Books Do Furnish a Room

"The story of Anthony Cima is the book lover's nightmare: The 87-year-old stuffed 10,000 books into a one-room San Diego apartment, and when a 5.4-magnitude earthquake hit just off the coast of Oceanside in July 1986, he was buried beneath them and barely survived."
 

farewell Barbara Bel Geddes, Miss Ellie on Dallas, "Midge" in Vertigo, "Maggie the Cat" on Broadway, the wife who does in her husband with a leg of lamb and then feeds it to the cops on Alfred Hitchcock Presents...

 

The Bacon Show

One bacon recipe per day, every day, forever...

(via Metafilter) 

(Popular Characteristics 1800)

(Henry Adams)


"Good country this
for lazy fellows,
(wrote Wilson from

Kentucky); they plant
corn, turn their
pigs into the

woods and in
the autumn feed upon
corn and pork.

They lounge about
the rest of the year."
But sometime between

then and now,
despite flip books,
Jack Spicer bootlegs,

Miltown, Motown, Milton
the race of tavern
loafers, customs-house flaneurs

wall holder-uppers
& Virginia eye gougers
died out, wagons

full of keeners,
enthusiasts, stereoptical
estimaters & paint-chip

matchers darkened
the passes, planting apples
for roughage not cider.

*

"That free-born
Rhode Islanders ought
never to submit

to be priest-ridden,
nor to pay for
the privilege

of travelling
on the highway."
Better indeed stranded

up to our
rusticated Yankee necks
in yellow shit

than travel
to Providence
under such pretenses;

wearing a horse collar,
a T-shirt reading
"Citizen X"--

better a beanie,
a New Year's diaper,
a Brownie uniform,

and the bones
of any shiny Hussar--
uncowed by Miranda v. Arizona

or the Second Amendment
or the by-God
Yosemite Sam mudflaps

hanging from my ears--
attempts to stroll unbidden
into my library,

garage or sugar shack
will end up as struts
in the drug tunnel

that gently winds
between Lasqueti
and Narraganset:--

Canadians Hate Freedom, Too

"And if you want to blue-sky a little bit, if that eventuality was to occur, the government would probably move in with some pretty stiff measures and not meet much public resistance."

(when bees are in hives)

(cont.)


Just but one bee
on the paler
other kind of

sweet-pea, orange
chevron very
circa '83, &

you'd think the boys
at Last Call Towing
would be glad to

see their girlriends
(Wednesday PM
half-cloudy

scented August)
but they won't climb
down or let go

their pneumatic
bolt-tighteners
long enough

and won't discuss
who said what to
who last weekend

on innertubes
that flattered them
but made us look

like our dads, tits
up on the couch
and these maroon

uniforms itch
more and more as
threadbare summer

wears out its buzz
and welcome mat
and baseball hat.

UK's oldest fountain restored

"Minister for tourism Patricia Ferguson MSP said: "I think this was built to show the power and the confidence that James V had, and I think he very much wanted to say to people "I'm here, look at me". I suspect that now that it's been restored, it will actually have the same effect in Linlithgow.""

thanks to Daphne for this one 

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir

"All of a sudden, he pulled out of his pocket a string of firecrackers and asked, 'Where can we set these off?' "

Observations

on the Bills of Mortality:
on the leaves of Sage:
on small living Flies in the powder of Cantharides:
of insects bred in Dew:
of Virginian Silk-Bottoms:
of the parts, and anatomy, of fishes:
of Barnacles:
of the calcin'd powder of Toads:
of an outlandish Deer-Skin, and hair:
of the parts of Vipers:
of Stones taken out of the Heart of a Man:
of young Vipers, that they do not eat holes
through their old ones Bellies
as is commonly affirm'd.

from "The History of the Royal Society" Thomas Sprat 1667
quoted in "Pandaemonium" by Humphrey Jennings

from Darwin's Origin Of Species chapter Vl:--

"It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or in any degree, tends to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed."  

[ mytinygarden ]

splendid, intensive Flash site of the bugs in someone's yard:--

(via Plep)

 

Lambden Milligan's petition to Sec. Stanton


from EX PARTE MILLIGAN

(re: Lincoln's Civil War suspension of habeus corpus & military tribunals)

"This nation, as experience has proved, cannot always remain at peace, and has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln; and if this right is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate. If our fathers had failed to provide for just such a contingency, they would have been false to the trust reposed in them. They knew -- the history of the world told them -- the nation they were founding, be its existence short or long, would be involved in war; how often or how long continued, human foresight could not tell; and that unlimited power, wherever lodged at such a time, was especially hazardous to freemen. For this, and other equally weighty reasons, they secured the inheritance they had fought to maintain, by incorporating in a written constitution the safeguards which time had proved were essential to its preservation. Not one of these safeguards can the President, or Congress, or the Judiciary disturb, except the one concerning the writ of habeas corpus."

great-sounding Sergio Leone museum exhibit:--


"So on loan from Eastwood himself is the iconic poncho he wore as the Man With No Name, as well as the wooden gun grips decorated with metal snakes that he used in the films. These were the same grips he'd used as Rowdy Yates in the TV series 'Rawhide': The actor, who dedicated his classic western 'Unforgiven' to Leone and director Don Siegel, had brought them to Hollywood for good luck.

Though the curators couldn't manage to pry the bed Claudia Cardinale used in 'Once Upon a Time in the West' from the gentleman in northern Italy who's currently sleeping in it, they did get the Winchester that Gian Maria Volontes bad guy used to put some holes in that poncho, a rifle that took a while to get into this country. 'We're one of the few organizations,' Frayling says dryly, 'importing firearms into the U.S.'"

 

"Advice from a Caterpillar" from

The Many Faces of Alice,

"the process and product
of a fourth grade class study of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, its author,
Lewis Carroll, and its many illustrators"

includes great puppet theatre quicktime movies, hypertext annotations &c. :--

"The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then...'"

(thanks to the Protection Island crew)

"a blood-spattered Canadarm..."

"Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.

As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process. That so much about the vehicle design is bizarre and confused is the direct result of the Shuttle's little-remembered role as a military vehicle during the Cold War. "

from

(When bees are in hives)

from

Bracton: De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliae
(Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England
attributed to Henry of Bratton, c. 1210-1268)


For if they settle
in my tree
they are no more mine--

before I shut them
into a hive--
than are the birds

who make their nest there,
and therefore
if another hives them

he will be their owner.
A swarm that flies
out of my hive

is taken to be mine
so long as it remains
in my sight

and pursuit is not impossible,
otherwise it becomes
the property of the taker.

trippy single-cell silica leak forms:--Ernst Haeckel: Die Radiolarien (1862)


(from MetaFilter where there's more)

some deadly unreachable & far from ripe Vancouver blackberries from Adam Harrison; Nanaimo's are good to go, ran into a couple of folks picking in the lee of our hinge and their pails were 3/4 full, leaning over to check, that great wafting smell...
 

interesting guest writer at Altercation

"Although liberals accomplished great things during the first three quarters of the 20th century, thereafter they stumbled badly. When they encountered resistance to black civil rights among poor and working class whites--some of it racially motivated some of it not--rather than dealing with the resistance politically, liberal elites sought to impose solutions from above by taking advantage of their privileged access to judicial and executive power. Then, rather than telling Americans honestly about the likely costs and consequences of a military intervention in Southeast Asia and trust them to make the correct decisions, they used lies and deception to trick voters into supporting an unwinnable war that was fought mostly by the poor and working classes; and when the war came too close to home, they quickly forgot about the lower class combatants and their sacrifices they had made. Then after liberals' attempt to support guns and butter set off hyperinflation to erode the real value of wages, they callously thought up new ways to spend the windfall of tax revenue rather than adjust tax brackets to relieve the unsustainable burden on the middle class. Finally, when faced with political revolt because of these misguided policies, they retreated into arcane ideologies to wage a rearguard cultural insurgency from the safety of the ivory tower. Is it any wonder that liberals lost the public trust?"

many, many versions of Ghost Riders in the Sky--including Burl Ives, Shadows, Roy Rogers & c. I remember a fine, unrecorded instrumental version played by the Dick Damron Band (my pal Vic Bateman on bass)in the hotels & beer halls of Edmonton, winter of '77...

(via the newly-located gmtPlus9)