in America. I guess I was overwhelmed with the second immaculation taking place somewhere very far off to much more muffled praise than the first immaculation. In addition, being in Seattle you just don't get a lot of notice about MLK regardless of the media's breathless litany of adulation and rotund hosannas of praise. Seattle is, after all, the very whitest city or town I've ever had to endure. That is, however, no excuse -- at least to the ever sensitive and always guilty white folks that yabble and clatter about the town.
Early in the day the holiday was brought to my attention by the always slavish Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker who confidently opined: "Today, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a lot of us will be watching King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, on YouTube or elsewhere." A bit later on another page I read a more realistic assessment of the day which went, "We have "progressed" from 'I have a dream...' to 'I have a drone...'." My range of reaction was measured between a muttered "Yeah right" and a rueful but passing smirk.
And then I just forgot about it. Seattle's just too white to pull together a convincing MLK Day parade.
Reflecting on The Day after my grocery store reminder I have to say that I'm sticking with that rueful but passing smirk as I consider the distance we've come since King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago in 1963. Then we struggled, with men like King, to come together as a people, to move beyond our past, to be one nation. Now, under the cynical manipulation and malicious policies of one who would cast himself as the inheritor of the King mantle, we find the current occupent of the White House doing his best, day after day, to drive the races apart once again.
How strange that someone who has attained the presidency in this day and age should not only hate citizens because of the color of their skin and the cut of their bitter and clinging class, but be lauded for it. Stranger still that he should be half-black and be inaugurated on the day set aside to honor Martin Luther King. Once I would have remembered and honored this day and felt we were at last getting beyond race hate in America. When exactly that was I now forget. I guess we've still a reckoning ahead of us.
Continued...Don't give up. You know it's never been easy.
"November 2012 was not a defeat. It was a loss in a close election that rattled the Democrats by showing just how much of the country had turned on their savior.
It was a rebuke to Obama's mismanagement of the country and the economy over the last four years..... The country did not repudiate us. The majority of Americans did not pledge allegiance to some rotten post-American country. The majority stayed home. And that is damning, but it's also comforting because these are the people we have to win over. They don't believe in Obama, but they don't believe in us either. They don't believe in politics because it isn't relevant to their lives." -- Sultan Knish: Don't Give UpContinued...
"Line drive! Into left field! Hit number three thousand! A run has scored! Musial around first, on his way to second with a double. Holy Cow! He came through!" — Harry Caray's radio play-by-play call of Musial's 3,000th major league hit
The titans who made this recording were: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band 1989 (Jeff Hanna,Jimmie Fadden,Bob Carpenter,Jimmy Ibbotson) , Johnny Cash, Roy Acuff, Bruce Hornsby, Paulette Carlson, Michael M.Murphey, Earl Scruggs, Roy Huskey Jr., Randy Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs, Chris Hillman, Jimmy Martin, Levon Helm, Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt, Roger McGuinn, Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Mark O'connor, Rosanne Cash, Jerry Douglas, Chet Atkins, Marty Stuart, Vassar Clements, the Carter Family.
Continued...
Taking the blame for this is Morgan @ House of Eratosthenes
Empty is only the warp of the tapestry,
the portion of pattern, is only the interval,
is solely the silence that shapes our pale music
heard faded when drifting towards day from our dreams;
from that sleep-shaded land where our souls
slake their thirst for the new, for the novel,
and the stone still rolls down the thousand-year cliff
from the first of our dreams, from the red heat of those plains,
from our search for safe shelter, from our consumption of carrion.
Yet if dreams hold an answer, as flowers clasp fog,
they must answer with breath, and, if they answer,
must move among stars, and have their own songs
of the body and blood, and must sing them....
Money, money, money. That's all you hear these days. Hundreds of billions, working on a trillion. Banks need a bailout. Cars need a bailout. Housing needs a bailout. You need a bailout. I need a bailout. Even President Obama needs a bailout from his bailout. Everywhere you go we're tapped out, busted, broke. Let's face it, we need money. It's time for tough choices and tougher love.
Where, oh where, shall this money be found? It is to be found, it would seem, far out on the ocean of the future dead center in the Sargasso Sea of debt. But why borrow from the future when you can simply liquidate under-performing assets in the present? Isn't it better to turn useless stuff you've got just lying around into cash than to take on new debt? Especially if a lot of the new debt is going to pay off the old debt? Of course it is.
The rush to borrow from the future ignores some very tangible assets here at home that could be used to give us all, citizens and government alike, a very nice hit from the money machine.
Traveling through Florida, as I have been for some weeks, you see these underutilized assets all about you. They are everywhere, like rich, virgin topsoil ready to be planted and then harvested. What's more, harvesting these assets to put some real money into circulation does not go against the core values of the ruling Democratic majority. It merely extends them to the logical conclusion. Like the culling of the herd before birth through the use of abortion to get the nonproductive out of the way before they can consume resources, it is time our older citizens -- far past their usefulness, their productive years, but likely to consume lots of resources for decades to come -- were, quite simply, liquidated.
Yes, it's time for mom and pop and granny and grandpop to go. All 37 million of them must be transformed from codger to compost if the American dream is not to become a new-age nightmare. It's time for a government program from coast to coast to make sure that every American over the age of 65 takes one for the team -- in the form of a government approved and delivered .22 bullet in the back of the head.
Continued...
by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg
For Karl Rove Solomon
I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, and not looking too sharp naked,
bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour lusting for a Cialis refill and one black friend on the down-low,
aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of monied moonbats,
who warred on poverty and Blackwater's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship Zero!",
who on the Burly Bears float of gay pride bared their man-breasts and, he she or it, bleated their vaginas' mawkish monologues to John Kennedy's ghost under the Capitol Dome and french-kissed Mohammedan agents in the gore-drenched redrum rooms of Guantanamo,
who passed gas in grad school and on into universities with radiant meth eyes hallucinating President Barry O'Bama and Vice-President Joe Who?, envisioning world peace among the masters of war and stayed on and stayed on and stayed on sucking off the great teat of academe in unpaid student loans and over-paid professorial positions the better to molest the minds and bodies of children for decades with every third year off in Provance for bad behavior,
who were embraced by the academies and hired by the New York Times for crazy & publishing obscene odes or anything else that trashed Republicans or non-Unitarian Christians without regard for truth since there were no consequences for these posturing poseurs of puke,
who cowered in their marble-countered plasma-screened media rooms in smegmaed underwear which was no longer Victoria's Secret, burning their money by donating it in carloads to every half-assed Democratic POL that promised re-erections in Two-Ten without the losing proposition of actually holding an election, and listening to Rush Limbaugh through the wall,
who got bombed at public wine-tastings by chugging the slops bin and referencing Sideways, returning to their summer house in the Hamptons where they ate smoked salmon and each other, smoked $400-a-bud marijuana, wore $250 denims, paid the maid $200 a week before taxes, and bitched about how the economy was a mess but did not really, as they claimed, send their $36,000 tax cut back to the government, and continued to suffer the secret shame of Affluenza,
who breathed fire and bile about ungrateful "Democrat plantation negroes" among their cooler college comrades, and shut up around the one black friend they all shared, and drank turpentine to get through "A Night with Gloria Steinem", claimed bogus ego-death, blended health shakes from Cherry Garcia, seaweed, and the dried dung of Deepak Chopra, and Ab-Busted their torsos night after night that their butts might spread on the Le Corbusier sofa eternally after,
with dreams of Two-Ten re-erection victory without elections, with seven different mood-soothing drugs in the Ikea medicine cabinet, with waking Birkenstock nightmares of Bush, Bush, still of Bush, alcohol Jello shots and the soon to be sanctified Holy Matrimony of gay cock and deballings by their now not-so-significant others,
who blathered continuously about the Florida "theft" for decades after the two Bush terms while the One put one, two, maybe three or even four justices on the Supreme Court, but still not nine!, causing a million fatal air-embolisms during consenting acts of mutual Manhattan humm-jobs,
a lost battalion of a multi-million man and mom marching platonic conversationalists jumping to conclusions about WMD off fire escapes off windowsills off World Trade Center out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering "BUSH LIEEEEEEEEED!" forever after into deepest eternity, and moonbat memories and false anecdotes and eyeball kicks and yearning for the electro-shocks of hospitals and the briefness of jails and bring back the endless Bush wars that we may hate into our drool-cups again .... oh my sorry little schmos.... ,
who wandered around and around at midnight at the White House wondering where O smoked and Michelle hid her dildos, got the address of Obama's birthplace in Hawaii at 1776 Kenya Street and went there with fresh batteries, and found Barbra Striesand lurking in the lanai with Whoopi Goldberg and Goldie Hawn, all set on leaving no child's behind,
who had double-standard visions of fashionable footwear while their baby seals died, turned inside-out into a pair of fur-lined muck-lucks by Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton
who thought they were only mad when the second coming of BushHitler appeared in the clouds above their White House like the mother ship in Independence day proclaiming "Neener, neener, neener,"
who in humorless protest turned Hillary Clinton into their personal hand-puppet, which she enjoyed, and then complained that she looked far too much like the devil spawn of Howdy Doody and Alfred E. Newman, and that the fit was too loose,
who scribbled celebrity porn from scuffed kneepads in the offices of Vanity Fair and collected and shaved stray cats far into their barren Pecksniffian nights until that bleak Upper West Side dawn when, waking from their stupor, rolled over in bed and discovered they had slept, not with their sixth spouse, but with Barney Frank, and thought, "Well, that's an upgrade,"
who dreamt O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! hectoring and bloviating in the White House until in galactic luminosity Nancy Pelosi stood knock-kneed and naked on "Fleece the Nation" clad only in her San Francisco penis-gourd of flaccid played-out policies, while being frisked by a thousand agents of I-Am-the-President Obama, super avenging angel of the SortaSocialist Party, now and forever recreating the syntax and measure of polluted human prose, "Oh Hope!, Oh Change!, O Timor!, O Mortis!, Oh Yes We Can't!," and then all of them in their faded glory standing before America past, present, and to come, speechless and pseudo-intelligent and shaking with unshamed shame, a whole once proud party now doomed to decorate pikes and lamp-posts,
who were reduced in desperation after aborting their next generation to bribing the fervently fertile illegal constituents of wise Latina judges with appointments, with dinner parties, with caviar burritos, with $50 a shot artisan tequila, with cash for Cuernavaca clunkers, and invitations to bi-lingual and tri-sexual Hollywood "events," rejected yet confessing to the guttering sparks of thought in its treppaned Democrat skull as it proclaimed its new positive program for "Mourning in America," "Yes, yes, yes, like our patron saint Michelle-O-LaBelle that deep driving dominatrix of The Won, we too have a two-inch political penis, give us alllll your money, give us alllll your votes, give us ALLLLL THE POWER!, we and we alone can give you the golden gifts of our youth -- appeasement, defeatism, pacifism, penury, poverty and death!",
and rose reincarnate in the tattered rags of bluster and blabber in the tinhorn shadow of the ballot box and blew the the suffering of America's lumbering liberals' lust for unearned power into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone bleat still pandering for the Jewish vote after erasing Israel, as the American people, at long last no fools they, shived the elite in their entrails and blew them off again and again right past the last bus stop of democracy
with the absolute loss of political significance butchered out of their own body politic good to lose a thousand years.
Central Park from above like you've never seen it. Big dreams just below like you've never heard them.
Continued...
The role of Stone is that of Ice
But seeks a slower sun.
To Synapse, Stealth Invisible,
Concision to the Bone.
The praying hands of branches bared
By Breath, this season's Star,
Implore insensate, arrogant,
As snowflakes to the Fire.
Above the church a fist of smoke
Diminishes the Blooms
Within that Park where prayers revolve
On a Carousel of tombs.
-- Gerard Van der Leun
It cannot be noted or said too often: There is something deeply and seriously wrong with Russians. It goes back centuries and it abides.
Found at Russian Icebreaker - Neatorama
Continued...[Note: Item received in email this morning.]
This car was assembled on November 11th of 1910. Normally, 1909/1910 style bodies were wooden, but this 1910 style body is partially steel, the only one known; presumably a transition to the use of all steel bodies in 1911. It was originally delivered to R.E. Lawrence in Astoria, IL. Vernon Jarvis of Decatur, IL, purchased the car in 1951 and later displayed it in his Early American Museum at Silver Springs, FL, until in 1967, when the current owner bought it. After 30 years in storage, restoration was completed in March, 2007.
The year is 1910, over one hundred years ago.
The average life expectancy for men was 47 years.
Fuel for this car was sold in drug stores only.
Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
The average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour.
The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME.
Ninety percent of all Doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press AND the government as 'substandard.'
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.
The five leading causes of death were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2, Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars.
The population of Las Vegas Nevada was only 30!
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented yet.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write and only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.!
I am now going to forward this to someone else without typing it myself.
From there, it will be sent to others all over the WORLD... all in a matter of seconds!
Outside the ancient offices of the Cosmoangelic Book Publishers that I once worked in at 2 Park Street in Boston, an old lady stood with her back to the old bricks on every working day. A square yard of sidewalk was her office. Eyes behind thick glasses were watery-gray. She stood hunched in a permanent flinch like some dog who'd been struck too many times for nothing. She dressed in clean, shabby, but not too shabby, clothing -- warm enough for the winters and cool enough when summer came around at last. To all who passed by her office she repeated her Bostonian-inflected mantra:
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"
She stood to the left of the entrance for part of the day and to the right for the remainder. You didn't know when she'd shift, but she always seemed to be in your path as you came out of the building.
Going for some coffee?
"Spare a quarta?"
Going to lunch?
"Spare a quarta?"
Going to skip out on the afternoon and catch a matinee?
"Spare a quarta?"
I once spared her a quarta and went into the Boston Commons with a newspaper and watched her work at her job.
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"
She asked everyone. It was the secret to whatever success she had. Since Park Street led from the Park Street MTA stop to the Massachusetts capital building and other large skyscrapers several thousand people a day had to pass by her and hear "Spare a quarta?"
She got a quarter out of about every fifth person. I once estimated she made about $75 a day, tax free. That worked out to a take homeless of $18,750 a year in 1983. Not bad when you considered that she had zero overhead.
No matter how you look at it old "Spare a quarta?" was doing all right and, to tell the truth, I contributed my share. She looked like what everyone fears their mother might become if she fell on hard time, but she wasn't scary. And she had perfect pitch. "Spare a quarta?" was slightly sing-song but never too whining. Just always said with an uplifting lilt right at the end of the opening note of desperation.
If you can't be really good at anything without 10,000 hours of practice "Spare a quarta?" had put in her time and paid her dues in full.
As beggars go she was "The Fantastiks" of street hustlers. Her performance ran uninterrupted and packed her pockets with quarters for years. She's probably long gone to her reward -- be that in Potters Field or in a small house in the hinterlands that she bought for cash. But I like to think that she's still there as the busy people of our era bustle up and down Park Street still shelling out to the refrain:
Continued...
Here at American Digest we are always eager to study the laws of the physical universe extremely closely. For some, slow-motion is a gimmick but for us it is a serious scientific tool.
Continued...
Socialism, so caring, so "fair," so humanity based, so green... and so wonderful for the environment! Especially when all the parasites run out of money: Smog hits Athens, residents resort to wood-burning for heat
A haze of smoke hangs over the city skyline in Athens, early Thursday, Jan. 3, 2013. The cloud is the result of a massive switch to wooden stoves and fireplaces for heating as many households, already hard hit by the economic crisis, can not afford to buy heating oil after the cash-strapped government decided to harmonize taxes on heating oil and diesel fuel, leading to a 40 percent rise in the price of heating oil.File under "Coming Attractions." Soon to be playing at an Obamaville near you.
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