http://media.theworld.org/pod/geoquiz/121820128.mp3
http://www.theworld.org/2012/12/india-protects-its-most-valuable-tea/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Darjeeling, North tip of West Bengal
http://media.theworld.org/pod/geoquiz/121820128.mp3
http://www.theworld.org/2012/12/india-protects-its-most-valuable-tea/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
Monday, December 17, 2012
I'll be your mirror
Let me just continue this week with a strange theme of fraternal dedications. First of all Lou Reed is a rock n Roll god. Anyone who denies this is just ignorant. Modern music would be no where without him and he is still alive.
I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you're home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you
I find it hard to believe you don't know
The beauty that you are
But if you don't let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won't be afraid
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you
I'll be your mirror
I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you're home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you
I find it hard to believe you don't know
The beauty that you are
But if you don't let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won't be afraid
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you
I'll be your mirror
FF MILES
OK, but everyone needs a hobby.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQlxtC69e3mCmkr9nn0awF-AVvH0UqsT2uMblF1x8z6uZ2GrZSrV0vXT5RYBJ9ansTz-t9HwYgIMaPsicUT0zEU7VXJ3nJvmRy72wYF4_kuh4Uej1LDeswfS6MFuxcjbR9tXE5/s1600/cartoon.jpg
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQlxtC69e3mCmkr9nn0awF-AVvH0UqsT2uMblF1x8z6uZ2GrZSrV0vXT5RYBJ9ansTz-t9HwYgIMaPsicUT0zEU7VXJ3nJvmRy72wYF4_kuh4Uej1LDeswfS6MFuxcjbR9tXE5/s1600/cartoon.jpg
Sunday, December 16, 2012
What about this guy?
And his name is Graham. Graham Hughes
http://www.theodysseyexpedition.com/
I'd have loved to have done this first and I love the Vexillological angle.
http://www.theodysseyexpedition.com/
I'd have loved to have done this first and I love the Vexillological angle.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
For my Father
I've read this poem a dozen times and each time I get something new from it. Poetry is funny. So simple but yet so much like sunlight. Always Changing.
I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and —
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and —
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Surprise - Yoko Ono is out of her mind
http://www.wearedesignbureau.com/projects/imagine-all-the-people-wearing-yoko-ono-fashions-for-men/
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
The Leaders of China
I've read this, and read this and reread this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?hp
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Of Vice and Men by Garrison Keiller
http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/vice-men
I know what he means.
I came along toward the tail end of a grand old tradition of
manly self-destructiveness in American writing—Fitzgerald, Hemingway,
Faulkner, O'Neill, Cheever, Carver, Tennessee Williams. And then of
course there was Dylan Thomas, the Welshman.
So when I determined at the age of 18 to become a writer, I accepted my obligation to smoke many packs of cigarettes a day and learn how to drink gin and whiskey in goodly amounts, and to shun exercise done for the sake of exercise. No running. Writers were not runners. It was too awkward to run and smoke at the same time. We sat, brooding, and lit up and refilled the glass.
I was a healthy young man who enjoyed tennis and soft-ball and basketball, but I made the leap from beer to bourbon, skipped the low-tar smokes in favor of Luckies, Camels, Pall Malls, and, when feeling flush, Gauloises. I drank a gallon of coffee a day, all because that's what writers did.
When I was 24, I visited New York City, angling for a writing job, and went to the San Remo where the poets hung out, and the Cedar Tavern where the painters were. I studied how they sat, how they held a glass and exhaled the smoke cloud. I perched in the lobby of the Algonquin for 3 hours with a gin and tonic imagining that E.B. White would walk in and I'd buy him a drink and we'd become pals, which sometimes happens when two guys drink together.
My heroes in the New Yorker were unabashed alcoholics. The people in their stories were always sitting down for drinks, and cigarettes were more common than semicolons. If my writing was not yet on a par with Benchley's or Thurber's, I still felt I was on track, stylewise.
I was an English major at the University of Minnesota and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression I became the editor of the campus literary magazine. I hiked around campus in jeans, white shirt, corduroy jacket, Red Wing work boots, and a broad-brimmed hat, with a pack of smokes in my pocket. If you hadn't anything to say but wanted to appear thoughtful, you reached for the pack and shook a cigarette out. The ceremony of lighting up said more than words: It was thought in motion.
Back then, a pack cost 35 cents and a drink was a dollar. John Berryman, James Wright, and Allen Tate were on the faculty. Mr. Tate was 68 when I took his graduate poetry seminar. He was a slim, elegant man with a Southern patrician accent, author of "Ode to the Confederate Dead," a pal of Robert Penn Warren and Hart Crane. He chain-smoked in class, so we did too. The whole English department reeked of smoke and was proudly alcoholic—anyone who didn't do both was considered an interloper, possibly a Mormon.
In Mr. Wright's humanities class, he stood at a lectern with an empty tuna fish can for an ashtray and chain-smoked through his lectures on Dickens and Whitman and Dickinson, which he delivered through a haze of hangover. He always looked pale and haggard. The line "Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom" was written by a man who felt most at ease with a drink in his hand and smoke coming out of his mouth.
As for Mr. Berryman, his readings of The Dream Songs were famous for their high drama, the slurred speech, the poet slumped on the lectern, the sudden lurches into reminiscence, the muttered asides to friends in the audience, the poet almost on the verge of collapse. I sat in the front row, off to the side, and watched the great man; to me his greatness and his drunkenness seemed intertwined. A true artist must engage with dark forces, and this man was engaging them in his own body in full public view. Fate had driven him to this drunken state, just as it had driven him to create timeless verse, and he could no more give up whiskey than he could stifle his muse.
After the reading, I hiked over to the Mixer's bar in Seven Corners, as I did several nights a week, where English grad students and instructors hung out. I ordered a scotch and soda and tapped my Pall Mall on a fingernail and lit it. Then I slid into a booth with Roland and Arnie and Rob and worked on developing my writerly persona, which, if not as dark as Berryman's—blighted at the age of 12 by his father's suicide by gunshot outside the boy's bedroom window—was nonetheless as dark as I could make it.
I had no sorrows beyond what any normal 25-year-old Minnesotan would go through—scarce money, absurd self-consciousness, cold weather—and so I needed the bitter cigarette and the sting of alcohol to create a little drama for myself. In the movies, a man lights a cigarette before he goes off to face death, and after he has faced it, he pours himself a drink. It was dramatic, sitting in the booth, going through a whole pack of smokes, and when someone said, "Another?" and pointed to my glass, I of course said yes. That was what writers did.
I had, a few years before, been a YMCA camp counselor. I was not one anymore. I had decamped and moved on.
I think of them now—Wright dead at 52, Berryman at 57, Tate lingering on to 79—as the elders of an extinct tribe. Nobody smokes at English department parties anymore, and hard liquor is nowhere to be seen, only wine. A writer wouldn't hesitate to spend the evening nursing a glass of club soda, wouldn't worry that it marked him as a freak.
I quit smoking in 1982—four packs of Pall Malls a day was my quota, then shazam, nothing—and went off alcohol in 2005. Both times I worried that I had cursed myself and would never write again and would need to find another career, perhaps as an inspirational speaker. But life went on much as before, except that mornings were brighter and I got to stop worrying about whether I should quit or not. That is enough reason to quit: to take the issue off the table. I who once created billows of tobacco smoke now find it irritating. The other night I absentmindedly sipped from my wife's glass of pinot grigio and shuddered at the taste—like battery acid.
And now I trot off to the Mayo Clinic down U.S. Highway 52 from where I live in St. Paul, and they run me through rigorous tests. I seem, at age 69—knock on wood, bonk bonk bonk—not to have paid a price for those years of dissolution. An MRI here, a CT scan there, an echocardiogram, an internist listening with a stethoscope—from all reports, my heart is thumping away like a teenager's, the arteries are clear, blood pressure is excellent, no spots darken the lungs. (Follow those tips to Live Longer, Look Sharper, and Feel Better at any age.)
Meanwhile, old friends who were athletes in high school and who worked hard to keep fit and eschewed smoking and drinking are complaining of serious stuff. These are skinny men who for 40 years have been putting on sweatpants and T-shirts and jogging a few miles. They are now staring at imminent hip replacements and unaccountably suffering from bad cholesterol and high blood pressure.
Glum talk at a party: 69-year-old men, lifelong runners and mountain climbers, now contemplating an operating table and an orthopedic surgeon whacking at them with a hammer and chisel. And then the OxyContin and long weeks of rehab. They look at me, a man whose main exercise is walking swiftly through airport concourses and whose joints work smoothly and who has thrived on a diet heavy in animal fats. The indolent prosper while the industrious exercisers endure blood full of triglycerides and 80 percent arterial blockage.
Ah, the utter unfairness of life.
Here I am, a guy who has earned a good living by weaving little fictions, and all around me at Mayo are southern Minnesota farmers who have worked to put food on our tables. You see in the bodies of old farmers what a brutal and punishing life it is, even now. Men my age with big, gnarled farmer hands, maybe a finger or two missing, beefy men with big bellies who groan as they rise from their chairs and lumber stiff legged across a floor toward the urology department to take the urine flow test. Good Christian men with broad competence in horticulture, veterinary medicine, finance, soil science, and small motor repair, who used to piss like horses in the weeds by the silo and now dribble and tinkle, due to an enlarged prostate, which might necessitate a biopsy, which is like hornets up your butt.
I grew up with farm boys. When we were all in junior high together, they were slender, pliable runners and jumpers, but 50 years of riding a tractor and wrestling with hogs and shoveling manure and killing time in winter has made them large and slow and achy. There are not many health clubs out on the rural route. Pilates has not taken hold among dairy farmers. And here I am with my delicate keyboard hands and long stride, walking past Urology to go read an eye chart in Ophthalmology.
I inherited pretty good genes—my mother is still motoring around at age 96, my dad lived to be 88—and then, too, I had the wherewithal to quit poisoning myself before I fell over. My friend the poet Bill Holm fell down and died at the age of 65. He was a man who maintained his regimen of whiskey and Marlboros even after his heart surgery, and who scorned moderation as the strategy of fear. Though all of us were stunned by his death, nobody was terribly surprised: What killed him was that romance of the artist dancing with death, living headlong, hurtling into the dark, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, a pork roast in the oven, a massive slab of pie on the counter. He never counted calories, never took sparkling water if beer was available.
Bill was the last of the tribe whom I knew personally: All my other writer pals are health conscious—watch their weight, exercise, pursue moderation. Bill was determined to be iconic, a Dionysian bull, a two-fisted foot-on-the-gas-pedal lover of life. I sat in the basement of a Lutheran church and listened to his funeral service, which was going on upstairs. It was a fine service and we all walked out into the sunny March day in 2009 missing that gentle 6'6" bear with the beard and mop of white hair, the red face.
I wished Bill could have turned away from his resolute path to the cliff. Old age would have been a blessing for him. (For you, too? Start with these 6 Easy Ways to Live Longer.) He had much more to write—about Iceland and American politics and life on the prairie. He had come to despise teaching, which he did for most of his life, and he was overjoyed to retire. Then to fall down in the Sioux Falls airport a year after retirement, having spent most of the winter in Arizona, was a cruel, cruel end.
But I understood what drove him. And if I had been told at Mayo that I had 6 months to a year left on earth, I might have returned to the tribe to relive my 20s.
Why not?
I'd walk away from abstinence. Trot down to the liquor store and pick up a carton of Luckies (if they still make them) and a pint of Johnnie Walker and go home to relearn the finger ballet of the cigarette and wean myself back onto alcohol. Fill up the room with smoke and feel the warm, sloshy pleasures of inebriation. An eye-opener in the morning, a martini for lunch, or two—who's counting?—and at 5 p.m. sharp, the sun is over the yardarm, the bar is open, so belly up, gentlemen, and choose your poison.
You're the doctor, it's every man for himself, mud in your eye, and here's looking at you, sweetheart. I might grow back my old beard and put on a Panama hat and write heroically again.
The old revolutionary held the cigarette between his dry cracked lips and leaned forward so the young lieutenant could light it. The old familiar burn of smoke in his lungs, the palpitation of the heart, the dance of the nerve endings. He squinted against the bright Spanish sun and now he could see the line of six soldiers 30 feet away, their carbines cradled in their arms. Off behind him, hitched to a wagon that contained his coffin, an old gray horse chuffed and whinnied.
"Brandy?" said the lieutenant. The old man nodded. His wrists hurt from the rope. He felt sleepy. He put his head back and savored the delicious burn of the cool liquid in his throat. He took a deep breath and nodded to the lieutenant.
"No blindfold," he said. "And tell the men to take good aim."
The lieutenant pulled the sword from his scabbard. "Any last words?" he said. The old man twitched. Last words?
He had neglected to think of any.
What to say?
What I did, I did for the working men and women of my country?
Viva la revolucion?
He cleared his throat.
"I go to a better place," he said. "A place where nobody talks about diet or working out and everyone drinks like crazy and feasts on pork roast and fried potatoes and has beautiful abs."
The soldiers, who were all vegans and physically fit, raised their rifles and waited eagerly for the command to kill him.
I know what he means.
So when I determined at the age of 18 to become a writer, I accepted my obligation to smoke many packs of cigarettes a day and learn how to drink gin and whiskey in goodly amounts, and to shun exercise done for the sake of exercise. No running. Writers were not runners. It was too awkward to run and smoke at the same time. We sat, brooding, and lit up and refilled the glass.
I was a healthy young man who enjoyed tennis and soft-ball and basketball, but I made the leap from beer to bourbon, skipped the low-tar smokes in favor of Luckies, Camels, Pall Malls, and, when feeling flush, Gauloises. I drank a gallon of coffee a day, all because that's what writers did.
When I was 24, I visited New York City, angling for a writing job, and went to the San Remo where the poets hung out, and the Cedar Tavern where the painters were. I studied how they sat, how they held a glass and exhaled the smoke cloud. I perched in the lobby of the Algonquin for 3 hours with a gin and tonic imagining that E.B. White would walk in and I'd buy him a drink and we'd become pals, which sometimes happens when two guys drink together.
My heroes in the New Yorker were unabashed alcoholics. The people in their stories were always sitting down for drinks, and cigarettes were more common than semicolons. If my writing was not yet on a par with Benchley's or Thurber's, I still felt I was on track, stylewise.
I was an English major at the University of Minnesota and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression I became the editor of the campus literary magazine. I hiked around campus in jeans, white shirt, corduroy jacket, Red Wing work boots, and a broad-brimmed hat, with a pack of smokes in my pocket. If you hadn't anything to say but wanted to appear thoughtful, you reached for the pack and shook a cigarette out. The ceremony of lighting up said more than words: It was thought in motion.
Back then, a pack cost 35 cents and a drink was a dollar. John Berryman, James Wright, and Allen Tate were on the faculty. Mr. Tate was 68 when I took his graduate poetry seminar. He was a slim, elegant man with a Southern patrician accent, author of "Ode to the Confederate Dead," a pal of Robert Penn Warren and Hart Crane. He chain-smoked in class, so we did too. The whole English department reeked of smoke and was proudly alcoholic—anyone who didn't do both was considered an interloper, possibly a Mormon.
In Mr. Wright's humanities class, he stood at a lectern with an empty tuna fish can for an ashtray and chain-smoked through his lectures on Dickens and Whitman and Dickinson, which he delivered through a haze of hangover. He always looked pale and haggard. The line "Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom" was written by a man who felt most at ease with a drink in his hand and smoke coming out of his mouth.
As for Mr. Berryman, his readings of The Dream Songs were famous for their high drama, the slurred speech, the poet slumped on the lectern, the sudden lurches into reminiscence, the muttered asides to friends in the audience, the poet almost on the verge of collapse. I sat in the front row, off to the side, and watched the great man; to me his greatness and his drunkenness seemed intertwined. A true artist must engage with dark forces, and this man was engaging them in his own body in full public view. Fate had driven him to this drunken state, just as it had driven him to create timeless verse, and he could no more give up whiskey than he could stifle his muse.
After the reading, I hiked over to the Mixer's bar in Seven Corners, as I did several nights a week, where English grad students and instructors hung out. I ordered a scotch and soda and tapped my Pall Mall on a fingernail and lit it. Then I slid into a booth with Roland and Arnie and Rob and worked on developing my writerly persona, which, if not as dark as Berryman's—blighted at the age of 12 by his father's suicide by gunshot outside the boy's bedroom window—was nonetheless as dark as I could make it.
I had no sorrows beyond what any normal 25-year-old Minnesotan would go through—scarce money, absurd self-consciousness, cold weather—and so I needed the bitter cigarette and the sting of alcohol to create a little drama for myself. In the movies, a man lights a cigarette before he goes off to face death, and after he has faced it, he pours himself a drink. It was dramatic, sitting in the booth, going through a whole pack of smokes, and when someone said, "Another?" and pointed to my glass, I of course said yes. That was what writers did.
I had, a few years before, been a YMCA camp counselor. I was not one anymore. I had decamped and moved on.
I think of them now—Wright dead at 52, Berryman at 57, Tate lingering on to 79—as the elders of an extinct tribe. Nobody smokes at English department parties anymore, and hard liquor is nowhere to be seen, only wine. A writer wouldn't hesitate to spend the evening nursing a glass of club soda, wouldn't worry that it marked him as a freak.
I quit smoking in 1982—four packs of Pall Malls a day was my quota, then shazam, nothing—and went off alcohol in 2005. Both times I worried that I had cursed myself and would never write again and would need to find another career, perhaps as an inspirational speaker. But life went on much as before, except that mornings were brighter and I got to stop worrying about whether I should quit or not. That is enough reason to quit: to take the issue off the table. I who once created billows of tobacco smoke now find it irritating. The other night I absentmindedly sipped from my wife's glass of pinot grigio and shuddered at the taste—like battery acid.
And now I trot off to the Mayo Clinic down U.S. Highway 52 from where I live in St. Paul, and they run me through rigorous tests. I seem, at age 69—knock on wood, bonk bonk bonk—not to have paid a price for those years of dissolution. An MRI here, a CT scan there, an echocardiogram, an internist listening with a stethoscope—from all reports, my heart is thumping away like a teenager's, the arteries are clear, blood pressure is excellent, no spots darken the lungs. (Follow those tips to Live Longer, Look Sharper, and Feel Better at any age.)
Meanwhile, old friends who were athletes in high school and who worked hard to keep fit and eschewed smoking and drinking are complaining of serious stuff. These are skinny men who for 40 years have been putting on sweatpants and T-shirts and jogging a few miles. They are now staring at imminent hip replacements and unaccountably suffering from bad cholesterol and high blood pressure.
Glum talk at a party: 69-year-old men, lifelong runners and mountain climbers, now contemplating an operating table and an orthopedic surgeon whacking at them with a hammer and chisel. And then the OxyContin and long weeks of rehab. They look at me, a man whose main exercise is walking swiftly through airport concourses and whose joints work smoothly and who has thrived on a diet heavy in animal fats. The indolent prosper while the industrious exercisers endure blood full of triglycerides and 80 percent arterial blockage.
Ah, the utter unfairness of life.
Here I am, a guy who has earned a good living by weaving little fictions, and all around me at Mayo are southern Minnesota farmers who have worked to put food on our tables. You see in the bodies of old farmers what a brutal and punishing life it is, even now. Men my age with big, gnarled farmer hands, maybe a finger or two missing, beefy men with big bellies who groan as they rise from their chairs and lumber stiff legged across a floor toward the urology department to take the urine flow test. Good Christian men with broad competence in horticulture, veterinary medicine, finance, soil science, and small motor repair, who used to piss like horses in the weeds by the silo and now dribble and tinkle, due to an enlarged prostate, which might necessitate a biopsy, which is like hornets up your butt.
I grew up with farm boys. When we were all in junior high together, they were slender, pliable runners and jumpers, but 50 years of riding a tractor and wrestling with hogs and shoveling manure and killing time in winter has made them large and slow and achy. There are not many health clubs out on the rural route. Pilates has not taken hold among dairy farmers. And here I am with my delicate keyboard hands and long stride, walking past Urology to go read an eye chart in Ophthalmology.
I inherited pretty good genes—my mother is still motoring around at age 96, my dad lived to be 88—and then, too, I had the wherewithal to quit poisoning myself before I fell over. My friend the poet Bill Holm fell down and died at the age of 65. He was a man who maintained his regimen of whiskey and Marlboros even after his heart surgery, and who scorned moderation as the strategy of fear. Though all of us were stunned by his death, nobody was terribly surprised: What killed him was that romance of the artist dancing with death, living headlong, hurtling into the dark, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, a pork roast in the oven, a massive slab of pie on the counter. He never counted calories, never took sparkling water if beer was available.
Bill was the last of the tribe whom I knew personally: All my other writer pals are health conscious—watch their weight, exercise, pursue moderation. Bill was determined to be iconic, a Dionysian bull, a two-fisted foot-on-the-gas-pedal lover of life. I sat in the basement of a Lutheran church and listened to his funeral service, which was going on upstairs. It was a fine service and we all walked out into the sunny March day in 2009 missing that gentle 6'6" bear with the beard and mop of white hair, the red face.
I wished Bill could have turned away from his resolute path to the cliff. Old age would have been a blessing for him. (For you, too? Start with these 6 Easy Ways to Live Longer.) He had much more to write—about Iceland and American politics and life on the prairie. He had come to despise teaching, which he did for most of his life, and he was overjoyed to retire. Then to fall down in the Sioux Falls airport a year after retirement, having spent most of the winter in Arizona, was a cruel, cruel end.
But I understood what drove him. And if I had been told at Mayo that I had 6 months to a year left on earth, I might have returned to the tribe to relive my 20s.
Why not?
I'd walk away from abstinence. Trot down to the liquor store and pick up a carton of Luckies (if they still make them) and a pint of Johnnie Walker and go home to relearn the finger ballet of the cigarette and wean myself back onto alcohol. Fill up the room with smoke and feel the warm, sloshy pleasures of inebriation. An eye-opener in the morning, a martini for lunch, or two—who's counting?—and at 5 p.m. sharp, the sun is over the yardarm, the bar is open, so belly up, gentlemen, and choose your poison.
You're the doctor, it's every man for himself, mud in your eye, and here's looking at you, sweetheart. I might grow back my old beard and put on a Panama hat and write heroically again.
The old revolutionary held the cigarette between his dry cracked lips and leaned forward so the young lieutenant could light it. The old familiar burn of smoke in his lungs, the palpitation of the heart, the dance of the nerve endings. He squinted against the bright Spanish sun and now he could see the line of six soldiers 30 feet away, their carbines cradled in their arms. Off behind him, hitched to a wagon that contained his coffin, an old gray horse chuffed and whinnied.
"Brandy?" said the lieutenant. The old man nodded. His wrists hurt from the rope. He felt sleepy. He put his head back and savored the delicious burn of the cool liquid in his throat. He took a deep breath and nodded to the lieutenant.
"No blindfold," he said. "And tell the men to take good aim."
The lieutenant pulled the sword from his scabbard. "Any last words?" he said. The old man twitched. Last words?
He had neglected to think of any.
What to say?
What I did, I did for the working men and women of my country?
Viva la revolucion?
He cleared his throat.
"I go to a better place," he said. "A place where nobody talks about diet or working out and everyone drinks like crazy and feasts on pork roast and fried potatoes and has beautiful abs."
The soldiers, who were all vegans and physically fit, raised their rifles and waited eagerly for the command to kill him.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Um Screensaver from Clientsfromhell.net
April 26, 2011
Me: “How can I help you today, ma’am?”Client: “Is e-mail internet”?
Me: “I beg your pardon?”
Client: “Is e-mail on the internet? I have no internet, can I still read my e-mail?”
Me: “Well yes, you must be able to get online to view your e-mail.”
Client: “Oh, dear. I can’t see my e-mail.”
Me: “Well, let’s see. Can you open up Internet Explorer for me and tell me what you see?”
Client: “Open what?”
Me: “Your browser, can you open up your browser?”
Client: “My…my…?”
Me: “What you click on when you want to browse the internet?”
Client: “I don’t use anything, I just turn my computer on, and it’s there.”
Me: “Okay. Do you see the little blue ‘e’ icon on your desktop?”
Client: “You mean I have to start writing letters again?”
Me: “I’m…what, I’m sorry?”
Client: “I don’t have any pens at my desk. I just want my e-mail again.”
Me: “No, ma’am, your desktop, on your computer screen. Can you click on the little blue ‘e’ on your computer screen for me?”
Client: “Oh, this is too much work. I’m too upset. Just send me my e-mail. Can’t you send me my e-mail?”
Me: “We…okay, ma’am. Can you tell me what color the lights are on your router right now?”
Client: “My what?”
Me: “The little box with green or possibly a couple of red lights on it right now - it’s most likely near your computer?”
Client: “Lights and boxes, boxes and lights, just get my e-mail for me.
Me: “My test is showing that you should be able to get online right now. Can you tell me what you’re seeing on your computer screen?”
Client: “It’s been the same thing for the last two hours.”
Me: “An error message?”
Client: “No, just stars. It’s black and moving stars.”
Me: “…Do you see your mouse next to your keyboard?”
Client: “Yes.”
Me: “Move it for me.”
Client: “Move it?”
Me: “Yes. Move it.”
Client: “My e-mail!”
Monday, September 24, 2012
Shuttle over Austin
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Welcome to Houston
I went out to my truck to leave this morning and noticed that someone had done me the service of removing my tailgate. UGGG.
I drove around the neighborhood to see if it had been pilfered by some kids but found nothing. The insurance deductive is $500 but a new tailgate from a body shop costs $1000. From a dealer it costs $1500.
So I started to search CL. I found 3 and emailed all three offering them all $200 (or between $50/$100 off what they were asking). I found one 9 miles away that had bedliner on the inside but otherwise was white, the right model type and fit. I asked the guy at "MR BUMPER" where he got his. He said he bought it from an body shop that deals in insurance claims and parts, but that it was probably stolen. He said he paid $100 for it.
He also showed me the way to put a 1.5" hose clamp around the hinge to slow down a would be thief and even installed it for me.
So, advise to all. Buy a hose clamp for your tailgate. It's a good $2.00 investment.
I drove around the neighborhood to see if it had been pilfered by some kids but found nothing. The insurance deductive is $500 but a new tailgate from a body shop costs $1000. From a dealer it costs $1500.
So I started to search CL. I found 3 and emailed all three offering them all $200 (or between $50/$100 off what they were asking). I found one 9 miles away that had bedliner on the inside but otherwise was white, the right model type and fit. I asked the guy at "MR BUMPER" where he got his. He said he bought it from an body shop that deals in insurance claims and parts, but that it was probably stolen. He said he paid $100 for it.
He also showed me the way to put a 1.5" hose clamp around the hinge to slow down a would be thief and even installed it for me.
So, advise to all. Buy a hose clamp for your tailgate. It's a good $2.00 investment.
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
West Side Wellington Square
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Good Day
As I sit on the floor, pouring soapy water over my son's head, I can't help but think what a wonderful time we're in right now. The past two years have been very hard as we've struggled a bit during this difficult time, but the horizon and our attitudes seem very bright as we look at Houston, Graham and our lives. We can breathe deep for the time being and just enjoy what our lives produce. Security is a fantastic thing.
I totally agree with this. As someone who was born outside of this country and went to a 'elitist' school in the "red-dirt" league (rather than IVY), I am tired of our Presidents foreign-ness being questioned. He is a citizen and President, the Supreme Court said so when they swore him in. On the other hand, Romney's ignorance to his own finances seem shady and disingenuous. I would never condemn anyone for being successful and advancing his position to an amazing point, but you did it, own it. You own a dressage horse. I've never even seen a dressage horse, but that's not the point. Don't pretend to be 'quaint' and homespun just so you can play to your religious right base in the South & West.
A President is not an 'average-joe'. Americans shouldn't want an President who is an average citizen. We should demand an extraordinary citizen who is a listener with real intellect and the leadership skills to take responsibility for his past and the future of us all. Families, Children, the Elderly, Black, White, Gay and Straight. We are all Americans and have more in common than we differ. If you dwell too long in Donkeys and Elephants, you forget that the job that these men are interviewing for require exceptional honor, training, skills and judgement.
A President is not an 'average-joe'. Americans shouldn't want an President who is an average citizen. We should demand an extraordinary citizen who is a listener with real intellect and the leadership skills to take responsibility for his past and the future of us all. Families, Children, the Elderly, Black, White, Gay and Straight. We are all Americans and have more in common than we differ. If you dwell too long in Donkeys and Elephants, you forget that the job that these men are interviewing for require exceptional honor, training, skills and judgement.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)