Bill Luse sent me an attaboy concerning this pic of our dog. I like it too. I like it not only because he has such a winsome expression on his face (kind eyes) but also because there was a subtle "halo" effect made by the fact that the background is lighter around him - the trees a lighter green. The halo effect is more obvious in this smaller shot.
Sometimes the “Other” is closer than you think.
I grew up with Germans next door. Not the Hun kind, but gentle, gemütlichkeit folks with a home full of tasteful tokens from the old world.
They were second generation and their house was so redolent of Deutschland that you could almost smell it when you came in.
Music, sure. And a cellar full of homemade wines from which we took tiny sips after his parents went to bed in order to stay awake during late night baseball card trading sessions. A little statue of “Perkeo”, a goat-herder of myth and legend who is the yin to Heidi's yang. There was that scary pointed helmet used by troops in the Great War, complete with a scary story of a relative who survived a battle and intolerable heat only to die from the shock of the cold water of a shower afterwards. Cold water could kill you. The sheer mundaneness of such a death (as well as National Enquirer reports of spontaneous human combustion) was somehow more terrifying than serial killers.
Naturally I felt an affinity for this German culture though I was Irish. And not having Irish as the foreign language option at high school meant German. But years later I learned the culture was not so foreign as I’d thought. Turns out a great-grandmother had come from southern Deutschland back in the 1880s. And so did another one. All the dee's and der's that Grandpa affected was legit, authentic, gotten from his mother and not from the local saloon!
Regarding idiotology, a subject of endless (some would say narcissistic) fascination to me, Tom of Disputations writes and says in the comment thread: I think the best coping mechanism is to keep one's idiocies to oneself.
And a chill fell over blogdom. *shivers*
Better to find a coping mechanism to deal with Tom's proposed coping mechanism than to quit blogging. Why should only Tom & Bill & Zippy et al have all the fun? Kreitzberg has a severe conflict of interest don't you think?
They say that it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to be prove it by speaking, and that reminds me of the days of summer, thick with cattails and goldenrod, back when I was a lad in the humid valleys just north of the Ohio river. 'Twas there that I first learned to apply the hardwood to the ol' horsehide, i.e. bat to ball, and became a feared walksman did despite the difficulties of being a slow grower and blind as a bat of the animal variety.
Being short gave me a small strike zone and being near-sighted gave me the opportunity to take a lot of pitches since you can't hit what you can't see. The combination of small size and bad eyesite was tailor-made for receiving base-on-balls. And walk I did! I took more pitches than Bill Clinton made passes during his Administration.
But sometimes you just want to get up there and swing the bat. As Joe Nuxhall says when pitchers come to the plate: "if you swing the bat you're dangerous". Dangerous in the sense that you might just hit a home run.
Been drowning in a sea of bad familial and friend news, all of a financial nature. My but they be risk-takers! They surf the high waters of high debt with a marvelous insouciance; they quit good jobs as if financially independent, they spend as if on a corporate expense account, they treat credit cards as manservants. I watch wide-eyed in childish wonder, their debt piling to the point of pecuniary pain, to the point of late fees and astronomical interest charges as they buy trifles down the home stretch to Misery. Surprisingly, I find my own peace destroyed as they strive towards losing their houses. ("It's all good till somebody loses an eye" went the childhood phrase; the adult equivalent is "It's all good 'till somebody loses their home".) I cannot shake them out of it since talking of financial matters directly is absurd, gauche, like asking if they masturbate. They recognize no personal sin and yet expect redemption. They would say, rightly, that it wasn't trifles exactly that got them into the mess. But it's somehow symptomatic.
It’s a seller's market for Beauty. Dreams, sentiment, trees, beaches - everybody wants more of it now that Politics is officially over. It's the classic tulip bulb crash with the conservative party playing the part of the tulip bulbs. Sell Ann Coulter, buy Gordon Lightfoot.
Conservatives are called reactionary for a reason. They are called upon only in reaction to dismal conditions. You couldn't get a French president like the one they just elected without the backdrop of thirty years of failed liberal ones. You don't get Ronald Reagan without Jimmy Carter. You don't get even a George Bush (and Roberts & Alito) without a Bill Clinton (and Bader Ginsburg). The default is liberalism. My dad says these things are cyclical, and they are. The question is whether the lows are lower and the highs not as high.
But the good news is beauty is back in style. Call your broker. I'm digging into Isak Dinesen and her dreamscape prose of Africa and Ehrengard. My foray did make “re-entry” more difficult, to borrow from Walker Percy. I guess it's been too long.
Five years ago I think I would’ve greeted a website titled “What’s Wrong With the World” with much enthusiasm. But now I think the subject has jumped the shark, beaten to death by the good denizens of St. Blog’s. The natural contrarian in me would normally like such a title but now true contrarians would prefer the (sparser) site titled What’s Right With the World. But Bill & Zippy are contributors so I shall not despair at what promises to be despair-full posts. Still, sometimes I do miss ol’ Gerard. I'd say "I'm just sayin'" if it wasn't a cliche.
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