out & about

it's all Bob Hope all day on TCM today, culminating in the Rosetta Stone of Kevin Davies studies, "Call Me Bwana"...

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

(thanks AY!)

new EPC John Wieners Author Page

You Talk Of Going But Don't Even Have A Suitcase (A Series of Repetitions)

I will be an old man sometime And live in a dark room somewhere. I will think of this night someplace the rain falling on stone. There will be no one near no whisper on the street only this song of old yearning and the longing to be young with you together on some street. Now is the time for retreat, This is the last chance. This is not the last chance. Why only yesterday I lay drugged on the dark bed while they came and went as the wind and they shall come again to bear me down into that pit there is no returning from. Old age, disaster, doom. It shall be as this room. With you by the sink, pinching your face in the mirror. Time is as a river and I shall forget this night, its joy. You shall disappear down the road and I shall moan your name in the pillow, while candles burn outside in windows of strange houses to mark our fame.

Pencil sculptures

Interesting Letterhead Designs

nice to see Donald Roller Wilson is still at it...

some books on walking ....

The Winter War

walking with Shasta

Animal Experts Debunk the Alpha-Dog Myth

The debate has its roots in 1940s studies of captive wolves gathered from various places that, when forced to live together, naturally competed for status. Acclaimed animal behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel dubbed the male and female who won out the alpha pair. As it turns out, this research was based on a faulty premise: wolves in the wild, says L. David Mech founder of the Minnesota-based International Wolf Center, actually live in nuclear families, not randomly assembled units, in which the mother and father are the pack leaders and their offspring's status is based on birth order. Mech, who used to ascribe to alpha-wolf theory but has reversed course in recent years, says the pack's hierarchy does not involve anyone fighting to the top of the group, because just like in a human family, the youngsters naturally follow their parents' lead...

Remembering Anchorage In The Seventies

Macabre kids’ book art by Gojin Ishihara

Glenn Greenwald

...the bulk of political discussion in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures focuses not on our failing, sagging, pointless, civilian-massacring, soon-to-be-decade-old war, but rather on the Treasonous Evil of WikiLeaks for informing the American people about what their war entails. While it's true that WikiLeaks should have been much more careful in redacting the names of Afghan sources, watching Endless War Supporters prance around with righteous concern for Afghan lives being endangered by the leak is really too absurd to bear. You know what endangers innocent Afghan lives? Ten years of bombings, checkpoint shootings, due-process-free hit squads, air attacks, drones, night raids on homes, etc. etc....

Down to the Last Cream Puff

"The second most profitable national market for McDonald’s is now France. The Great Satan of dietary mondialisation is now woven into the fabric of French life and, while Steinberger has no taste for fast-food malbouffe, he also has no time for the facile notion that this is a story about Americanisation: ‘The quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin’ it – the architects of McDonald’s strategy in France were French.’ The French buy ‘Les Big Macs’ because they like them. McDonald’s French executives have successfully argued that it is a French company, supplying emerging French needs, adjusting its facilities to French habits, and sourcing its beef, bread and condiments from impeccably French sources. One of McDonald’s advertising campaigns posed the question ‘D’où vient ton McDo?’, since the company was happy to supply the answer..."

Records

Willis Avenue Bridge on the East River - a set on Flickr

The new Willis Avenue Bridge was transported up the East River via barge this morning towards its new home in Harlem...

This is what Harper wants for Canada
Too many laws, too many prisoners

Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for...

Kasper Sonne Nine letter words (Rubik's cube revisited), 2007

Mad Men Official Site - AMC