looks like robot wisdom weblog, the original "weblog" is no more...only this cache...

Happy Birthday Jack Sheldon!

Cinnamon: "'We were looking at the effects of common foods on blood sugar,' he told New Scientist. One was the American favourite, apple pie, which is usually spiced with cinnamon. 'We expected it to be bad. But it helped,' he says."

Cinammon

Giving cats a chance in life: "Behind him are several miniature dwellings that look like igloos. The cats sleep in the tiny huts, which the volunteers line with straw in the winter. 'They're like little subdivisions,' Shaw says. "

Dave Till's Toronto Photos - ghost signs

Dictionary of Victorian London

Referential Communication with an African Grey Parrot: "Alex has learned over 40 object labels: paper, key, nut, wood, wheat, truck, hide (rawhide chips), peg wood (clothes pins), grain, cork, corn, walnut, block, box, showah (shower), banana, pasta, gym, cracker, scraper (nail file), popcorn, chain, kiwi, shoulder, rock (a lava stone beak conditioner), carrot, gravel, cup, citrus, back, chair, chalk, water, nail, grape, grate, treat, cherry, wool, green bean, and banerry (apple). We have tentative evidence for labels such as bread and jacks. He has functional use of 'no', phrases such as 'come here', 'I want X', and 'Wanna go Y' where X and Y are appropriate labels for objects or locations."

Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll, London 1968

New Scientist on the three minute pop song: "Right back to Kylie in the 1980s, I have always looked at beats per minute as fundamental to a song. Anything too slow and you get a lethargic reaction. With Stock, Aitken and Waterman we were trying to make people feel uplifted and get their heartbeat moving. There is definitely a point somewhere around 120 bpm when it starts to get excited."

CBC News: Deadline Iraq - Uncensored Stories of the War

Tube maps

Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway

Monument to William Collins

Garden and entrance to a Neo-Gothic house - Strawberry Hill

Portrait of Professor Anthony Blunt reading

Constable's daughter, Emily, lying on a sofa reading

Monument to William Cowper

Bust of Trevor Howard

RobertAldrich: an independent career

Adorno on Aldrich

Art & Architecture at the Courtauld institute. A must see.

LINTON GARNER--KSW founder Colin Browne's film about this jazz great on CBC tonight at 7

DUCK, YOU SUCKER at Film Forum in New York City

Useful Noise: "And why not--finally we can close the book on the utopian vision of Thriller and once more successfully police the borders of adulthood and race and sexuality. Of course a black performer who won such a white audience harbors secret dreams of passing. Of course an effeminate adult with so pronounced a childlike side wants to fuck little boys. Glad that's over with. "

Brian Kim Stefans reviews the Sieburth Pound: "Impatience and a sense of wonder might be the two best qualities of a critic, though neither is very useful without a decent prose style. "

The Dominion Daily Weblog another BC blog

The Tyee independent news from BC

Portrait of Anna Akhmatova

Beckford's Tower & Museum

Laibach Kittens

Ida Lupino

The Big Knife

Nealenews-- lots of "wacky Canadian" content on this Drudge-formatted blog

The First Vintage: "But in addition, McGovern thinks, ancient people were probably well aware of the fermentation process whereby yeast turns the sugar in grape juice into alcohol. Indeed, wild grapes frequently carry a dusting of yeast on their skins, probably transported by wasps and other flying insects, and will occasionally ferment right on the vine (birds sometimes become so inebriated eating wild grapes that they fall from their perches). "

Complete Poetical Works by William Cowper

from "The Winter Walk at Noon"

Where now the vital energy that moved,
While summer was, the pure and subtle lymph
Through the imperceptible meandering veins
Of leaf and flower? It sleeps; and the icy touch
Of unprolific winter has impress’d
A cold stagnation on the intestine tide.
But let the months go round, a few short months,
And all shall be restored. These naked shoots,
Barren as lances, among which the wind
Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes,
Shall put their graceful foliage on again,
And, more aspiring, and with ampler spread,
Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost.
Then each , in its peculiar honours clad,
Shall publish, even to the distant eye,
Its family and tribe. Laburnum, rich
In streaming gold; syringa, ivory pure;
The scentless and the scented rose; this red,
And of an humbler growth, the other tall,
And throwing up into the darkest gloom
Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew,
Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf
That the wind severs from the broken wave;
The lilac, various in array, now white,
Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set
With purple spikes pyramidal, as if,
Studious of ornament, yet unresolved
Which hue she most approved, she chose them all:
Copious of flowers the woodbine, pale and wan,
But well compensating her sickly looks
With never-cloying odours, early and late;
Hypericum all bloom, so thick a swarm
Of flowers, like flies clothing her slender rods,
That scarce a leaf appears; mezereon too,
Though leafless, well attired, and thick beset
With blushing wreaths, investing every spray;
Althæa with the purple eye; the broom,
Yellow and bright as bullion unalloy’d,
Her blossoms; and luxuriant above all
The jasmine, throwing wide her elegant sweets,The deep dark green of whose unvarnish’d leaf
Makes more conspicuous, and illumines more
The bright profusion of her scatter’d stars.—
These have been, and these shall be in their day;
And all this uniform, uncolour’d scene
Shall be dismantled of its fleecy load,
And flush into variety again.

Invisible Library of non-existent books. Contains neither "The Boy's Book of Burls" or "Twenty Scottish Verbs Explained" unfortunately.

Umberto Eco--The future of books: "A person reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica every night before sleeping, from the first to the last page, would be a comic character. "

Venus has 'heavy metal mountains'

The Women of Juarez Demand Justice

The Groove Monday Made Her "Chasing After the Sun" on repeat mode for the last half-hour...

Red sea urchin 'almost immortal': "'Some of the largest and we believe oldest red sea urchins up to 19 centimetres in size have been found in waters off British Columbia, between Vancouver Island and the mainland.
'By our calculations, they are probably 200 or more years old.
'They can die from attacks by predators, specific diseases or being harvested by fishermen. But even then they show very few signs of age. The evidence suggests that a 100-year-old red sea urchin is just as apt to live another year, or reproduce, as a 10-year-old sea urchin.'
In fact, the indications are that the more mature red sea urchins are the most prolific producers of sperm and eggs, and are perfectly capable of breeding even when incredibly old"

Scottish Cuisine in NYC: "'The other organs can't be included because they're illegal here,' exclaimed the waitress, only half correct. "

Once Upon a Time in the West They've done a very good job with the the DVD, for 14 bucks Canadian!

C'era una volta il west

Sergio Leone: "Leone's explicit employment of reflexive genre clichés in Once Upon a Time in the West, and again in his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, would seem to cast him as a trail-blazing post-modernist, but there is an important difference between Leone's referential system and the 'blank irony' that Frederic Jameson identified as being cental to a post-modern aesthetic. Leone has a profound emotional and intellectual investment in the cinematic mythologies he explores, however compromised and clichéd these mythologies may have become. Thus, as his films become increasingly self-conscious about the 'lost' classical American filmic tradition they are drawing on, they start to exhibit a meditative, melancholic quality that is completely absent from the energetic exuberance of the dollars trilogy. Adrian Martin admirably summed up this aspect of Leone's later work in his book on Once Upon a Time in America:

It was as if, for Leone, such disembodied 'quotations' – if they could be made to retain their mythic intensity and potency – might provide a kind of catharsis or ecstasy for modern-day cinephiles pining over their precious 'lost object'. That is why, finally, form can never be 'pure' in Leone's work: at stake in it is a psychic investment, a whole elaborate machine of selfhood, culture and longing… "

Don't Look in the Rubble for Answers - Look Into Yourself: "BAD CAUSES NEED martyrs. The War on Terror, as conceived by the US President and the British Prime Minister, is a bad cause, and this week in Istanbul it has claimed new martyrs. Both sides in this war - the US-led coalition and the al-Qaeda terrorist network - will be quietly reinforced by what has happened: reinforced in their prejudices; reinforced in their own self-belief, and reinforced in the new support this will bring them. Both gain. The world loses.
When news reached me of Thursday's outrage, I had just reread this passage in The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot: 'To minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity - strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great powers of self-control and a disposition to exert control over others - prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.' "

Cahiers de Corey reports on Lee Ann Brown and Carla Harryman at Cornell

Shandy Hall

Metalepsis: "Reference to something by means of another thing that is remotely related to it, either through a farfetched causal relationship, or through an implied intermediate substitution of terms. Often used for comic effect through its preposterous exaggeration. A metonymical substitution of one word for another which is itself figurative. "

'The Fly'

Uncle Toby and the Widow

Happy Birthday Laurence Sterne!

Why Hari Kunzru refused a literary award sponsored by the xenophobic Mail on Sunday

Time for Canadian Change

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Author rejects prize from 'anti-migrant' newspaper: "Not since 1972 when John Berger gave half his winnings from the Booker to the Black Panthers, and rubbished book prizes as glorified horse races, has literary London witnessed such a dramatic demonstration of writerly conscience."

Moon Lore

where's my jetpack??

excellent Riefenstahl takedown, from 1981 Sight & Sound (pdf)

happy birthday Bjork

and Hawk!

The Full Moon Atlas

The Steely Dan Dictionary

Candy Apple Pee: Mis-Heard Beach Boys Lyrics

City Lights: Vancouver's Neon Heritage

belated birthday greetings to William Cowper :

from "The Winter Morning Walk"

"The cattle mourn in corners where the fence
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep
In unrecumbent sadness. There they wait
Their wonted fodder; not like hung'ring man,
Fretful if unsupply'd; but silent, meek,
And patient of the slow-pac'd swain's delay.
He from the stack carves out th' accustom'd load,
Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft,
His broad keen knife into the solid mass:
Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands,
With such undeviating and even force
He severs it away: no needless care,
Lest storms should overset the leaning pile
Deciduous, or its own unbalanc'd weight."

the sevenups when's this coming out on dvd??

Conrad Black's retinue of insiders, cronies, and clunkers: "Given this cast of characters, it should come as no surprise that over the years the stock of Hollinger International has failed to keep pace with the broad market indexes and many of its peer media companies. After all, putting a bunch of right-wingers with occasionally dubious foreign policy credentials in the position of directing a profit-making business seems almost as illogical as putting a bunch of right-wingers with occasionally dubious business credentials in charge of foreign policy"

Lichen Portrait Gallery

Shadwell vs. Dryden

Happy Birthday Billy Strayhorn!

Lush Life

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes
on the axis
of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails

The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distingue traces
That used to be there
You could see where they'd been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o'clock tales

Then you came along with your siren song
To tempt me to madness
I thought for awhile that your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness
Of a great love for me
Ah yes, I was wrong
Again, I was wrong

Life is lonely again
And only last year
Everything seemed so sure
Now life is awful again
A trough full of hearts could only be a bore

A week in Paris could ease the bite of it
All I care is to smile in spite of it

I'll forget you, I will
While yet you are still
Burning inside my brain
Romance is mush
Stifling those who strive
So I'll live a lush life in some small dive
And there I'll be, while I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely too

The Onion | I Have To Admit: I Love The Nuts: "I'm not a strong-willed squirrel. If you take a can of nuts and dump them in your backyard, you'd better believe I'm gonna eat those nuts. I won't be polite about it, either. I won't share them with the chipmunks or the birds. No, I will behave like a fool to secure those nuts. I'll shove as many nuts in my mouth as I can fit, and chew as fast as possible to make room for more nuts. If I have some leftover nuts, I'll bury them for later. And let me tell you: If I can't find my nuts, there's going to be some frantic chirping and running around, believe me. I don't care if passersby stop, point, and laugh at my actions. They can call me me all sorts of nut-loving names. I won't stop until I find those nuts."

Top Justice Aide Approved Sending Suspect to Syria : "Imad Moustafa, the charge d'affaires at the Syrian Embassy in Washington, has denied Arar was tortured. But he said Syria had no reason to imprison Arar. He said U.S. intelligence officials told their Syrian counterparts that Arar was an al Qaeda member. Syria agreed to take him as a favor and to win goodwill of the United States, he said. "

Silliman's Blog looks at a new book on Gertrude Stein

Spinoza and neuroscience

"My view is that the substance of feelings, the heart of feelings, is really a perception of what has changed in our organism, in our bodies during an emotion. Emotions are unlearned responses to certain classes of stimuli. We are equipped to have emotions, thanks to evolution. When we emote we alter the state of the organism in a rather profound manner - the internal milieu, the viscera, the musculature - and we behave in a particular way. The collection of these changes is the emotion, a rather public affair which helps us deal with a threat (think of fear) or with an opportunity (eat or drink or mate). Feelings are the perception of these changes together with the perception of the object or situation that gave rise to the emotion in the first place. In essence, this is James's idea, although Spinoza envisioned something similar. James was attacked for this proposal."

snowflakes the size of cat's head biscuits falling outside (flash)

Seinfeld Blog

BOOKMAN: (Strict) Yeah, '71. That was my first year on the job.. Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, Abby Hoffman telling everybody to steal books. I don't judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the New York Public Library, fella.

JERRY: Look, Mr. Bookman. I-I returned that book. I remember it very specifically.

BOOKMAN: You're a comedian, you make people laugh.

JERRY: I try.

BOOKMAN: You think this is all a big joke, don't you?

JERRY: (Completely serious) No, I don't.

BOOKMAN: I saw you on T.V. once; I remembered your name - from my list. I looked it up. Sure enough, it checked out. You think because you're a celebrity that somehow the law doesn't apply to you? That you're above the law?

JERRY: Certainly not.

BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, funny boy. Y'know that little stamp, the one that says "New York Public Library"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking, 'What's this guy making such a big stink about old library books?' Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a book, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing books, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to read a book without getting his mind warped! (Pauses) Or, maybe that turns you on, Seinfeld; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies.. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over. Y'got seven days, Seinfeld. (Opens the door to leave. Marion, the librarian, is at Kramer's door. She quickly enters Kramer's apartment and slams the door in fear that Bookman might see her) That is one week!

Happy Birthday Wyndham Lewis

and Johnny Mercer

Happy Birthday Peter Cook!

Armond White on Isaac Julien's "Baltimore" :
"Julien comments on the Matrix phenomenon in Baltimore when Van Peebles’ perambulations cross paths with the stylish Sister’s. In a bit of sci-fi whimsy, the Sister is able to make Van Peebles materialize out of the ether; later, she levitates in one of the museums that feature paintings by Piero della Francesca. Julien’s caprice asserts the power of black imagination within the European institution. He doesn’t merely use black figures to market an old genre the way black performers, including professor Cornel West, are used in the Matrix movies. Julien’s sense of pop history and political necessity emboldens him to assert their presence, their art, as legitimate. (Perhaps the most splendid f/x in any movie this year is a blue plume that mysteriously streaks across all three screens; it’s like an acrylic aerosol spray of graffiti–rude and beautiful ingenuity–made against Baltimore’s concrete-and-clay cityscape.) "

Gordon Burn on US contemporary fiction lost me with the Simpsons dis.

Kenny Dorham: "Kenny Dorham was well known for his quiet, subdued sound. He could play as high and as fast as other trumpet players, but his sound was much softer, earning him the nickname of 'Quiet Kenny.'

His sound had a lot to do with his embochure. You can hear that he plays with his tongue high in his mouth, getting a thin sound. Also, he uses primarily upper air, almost never supporting his sound with lower air.

The combination of the high tongue and lack of lower air support made the sound very light, thin, and soft, giving him the sound that we easily recognize as Kenny Dorham."

listening to Kenny Dorham and the Jazz Prophets play "Autumn in New York" recorded May 31, 1956

Oregon says unlawful labelling of an MP3 is 'terrorism'
"Other acts described as terrorism include (but are not limited to):
* Blocking traffic
* School walkouts
* Computer crime
* Accepting a bribe
* Theft and Burglary
* Unauthorized use of a vehicle
* Unlawful labeling of a videotape
* Unlawful recording of a live performance
* Negotiating a bad check
* Dogfighting
* Delivery of an imitation controlled substance
* Producing fake IDs
* Using another's driver's license
* Drunk driving
* Selling cigarettes to a minor"

'Shoot-to-kill' demand by US: "Ministers have made clear to Washington that the firepower of the mini-gun will not be available during the state visit to Britain. "

Chic Drummer Tony Thompson Dead

Afternoon of a Blakey-ite: "The existence of an 'abysmal' Lee Morgan session suggests another thought. It's difficult to talk about records like The Sixth Sense, The Witch Doctor, and Roots & Herbs without, on the one hand, seeming to overvalue them from enthusiasm for the idiom and for the players' styles, or, on the other, making them insignificant by reducing them to idiomatic and stylistic examples. One is in danger of becoming the pathetic and unwilling hackworker of one of the most unproductive of all critical tasks: contriving to set up an artificial balance between history and appreciation. It's better to love the aesthetic object, to see nothing but it at the moment when one talks about it, and in this way to refuse connoisseurship and spurn the aloof embrace of measure. At the same time, the innocence of a pre-intellectual relationship to the object would be an empty pose. One is left asserting, rather helplessly but also with a certain confidence, the primacy of the pleasure the object gives, a pleasure that the act of talking about the object would perpetuate"

ms page of Balzac

ms page of Thomas Bernhard

Frank Rich: Angels, Reagan and AIDS in America: "Jon Stewart, as always, could be counted on to crystallize that point when discussing the fictional 'live in sin' line last week on 'The Daily Show.' 'As critics point out, Reagan never said anything like that,' Mr. Stewart said. 'In fact he didn't even mention the word AIDS in public until seven years into his presidency. So you can see why people are upset: CBS made someone totally indifferent look callous.'"

Louis Black, via below, eloquently defends Tarantino

Viggo seems like a nice guy

GreenCine Daily terrific movie blog

NDP could form next opposition

The Return of the Giant Hogweed

The Amazing Story of Kudzu the vine that ate the South

Red River rebellion:
"The situation in the Canadian Northwest in 1884 was very different from what it had been in Red River in 1869-70. In addition to the disappearance of the herds, the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway was nearing completion, and the federal North-West Mounted Police were a strong presence. But in one unfortunate respect, things were all too much the same: Ottawa was still having trouble hearing the voice of the West, particularly that of the Metis. Frustrated at the slow pace of negotiations over the place of the Metis in the province, Riel, on March 8, issued a ten-point bill of rights for the North-West Territories. The manifesto included provisions recognizing the rights of Amerindians and white settlers as well as the rights of the Metis. When Ottawa did not respond, Riel proclaimed a provisional government on March 19 (the name day of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of the Metis) and seized the parish church at Batoche, on the Saskatchewan River. Within a week, with the help of the new railway, federal troops were on the scene."

Louis Riel executed, 1885

British Garden Birds

James Boswell heads south

ABCNEWS.com : Woman Just Can't Shake Flock of Crows

Joey Ramone Place

bad map
"After a picture of the lobby of the still-under-construction building ran in the Citizen yesterday, eagle-eyed readers noticed that the Queen Charlotte Islands off the west coast were missing and that Vancouver Island had suddenly become a peninsula. Further, that new peninsula no longer dipped below the 49th Parallel.
Yet, while the map missed out on those bits of Canada, it did not fail to incorporate what appeared to be a new province: Alaska"

John D. MacDonald

Owl

The making of apple butter

Blue Ridge blog

Sir Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875) an eminent scientist

Happy Birthday Sir Charles Lyell:

"General Position of Drift with extinct Mammalia in Valleys.
Discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville.
Flint Implements found also at St. Acheul, near Amiens.
Curiosity awakened by the systematic Exploration of the
Brixham Cave.
Flint Knives in same, with Bones of extinct Mammalia.
Superposition of Deposits in the Cave.
Visits of English and French Geologists to Abbeville and Amiens.

Fluvio-marine Strata, with Flint Implements, near Abbeville.
Marine Shells in same.
Cyrena fluminalis.
Mammalia.
Entire Skeleton of Rhinoceros.
Flint Implements, why found low down in Fluviatile Deposits.
Rivers shifting their Channels.
Relative Ages of higher and lower-level Gravels.
Section of Alluvium of St. Acheul.
Two Species of Elephant and Hippopotamus coexisting with Man
in France.
Volume of Drift, proving Antiquity of Flint Implements.
Absence of Human Bones in tool-bearing Alluvium, how explained.
Value of certain Kinds of negative Evidence tested thereby.
Human Bones not found in drained Lake of Haarlem. "

amazing snapshot archive

where lego comes from (flash)

Equanimity notes Canada's quiet one-party handover from Reaganesque "little guy" phony Chretien, who actually gets credit for keeping us out of the coalition as if it was some brave thing, to Paul Martin, who probably wouldn't have.

film moratorium in home of realism (olefactory?): "DUMBO - Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - has become an extremely popular backdrop, thanks to its gritty urban realism, old factory buildings and sweeping views of Manhattan and the East River. "

Newswriting.com - The 100 Worst "Groaners"

walking all of Manhattan

Bender in Vegas

Catalog of Birds: "'Then comes a further difficulty, the reproduction of timbres. If I want to reproduce on piano, let's say, the song of a garden warbler or a nightingale, I need to find a complex of pitches for every melody-note. Each note of the melody is furnished with a chord. It consists quite simply of conforming to reality, not only to the birdsongs, but also to everything surrounding them: the landscapes, fragrances, colors, and above all, the passing of the hours during the day and night. It's very complicated. "

And a nice pic too: "As snails are wont to do, these sulfide-armored creatures live sedentary lives. This species doesn't even bother to eat. Instead, the animals gain energy from symbiotic bacteria that live within the cells of a gland in their esophagus, says Waren."

bad toon rising

from "Breathless"

SAINT JEAN Seberg, actress hounded to death by the FBI, born today

Let them sing it for you

flash Omelet Recipe

Orange Penguins

Burying brutal truths about war:

"Noticeably absent, though, has been the New York Times, which, according to an electronic search, has never even referenced the Blade series or its historic findings in its print pages. Asked about the omission, a Times spokeswoman did not return calls by deadline.

The Times' peculiar silence has raised eyebrows in some journalistic circles. 'I'm appalled the New York Times hasn't run anything,' says investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. 'Not even a wire story?' Additionally, for three weeks none of the network news operations or all-news cable channels picked up the Blade's report. Asked if he's surprised by the lack of media pickup, Hersh answers, 'I'm enraged, are you kidding?' Hersh, who won a Pulitzer for uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, where U.S. troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, suggests the Blade's work has been ignored because of a chill that's in the media air today, with troops on the ground in Iraq, and the White House claiming too much attention is being paid to bad news. "

Tiger Force must read Vietnam series from Toledo Blade

NPR : Sewer Cleaners, Dirty Work: "Americans' perception of sewer workers, Speer says, 'is largely defined by one 1950s-era television show' -- The Honeymooners, in which comedians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney played bus driver Ralph Kramden and his pal Ed Norton, a sewer worker. Real-life sewer workers 'aren't above joking about the work they do,' says Speer -- but they contend their lives are nothing like a TV sit-com. "

The Wine of Life: The Meaning of Drainage:
"This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black. It moved fast but clumsy. It could have been lazy, or old or stupid. Profane thought maybe it was tired of living.
The chase had been going on since nightfall. They were in a section of 48-inch pipe, his back was killing him. Profane hoped the alligator would not run off into something smaller, somewhere he couldn't follow. Because then he would have to kneel in the sludge, aim half-blind and fire., all quickly, before the cocodrilo got out of range. Angel held the flashlight, but he had been drinking wine, and would crawl along behind Profane absent-mindedly, letting the beam waver all of the pipe. Profane could only see the coco in occasional flashes.
From time to time his quarry would half-turn, coy, enticing. A little sad. Up above it must have been raining. A continual thin drool sounded behind them at the last sewer opening. Ahead was darkness. The sewer tunnel here was torturous and built decades ago. Profane was hoping for a straightaway. He could make an easy kill there. If he fired anywhere in this stretch of short, crazy angles there'd be danger from ricochets. "

Brooklyn Bound

The Norton Anthology

Neil's Garage

Happy Birthday Shakey!!

You wake up
in the morning
And the sun's comin' up.
Its been up for hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
It's been up
for hours
and hours
and hours
And you light up
the stove
And the coffee cup, its hot.
And the orange juice is cold,
cold, cold
Monday morning,
Wake up,
wake up,
wake up,
wake up
Its time to go,
Time to go
to work.

New Marianne Moore collected

Drew Gardner's Blog assays Wilder's "Apartment" as well as George and I's reading

Armor-Plated Snail Discovered in Deep Sea: "Waren said that when he first examined the sea snail, the animal's magnetized scales kept sticking to his forceps. He guessed that an iron mineral was involved. "

Songs of ourselves: " In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument -- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us -- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us."

Happy Birthday Rene Clair!

No Nanaimo record stores reviewed but still a good resource

Alberta Wheat Pool

Grain Elevators

Buffalo Grain Elevators by Michael Smith

Buffalo Grain Elevator Project : "When LeCorbusier saw the pure cylindrical forms of Buffalo's concrete grain elevators he exclaimed: 'The first fruits of the new age!' "

Listen to Old Time Music from 78s

good Night time photos from the area just south of K's

wild boys of Vernon: "'I spent a lot of my former life in the bush,' Stinson told the Vancouver Province. 'I once met a person who hadn't been out in society since 1918. We took him out in 1976 and he flipped out seeing cars and stoplights. So is it possible, you bet it is.' "

Happy 18th Brumaire!
"But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. "

Colour Order Systems in Art and Science

Radio Free Flatbush
"He drives a cab by day. At night, he broadcasts Haitian gospel music somewhere between Flatbush and Crown Heights with the help of a used, low-power FM transmitter that he bought from a friend for $1500. Last Saturday night he was parked on 87.9 FM.

'My music is my ministry,' he says with a thick Creole accent and gravelly voice. 'But there's no one in Brooklyn who knows my place. Even my wife, I can'tt tell her. I am always traveling. I don't even get time to sleep.'"

Soup

Popsicle art

Fort Tryon

Van Cortlandt Park

did most of this between the bridges tour myself, but would still have been fun

Lunar Eclipse

Alfred Hitchcock mosaics

Michael Bracewell hosts Mark. E Smith: "I remembered too late that these kinds of events - 'In Conversations', bookshop appearances and so forth - are wholly bourgeois in their conception: they presuppose a complicity between the audience, subject and interviewer, in which a kind of broadsheet notion of edification is the predominant tone. And I was face to face with the man who had written Prole Art Threat in 1979 and thrown Courtney Love off a tour bus. A man who preferred to get arrested by the LAPD rather than put out his fag on a plane. Smith had lambasted all the institutions of middle-class popular culture, from open-air festivals to student vegans; and as his greatest hero was Wyndham Lewis, so he assumed his best-known public mask of being The Enemy. No matter that I'd seen The Fall maybe 20 times, no matter that I listened to the records with unceasing enthusiasm, and had written about them as vital works of contemporary art. I came across like Wilfrid Hyde-White trying to interview Eminem"

Purple frog delights scientists

Bellona Times: "Sofia Coppola wants to make herself look good the way Woody Allen used to make himself look good, but she's unable or unwilling to provide her stand-in with any distinguishing marks."

Allodox reviews overrated Lost In Translation: "Saw the movie at the crappy early 90s theater on Third Ave, around 11th St. 4 overlit floors. But the ticketseller back and forth courteous in an unforced way - pain reduction all around. On the way out, very humid, with fast thick fog passing across upper buildings and lights. Inflected greys and sharp whites. Some reflections from all the glass further uptown. Could just sort of glimpse the red-lit spire of a big gothic insurance building on Park South.

The new traffic signals and iconic pedestrian signage reduce the number of differences between Tokyo and New York."

craven realpolitik from Canada's national newspaper: "There is a larger issue. The United States has invited Canada to join in creating the so-called North American Security Perimeter. The success of that perimeter depends on close interdepartmental co-operation among the many police, intelligence, customs and immigration agencies in both countries."

Multi-intelligence matters: "Mr. Easter told reporters yesterday he did not know how the Americans obtained the lease, but said it did not come from the RCMP, and might have been obtained by foreign intelligence agencies.
'That particular document, there are multi-intelligence agencies involved in these matters,' he said.
'Just because it happens to be a lease does not necessarily mean it came from Canadian sources,' he said. 'Of course, I'm worried about it. I'm always concerned about illegal matters.'"

Diplomacy: "'I don't know if diplomacy blinds them to the obvious,' said Mr. McTeague. 'But it's pretty clear when a person is busted up and kept in those kind of conditions and he's trying to signal to you with three of his tormentors who happen to be around him, that there is something wrong.'"

The Soft Power Argument: "Sampson suggested that the Canadian government decided to take a soft approach to his case so as not to anger officials in Riyadh.
'I'm not convinced the soft power argument has worked in my case or other cases,' he said. 'If the Canadian government wanted to effect an earlier release, they have to be prepared to much more publicly declaim the government's concerns.'
'Because of the political clout that Saudi Arabia supposedly has, people were hiding behind the soft-power argument to do nothing.'
Saudi Arabia has rejected a formal Canadian request for an investigation into Sampson's imprisonment. They insist the torture did not happen and that Sampson is still guilty of the bombing."

NATIONAL POST: "Reporters asked Bill Graham, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, how this document came to be in the possession of the FBI, but he had nothing to offer but his own confusion.
'If I could answer that question, I wouldn't be Foreign Minister, I'd be the divine. There are many things that are unanswerable,' he replied."

Democracy Now! | Canadian Man Deported by U.S. Details Torture in Syria: "On Wednesday, officials told the Washington Post anonymously that the U.S. knowingly sends suspects abroad to be tortured. One official said 'The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards,' while another said, 'Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees.'"

Continues clear and cold here. The thick frost via the brushwork of Denzil Best w/George Shearing ca. 1951(thank you Rod) doesn't begin to budge before full sun hits it early afternoon.

A walk with Gilbert White (PDF)

Water proof: Dinosaur secret revealed: "This is where the mystery comes in. In many places, including Texas and Korea, researchers have found sauropod footprints -- but only from the front feet. Henderson, whose work combines paleontology with biomechanics, says the dinosaurs were floating, and were able to punt along the bottom with their front feet."

Baltic Light

Found the catalogue for this show on the sale table at the National Gallery bookstore in DC.

Deal for Nanaimo band is short on land, long on weasel words

Field's Chip Shop and lots more from the Amber Collective

Las Vegas sign graveyard

more on the Gunpowder Plot

"I am a Syrian-born Canadian. "
Canada's complicity with the appalling treatment of this man by US and Syrian officials is shameful and scandalous. I experienced an extremely minor version of this when I was "refused" at the border trying to get to Portland, Ore. last month--I was fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated for no stated reason--and it was trauma and humiliation enough. The anguish of this man, as innocent as I was but unprotected by whiteness, can scarcely be imagined.

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union: "36-G (Buffalo, N.Y.)-Cheerios, Kix, Total, Lucky Charms, Wheaties"

Found photos

Kind words on George and myself's St Mark's reading via THE PHILLY SOUND: New Poetry from gypsy queen bowling sensation Cori Copp...

Many thanks to everyone who organised and came to my readings, but especially to George Stanley and Bernadette Mayer, the poets I was fortunate enough to read with. Their shining models of sustained attentiveness could not help but flatter and enhance my efforts.

Home to this bright clear cold fall here after 80 Fahrenheit in Fort Tryon the day before yesterday. Not one Protestant firework last night, though a hundred years ago...

In Scotland (late 60's/early 70's) I remember huge bonfires, Bengal matches (which were regular matches with huge heads which burned in different colours--sold to children for thruppence literally!-- wrapped in a swatch of a provincial newspaper from the midlands, a red elephant on the yellow box) and being given cocoa and a baked potato. Helicopters would fly up and down the UK photographing the bonfires for TV. The implied assertion of the crown's legitimacy very much in the picture.