Thursday, March 31, 2005
Eat The Strawberry, Grasshopper...
A few years ago I lent my copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War to the wrong sort of person, and he stole it.
There's a parable in there somewhere.
I'll lend my copy of the Tao Te Ching to anyone, though, as anyone interested in reading it is usually the type to return it as well.
Wisdom? Strawberries. Plenty of vitamin-C.
~
3/31/2005 11:42:00 AM
Friday, March 25, 2005
Coffee with Karloff
I used to publish stills from old movies every Friday, but at some point I got tired or decided it was kitschy or something. It's still Friday today, though, and I have this all-too-cool shot of Boris Karloff drinking coffee on the set of Son of Frankenstein. It's just begging to be shown around.
(Click image to see full size.)
~
3/25/2005 08:57:00 PM
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Santa Feels Left Out...
Does anyone ever think to give Santa Claus a Christmas present, or does it simply not occur to people, anymore than it might occur to someone to give a glass of milk to a cow?
I hope Mrs Claus gives him something now and again.
~
3/20/2005 05:27:00 PM
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Message from a Bottle Washed Ashore...
The cliffs of Lake Erie loom hundreds of feet above the frozen surface below, but they only appear on one of the coldest Winter nights each year, and then only to the most dedicated hiker, pure of soul, true to his animal-spirit, and able to see with the sixth sense, the third eye, of a coyote.
(Click images to see them full-size.)
No-one knows how or why the cliffs appear, which is fine, because people who wonder why or how are blind to their beauty and magic anyway.
Below, freshwater sandwhales gather around the shoreline, meeting to celebrate themselves and all things alive, their plaintive cries lifting to the cliffs and beyond to the heavens above until, finally, they wriggle and slide back out miles across the ice to descend back into the water below.
It is a special sight on a special moonlit night.
Oh, I know: Many of you won't believe this is true. But you'll also never journey out onto the cliffs on the third night of a February full moon, nor will you ever see with the vision granted to one who has been baptised by the icy water and survived, following coyote tracks back across the lake to see things in a way you could never have imagined, and sights you would never have believed to exist.
~
(Photos by me from the ice of Lake Erie. Maybe not quite as big as I made them out to be, though.)
3/16/2005 09:48:00 AM
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Mr Potato Dead
(2005, mixed media including potato, apple-skin and Sharpie magic marker. Heh!)
Okay, okay, so I'm not as good as Saxton Freyman or Greg Brown. I just whipped up that image to announce the death of a raw foods 'blog I participated in.
Here's some Freyman and Brown (and an oldie from Beuckelaer). Click on the thumbnails to view the full image.
Is Joachim Beuckelaer's "Woman Selling Vegetables" suggestive or what?:
Saxton Freymann:
Greg Brown:
And speaking of Greg Brown, check out the trompe l'oeil murals of a different Greg Brown here. Wow. How cool.
(...mostly borrowed from my old "ARTAFRUITAVEGEMIN" post on MetaFilter.)
~
3/13/2005 06:35:00 PM
Coming soon to a theatre near you:
PassionLite!™
Now with 20% less violent calories for consumers who may NOT be sadists, masochists, or guilt-tripped self-flagellating Christian extremists.
Chicago Sun-Times~
Recut 'Passion' has fewer minutes and less gore
March 13, 2005
BY CHRISTY LEMIRE
Director's cuts are usually longer, beefed up with precious footage -- at least in the filmmaker's mind -- that ended up on the cutting-room floor the first time around.
But Mel Gibson's ''The Passion Recut,'' in theaters now, is actually six minutes shorter than his 127-minute original "The Passion of the Christ,'' one of last year's biggest films.
The footage Gibson deleted is some of the goriest, which he says he removed to make it more palatable for a wider audience. While "The Passion'' grossed more than $370 million in the United States alone, some critics believed its depiction of Jesus Christ's crucifixion was relentlessly and shockingly bloody....
3/13/2005 06:15:00 PM
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Snowflowers:
(Click to see larger images.)
~
(Photos by me.)
3/12/2005 05:36:00 PM
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Sign at the Edge of the World
(Click to see larger images.)
I went to see the Void yesterday. I didn't mean to. It was an accident, I guess. There was a Warning sign on the Edge of the Void, but you really can't read it until you're right in front of it. It's a trick, see? Captured by Curiosity, you hike up to the sign to see what it says. And THEN you find out it's a Warning. Maybe you put that Warning there yourself ages ago and forgot about it. In any case, by the time you're at The Edge, you can't help but peer over for a look.
So maybe it wasn't an accident that I ended up there?
"Long time no see, Void."
It had been ages since we talked.
There was a time when I accepted the Void as a part of Myself, as a part of Life. It was Nothing to be afraid of, it was just sort of There. The fact is, everywhere you find a Nothing, you find a Something on the other side; and everywhere you find a Something, you find a Nothing on the other side of that.
I guess you find Something and Nothing Everywhere...
They're like opposite twins. Night and Day. The Sun and the Moon. Yin and Yang.
So why fear The Void? That was the question I was asking myself as I finally gazed down at the Nothing I'd been avoiding for so long. Why fear Nothing when you have Nothing to fear?
When did I put up that Warning sign, anyway?
Now, having sat down and chatted with the Void, I can't remember exactly why I'd been avoiding It for so long. We should have tea and scones on a regular basis. Maybe sit down and watch some TV. Sometimes you really feel the Void when the TV is on. Other times the TV drowns the voice of the Void right out. Maybe that's the ultimate use of TV, in fact...
Anyway, we hit it off swimmingly. (What does that mean, "swimmingly"?)
I can only imagine it was a case of mistaken identity. Someplace along the line I associated the Void with a hole somewhere in my life, some loneliness or fear thereof, something missing, something lost, maybe something just not found. So I ran away from the Nothing inside myself, and the Nothing in Life, as I ran from that other nothing, that was just really a small thing. Small things, no matter how HUGE they may seem at first, eventually pass with time.
If Nothing is Something, or at least the two are tied together, then I suppose at some point I ran from Myself.
Hello, Void. Hello, Me. Hello, Life.
Long time no see.
~
(A wee note: It's actually a real sign thet you can't read until you're right next to it, the letters are worn or falling off [were they decals?], and it says THIS. You'd think that might be an important sign to maintain, eh? Of course, you can't get near the sign without hiking for half an hour through woods, crossing a rushing stream at least once, then scrambling up a nearly vertical 30-foot-high hill. And the shooting range is another 30' down the other side. But didn't these people know sooner or later some nutter like me would climb up there to read it? Oog!)
~
(Photos by me.)
3/08/2005 01:37:00 PM
Monday, March 07, 2005
Busy...
...busy, busy, too busy to post. So I thought I'd share some of Argybarple's fan mail, which obviously comes from educated, multilingual nice peeps from all over the world who really want to help me out:
Seymour Sheffield says:
We, at our toop phermacii, got a graet...then gives me the option to click on links labelled:
deel for you. You can have better and moer
satissfying live with this, moreover it is
the leadding drug all over the world!
I nned moore infoThanks, Seymour! Are you Dutch? I'll, um, get back to you about my crocodile.
me out pulaski crocodile
Then Bruno McGuire, obviously a professor of some sort, has these comments:
Do you really want to increase your performance? This remedy intensifies your drive and sensation. It gives much better feelings during the process.Thanks, Bruno! I've wanted to do a residency somewhere ever since I first saw Scrubs. How 'bout that Zach Braff, eh? Was Garden State a great movie (and soundtrack) or what? And Braff even has a 'blog, on TypePad, no less!
Become to know more at our online residence
'Kay, gotta go.
-Shane
~
3/07/2005 01:38:00 PM
Thursday, March 03, 2005
More on these later...
(Click for larger image.)
~
(Photos by me.)
3/03/2005 08:29:00 PM
