Blankety blank blank blank

Nothing to report today... will be returning home tonight.


More tomorrow . . .

War, Peace, And Otherwise

This is the second blog posting in my three day stint of Adventures In Dog-sitting... and Eva has been a fine, well behaved puppy... she's a 'good girl' and I strive to tell her so. But not often enough she seems to think because every time I approach her when she is lying on the carpet relaxing and I say, "you're such a good girl, Eva" she rolls over on her back so I can scratch her belly... she really enjoys that.

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According to The Writer's Almanac: On this day in 1917, the United States officially entered World War I. President Woodrow Wilson tried to keep the U.S. out of the war, even after a German U-boat sunk the passenger ship Lusitania, until British intelligence intercepted a secret German communication to Mexico. Apparently, Germany had promised Mexico that they could have the U.S. if Mexico would support the German cause.

Read more about it HERE


Well, the government of Mexico's plan didn't work back then, but their newest method of taking over today (illegal immigration) seems to be succeeding.

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How Hoofed Animals Pick Their Noses is an image from a PZ Myers blog entry. I am re-posting the picture here because I thought it intriguing. I will remove it if PZ asks me to.

"Good Gosh!"

Well... my stomach tells me that it's time for breakfast now, so...

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Home Away From Home

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Tucson Weather Today

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I am dog sitting with Eva in the house out here in the desert for a couple of days so I'm not sure how much blogging I will get done. Probably not much. I'll bet that makes you (the reader) sad... right? Or maybe the opposite.

This entry is being composed on a cute little e-machine that Mike has installed here in one of their guest rooms. Personal computers have come a long way since the early days, back in the 1980s. Who'd a thunk it?

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Sandi Jo is visiting here from Florida till Thursday. I hadn't seen her for more than a year, so there's some 'catching up' to do.

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That's it for now... I'll add more later today if something new comes to mind.

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"I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my shelf."
--Robert B

A Noteworthy Day In History

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Tucson Weather Today

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Last night, even though I dozed off at around ten o'clock, I woke back up after an hour and lay there for roughly a half hour, finally slipping back into my own (restless) version of the land of nod -- but only to reawaken after another sixty minutes. It was one of those times when I found that I just could not sleep for more than an hour at a time. So, at four a.m. I rose and brewed myself a cup of Pumpkin Pie flavored coffee and turned on the computer.

First I checked my email and then began to visit my favorite daily blogs...

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At The Writer's Almanac I was reminded of some historical facts, such as:

On this day in 1928 Marguerite Ann Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Later she changed her name to . . .

Maya Angelou

Global Renaissance Woman

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Ms Angelou to work for him. After his assassination, on this day in 1968, which was on her 40th birthday, she was devastated.

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If I think of something clever later on today I'll append it here.

If not, I won't.

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Do you know who this is?

A character you love to hate

Oh sure, you recognize the face . . . from Fargo . . . or maybe from Armageddon -- or perhaps from The Sopranos -- but do you know his name?

Well... it's Steve Buscemi

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How about this?
Who is she?

Bet you don't know . . .

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"If civilization had been left in female hands, we'd all still be living in grass huts"
--Camille Paglia

(see picture above)

Vicissitudes Of Writers And Wannabes

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Tucson Weather Today

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Writing a short story used to be such a simple task for me... and a most enjoyable one. I would just sit down at my old portable (manual) typewriter and start pounding the keys. More often than not I would continue for hours and hours until the entire first rough draft was finished. Of course, most of those stories died at that point. After the first flush of creativity was concluded I had little incentive to revise or rewrite, since I soon realized that my story was nothing more than a personalized re-hash of a short story I had read recently. Occasionally, though, I did succeed in writing an original story... and some of them were actually accepted and published.

Some of my published stuff . . .

But now the process is quite different. Now I brood for days, weeks, months, and even years on an idea before even sitting down in front of my computer's keyboard.

Even then, I just sit there staring at the monitor for a really long time before tentatively tapping out a sentence. Then I read that sentence, change a word here and there, add a phrase, remove a word, change another word, get up and brew a cup of coffee, go for a long walk, or take a nap.

When I return to the single sentence and again read it, I highlight it and angrily hit the delete key.

I wonder what ever made me believe that I could be a writer.

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As I am preparing this blog entry I am listening to my local Talk Radio station (out of habit) and the Sunday morning show running at this time is some religious call-in program titled The Jesus Christ Show. And believe it or not, the host is supposedly Jesus Christ himself. Each segment opens with the man behind the microphone intoning:

"Welcome to the Jesus Christ Show... this is your holy host (pause) taking your calls."

A lady caller just said: "I would like to know if you could express to me the meaning of the body of Christ?" I thought her question was rather wordy, and I couldn't help revising (in my mind) her question to: "What does the body of Christ mean?"

Don't ask me why I am listening to such a silly radio program. That's not the point.

My point is: If I am not a writer, why then am I always examining, criticizing, and correcting overheard text -- or composing effective sentences of my own?

Why is that?

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While reading The Writer's Almanac I learned that it was Washington Irving -- author of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow -- who coined one of New York's most enduring nicknames, "Gotham," which is Anglo-Saxon for "Goat Town," and which comes from a town called Gotham (GOAT-um) in Lincolnshire, England, which was famous for tales of its stupid residents.

Washington Irving

The Almanac's piece on Washington Irving so intrigued me that I toddled on over to Amazon.com and downloaded one of his stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in the Kindle edition which was FREE, of course. It's been more than fifty years since I first read it, and I'm looking forward to the re-reading.

The Headless Horseman

(From The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)

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vicissitude
-noun
1.
a change or variation occurring in the course of something.
2.
interchange or alternation, as of states or things.
3.
vicissitudes, successive, alternating, or changing phases or conditions, as of life or fortune; ups and downs: They remained friends through the vicissitudes of 40 years.
4.
regular change or succession of one state or thing to another.
5.
change; mutation; mutability.

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Of course man was created before woman . . .there's always a rough draft before the masterpiece.

First Weekend In April... So?

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Tucson Weather Today

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Carlos Silva Costa forwarded to me a supposedly true story. I thank him for the welcomed laughter it induced... here it is:

A little old lady from Wisconsin had worked in and around her family dairy farms since she was old enough to walk, with hours of hard work and little compensation.

When canned Carnation Milk became available in grocery stores in approximately the 1940s, she read an advertisement offering $5,000 for the best slogan. The producers wanted a rhyme beginning with Carnation Milk is best of all.

She thought to herself, I know all about milk and dairy farms. I can do this! She sent in her entry, and several weeks later, a black limo pulled up in front of her house.

A man got out and said, "Carnation LOVED your entry so much! We are here to award you $2,000 even though we will not be able to use it'"

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My New Word(s) For Today

bmpf - Toilet paper; Useless papers; especially official documents and standardized forms, sales and marketing print material etc; junk mail; spam


The word trope is another term with which I have always been somewhat unfamiliar.

trope: language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense
trope: In linguistics, trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e., using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form. The other major category of figures of speech is the scheme, which involves changing the pattern of words in a sentence.
trope: metaphor, often ironic, using words other than dialogue in their literal sense

It was difficult for me to find simple examples of a trope. Here are three:

Dear John letter
A taste of the lash
"Nuke em"

Please advise me if I am mistaken . . .
(sometimes I need things spelled out)

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The Dancing Shiva

It's the illusion that all of us scientific types suffer from, that there is nothing more to the Universe than the mindless gyration of atoms and molecules, that there is no deeper reality behind appearances. … It is the logical delusion that after death there is nothing but a timeless void. Shiva is telling us that if you destroy this illusion and seek solace under his raised left foot (which he points to with one of his right hands), you will realize that behind external appearances (Maya), there is a deeper truth.

From: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran. 357 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

Hopefully the above speaks for itself

because I have nothing worthy to add

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Finally, someone beside the abysmally deluded conventional Powers that be is addressing the fact that education begins with presenting actual facts to the very young.

Richard Dawkins

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, born on March 26, 1941 in Nairobi, was a professor at Oxford University until 2008 and is a fellow of the Royal Society. He is considered one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of our time and has broadened understanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts have made him one of the most widely read scientific authors in the world.

In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview Richard Dawkins finishes with:

I am halfway through writing a children's book which is called "The Magic of Reality." Each chapter is a question like: What is an earthquake? What is a rainbow? What is the sun? Each chapter begins with a series of myths seemingly answering those questions, and then I counter that with explanations about the true nature of things. There is something very cheap about magic in the supernatural sense, like turning a frog into a prince with a magic wand. Reality has a grander, poetic magic of its own, which I hope I can get across.

Finally some true, solid education.

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"I want to be in Kentucky when the end of the world comes, because it's always 20 years behind"
--Mark Twain.

Rick Nelson, Lonesome Town, on AM 1400 Tucson

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Tucson Weather Today

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I seem to have gained a follower... YD2TFB -- but I do not understand his language (not English) and when I try to access his Ham Radio web site something wreaks weird havoc with my browser, and occasionally knocking me from my Wi-Fi connection. So I will just ignore him and hope that he'll get tired of my inane and inconsequential maunderings and quietly go away.

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Just before my morning walk I decided to snap a couple shots of the amenities here at Toscana Cove Apartment Homes.

Hot Tub

No, I have not yet sampled the delights of rapidly swirling waters warmly washing against my bare skin... not yet.

Nor have I dived into the swimming pool.... not yet.

Swimming Pool

Good Golly Miss Molly... I have not yet used the basketball court over on the west end; nor have I played tennis on the adjoining tennis court. What's the matter with me?

Too busy walking the avenues and boulevards and trying to write something of consequence, I suppose.

Something like that . . .

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Okay . . .

It's confession time. As much as I hate to admit it, I indulged one of my many weaknesses last night and wolfed down a twelve ounce container of Chocolate/Peanut Butter Explosion Premium Ice Cream. It did not upset my stomach and digestive system as it would have done a couple years ago during the height of my intestinal discomfort period...but I have a feeling that I had better nip that in the bud immediately instead of experimenting with my apparent good luck.

Seriously . . .

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For anyone interested in History, especially Indiana History, and more specifically the History of the Monon Railroad... you can't go wrong by visiting This Historical Site

All kidding aside, it's a wonderful website to browse.

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This experience of not having a TV (intentionally) is liberating. I can stay on the computer as long as I wish, surf, blog, create my weird fiction... and at the same time listen to the hits of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s on the radio. Oh my! Talk about 'Hog Heaven.'

Hey! YOU can listen to it too. Just visit HERE and click on "Listen Live"

Or not . . .

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And . . .

Today all life will vanish from the Earth.

("April Fool!")

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