1956 Mondrian-Style Armstrong Kitchen – Mondrian paintings were an avant-garde statement during the 1930s. For the majority of American homeowners, modern design was a feature of the 1950s. Leary of faddish designs at first, it took a new post-War generation to embrace the new style.

MORGAN AT THE House of Eratosthenes NOTES: Fauci’s contribution was the creation of an environment in which we couldn’t hear from #2 through #5. There’s something about modern liberalism, they’re just suckers for this. They want a single point of control. I think, maybe, they like him because he took sides. He claimed to “represent science” but he never showed the tolerance for a dissenting viewpoint a real science practitioner should show. Conservatives noticed his advice seemed tailor-made to get rid of Trump. After awhile, Fauci came out and admitted it, he wanted Trump gone.

MORGAN AT House of Eratosthenes ALSO NOTES: This is a power our “free press” has always had that people don’t think about much. We allow them to determine, in large part, what we as free citizens discuss. If they decide something like this is not to be discussed, and a bunch of us disagree, they pretty much win. We go off and exercise our right to free speech over on blogs or discussion forums or whatever…the citizenry in large part discusses what’s printed in the mainstream press. For just a few moments. Before turning the page to sports and entertainment. [continue reading…]

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words  of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul. [continue reading…]

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.” – – ScienceDaily

We don’t fill in a formula of departments and features and tips and quips every hour every day every week.

We’re jamming.

We just make up our content on the fly. No going back. No edits. Working in raw ASCII. Keyboarding. Mainlining others’ thoughts.

Lock and Load. Fire and forget.

It’s like an endless orchestra of brain musicians high on brain jazz.

If you can type and have something to say, you can sit in on the session and jam.

If you can take it high if you can take it low if you can tie it in a knot if you can tie it in a bow. If you can throw it o’er your shoulder like a continental soldier…

You.
Can.
Play.
You. Can. Play.

You can play. Any number can play. ANY NUMBER can play a number and that number is always an unknown number. But if you can play unknown numbers you can sit in on the session and jam.

If not, you can just log in and kick back and watch the others go at it.

You never know what you’re going to get, or which way the next person is going to bend the thread in your head.

You’re just there, in real-time, and saying, really, whatever comes into your head. Cause you can’t know what you think until you see what you say. . . . man.

Sometimes it’s flat, even more often predictable, and, yes, it can get really boring…. just like a lot of modern jazz.

But still. . . . man. . . .  there are times — rarer now to be sure — when the whole thing . . . the thread . . . . woven through everyone’s head. . . .

Just. Takes. Off. . .

And you find yourself thinking things you never thought you’d think remembering licks long forgotten and saying things you never planned to say to a lot of people who are coming right back at you, jamming harder and seeing if you can all somehow take it higher.

Not to be profound, just to take it around. It’s like being in a Doctor Strange far out on the range in an intellectual groove and you’ve got lift off.

Have this happen a couple of times and you’re hooked, man. Like me, man.

I’ve been hooked for years, man. . . .

but it doesn’t rule my life,

. . . . man.

for Tom Mandel, 1946-1995

[NOTE: Yesterday’s inevitable rupture of an old untended friendship among the plethora of my virtual friends on Facebook put me in mind of another good friend and true from the past, Tom Mandel, and this memoir from 2005. I’m moving it here so that it will not perish from the Net. Godspeed and God bless, Tom. Godspeed.]

THESE DAYS NEW FRIENDS come more rarely and old friends begin to leave more often. Fate, accidents, God’s will, and misunderstandings take them, as they shall take us all, as the years roll on. And as these years roll on the need to acquire new, often slight, friendships pales before the deeper ones that endure. But some end too soon, far too soon, and their leaving lingers as if the debt you owe to them is the debt of memory; one on which only the interest can be paid, never the principal.

Those friends that have left the world come back to the mind unbidden and at strange moments; moments unguarded and almost, well, casual. This morning I remembered, as I only sometimes do, Tom Mandel — ” the first friend I ever made before I met him.” [continue reading…]

“Although the sight of water made her feel ten times thirstier than before, she didn’t rush forward and drink. She stood as still as if she had been turned into stone, with her mouth wide open. And she had a very good reason; just on this side of the stream lay the lion. [continue reading…]

This was found at You Stepped Into My Life @ The New Neo who notes, I think we could all use a dose of joy, right?

Neo is a self-selected, self-educated, late-blooming but rabid Bee Gee’s fan: A lot of people think the Bee Gees’ lyrics are ho-hum, but although I think I understand why they say that, I don’t agree. They’re not deep poets like Leonard Cohen, whom I also love. They’re not Bob Dylan, whose lyrics are more obscure and complex, whom I don’t especially love. I like the Beatles but I don’t love them, and many of their early lyrics are just bubblegum stuff and many of their later ones are rather nonsensical to me. The Bee Gees’ lyrics often seem simple and mundane till you think about them more; sometimes a word such a “stepped” is very telling. “You Stepped Into My Life” is one of their more simple lyrics, except that in a way it’s brilliant. And the music isn’t simple at all, although it’s catchy as all get-out.

She’s right but this particular video is even more catchy than the experience of sudden-onset-love-syndrome (SOLS). The images in the video perfectly encapsulate the time and the scene that existed in New York City at the time I started what became my career, such as it was. They gave me my own SOLS with New York City. It was a love that lasted for a long time before it burnt out in the ashes of the World Trade Center. Still, if you look at those bits of the city and emblems of the late 70s, shown as it was then in all its grubby glory, you might catch just an echo of my favorite year; the year when New York City stepped into my life.

From the dawn of diversity in 1969.

Once upon a time in the United States, someone somewhere in the government for the greater good asked, “What better medium to get across the message of benevolent government programs is there than comic books?”

The SSA certainly knew this and, along with other government agencies, has a long history of “getting the message out.” Here are some samples from the Social Security Administration’s Special Collections – Public Information Materials where you are warned, “This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current policies or procedures.”

One of the great heroic characters found in a visit to this archive is the smooth, confident, well-dressed, and stunningly white ivy-league guy “Genial Bureaucrat:”

[continue reading…]

Lake Tahoe (1868)

The Big Bang didn’t happen |   It is not too complicated to explain why these too small, too smooth, too old and too numerous galaxies are completely incompatible with the Big Bang hypothesis. Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.

California bans the sale of new gas-powered vehicles after 2035.

California charging stations:pic.twitter.com/m9NNoaDaxi

— Kevin Dalton (@KevinForBOS) August 26, 2022

It Is In God // Free Men Free Minds   It is in God that the universe begins to blaze with light and glow with warmth. It is in God that we first see man in the blaze of possible glory. But the word “God” must have a certain meaning. And we must meet God in actual experience. The God in whom we find the meaning of existence must be conscious intelligence, perfect in goodness, and radiant with love. A God who cannot be conscious of every individual in the world would be no God at all. A God who cannot consciously hear prayer and perfectly apprehend the moral and spiritual longing back of it is not even a false God. — Lynn Harold Hough, Free Men, 1939

Launched by the U.S. Navy in 1933, the airship USS Macon was one of the largest flying machines in history 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/wbAxuQQoCQ

— A Beautiful Culture (@ABeautifulCult1) August 22, 2022

An Ill Wind – Kunstler   The regime that has turned our world inside out in its Satanic pursuit of comfort and power will be stripped naked and judged, if not by official judges, then by an unstoppable consensus.

The sore-beset public will take an inventory of what has been lost and begin reconstructing a scaffold of shared life that rewards fidelity to the way things actually work. It will be a rough passage out of what amounts to a hostage crisis. There will be friction and heat. You will not be comfortable, but you will be dauntless. You will certainly not have nothing or be happy about that. You will have, at least, a restored memory of what it was like to strive honorably for a life worth living.

We’re in the crucible of all that just now, where everything is white hot. Do not bend or melt. Soldier through. Be men and be women (there is truly nothing in-between, and do not fall for faithless inducements to doubt that). You are brothers and sisters in an enterprise worth saving and you have a history worth defending. Believe it.

Germans warned of toilet paper shortage — Because Ukraine “We are particularly dependent on gas for the production of tissue paper. Without it, we will no longer be able to provide security of supply,” Krengel said in a statement published on Thursday. According to data provided by Die Papierindustrie, each German citizen uses an average of 134 rolls of toilet paper per year. “In the current energy crisis, our top priority is to provide people with this important commodity,” Krengel stressed. Last month, the Bavarian Paper Association warned that operating paper plants may become unprofitable if they are forced to work at reduced capacity due to natural gas shortages. Germany and the EU as a whole have recently seen a significant reduction in natural gas supplies from Russia, leading to numerous warnings of possible industrial shutdowns.

[continue reading…]

Found at MOTUS A.D.: A Post-Birthday Bonus Post. Drop by and drop a post-birthday-day note. [continue reading…]

That would be 87,000 new Goodfellas comin’ right at chu Get ready.

Now the guy has got to come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what.

Business bad? Fuck you, pay me.
You had a fire? Fuck you, pay ma.
The place got hit by lighting? Fuck you, pay me.

Also, Paulie could do anything. Especially run up bills on the joint’s credit. Why not? Nobody’s gonna pay for it anyway.

As soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move the stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a two hundred dollar case of booze and sell it for a hundred. It doesn’t matter. It’s all profit.

And, finally, when there’s nothing left when you can’t borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out.

You light a match. [continue reading…]

pic.twitter.com/T5oFebaKgH

— Sam Ro 📈 (@SamRo) August 24, 2022

[continue reading…]

The Ferris Wheel lit in long stripes of searing red and gold neon like some whirling sketch of an earth-bound star, pirouettes into the night sky above the slate waters of the Pacific at the end of the Santa Monica pier. Below it, the old seafood restaurant now serves Mexican food where gang-bangers herd their Saturday night dates around the bar, and the loud murmur of Angelino-accented Spanish rises above the waves that lap the pilings driven deep through the slow Pacific swell and into the sands below.

In a dark hollow somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, the first winds of winter hiss around an old dance hall where hundreds of white people and one black man stomp the boards in a contra dance. Dressed as vampires, wolfmen, fairies, cowboys, and a host of other laughing fantasies, the dancers welcome the day of the dead to fiddles, guitars, pianos and drums as the caller makes the long lines of whirling people into stars and boxes, and a new girl is spun into your arms, flirting and bobbing, with every change in the ancient pattern of the dance, only to roll away with a half-sashay.

Outside the lights from the hall catch the flying drifts of gold and red leaves, the wind is tearing from the trees, pushing them across the stars, and rolling them up in long drifts of crisp shadows against the wheels of Willys jeeps, old bangers, and brand new SUVs of every make and model. After the dance, Waffle Houses along Route 26 will fill up with costumed, exhausted dancers, their endorphins convincing them that, for this night at least, they are probably immortal.

The long wave laved beaches of the Isle of Palms outside of Charleston reinforce the new rule that no poor — or even middle class — people are now allowed to live by the ocean in America. The lots on which the endlessly elaborate houses that look out on the sea stand now cost between three and four million dollars each. If you bought one and immediately burned down the four to six-bedroom three-story house, the cost of the lot would still be three to four million dollars. The house is, in essence, free.

Offshore, even on a dank day with large winds pushing in from the Atlantic, the bright scoops of kite surfers soar and pull their riders up off the crest of the waves high into air before gliding down to slide on the surface of the long breaking waves, and into the sands where the plastic pails of the nation’s fortunate children are abandoned just above the reach of the waters. [continue reading…]

And this is how it goes…

Once upon a time, you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown,
Like a rolling stone?
[continue reading…]

Elf Fauci pic.twitter.com/onxBwOzDAq

— NautPoso 🇮🇪☘️ (@NautPoso) August 24, 2022

The IRS is hiring! Right here. For you. Maybe it’s recruiting directly from the Mexican Cartels for some of their surplus underemployed killers. Maybe those recruits will be given instant citizenship, snappy new uniforms, automatic weapons, on-base housing, and a tasty hiring bonus with no bag limits. Plus a tax holiday for the rest of their lives, no matter how long or short.  Who could refuse such a sweet sweet offer?Why give IRS a private army? Because it has ready-made intimidation built in. That’s the cause. This is the effect. . .
[continue reading…]

“Well, what can a poor boy do / Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band?”

Big Al’s workers are hip to their menu and full-belly promise. With their award-winning for the last-50-years-straight chocolate malted they give you a long spoon so you can spoon out gobs of malted before they melt into the slurp for the straw. But the malteds are the least of Big Al’s All-American Menu.

Le menu du Big Al’s

Big Al’s flattop grills have been frying burgers for fifty years and are just beginning to be broken in. Every year brings a slightly more tasty burger than the year before.

Big Al’s burgers are always trending. They are tasty but a far cry from the patty-made-of-dry-aged-porterhouse-trim sliders from the Fifth Street Steak House. Nothing as Happy Hour as that. Big Al’s burgers are always at hand ready to make a five-o’clock working man feel fed and a late-night drunk feel sober. 

Big Al’s started accepting debit cards grudgingly about two years ago. Before that, it was a cash-only business through the years and multiple owners. Late one night, after the last burger call, I saw an owner pull in to check his cash receipts. He was in a brand new Lexus. His wife was in a formal satin evening gown. Big Al’s has two registers. The IRS and the State of California probably think Big Al’s has only one. The owner carried his personal cash register out of the restaurant, placed it in his trunk, and drove off. Nobody working or eating at Big Als never saw nothin’ no how. 

I’ve been coming to Big Al’s for burgers, shakes, and its air-conditioned student’s and working man’s reading room since my family moved to Chico in 1963. Big Al’s reading room is big and never crowded. Today it’s empty. As always in the last 59 years, I order the chocolate malted, the basic burger, and the large order of fries piping hot and nicely salted fresh from the deep fryer. Too much fat. Too much salt. Too many carbohydrates. Too much dairy. Too much sugar. It’s not really a good diet for an old man, is it?

Now it is just me and my latest book all alone in Big Al’s reading room.

That book would be,  The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard with an introduction by W. H. Auden

As I read these “Living Thoughts” it comes to me,

Who, just who, do I think I am? Really?

Then I read from the introduction by W. H. Auden for a moment and then I just stop. I think,

“Who reads such arcane stuff in this day and age? Damned few and never in Big Al’s.”

Then I just stop and think to think again, as so many at a similar phase of life do,

“What? Just what am I doing with the dwindling years given and now left to me? Just what do I think I am doing with these last works of my days.”

It was a strange and sobering moment and the irony of being at Big Al’s was not lost on me.

On the other hand, the questions of

“Who do I think I am?”

and

“What I am doing with the days?”

are the sort of questions that now recur dependably in any and all locales. It’s the kind of thing that tasks me as I expect it tasks all of us in our time — if we are in fact given enough time for such questions to form in our souls; if indeed we take the time to develop a soul. At all. [continue reading…]