State of Texas
State of Texas. Circa 1913. Collection of cowgirl postcards. Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library.
quote out of context
Attorney Dee Miles said attorneys had Taco Bell’s “meat mixture” tested and found it contained less that 35 percent beef.
Arthur Godfrey for Lipton Soup
Daryl got me to thinking about iconic TV and radio personalities beloved by American housewives of old.
Everyone knows Liberace. And most everyone knows Jack LaLanne. But not everyone remembers Arthur Godfrey.
In fact, I once surprised a friend, someone slightly older than me, when I blurted, “Arthur Godfrey?” in response to a reminiscence about his mother.
“You’re too young to remember Arthur Godfrey,” he replied.
Maybe. Anyway, here’s Arthur Godfrey.
Vinyl hunters
headline of the day
Threats keep Arizona eatery’s lion tacos off menu
“It can be painful, and you can suffer, but it can also be intensely beautiful and enlightening beyond words”
I fidget uncertainly. After 20 minutes, I wonder if we got a bad batch. And then I realize that I’m seeing Cairuna’s songs: an indigo line quivers in front of me in sync with the pace and pitch of his singing. I watch, fascinated, and fixate on what I see and hear. Another 20 minutes later, I can’t open my mouth to speak, nor can I stand. I close my eyes to dull the panic and see fragments of memories as if on old film reels, which I watch for nearly an hour. Most of them involve events I haven’t thought of in years. When I open my eyes, I see a bear walk into the room on its hind legs and sit next to me. I know there is no bear, yet I perceive the heat radiating off its body. Focusing on Cairuna’s singing, I try to relax. The bear leaves and I feel somewhat victorious, though I don’t know why.
Thomas Bernhard, My Prizes
An overview of Thomas Bernhard and his posthumous My Prizes:
Probably completed in 1980, it languished first on Bernhard’s desk and then, inexplicably, in the offices of his publisher, Suhrkamp, until 2009. It is an account, prize by prize, of the background and circumstances of reception of nine literary prizes that Bernhard was awarded between 1963 and 1980, followed by some of the speeches he delivered on those occasions.
He damns prize-givings, where protocol is far more important than the work being honoured. Ministers snore on the platform; chairmen of the jury praise him fulsomely, yet attribute to him things he never wrote; organisers fail to greet him and his aunt when they arrive and ignore them once the ceremony is over. The only prizes that bring him pleasure are the Julius Campe, awarded by Hamburg — a place he loves as much as he hates smug Regensburg and Bremen, venues for other prizes — and for which there is no ceremony, just a tactful handing over at the offices of Julius Campe, Heine’s publishers; and the Prize of the Federal Chambers of Commerce, where, at the awards dinner, he finds himself sitting next to the jury president — none other than the man who interviewed him when he was taking his commercial exams for the post at the grocery.
The book is available here.
from the comments
I remember watching Jack Lalanne when I was a little kid and TVs looked like furniture. He was great. When he talked with his hands, it was like he was picking up heavy shit with ease.
Lascaux, The Prehistory Of Art
In anticipation of the new Herzog film, I stumbled on this documentary of the prehistoric paintings in the caves of Lascaux.
quote out of context
“The code never affected us editorially the way I think it did other companies,” he said. “You know, we aren’t about to start stuffing bodies into refrigerators or anything.”
Jack LaLanne (1914-2011)
“Billy Graham was for the hereafter. I’m for the here and now,” he told The [LA] Times when he was almost 92, employing his usual rapid-fire patter.
Once upon a time, Jack LaLanne was a figure of fun to me. Corny guy in a jumpsuit, host of a cheesy TV exercise show for housewives.
But I came around. In the face of disapproval from established medical authorities, he encouraged work-outs (including weight-bearing exercise) for women, old people, and people with disabilities. He advocated good nutrition (not dieting) — and friends who own his trademarked juicer swear it’s one of the best.
Jack LaLanne, dead at 96.
The state of our union is…
What will it be this year? Are you excited? I know I am.
1973, Nixon: “The basic state of our Union today is sound, and full of promise.”
1974, Nixon: “Tonight, for the first time in 12 years, a President of the United States can report to the Congress on the state of a Union at peace with every nation of the world. ”
1975, Ford: “I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good”
1976, Ford: “Just a year ago I reported that the state of the Union was not good. Tonight, I report that the state of our Union is better–in many ways a lot better–but still not good enough.”
Read more
quote out of context
The only disorderly conduct the jury found was that of the TSA officers.
headline of the day
Undercover police cleared ‘to have sex with activists’
a brief history of Wikipedia Jesus
At 1:12 a.m. on March 3, 2001, Jimmy Wales created a page for Jesus on a three-month-old site called Wikipedia. “Jesus Christ is a central figure in Christianity,” he wrote. The site’s co-founder followed with a petition to his fellow first-generation editors: “I fear great controversy if this encyclopedia entry isn’t written well, and so I think we should all plunge in and duke it out quickly.” Four months later, a user called “Hiram” answered the call, changing “a central figure” to “the central figure” and writing a respectable four-paragraph summary of the biblical story of Jesus. “Added some details. Not enough, I know,” he noted in the comments to his edit.
And much more.
(via @tcarmody)
“They have been here!”
As the painters were learning to crush hematite, and to sharpen embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal (red and black were their primary colors), the last Neanderthals were still living on the vast steppe that was Europe in the Ice Age, which they’d had to themselves for two hundred millennia, while Homo sapiens were making their leisurely trek out of Africa. No one can say what the encounters between that low-browed, herculean species and their slighter but formidable successors were like. (Paleolithic artists, despite their penchant for naturalism, rarely chose to depict human beings, and then did so with a crudeness that smacks of mockery, leaving us a mirror but no self-reflection.) Their genomes are discrete, so it appears that either the two populations didn’t mate or they couldn’t conceive fertile offspring. In any case, they wouldn’t have needed to contest their boundless hunting grounds. They coexisted for some eight thousand years, until the Neanderthals withdrew or were forced, in dwindling numbers, toward the arid mountains of southern Spain, making Gibraltar a final redoubt. It isn’t known from whom or from what they were retreating (if “retreat” describes their migration), though along the way the arts of the newcomers must have impressed them. Later Neanderthal campsites have yielded some rings and awls carved from ivory, and painted or grooved bones and teeth (nothing of the like predates the arrival of Homo sapiens). The pathos of their workmanship—the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence—nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.
From Judith Therman’s 2008 New Yorker article about the Chauvet cave, the subject of Werner Herzog’s 3-D documentary.
from the comments
One of last night’s dreamland vignettes was set in Finland in 1939. A tire on our vehicle had developed bald patches, and we had no spare. A sympathetic man and his son (who was really his daughter) offered to take us to where we could get a replacement tire, but I thought that might place them in too much danger, so we set off on our own.
Then something else happened.
From the Glasgow School of Art Archives & Library
Set of costume and stage designs for theatrical productions of Macbeth, Salome and Parsifal, 1933. Pen, pencil and paint with metalic paint touches. Various dimensions around 405×270 mm.
(via @wilfreeborn)
from the moderated comments
Actually, I love the fuck out of the damned things too… Hell, I get off making shit out of them. One year at Halloween, I made a scarecrow man out of a bunch of em and scared the shit out of a bunch of people. I even used to talk to it when I got drunk. He even became my best friend. Eventually, he rotted though. Never did try to make another scarecrow out of gourds after that….
from the moderated comments
Totally, true Christian girls are the best sluts, some time ago I knew a few, I know they are out there, I want them so bad and I feel totally frustrated that I haven’t seen enough of them lately, just my bad luck. My personal belief is that they are reacting to the control freaks in their own respective churches probably with the blessing of the State, although they want to be good and why wouldn’t they want to do what they want on their own terms.
Amy said
Damn, I’ve got a pimple on my butt. Shouldn’t some things be sacred?
Ken’s Chicken-N-Fish Drive Thru, Breckenridge, TX 76424
A street view for those with an interest.
Time-Based Entanglement
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart.
Now, two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky effect, called entanglement, could also bind particles across time.
If their proposal can be tested, it could help process information in quantum computers and test physicists’ basic understanding of the universe.
“You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” said quantum physicist S. Jay Olson of Australia’s University of Queensland, lead author of the new study.
first time I’ve seen awhile used ‘officially’
from the comments
When we would visit friends, when they lived here, whose son was autistic, their son and I would get into this word thing. He’d say, “Rick, Rick say bandaid!” It came out like “Ban Daid!” And I would repeat it back to him just the way he said it. “Ban Daid!” He would laugh and laugh, then say “Rick, Rick say (another word). I would repeat it, accented as he had. I’m pretty sure we could have kept this up for hours. Once, his father, from over the stove, cooking dinner, said “Elliot! Please stop! You’re killing me!” Elliot looked sheepish and forlorn.
I’m pretty sure I was the one being asked to stop.
