Bees

Rod Dreher links to an interesting (and very "crunchy con") essay by Eric Miller on the "metaphysics of honeybees"— or, as we might also put it, an essay on how secular modernity blinds us and impoverishes us in our relationship with the world around us.

(BTW, that pure natural comb honey I got the other day sure is excellent...)

New State Quarters

I was all set to write about how I haven't seen any new state quarters lately. Not since Nebraska.

Then last night someone was showing me a new North Dakota state quarter. There was general agreement that the scene on the back, from the position of the sun and the butte in it, was facing west, and probably in late fall, November or thereabouts.

I've noticed that the farther the state quarter series has gone, the more slowly new quarters have gotten into wide circulation, and the fewer of them I've seen, even after quite a while. As if collectors are more and more glomming onto them. I mean, I never have seen many California or Oregon quarters.

And I must confess, I've never entirely gotten over the last-minute replacement of what would have been a great state quarter design from my home state of Wisconsin.


Above: The Wisconsin state quarter that wasn't.

Trick Dog Bank

Here's another cool item I've got sitting around the house. It's a cast iron bank. Trick Dog. With Clown holding a Hoop. Just put a coin in the dog's mouth...


...Press the lever on the side of the bank, and the dog jumps up through the hoop and deposits the coin in the slot in the top of the barrel!

The Kaleidoscope Within

My mind has always been a kaleidoscopic torrent of surreal imagery: think Salvador Dali music video on fast forward. The images flash and flow, faster than I can note them all down:

• Dude gliding through the air on a yellow rocking horse that has sleigh runners instead of rockers. He lands on the snowy downhill of a ski slope, and in a spray of loose snow goes skiing down the slope on the rocking horse.
  

• The furry snake with wings, reared and snarling. Hsssss!!
  

• Yellow five-pointed stars, as if cut out of construction paper, on a blue background; and laid over it all, a translucent layer of vibrant bright red.
  

• My apartment in Durham, North Carolina, circa 1990: looking down on the old overstuffed armchair in the living room, as if from somewhere up near the ceiling.
  

• In my own Hermetic language: "Ai, vorthoz ir iclnithis?" Rough translate: "Hey, why set it out on the lawn?"
  

• Abstract image of a cowboy twirling a lasso in the air, surrounded by freehand "boomerang" or "kidney" outline shapes, part of the "early 1960s coffee table" design on a sheet of light yellow Formica.
  

• Dark bronze sun in the sky, with a triskellion-medallion image stamped on the face of the sun. Dull metallic sound of a hammer being struck repeatedly on an anvil.
  

• Marble pillar, like a Corinthian column six feet tall, standing in a back alley of a large city like Philadelphia. Few know of the pillar; but those who do, will come to the pillar in the back alley with a sense of wonder.
  

• Ben Franklin, on a $100 bill, wearing sunglasses.
  

• A gigantic reindeer, 8 or 10 feet tall at the shoulder, wearing a harness with bells and charging down the winter street at night. Reindeer antlers, snowflakes drifting down beneath the streetlights. People scrambling in terror to get out of the way.
  

• A hail of winged boots falling out of the sky. Red boots, yellow wings, like winged Mercury boots, like something in a cartoon.
  

• In my old high school math classroom, a man and a woman hold a large paper-covered hoop between them. A tiger jumps out of the hoop, through the paper, from nowhere.
  

• The sound of piano music drifting across the moonlit lawn and down the slope to the river, back in the 1920s.

And that's not the half of it, those are just the items I catch in my net while many others flash by, uncaught. And as they pass in cavalcade, they're much more melded and melted together in the flow than breaking them out in a list makes them seem: flowed together, flowing one into another, in a vast quick-moving Neapolitan swirl.

An intricate tableau in my mind's eye, and I think if only I could catch or sketch or paint that on canvas, but then I despair 'cause it's gone, to be replaced by other tableaux just as vivid...

I mean, that's what the inside of my mind is like. Like a roiling multimedia equivalent of the Beatles' Revolution 9. And it goes on and on and on, a perpetual background to my mental processes. Like Revolution 9: 6:24-6:40 Intelligible speech (John/George, right): John: "Personality complex... industrial output... financial imbalance... the Watusi... the Twist..." George (left): "Eldorado" 6:32 George (right): "...pushing it between his shoulderblades..." Backwards piano loop (intro reversed?) 6:42 Marching band (left) 6:43-6:44 Intelligible speech (John): "Take this brother, may it serve you well..."

Hard to tell whether this is anything like what goes through the minds of other people, or whether it's just one more peculiar feature of my ongoing "radioactive core meltdown of the imagination." From conversations I've had with people on this point, I gather that some individuals think more in visual terms; others think more in verbal terms; some think in a mixture. But generally not in this churning, volcanic, cavalcade-parade hypersurreal flux...

Oh, I do find hints of it, and resonances with it, in some quarters: in Dali's paintings; in the pyrotechnic roman-candle prose of Jack Kerouac; in the occasional piece of rock music; in the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's account of "Firstness"; in Goethe's Farbenlehre, in poets as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dylan Thomas. And it's densely interwoven with certain other elements of my soul, my experiences with synaesthesia, "music" in repetitive background noise, hypnagogic and hypnopompic dreams, and mystical experience; to say nothing of my nigh-synaesthetic reactions to board games and card games, listening to the radio, slide rules, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Plus, last but not least, that language I created starting at age 13.

Still, it's just damn peculiar. To say nothing of its being an instant source of inward preoccupation on a quiet evening when I've nothing else to do. Watching the kaleidoscope inside my own head is better than watching a movie.

"Numbah nine... numbah nine... numbah nine... numbah nine..."

Breakfast Sweet as Honey, Folks, Honeycomb

So for breakfast this morning I had:

• orange juice
  

• milk
  

• toast with olive oil on it
  

• ham
  

• applesauce
  

• pure natural comb honey, yes, honey still in the honeycomb
  

• coffee

Picked up that honey-in-the-honeycomb yesterday at a sort of greenhouse/natural foods outlet up in La Crescent. Haven't had honey-in-the-honeycomb in years. Only drawback is, picking bits of beeswax out of your teeth afterwards...

And note, no bananas for breakfast. Yes, no bananas. Not for breakfast, not for lunch, not for supper. No bananas.

Yes, We Have No Bananas

True fact: I do not eat bananas. I will not eat bananas. Nohow. No way. Bananas are one food I simply will not eat.

I have not eaten a banana in over 40 years.

This dates back to age eight, when I ate a banana, and shortly thereafter I got sick to my stomach and threw up. Actually I suspect I would've thrown up with or without the banana. I mean, you know, whatever the bug was. But the upshot of it is that I've never eaten bananas since.

I will not eat a banana. If something with banana slices in it is put in front of me, I will pick the banana slices out. Avoid eating it altogether if I can.

And pineapple and coconut aren't far behind. I mean, I will eat pineapple and coconut if I must. But I'd rather not.

But bananas? No. Just no.

Mocking the Radio

Given my inveterate habit of mocking the radio, it should come as no surprise that, whilst cruising the gravel roads of rural America this afternoon in my Jeep, I broke in and interrupted an unusually inane radio commercial:

He: "Oops, looks like we're out of cash. I'll have to stop off at an ATM."

She: "And pay a service fee? No way!"

I (interrupting the commercial): "Take out a car title loan instead!"

As usual, I'm quick with the witty rejoinder. Only I do wonder how those people on the radio commercials ever put up with me...

While the Sun Shines

Beautiful fall day around here. Sunny, 60°, too beautiful a day to hang around over the keyboard. I'm heading out, up into Minnesota, winding and twisting gravel roads up to Freeburg, have lunch at Little Miami. I'm feeling like battered fish. Then drift around the back roads of the countryside this afternoon.

Less than two months and we could have snow on the ground. I figure, get out and enjoy it while I can.

Justo Juez

Okay, let's see if I can make things right for the visitors— usually several of them a day, often though not always from Latin America— who arrive at my blog by way of a Google Image search for "Justo Juez."

I get a lot of visitors from Google Image searches for Jeep Cherokee, state quarters, Albert Camus, school bell, Where's George, coffee can, Russian watch... and Justo Juez.

"Justo Juez," or "Just Judge," is an image of Christ on the cross, surrounded by the Arma Christi and other items, which is evidently popular in Latin American Roman Catholic spirituality. Back last November I blogged about how I was down in Dubuque, stopped by a little Catholic religious supply store, and picked up several random items, including a Justo Juez holy card.

I didn't include a picture of the card, though I did provide a link to another site where you could find a Justo Juez picture. Due, it would seem, to a glitch at Google, this has somehow led to my blog rating highly in a Google Image search for "Justo Juez." Even though that blog post of mine had no Justo Juez picture in it.

I mean, come to my blog via a Google Image search for Jeep Cherokee, state quarters, Albert Camus, school bell, Where's George, coffee can, or Russian watch, and you will at least find on my blog a picture of what you were looking for. Come to my blog searching for a Justo Juez picture, and you will not find a Justo Juez picture.

Until now. I've finally given in. Hopefully this blog post will rise to the top in Google image searches for Justo Juez. And from now on, when those several visitors a day, often but not always from Latin America, come to my blog in search of "Justo Juez"... they will actually find a picture of Justo Juez.

Yabba Dabba— Hack! Hack! Kawff!!!

Here's an old TV commercial from the early 1960s, when I was a kid.

Oh, how times do change!

News of the Week™

Oh dear. Searching through old papers, I ran across some News of the Week™ stories I wrote up, must've been back around 1990 when I was living in North Carolina.

You know, News of the Week™. Those stock, painfully predictable storylines you can count on finding, any time you read the newspaper. Storylines that are repeated over and over and over again, in one minor variation or another, without ever varying in their essential details.

And did I say, painfully predictable?

* * *

A plane crashed in Indiana. Some people were killed. Many survived. Some are "still missing." The black box flight recorder has been recovered. The Governor toured the crash site.

A committee has been formed to study the crash. After two years of dull, dry-dust committee hearings, they will issue twelve thousand pages of findings (printed at government expense) which no one will ever read.

Boeing, which cut corners in designing the DC-10, disavows all responsibility. The pilot is a hero, but will be fired as a scapegoat.

* * *

Congressman Larry "Buzz" Wallace attempted today to answer the latest charges in the mushrooming ethics scandal which has engulfed him. In the wake of the charges of four parking tickets in the past month, it has emerged that five years ago Congressman Wallace's car was towed for illegal parking.

Denying all wrongdoing, he faced an angry pack of reporters baying like wolves and wanting to know if he will resign now or what?!

* * *

A humorless feminist spokesperoffspring for NOW (National Organization of Woperoffspring) announced the formation of a mass political party with a platform urging the following amendments to the Bill of Rights:

• Immediate implementation of utopia here and now
  

• Granola nuts (not a chicken) in every pot
  

• The right to do everything that NOW doesn't disagree with, even if it would give Great-Aunt Tilda a fit.
  

• Prohibition of anything NOW disapproves of.

[It has to be "spokesperoffspring," because "spokesperson" would be sexist]

* * *

President [George H.W.] Bush responded nervously to charges that he is just as hateful as President Reagan because he is for only $53.6 billion for the new National Nose-Wiping Federal Socialization of Medicine program, whereas Democratic congressional leaders are for at least $74.3 billion of entitlement funding.

"He's an unfeeling monster," said House speaker Tom Foley. Bush said that he is not.

Charges include that Bush does not support Democratic-sponsored mandatory weekly medical checkups for all, or mandatory confinement of patients in an intensive care unit of a hospital hooked up to catheters and electronic monitors whenever they come down with a cold. Bush favors letting such persons make up their own minds.

"This just shows how callously insensitive he is to the needs of women, minorities, and left-handers," said an angry Democratic spokesperson.

* * *

A spokesperson for a Wheeling (W.Va.) chemical plant blandly denied assertions that his company's Wheeling (W.Va.) plant is dumping up to 5,000 tons of toxic xylene, toluene, benzine, and dithiophosphates into the Ohio River every day.

"We would never do anything wrong," smirked the spokesperson. "What we're dumping in the river is just... is just... uh, water with food coloring in it, yeah, that's what it is."

When asked by accommodating reporters if he would drink a glass of water from the river, the spokesperson said yes, though, he noted with a wink, "not just right now."

Behavior in an Ecological Nietzsche as Explicated in Zoology 101

Birds drinking cream from milk bottles in the morning in England as a learned response

Monkey tribe washing sweet potatoes in the river in Japan as a learned response

From 1958 on, monkeys washing sweet potatoes in the sea water at the beach for seasoning as a learned response

Throwing wheat and dirt into the water so the wheat will rise to the surface to be carried off by monkey welfare sponges waiting downstream as a learned response

Younger male monkeys and more than 1/6 of older females and all baby monkeys eating caramels laid on the ground every 18 months as a learned response

Male monkeys, sporting Reagan buttons and crewcuts, more conservative than female monkeys as an unlearned response

Shooting African baboon troops to cause avoidance of safari automobiles by troops absorbing survivors of a massacre, as a learned response

Male monkeys surprised by blasts from an airhose while playing with coffee pot rings naively in a lab cage and rescuing friend monkeys from the dire fate of playing with coffee pot rings naively in a lab cage as a learned response

Female monkeys overcoming reactionary and antirevolutionary responses to coffee pot rings and engendering consciousness-raising among friend monkeys in lab cages as a learned response

Monkeys eating strychnine and staying around lions dismissed from serving as role models for fellow monkeys as a learned response

Electrified floor grid with Mr. Edison's light bulb as a warning to impress monkey as an amateur lever-pusher, which is transmitted to monkeys watching the scene in horror through a glass window and also to entertain them as lever-pushers while watching movies, as a learned response

Monkey with a television camera on its face transmitted to movie screen where other monkeys exhibit similar physiological responses as transmitted through the ether, while eating popcorn, as a learned response

Isolated monkey who had never learned to relate also unable to transmit responses to the monkeys in the TV studio via wireless signals, while wearing a TV camera pointing at its face, as a learned response

—actual lecture notes I took one day in Zoology 101, spring 1977

Drone Download Project

Look, let me make one thing clear from the outset: I am pretty much clueless when it comes to music. I have something of a feel for "moldy oldies" rock music from, oh, the mid 60s to the early to mid 80s. Any other kind of music, I may listen, I may vaguely enjoy, but I just don't get it. In fact, country music, I just don't get, period.

When it comes to my reactions to, ummmm, noise, I'm rather strange. Among other things, I have always been strangely moved by the noise of a vacuum cleaner motor running. The noise of a vacuum cleaner has an effect on me, something like the effect music may have on you. Well, no, not exactly like music; more like a tingle up the spine, Jack Frost at the windowpane, wool blanket and mug of hot chocolate on a dark, cold, and desolate winter night. It feels almost like being in touch with some strange alternate dimension of reality.

Anyhow. A while back, I stumbled across an online radio station called Darkdrone Radio, on Live365. And it sounded to me, and affected me, much like the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Music only a few steps above sheer noise. Music that is almost all background, and hardly any foreground. I'm far too dense about music to know what kind of music this was, though I think the description at Live365 included reference to something like "drone music" or "ambient music." Or whatever.

Darkdrone Radio has since joined the ever-growing list of stations at Live365 for which you now have to pay a subscription fee if you want to listen. So. I searched around, and ran across another site which carries tons of this kind of music. For free. Plus also CDs for sale.

Dark Duck Records: "Established in 1988, Dark Duck Records is an independent record label featuring ambient, deep chill, minimal techno, glitch, dark ambience, minimalism, environmental ambient, experimental electronica, click, and other 'electronic' music." Okay, I'll take their word for it, I freely admit I have no idea what they're talking about.

But their music is cool. Like the sound of a vacuum cleaner, or so it seems to me. And if you check out their Drone Download Project, you will find, like I say, drone music, or ambient music, or whatever, available for download. For free. They don't have limitless resources, they can't keep hosting it all forever, but the project has been running for almost four years, and the past year or so of music is still available for download, free.

If you want to get the droning, buzzing, whanging, wowing and mumming music that was posted earlier on, you can order it from Dark Duck Records on CD. With never-before-posted bonus tracks thrown in for free. I ordered the first three years of the Drone Download Project. A total of 24 hours of music. In fact, when it arrived I found they'd even thrown in an extra CD for free.

Like I say, I call it "vacuum cleaner music." Like the noise of a vacuum cleaner motor running. But then, I'm rather strange.

Post #600: Brown Cowboy Hat

I see this is my 600th blog post. Back when I was a kid, for some reason I always used to associate the number 600 with the image of a brown cowboy hat.

Don't ask me why. I just did.

Quote

"All grammars leak."
     —Edward Sapir

On the Move

Looks like Jay & Deb have uprooted themselves from Accidental Verbosity and established new digs at Dispatches from Blogblivion.

I've blogrolled 'em. And one of these days I've got to get around to tidying up my blogroll, which by quick informal count now contains something like 15 or 16 blogs which are either abandoned, obsolete, or long-quiescent. The blogosphere, like much that is online, seems to grow and shift and change as if in time-lapse photography.

Busy

Busy. In the midst of the very busiest week of my busy fall rush, getting everything back up and running for the fall at St. John's and Mt. Hope. Plus busy with Lions Club. Have a few items I want to blog about, but need time to think, and write them up properly. Soon!

9/11 + 5

I was working at my desk all morning on the eleventh, five years ago. Some time into the noon hour, I think, my computer beeped. New e-mail.

I opened the e-mail. It was from a parishioner, forwarding some account from an eyewitness who described staggering through the streets of Manhattan, amidst shock and confusion. "As I looked back at where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood"... words to that effect...

Oh, Phyllis, I thought to myself, are you forwarding science fiction to me, or something? I read the piece a second time, still couldn't make sense of it.

Still more or less thinking that it couldn't be for real, I went into the living room, turned on the TV, turned it to Channel 19 from La Crosse. ABC News.

I got a horrible twisting sensation in my solar plexus. This was no science fiction. This was a terrorist attack, against thousands of innocent Americans, on American soil.

I spent the afternoon phoning people, e-mailing people, watching the coverage on TV. That evening, next door at St. John's, I led an informal and hastily improvised worship service. I remember I talked about dates that those of us old enough to remember would never forget. We would never forget where we were when we heard the news. December 7, 1941. November 22, 1963. And now September 11, 2001.

Perpetual Calendar Wheel

Here's a clever item I ran across back in the year 2000, just as we were all thinking of the new century, the new millennium, and all. It's a genuine brass calendar wheel, a perpetual calendar which will work for any month of any year from 2000 to 2099.

It stands up like a little easel, with a third brass leg folding out behind. Just rotate the wheel to line up the year over the month, up on top. And then in the window down below, you can read off the calendar for the month. Presently set, of course, for September 2006.

Made in India, I'd guess low-tech, molten brass poured into a mold, cool and paint, a few screws to assemble it, and voilà! Aesthetic and functional, both. It appeals to the Selective Luddite™ in me— why don't we have more funky devices like this, devices with soul, instead of sterile items that require batteries and then at a critical moment don't work? By the time this calendar wheel doesn't work, it will be New Year's Day 2100. In other words, this calendar ought to last me for the rest of my life.

Automatic Sayings Generator

Never tell all that you know; for he who tells all that he knows, often tells more than he knows.

Never spend all that you earn; for he who spends all that he earns, often spends more than he earns.

Never guarantee all that you undertake; for he who guarantees all that he undertakes, often guarantees more than he undertakes.

Never discuss all that you hear; for he who discusses all that he hears, often discusses more than he hears.

Never eat all that you can; for he who eats all that he can, often eats more than he can.

Ran across this one once upon a time in an old puzzle booklet from the 1930s. A long, long list of sayings like these, and more, all constructed on the same pattern: Never x all that you y... Odd, they all more or less made sense: it was a funny sort of "sense," a fortune-cookie sense; but I got the impression that it could have been extended indefinitely.

Bandwidth Leeches

Oh great, so now I find some people out there are leeching my bandwidth, by linking directly to some pictures I've posted here on my blog!

However, I have, ummm, rectified the situation. Read on...

I never would've known this, except that back several months ago, my personal website's old webhost— alias my ISP, alias my small local phone company— shuffled me off onto a new webhost. (I honestly think mine was the only very complex site my ISP was hosting.) New webhost provided, for half the price, dozens of times as much webspace, and dozens of times as much bandwidth.

You understand, my personal site's webspace is where I host not only my personal website, but also almost every picture you see here on my blog. A practice made all the more attractive by the fact that I now have probably 40 times as much webspace there as I'll ever use.

Anyhow. New webhost also provided detailed file-by-file monthly stats on my personal website. I now have a directory "out there" with neatly packaged little archives in it, each archive containing a month's stats for my site. Well, download and dearchive these packages, and I have an exhaustive if cryptic listing which can easily be scanned from the command line via a grep search.

This was sort of cool, I thought. Until I was skimming these stats, and noticed that certain picture files I've posted to my blog were being requested by various MySpace users. So I ran a search:

$ grep -i myspace access_log_Aug31_2006

and I was horrified to see endless, endless lines of cryptic stats scrolling up the screen. I visited some of these MySpace pages, and sure enough, there were my pictures, being loaded directly from my webspace.

I wouldn't have minded at all if they'd copied the pictures and hosted them on their own webspace. Like they say, "information wants to be free." But I don't much like having my bandwidth leeched. Y'know?

Turns out I had over 500 requests in August for pictures posted to this blog and hosted on my webspace. Involving multiple MySpace users who had somehow gotten onto two pictures of mine, one a picture of my Jeep, the other (very popular) a picture of the late French writer Albert Camus.

So. I went and changed the filenames of these two pictures, changing the filenames also in the blog posts in which they'd originally appeared, so that the pictures will keep appearing in those blog posts of mine just the same as ever. Only, of course, with new changed filenames they will no longer appear out there on those MySpace pages.

If I'd really been nasty, I would've supplied some, uh, "not work-safe" pictures under the old filenames. Either that, or a sign reading, "Don't leech my bandwidth!" But I decided to be a nice guy. Pictures disappear in cyberspace all the time, nobody will be the wiser, and I've ended my bandwidth-leech problem, at least for the time being.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

Just another one of the cool items I've got hanging up around the house... as a wall decoration, would you believe?! Picked this one up long ago, I forget just where. I don't know what a tiger is doing on a seed sack, but that is just such a cool tiger...

Labor Day Weekend

Hope you had a good Labor Day weekend. I was working as usual Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday, took the rest of Sunday and all day Monday off. And just sat around yesterday, watching Jet Li martial arts videos on YouTube, taking a nap for a couple of hours during the afternoon, all sorts of constructive stuff like that.

Now we head into the fall season, and my schedule, which has been slower much of the summer, resumes its more brisk pace. Missionfest coming up already this Sunday. Confirmation class. Sunday School. And what not...

8:30 When the Stars Come Out

When my brother and I were kids, we had a routine about an extra minute that was secretly added to every day. Between 8:30 PM and 8:31 PM was an extra minute which we called "8:30 when the stars come out."

People never knew about this extra minute, because the entire world froze for those 60 seconds.

Across the street from our house was a huge lawn which sloped up to a gigantic old building at the top of the hill, a building known as the Academy Lodge. Back around 1900 it was a Presbyterian parochial school. (Yes, a Presbyterian parochial school.) In our time, it served as a nursing home, then as a halfway house for mentally ill veterans. Anyhow, at "8:30 when the stars come out," the rest of the world would stop for 60 seconds, while two bands of skeletons materialized on the lawn of the Academy Lodge, to fight out the next minute in their battle of good versus evil.

The good skeletons of Herity Lodge, versus the evil skeletons of Googa Glaga! Imagine skeletons going at it against each other in a kung fu battle! "Herity Lodge" was supposed to be a transform of "Academy Lodge." Somewhat. More or less. While the evil skeletons of Googa Glaga were distinguished by the top of their skull being perfectly flat. This was based on a friend of my brother's, who my brother and I secretly used to say had a flat head.

For one minute every evening, the skeletons would wage their martial arts battle on the lawn of the Academy Lodge, the world around them unmoving and unknowing. Then the skeletons would fade away, like Brigadoon, and normal time would resume its pace. Until the next evening at "8:30 when the stars come out," when once again the world at large would freeze, and the skeletons would appear to carry on their perpetual battle.