But, for those of very little patience, here’s a cheat sheet: [continue reading…]
It turns out that the Utah Monolith is a Johnny-come-lately to the Mystery Monoliths On Earth collection. A drive-by commenter here points us to his own contribution from 1986.
Then there was the paint. Knowing it was just temporary, we didn’t consider using any primer on the bare wood. The plywood seemed to suck up the black paint like a sponge. We lost count of the number of coats of paint the Monolith took before it actually looked flat black.
We had it assembled, puttied and sanded, and painted in about ten days.
Now we had to find a good location for it, and prepare the spot for it’s installation…
We had taken a couple of twigs to mark in the holes we’d dug with the auger. In daylight it might have been fairly obvious what they were, when you got close, but at night the were just a couple more dark bits of foliage blending in with the background. We had to set down the Monolith and look around with flashlights for several minutes before we found our “camouflage”. We hauled the Monolith over to the site, pulled the small branches out of the holes, then carefully guided the “legs” into the holes, and rotated the Monolith upright. We packed the holes with the dirt we’d dug out. Looked at our creation, black against the dark as we hadn’t aligned it with the full moon. I think I pointed out Clavius crater on the moon, the site where the TMA-1 was found in “2001”. Then we turned away and ran back for the road.
To any visitor to the park the sculpture looked as it belonged. Another stoic shape among the grasses of the prairie.
Grounds Maintenence was obviously confused by its presence. They not only mowed a walking path past it, they trimmed the grasses up to it to allow people to view it as they did the other installations in the park.
We had a feeling it probably wouldn’t last for more than a week, maybe two, before the tore it down. We were wrong.
With a plant inside the University we discovered that with the pace of paper communication, memos were being passed back and forth among the different departments responsible for the artwork on the site. All trying to discover who’s sculpture it was! Was it a borrowed piece? Was it a student work? Who had installed it? “What big black box??” It was excellent because nobody would pull the trigger to take it down!
Sure, it was a bit amateurish, but it was a statement and SOMEONE had put it there. You could almost hear them talking as they stood next to it, “I’m not going to touch it because I don’t know who’s it is…” It was perfect! You could almost hear the turning of the screws.
Owing to confusion and bureaucracy within the University, the Monolith stood for twelve and a half weeks! Each week we would go back to see if it was still there. And it was! We were stunned!
The full caper is documented at MONOLITH BY ARGH PRODUCTIONS
I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong
The Range of Animals That Use This Wildlife Bridge in Utah is Amazing
And a good stretch and scratch was had at 3:05
There’s something startling about a culture and a civilization that is so advanced it takes the time, the money, and the materials to build bridges for the safety of its wild animals. (And motorists too when you know what an impact with a moose can do to your vehicle.)
Two days ago in If we believed in omens… I reported that “Utah Officials” didn’t want to disclose the location of the monolith for fear that people would risk their lives going to see it. Internet to Utah Officials, “Blo moi.“
Utah monolith: Internet sleuths got there, but its origins are still a mystery – By Wednesday, pictures were emerging on Instagram of people triumphantly posing with the monolith, eager to show the world that they had got there first – even if the wider mystery of why it is there remains unsolved.
They were aided by internet sleuths who had quickly geo-located the structure on Google Earth and posted the coordinates online.
“I decided to go there first because I was drawn to the fact that this object had been there for five years, hidden in nature,” said David Surber, a 33-year-old former US Army infantry officer who drove six hours through the night after finding a Reddit post claiming to have found the exact location. On the way, he was bombarded with hundreds of messages and requests. They included things like: “Bring a magnet in case there is a secret door!”
We Interrupt This Broadcast to Bring You an… | McMansion Hell Looks normal, right? Looks like the same low-brow New Jersey McMansion we’re all expecting, right? Oh, oh dear, you couldn’t be more wrong. Guess who’s making a list and checking it twice? Guess who’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice? Guess who’s coming to town? Guess who’s coming to town to drag your ass into hell?
Denver mayor tells residents to ‘avoid travel’ for Thanksgiving – then boards flight for a family gathering moments later — Pass the potatoes, not Covid,” Hancock said in a tweet on Wednesday morning, urging Denverites to “stay at home as much as you can” and “avoid travel” for the holiday, among other recommendations amid the health crisis. About 30 minutes after the tweet, however, Hancock boarded a plane bound for Mississippi, where he would spend Thanksgiving with family – directly at odds with the advice dispensed from his Twitter handle just moments earlier – according to a local NBC affiliate.
Fear And The Need To Feel Safe: A Coronadoom Tale – William M. Briggs People like Governor Nepotism of California or The Godmother in New York, or even Governor They Laughed At Me In High School of Michigan aren’t punishing us for our good. No. None of them give a damn for the masses under them. They only want to exercise power, to show who is in charge. They can’t be bothered to follow the rules their underlings have set, probably for the simple and good reasons that nobody can keep up with the changes, and they know the rules are nonsense.
— I,Hypocrite (@lporiginalg) November 25, 2020
The Ring camera missed this bit afterward… pic.twitter.com/urBxumw4qp
— JohannSchultz7 (@JohannSchultz7) November 25, 2020
“All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumors of vast underground conspiracies were true after all–perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing…” 1984, by George Orwell
We Do Lockdown – Miriam Elia’s Brilliant 1950s Spoof
“Burn It Down” Though these programs are ideologically aligned with revolutionary goals, they have failed to serve as practical replacements for the “formal justice system.” In one high-profile case, prosecutors diverted a youth offender named Diego Carballo-Oliveros into a “peace circle” program, in which nonprofit leaders burned sage, passed around a talking feather, and led Carballo-Oliveros through “months of self-reflection.” According to one corrections official, prosecutors and activists paraded Carballo-Oliveros around the city as the “shining example” of their approach. However, two weeks after completing the peace circle program, Carballo-Oliveros and two accomplices lured a 15-year-old boy into the woods, robbed him, and slashed open his abdomen, chest, and head with a retractable knife. The victim placed a desperate phone call to his sister and a passerby called an ambulance, but the youth later died at the hospital.
It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace? — Thomas Merton [continue reading…]
They gave us a world far better than they inherited.
The late World War II combat veteran and memoirist E. B. Sledge enshrined his generation of fellow Marines as “The Old Breed” in his gripping account of the hellish battle of Okinawa. Now, most of those who fought in World War II are either dead or in their nineties.
Much has been written about the disappearance of these members of the Greatest Generation—there are now over 1,000 veterans passing away per day. Of the 16 million who at one time served in the American military during World War II, only about a half-million are still alive.
Military historians, of course, lament the loss of their first-hand recollections of battle. The collective memories of these veterans were never systematically recorded and catalogued. Yet even in haphazard fashion, their stories of dropping into Sainte-Mère-Église or surviving a sinking Liberty ship in the frigid North Atlantic have offered correctives about the war otherwise impossible to attain from the data of national archives.
More worrisome, however, is that the collective ethos of the World War II generation is fading. It may not have been fully absorbed by the Baby Boomer generation and has not been fully passed on to today’s young adults, the so-called Millennials. While U.S. soldiers proved heroic and lethal in Afghanistan and Iraq, their sacrifices were never commensurately appreciated by the larger culture. [continue reading…]
Arlo Guthrie Featuring paintings by Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Frederick Remington, Howard Terpning, and visual arts by Spadecaller.
There are no “official” or traditional hymns of praise for Thanksgiving. This one, however, will do and do nicely.
“The lyrics tell the story of a roving trader in love with the daughter of an Indian chief; in this interpretation, the rover tells the chief of his intent to take the girl with him far to the west, across the Missouri River. Other interpretations tell of a pioneer’s nostalgia for the Shenandoah River Valley in Virginia, or of a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War, dreaming of his country home in Virginia. The provenance of the song is unclear.”
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1.Start drinking early.
2. Make sure your oven is on.
3. “Just Put the F*cking Turkey in the Oven”
[continue reading…]
In a bad mood? This will improve it.
One wrecked wreck, one banana yellow Yankem rope, two dogs, one game woman, and ten miles of very very VERY bad road.
Favorite quotes: “Okay, this is going to be quick and violent.”
“Holy Macaroni!”
“Howdy Howdy we got Rowdy”
“We’ll bring em home and hose em off.”
Your Say