Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 18

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A Bizarro cartoon.  I think and hope this is fair use, since I'm not using it to pump up my readership.  I was just struck by the beauty of the rendering.  A similar cartoon without those extraordinary color values wouldn't have been pasted into the notebook.

We fell down.  All of us.  There was no reason we should not, and so we did.

Our vision went black.  Sounds swam in our ears.  There was a very strange smell which we could not account for.  Our skin crawled.  We felt distinctly clammy.

We died.

By all possible standards, the world should have come to an end.

But it did not.  The meadows swam in the breeze.  The smell of buses [longed?] after them.  And the glow of my young wife lit up the world, the world, the world!

I have no memory of this whatsoever.  But I can tell it was written extempore.  I simply wrote the first sentence and forced myself to keep on writing, searching for an end, a meaning, a point, and all the while aware that it would all have to wrap up at the bottom of the page.

Marianne and I have been married for thirty years now, plus small change.  She still lights up the world.

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When Animals Assault

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Why do animals shag other species?  It's hard to say.  Evolutionarily speaking, there's no real point in it.

--Christie Wilcox

There is science and then there's Science for Mature Adults Only.  Click here to be offended.

This is the sort of science blog post one finds after being as-good-as-snowbound for a few days.


And I got boing-boing'd . . .


For, of all things, the picture I posted Sunday of the snow heap in my back yard.  Back when I was much younger and my son was a little boy, I used to make some wonderful stuff . . . snow forts with monster faces, sphinxes with saddles and so on.  But nothing I did could hold a patch to what my father did when I was a kid.


This was in Schenectady, New York, when there'd been a snowstorm so tremendous that the front yard filled up and my father had to pile up a lot of snow in the back.  Dad was originally a farm kid, 4-H ribbons and all, and knew some cool tricks.  So the next morning we woke up to discover he'd built a snow slide in the back yard, set a ladder up against one end, and then poured a bucket of water down the surface.  It was the best -- and fastest -- slide I was ever on.  Ever!


Thanks, Dad.  Half a century later, I'm still grateful for that.

And I'm on the road again . . .

. . . blogging from the Megabus on its way to NYC.  I'll report on the experience later.

Above:  The Monument to Dinosaur Sodomy in front of the Academy of Natural History, here in Philadelphia.

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The Great Humongous Snow Pile in the Back Yard

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It's night.  I'm done shoveling.  I can go indoors and relax by the wood stove.

Knowing that the snow is outdoors, plotting against me.

Above:  The great humongous snow pile in the back yard.

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Shoveling Snow in the City

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 I almost got this blog written and posted in time to be Friday's post. The problem is that it's been a full day.  I spent the morning heroically shoveling the driveway, and then . . .

Oh, okay.  Shoveling a city driveway is not the simple task it would be out in the country where you can simply sling the snow to either side.  On one side of the driveway is the house.  On the other is our neighbors' drive.  So every shovelful has to be walked to the back yard and dumped. All told I'm guessing that a couple of miles' walk is involved.

So after a morning's heroic shoveling, we went to the Arden Theater to see our friend Jennifer Summerfield in the understudies' rehearsal of A Moon for the Misbegotten.  Which turns out to be a particularly intimate way of seeing a play.  The occasional instruction from the director only emphasized the artifice in a way that feels perfectly natural in this postmodern era.

Oh, and Jennifer was terrific, which was very satisfying.

From the Arden we went to a friend's house where a group assembled for a Restaurant Week meal at the Bistro St. Tropez.  Terrific food and when one of the party texted a friend about the event, his phone software autocorrected the name to Bistro St. Trapeze.

So I am happy, and hope you are too.  Sorry I'm a little late on this post.

Above:  Winter in the city.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 17

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A panel from Dilbert and half of a picture of an expensive corkscrew.  Plus some very odd odds and ends.

1.  "Love me, do"  No idea why that's there.  Maybe it's the title for item two?  But if so, I forget exactly why.

2.  An anecdote which starts out looking like it's going to be about Janis Ian.  But which is actually about Bob the Musician.  B the M was a friend from my early poverty-drenched days in Philadelphia, back in the early 1970s.  I have a couple of stories about Bob the Musician.  I forget how I was going to use Janis as the lead-in, though.

I probably should have just written the whole thing down.  It sounds pretty good.

3.  The answer to a question that's vexed philosophers for milennia:

Q:  What is Art 4?
A.  One more than Art 3.

4.  Most drowned boaters, she said, are found with their flies open.  They were drunk, and they stood up to take a leak, and the rest -- well, the rest is marine boat insurance protocol.

Considering how many times Janis Ian comes up in this flurry of pages, I should probably mention that this factoid didn't come from her.

5.  Pity Jack Frost!  All the work he has to do!  And only a raft of nubile underage young women to help him do it.

There's probably a story in there somewhere.  Note that after I wrote it down, I very thoughtfully transcribed the unreadable parts.  Thanks, me!  I couldn't have read that item without your help.

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Walkin' Through A Winter Wonderland

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The fourth snow of the season ended and an hour later the fifth one began.  I feel like I'm back in Vermont!

Last night, Marianne and I went for a walk with our cameras to record what it was like in Roxborough, our neighborhood in Philadelphia.  Pictured above (photo by Marianne) is Ridge Avenue, a half-block from our house.  Ridge was originally an Indian trail.  During the American Revolution, George Washington and his troops walked up it on their retreat from Philadelphia and then after their defeat at the Battle of Germantown during the darkest hours of the war for independence. It was quite literally the road to Valley Forge.

As you can see, there wasn't much traffic.  Some city salt trucks, a bus, and rather a lot of people proving that their four wheel drive SUVs were sensible purchases.  But, oh my goodness, was the snow hard and driving and cold!   We were only out some fifteen or twenty minutes when we had to turn back.  Why?  Well, check out the photo of me smiling through the accumulated ice and snow.


And speaking of magnificent titles . . .

I just signed the Asimov's contracts for my latest story (not counting the one I wrote today), "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again."

The Stone of Loneliness lies in the West of Ireland.  It's a fallen Sarsen stone and if you look closely, you can see the cup-marks on it.  There was an ancient belief that lying on it was a cure for heartbreak.  So, during the Starvation, emigrants would sleep on it their last night before leaving for America.

True story:  Twenty-eight years ago, on my first visit to Ireland, I hunted it up and lay down on it.  And I felt all the pain in the world flow into me.

I put that incident into the work in question, as well as my glancing encounter with Gerry Adams and much else as well.  In a strange way, it may be the most truthful story I've ever written.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 16

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Another whimsy which came to nothing.  The reason so little in this notebook comes to fruition is that I was concurrently writing Dancing With Bears.  I simply didn't have the free time to work up essays or stories.  That didn't stop me looking for them, though.

Here, I was toying with writing an essay titled "The [Number] Basic Food Groups."  The number would have been filled in when I finished:

Chocolate, of course, though some of us believe that chocolate is not a food but a flavoring, like garlic or butter or salt.  And that eaten alone it is a sad commentary on the self – that one cannot afford a slice of apple, or nougat, or a lover’s body to slowly and lovingly pour it over.  But, by popular acclaim.

Then wine.  If soup is food and vichyssoise is soup and therefore food, then wine is equally food and in certain aspects far more nutritious than that thin, watery, cold stuff served out at that restaurant your mother likes so much.  Only, perhaps it should be alcohol – not that alcohol is good for you, it isn’t – but because then we could all have a second martini and chalk it up to good nutrition.  So, booze.

Then brie.  I know!  I know!  You want it to be cheese.  But cheeses are not interchangeable.  That is part of their charm.  

I probably could have made something of this essay.  But it wouldn't have been worth the effort.  So I dropped it.

In the first paragraph, "afford" would surely have been replaced by "arrange."

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