Garlic Scape
I bought these when I was at Loch Fyne Oyster shop (I was trying to find some crabs to draw). They’re the stalks of garlic which are taken off before they grow any further to allow the garlic bulbs to develop. Apparently you can slice them up and use these just like garlic, they also make a mighty fine pesto.
Weekly Picture 162
Man Wading, Cape Charles, VA, 8.14.2009
Where’s the moon?
This morning on the 2 train, a large white-haired man boarded in downtown Brooklyn, wearing overalls and a hat covered with all manner of buttons, clutching a worn, wrinkled photocopy. As the train started to move, he sat up straight, held the paper aloft, and began reciting the following to the assembled commuters, in the sing-song tone of a storyteller or a town cryer. This continued until I exited the train, a few stops later, and has been playing in my head for the better part of the day.
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon?
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon?The globe in Columbus Circle–that’s the Earth.
The moon’s on 63rd Street West;
It’s a simple test
Of spacial reality.How well did you do?
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon?
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon…?
In the American Grain
I’m reading William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, soon to be reissued by New Directions, for review. The book is a kind of fictionalized (or perhaps artistically rendered) history of the New World, from Columbus to Lincoln. Here are two quotes from his chapter on the Puritans, “Voyage of the Mayflower”:
In referring to a Puritan story he has just recounted, which ends with a moral, he writes: And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds. (p. 67)
And the penultimate paragraph of the chapter, in which it presumably refers to the United States: It has become “the most lawless country in the civilized world,” a panorama of murders, perversions, a terrific ungoverned strength, excusable only because of the horrid beauty of its great machines. To-day it is a generation of gross know-nothingism, of blackened churches where hymns groan like chants from stupified jungles, a generation universally eager to barter permanent values (the hope of an aristocracy) in return for opportunist material advantages, a generation hating those whom it obeys. (p. 68)
One would be forgiven, I think, for wondering if Williams was writing last week, but the book was first published in 1925. The new edition, with an introduction by Rick Moody, will be released in October.
New glasses
Bought not because I was eagerly desiring to change my look, but because I am a bit of a klutz and the old ones sustained injury.
(PS: I am slated to have lunch shortly with Jessie and Ed at Jason’s Deli. I will wear a shirt over my white chest hair.)
Dear clusterflock:
So Lucy and I got to cooking up this fake swami scheme, a lucrative racket whereby Cooper and I might separate fools from their money, and now I’m thinking that a carnival is what we want. If you’d like to join in the fun and make good money and travel and see the world, tell us what you’ve got to offer. Can you guess people’s ages? Wield a sledgehammer and ring a bell? Can you dance a little hoochie-coochie dance? Crawl on your belly like a reptile? Bite the head off a live chicken?
We also welcome non-traditional carnival acts.
What’s yours?
God, Gentle As The Bunk
Social conservatives are saying a tornado that ripped through downtown Minneapolis during a Lutheran Church Convention is God’s gentle wrath for discussing whether the Church should allow homosexual ministers to serve. Famous puritan minister John Piper (apparently he writes books), explained the happening as a simple matter of God punishing the Lutheran Church for condoning homosexuality:
Let me venture an interpretation of this Providence with some biblical warrant.
1. The unrepentant practice of homosexual behavior (like other sins) will exclude a person from the kingdom of God.
The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)
2. The church has always embraced those who forsake sexual sin but who still struggle with homosexual desires, rejoicing with them that all our fallen, sinful, disordered lives (all of us, no exceptions) are forgiven if we turn to Christ in faith.
Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)
3. Therefore, official church pronouncements that condone the very sins that keep people out of the kingdom of God, are evil. They dishonor God, contradict Scripture, and implicitly promote damnation where salvation is freely offered.
4. Jesus Christ controls the wind, including all tornados.
Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? (Mark 4:41)
5. When asked about a seemingly random calamity near Jerusalem where 18 people were killed, Jesus answered in general terms—an answer that would cover calamities in Minneapolis, Taiwan, or Baghdad. God’s message is repent, because none of us will otherwise escape God’s judgment.
Jesus: “Those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:4-5)
6. Conclusion: The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.
(italics mine)
This gentle wrath that God practices reminded me a bit of a scene from The Wire. The names have been changed to elicit a response:
Lutherans: You know why I respect you so much, God?
God: Mm-mmm.
Lutherans: It’s not ’cause you’re a good god, ’cause, y’know, fuck that, right?
God: Mm. Fuck that, yeah.
Lutherans: It’s not ’cause when I came to Minnesota, you taught me all kinds of cool shit about . . . well, whatever.
God: Mm. Whatever.
Lutherans: It’s ’cause when it came time for you to fuck me . . . you were very gentle.
God: You damn right.
Lutherans: See, ’cause you could have hauled me out of the garage and just bent me over the hood of a radio car, and . . . no, you were, you were very gentle.
God: I knew it was your first time. I wanted to make that shit special.
Lutherans: It was, man. It fucking was.
End scene.
Sometimes, when I’m just mumbling to myself,
I say clooterflook instead of clusterflock.
My latest foray
into Apemanlandia attempts to answer the question: Do our arboreal brethren have access to corrective lenses? (And if so, Do they wear them as they swing through the trees?) It seemed that it might be appropriate to post it here, given the recent number of comments dealing with armpits (prominently exposed as one swings through the trees, no?) On the other hand, some of our more fastidious compatriots might not want to see an armpit front and center, as it were, so instead I provide a link for those brave enough.
Texas, Our Texas
Members of the Texas State Board of Education have proposed adding Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority, James Dobson, Focus on the Family, Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Rush Limbaugh, and the National Rifle Association to state social studies text books.
Two reviewers have recommended that César Chávez, the late farm workers union leader, be removed from history books because they deem him an unworthy role model.
the clusterflock store
The apartment is also the headquarters of a glossy fashion and literary magazine called Dossier, a biannual that Ms. Parrott founded and runs with her business partner Katherine Krause…
The tiny store on the garden level is run by Ms. Krause and Ms. Parrott… It is named for the magazine and is, in a sense, its incarnation as a retail establishment…
“The store is the magazine that doesn’t get published,” Mr. Friedman said.
A great idea. What would be in the clusterflock store?
quote out of context
Dear God, please protect our Florida from storms and other difficulties. Charlie.
sequence
from the comments
Maybe you had to be there. This is a man who had a room filled with dozens of penis statues of various sizes, some bigger than the one in clockwork orange. Whose been living HIV+ for some 25 years. Who when we called from the East Coast one time to check out a lunar eclipse was doing a time zone calculation in his head to figure out when it would be on in Tucson. Some of this wears off on you when you get Polly-slimed or bit by his Chihuahua.
you spin me right round baby right round
A German study shows that, without the sun to guide us, humans have the tendency to walk in circles.
Circular walking befell only the four forest walkers who had to walk in overcast conditions and the one desert walker who walked at night after the moon had set. Those who could see the sun or moon managed to travel fairly straight.
Previous studies have shown that bees, pigeons and a variety of other animals move in tight circles when orienting cues like the sun are missing. The new study suggests that, whether we’re conscious of what we’re doing or not, people are tuned into those types of environmental signals, too.
“People find it really hard to say what they did exactly,” Souman said. “It’s pretty clear from our data that they do use the sun somehow.”
In a follow-up experiment, the researchers challenged 15 people to walk straight while blindfolded. When they couldn’t see at all, the walkers ended up going in surprisingly small circles — with a diameter of less than 66 feet.
In repeated attempts, blindfolded walkers circled in one direction sometimes and in the opposite direction other times.
The blindfold experiment dispelled one theory — that people might walk in circles because one leg tends to be longer or stronger than the other. Instead, Souman suspects that little mistakes in brain add up until the sense of what’s straight turns into something round.
Bill Maher Quote
I was so excited I nearly dropped the bible I was using to help me masturbate into my gun.
Oh wow, my face is inside yours!
Fuzzy Dice Hanging from the Rearview Mirror
What’s with them?
I have my theories.
Tonight!
First preseason football game in Cowboys Stadium.
An anecdote for your amusement (sic)
The standard line for women is “Hey, buddy, my face is up here”–standard, of course, because most men do indeed have a fascination with breasts. Well. Down here in the RV park in far south Texas, I mostly don’t wear a shirt because it’s too warm to need one, and neither I nor the laws of Texas consider male shirtlessness indecent. I am not beautiful, though I’m fairly fit for a 55-year-old, and I have noticed women here, when we’re conversing, glancing down at my chest. Is this because I have such stunning pectoral development? I think not. They almost always glance to their right, my left, which is where I have the greatest accumulation of white hair.
Shaving Points #2
There are oils, creams, cremes, foams, soaps, and gels all containing inexplicable and engineered molecules and/or the finest available botanicals. They serve either to facilitate the enactment of the sought after good, close shave or to soothe the hurt that accompanies it. And with a scent that evokes the essence of your particular brand of masculinity.
Hakuna Matata
As the folks at reddit proved (as if it needed it). This was clearly photoshopped. I do, however, love the fact that somebody spent time to do it.
from the comments
I was just a little train chuffing the C word.
We Have A Winner
Daryl and Renner know that, for over 25 years, I have obsessively compared performances of Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I’ll listen to one performance, then another. I’ll listen to a different Vaughan performance (there are more live recordings of Vaughn than Hendrix), then go back to one of Hendrix’s. Just when I’d determine one’s delivery superior, I’d hear something new in a performance and change my mind.
But last week, I reached a decision.
What’s Wrong with Kansas? What’s Right with Kansas?
Kansas’ new “Right Lane Law,” which went into effect July 1, makes it illegal to drive in the far left lane of multi-lane highways except when passing or turning left or when instructed to do so by traffic-control devices or officers. The law is designed to reduce road rage and prevent motorists from trying risky maneuvers, says Trooper Mark Engholm of the Kansas Highway Patrol.
