Speaking of the Pig wallowing in the national creek: [continue reading…]
. . . Pre-Adolescent Gender Mutilations, Breast-Bobbing Mangina Implants, AMA-Approved Child Sacrifice, and Other Rituals of the Post-Modern Bolshevik Bidenistas, the ProgTards Are History.
“There’s no way you could have a child now. Not with the market the way it is.”
Buh-bye. CU. Wudn’t wanna BU. Que sera, sera, whoever will be will be… but it won’t be these inverted perverts.
At this point, I’ll take that Idiocracy future even if it means I have to shotgun Brawndo and manipulate a president who is the demon seed of Mr. Mike Obama and Joe Rogan.
Even Idiocracy’s cinematic update of “Brave New Diversity World” would be preferable to the current newly-crafted “shithole country” that we live in now; a place where schools proudly display “learning opportunities” such as this on their classroom walls:
And the ABCs are taught by this walking cloud of moist phlegm:
Would American Idiocracy be better than the current heroin-laced pablum being shoved down the gaping maws of “lesser breeds without the law?” Some may call me crude. Others may say I have a mind tormented by demons of a future that will never be. I say that a sane man can only have one response to today’s “America. . .” I still say. . .
[continue reading…]
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.
— The Excesses Of God by Robinson Jeffers
Located roughly 650 light-years from Earth, it is one of the closest planetary nebulae and easy to spot through binoculars or small telescopes. It’s believed to have formed about 10,600 years ago when a dying star exploded and shed its outer layers into space. To spot it, Cosmic Pursuits recommends looking “10 NW of the bright star Fomalhaut.” To look into the Eye of God go here for directions The Helix Nebula – Cosmic Pursuits
The Helix Nebula is located about 10º NW of the bright star Fomalhaut. It looks like a big Moon-sized grey circle in a pair of binoculars. At low-to-medium power in a telescope, the nebula appears as a smokey oval set in a triangle of 10th-magnitude stars. At first, it seems well-defined and somewhat featureless. But keep looking.
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We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.
— Eliot, The Dry Salvages
Following a memory of my own, I “found” this video shortly after it was posted to YouTube over ten years ago. It struck me then as powerful in that offhand, out-of-left-field way that found objects can be. The power of this short window into 1977 is that it captures, without intent, the elements of memory. It melds the plaintive almost psalmic acoustic hit by Kansas with an imagery whose sheer faded quality adds to an overall impression of other times once lived and now gone beyond recall. It is the essence of “time in a bottle.”
Ordinary when made the film has aged into something beyond itself. Our better memories do that. They seem, if we think of them at all at the time we have the experience we will later remember, to be just barely beyond the cusp of the work-a-day patterns of our lives; of the ordinary. Often we don’t even discover them as memories until years later when they emerge, not as they were, but as they have become – – as our aging souls expand enough to value what we thought at the time was dross — become the real gold of our lives.
The fact that it was viewable by me at all was one of those strange conjunctions of love and fate that the Web has made possible. The video is under the YouTube account of “uselessdirector” who has in the years since he posted this posted only two other personal bits in his account. The response to those is what it should be. Negligible. But the response to this video is now above 3,640,000 6,277,000 9,595,301 views with fresh comments still coming in almost hourly.
What is the provenance of this video? Uselessdirector states only, “Filmed in 1977 by my dad, this music video nearly became “dust in the wind” until it was restored from its failing 8mm format.” His role was to see the film as it was made, 8MM or 16MM, and to save it as a video before time faded the film to invisibility. He caught it just in time and in doing so caught time itself. Then, because he knew it had a value beyond itself and because he could, he placed it on YouTube where, in time, it was discovered.
From the video itself, we learn the names of the “Cast” in the credits and also see a list of “The Tribe.” Aside from that there are other hints to the spring or summer in which this was made. We discover it was made in Findley Lake, New York, a small rural community up near the shore of Lake Erie. Was “The Tribe” a group of friends or a small commune of the kind that were still common in those years? Did the young man and young woman paired as “Adam” and “Eve” have a relationship outside the film or was it only for the purposes of the film? Somehow I doubt it was the latter.
Looking a little deeper into the Net I found a few things worth noting. For one thing it is possible, through the odd but wonderful Google Street View to compare “Then” with “Now” and confirm, as if we did not know it with every cell of our being, that “Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.” [continue reading…]
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Sonnet / 1802
Composed here:
Dove Cottage (Town End, Grasmere) – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1799–1808
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There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. — “Red Wind” Raymond Chandler
Out on our great plains, our land sea
Our Fall crops parch.
Waiting in the lingering light for the drifting night,
Waiting for the rains to stroll through.
Heat lightning.
Ball lightning.
Flameflicker of dark dustwind
Rattles, rustles the dry corn sheaves.
The dust rises within the wind.
To trace the inside of the atmosphere,
And then the hands of weather
Forms fists on the far horizon.
Look sharp.
There on the flint flaked edge
Of the far field the slash of lightning
Harrows and farrows and strikes, strikes, strikes,
Strikes up.
Look sharp.
There, from far hightower seen,
Out on the parched plains’ dust,
Over the stands of black bamboo,
The State’s preserve of heirloom grasses,
Bends before the wild mustangs,
Where ghostly riders behind the rain
Gallop robed with darkness visible…
And then the rose dawn.
And the swirls in today’s far fields
Out there where dust devils dance,
And then the final fall
Of the black shawl
Of night drifts draped
Across the shoulders of the stars.
And then the fading thunder
Rolling downslope into the distances
Into the land of cold stone silences.
Simmers and then sweeping into the West,
Into the blue, into the bleached black, back
Beyond the hills of haze, on the back of some immense angel.
And sheathed in the full armor of God,
The people ride in pursuit of a dream they’ve never dreamed,
Into which they shall, in a time without time, in a dream without dreams,
Awaken.
For his brother, Thomas John Van der Leun, 1947-2020
In the account books of friendship, a balance can never be struck. Favors are always owing. True, there’s some sort of record and you can, if you really push it, get overdrawn, but the Bank of the Friend is very forgiving of minor transgressions and small inconveniences. You can be lounging about on a weekend morning with no intention of dressing and driving out into the cold, but the call comes in and you saddle up.
Ringtone: “Hello.”
“I need help with my equipment I used in the sermon.”
“I thought that was just going to be one telephone.”
“It got more elaborate.”
(“Elaborate” is a word he uses when he let his imagination get the better of his judgement. In general, he believes in simple things: zen gardens, books of quotations or jokes, a single perfect leaf next to a perfect rock, wood floors instead of shag rugs. Over the years his friends have learned to fear “elaborate.”)
“More ‘elaborate’ huh?”
“Well, I wanted it to be a memorable sermon.”
(This was in response to an invitation to give a speech at a certain Seattle church’s 50th Anniversary.)
“And?”
“It started when I decided to give the sermon in the chicken suit.”
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something stinky this way comes.”
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https://buzzzz1964.tumblr.com/post/694284918127280128/babyanimalgifs-am-i-the-only-one-who-has-never
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Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379
Chico, CA 95926
Something Wonderful: Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on Piano for an 80-Year-Old Elephant
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d
The Falling Hammer
We Were So Beautiful
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Judge for yourselves! pic.twitter.com/f0bT8O1Wsu
— 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐦 𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐬 (@Wi_Lix) September 2, 2022
Massive crowd last night at President Donald J Trump rally.
This👇 makes Democrats’ knees shake. #TrumpRally pic.twitter.com/XFscfdWHwd— 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐦 𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐬 (@Wi_Lix) September 4, 2022
Why the Solution to the Drake Equation is Scary No Matter the Answer – “Once is never, twice is always.” Until we see it a second time, we can’t assume it has happened. 95% of all galaxies we can see in space are already beyond reach even if we can travel at the speed of light. All of those must be eliminated from the Drake equation. [continue reading…]
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Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379
Chico, CA 95926
Emergency Press Conference – Anybody Who Doesn’t Think Biden Looked Like A Dictator Last Night Has A Demented Brain pic.twitter.com/tYkpdlG4dx
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) September 2, 2022
If it looks like Satan, sounds like Satan . . .
“Planning to arrest Trump is one of their goals going forward. Prepare to deal with your local nomenklatura. Know where you need to go in order to announce yourself and your “feelings” at the local headquarters of the Democrat party. . . .”
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The #FBI remembers Special Agent Paul Andrew LeVeille, who died #OTD in 1999 while participating in a Bureau-sponsored mountain pilot training course in Colorado. He was a licensed FBI pilot. #WallOfHonor https://t.co/EZlWyAJZmr pic.twitter.com/K3yvt9ybsF
— FBI (@FBI) September 1, 2022
This a tragic loss for the family and friends and loved ones of Agent LeVille but sounds a sad note as I realize you can no longer say that “a nation mourns.” [continue reading…]
Gerard Van der Leun
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