Via YouTube’s under subscribed DanZai – YouTube who has posted dozens of short videos on the virus in his neighborhood in China in the last month.
Via YouTube’s under subscribed DanZai – YouTube who has posted dozens of short videos on the virus in his neighborhood in China in the last month.
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
I saw no bats on display. Maybe on bats they’d earlier held a fire sale? (!)
Interesting and colorful place but thanks just the same. His market obviously seems to lack the bat, aardvark and cat butchering section that the chinks find so irresistible.
Wrong type of mask for protection,, although likely no N95 masks can be had.
Mask worn incorrectly,, not pinched around the nose at the top, so air freely flows in around the mask,, might as well not wear one.
If this is a quarantine I would like to know what is not a quarantine? Food out in open for virus particles to freely fall on them and be eaten later.
jeesh. we screwed.
The masks aren’t for keeping contagions out, but for keeping them in.
If an environ requires a mask it’s a pretty good idea to not be there.
What does Remus say?
Right.
I wear one of these when in the woodshop:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013SIIBFQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Don’t know if we screwed by the virus yet. In reality we don’t know very much about this disease and how it will spread. Early days. Avoid crowds. Avoid panic. Stay on yellow alert locked and loaded just in case.
Having traveled a bit of Asia and lived there for most of two years I can say this type of open market in Asia is common. At least in the PI. I was in the Philippines during the SARS scare and the airports had infrared cameras set up to monitor incoming folks to see if they exhibited a fever. If the camera and screen deemed you as hot, you got pulled out of line. I never saw anyone get singled out.
What is common in the PI are open air markets with fresh seafood laid out on ice. Tremendous fish, prawn and things Westerners would not even be able to identify. Flies are common and probably spread dangerous bacteria from one single bad fish to another, another, etc. I got food poisoning three times in the Philippines. The first time was pure hell for most of 36 hours. I was a human volcano and waterfall at the same time, use your imagination. I was staying in a 5-star hotel at the time and it did not occur to me to call for any kind of help. I was trying to survive the moment. I think my body got acclimated (better word?) to the local kooties and my subsequent engagements with food poisoning were progressively less dynamic in body expulsions.
Summary: Remus is usually right. Avoid crowds, have plenty of backup chow & water and keep your 2A tools close-by. Conversely, my exposure to the third world probably helped my immune system build up to subsequent engagements with the local bacteria. I’be gotten sick in the PI, South Africa and Mexico. You cannot be too careful with the local kooties. I currently have an emergency pack of doctor prescribed Cipro, that I take with me in case of food poisoning. It apparently is also the solution to an engagement with Anthrax.
Just poured a second glass of wine. I shut up now.
My wife had to go to a gov’t facility today to correct a spelling error on her drivers license from 1984 when we got married. Yes, they made the error and refused to correct it through the various times she renewed her DL in 2 different states, until today. Her birthday was this month and the DL needed to be upgraded but they wouldn’t do it until she had the spelling error corrected. This required birth certificate, marriage license, and SS card – all originals with signatures, etc. No “copies”. She went inside and conducted the business and I waited in the sub-freezing parking lot. She disinfected her hands before entering the building and again when getting back into the vehicle. Potentially we are both now infected with the “virus” but have no way of knowing for sure. The incubation period is at least 6 days. So we will not encounter any people for at least the next 6 days. We don’t want to contaminate others. But that is not unusual for us. We frequently go 2-3 weeks or more without encountering other people. No big deal, in fact, we prefer it. Other people are mostly a pain in the ass in a million different ways. A virus is spread by “people” people. People that just can’t think bigger then their microscopic selves. Driving to and from the big city we saw numerous school buses, city buses, hundreds of cars and hundreds of people. All potentially spreading a virus. I hope we escaped unscathed.
China is the perfect factory for respiratory diseases. It is covered with thousands of sq. km of rice paddies with people working in them. The paddies attract tens of millions of migratory birds. And the farmers have chickens and pigs. Birds, chickens, pigs, humans share viruses and diseases, and the viruses merge and mutate. Some years we get bird flu, and all the chickens die. Last year we got pig flu, and all the pigs die. Every year we get a new strain of influenza, sometimes serious sometimes not. In 1918 we Spanish Flu, which killed tens of millions and ended WW I. A few years ago we got SARS, and this year we got COVID-19. SARS was serious. It remains to be seen how serious COVID-19 will be.
This process has been going on for thousands of years, as long as the Chinese have been growing rice. It will continue for thousands of more years, until the next Ice Age kills of agriculture and us.
I am 76 years old. COVID-19 might kill me, but I doubt it. I might not even get sick. One thing I am tired of is the mindless hysteria each new flu season brings. I’d be willing to trade the lives of millions of journalists, doctors, and politicians for some peace and quiet.
“…mindless hysteria…”
=========
Seems like the LSM comes up with a new hysteria each month and focuses microscopes and pandering all over it. At the beginning of Feb I mentioned, here, that the Jan impeachment fiasco is now behind us, so what will the new “media target of the month be”? Now we know.
So, a new month starts tomorrow, any guesses what the new “media target of the month” will be?
Gotta keeps them herd cattles stirred not shaken, ya know.
Ghost, a week or so ago I mentioned to my wife that except for the continual braying from the Left and the media’s shrieking fear of the newest gift from China it’s been kind quiet on the national disaster scale and that I thought it’s almost time for another murderous act or upheaval to chip away at the brains of the nation’s weak, ignorant and cowardly, throw the Left into greater contortions and establish another layer of fear in which people will happily cloak themselves in preparation for their ultimate surrender.
Our area is witnessing the emergence of a form of hysteria. My wife was at the pharmacy yesterday and a soy boy was in line with 2 carts. He had 30+ large bottles of hand sanitizer and every box of available rubber gloves and face masks in the store. Must be prepping for a vid game party.
@Jack, he was a fag heading to an orgy. Why buy ‘spensive rubbers when you can buy gloves for less, plus, you get 10 for the price of 1? Then, flip it inside out and do it all over again. Hand sanitizer doubles as loob for the nihilists. euuuuwwww