dear clusterflock
How do I feel about this SOTU?
dear clusterflock
I don’t mean to go around hawking my wares, but this seemed so relevant and useful to you personally that I thought it would be wrong not to share it. Please keep in mind that I am financially involved with this offer, but even so I think you’ll find I was right to share this marvelous opportunity with you today.
Well now here I’ve wasted a lot of your time with technicalities and jibber jabber, I’ll come to my point quickly. Let me ask you just one question:
Have you ever wanted to have a spleen named after you?
headline of the day, II
Paula Deen confirms that she has type 2 diabetes, unveils partnership with drug company
Not my super-heroine persona,
but I am thinking that somebody should assume the mantle of The Sanitizer.
There’s really one reason,
and one reason only, that I put this photo here on clusterflock.
Joel, I love you, man, but that photo out of context was beginning to make my tummy sad every time I stopped by.
Besides, I know you love Culver’s.
Winter poem
After Villon
Where’s all the old snow?
Heaped up over there
By the Walmart.
Snow crew
Come through
At four AM.
Sign of the Times (and the Place)
Half a dozen Russian speakers, all under thirty, packed up their car after a weekend rental of one of my neighbor’s cottages here in the Driftless Regional Resort Region. A few may have glanced at me as I scrabbled in the dirt, digging up buried money and muttering, “I am uncovering my wealth.”
Funk songs from Vietnam GIs
If you didn’t get a Christmas present from me, it’s because I’m waiting till the New Year to buy you East of Underground: Hell Below. (Thanks to Valerie for the tip.)
In 1971 the US was pulling troops out of Vietnam, and its bases in Germany were full of draftees at a loose end. “You were painting shovels, picking up cigarette butts – it was a lot of busy-work,” remembers former serviceman Lewis Hitt. “There was a longing by everyone, especially the draftees, to get home and go back to what you were doing before.”
This was the crucible in which were formed scores of raucous funk bands made up of servicemen, four of which have just been compiled by Now-Again Records. Adoring crowd noise was crudely dubbed on top of their records, which were then distributed in recruitment centres. These bands were used by the army to present service as varied, even hip. But the songs they cover – the bitter, suspicious likes of Backstabbers and Smiling Faces Sometimes – undermine any potential propagandising.
I am posting this post
because to now I have posted 1964 posts. So this will be 1965. And that was a beautiful year. I was just old enough to know that I wanted to be a grown-up woman. In 1965.
At least one of those grown-up women in the movies. Or to have a hit record.
How doctors die
Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. These are his observations:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. [...]
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this — that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.
The Sword Maker
Korehira Watanabe is one of the last remaining Japanese swordsmiths. He has spent 40 years honing his craft in an attempt to recreate Koto, a type of sword that dates back to the Heian and Kamakura periods (794-1333 AD). No documents remain to provide context for Watanabe’s quest, but he believes he has come close to creating a replica of this mythical samurai sword.
(via Product by Process)
some people told me not to walk into nature at all
According to BHMAC (the Mine Action Committee for Bosnia and Herzegovina), just over 3.5% of the land area of the country is still contaminated by landmines. Many of the deminers in the field believe roughly 10% of the country can still be deemed a landmine area. They also feel that nowhere in the countryside is safe, as they may clear one area but a torrential downpour may unearth landmines upstream or upriver; consequently, these unearthed landmines find their way into vicinities that were deemed safe weeks, months or even years ago.
(via BLDGBLOG)
Wanted: Antlers
Posted to the Dubuque Freecycle list:
If anyone is going hunting, and has antlers that aren’t of ‘keeping’ size, I would greatly appreciate them. Deer, Elk, etc. Its the only thing that keeps the puppy from destroying the house with his teething.
thank you
quote out of context
Someday the Occupy Wall Street protests will end, and the only question is whether they will go out with a bang or a whimper—or a lot of loud banging followed by whimpers.
Sheila’s Oak Park Walking Tour
Called to mind by the Where we are today thread.
Friend #1: I can’t believe these are all single-family houses.
Friend #2 (sotto voce): Ah, the voice of the eternal proletariat. “Why, five families could live in that house!”
image in context
Something I’m Working On…
I’ll say no more for the moment.
OFFER: plastic hangers (Dubuque)
Posted to Dubuque Freecycle list:
About 25 plastic hangers in various colors. 10 of them never used, still in packaging. Had been promised to several people; none ever showed up.
Damn people. Damn them.
From 102 to 67…
In 36 hours. Out on the patio, I’m shivering.
For 24 hours…
our internet connection, at the house, has been off. It just came back on 20 minutes ago. I’m FULL of shit to share. (Well, sort of full.) I feel like I lost the feeling in both my arms and got it back.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
On the redemption of physical reality
“This is, of course, what (film theorist) Siegfried Kracauer meant when he spoke of the ‘redemption of physical reality.’ It’s also at the heart of Werner Herzog’s new documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), in which he attempts to retrieve the ‘now’ of prehistoric cave painters flickering into life – the analogy often used to explain the psychological power of film.”
In the same way that cutting ourselves off from any older aspect of our culture diminishes us by dimming our awareness of who we were and how that made us who we are, there is something lost when we turn away from the gray ones.
It’s quite a long piece, but it is worth reading. Bill Mesce’s The “Gray Ones” Fade To Black, brought to attention by Ebert.
Dear Clusterflock
86-ed?
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
Peter Falk || Gena Rowlands || “A Woman Under the Influence” || (1974) || d. John Cassavetes
There is a Criterion version available.
