"All hope abandon, ye who enter here! - Dante Alighieri

---

"Cyclist Robert Marchand of France celebrates after setting a world record for cycling non-stop for one hour, in the over 100- year old category, at the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) velodrome in Aigle, Switzerland on Friday. Marchand, born November 26, 1911, cycled 125 laps around the 200 metre indoor track - a distance of 24.251 km (15 miles) - to set the record." -- 100-year-old cyclist sets record for one-hour ride in Switzerland

I'm all for the celebration of the elderly for doing amazing things. My own mother, at 97 and only 3 years away from being an active tennis player, is constantly amazing. It does, however, strike me as somewhat odd to compulsively declare a "world record" when, as far as I can tell, Robert Marchand is the only one competing in this self-limiting category. It smacks of turning the elderly from distinguished members of humanity into cute pets like performing seals to somehow 'inspire' others into thinking they too can somehow beat the reaper.

You're welcome.

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ScottM notes in a comment to: Humiliation was, in fact, their only aim, and malice, their motive.

"This is the point of commie-lib politics. They will use their power to take your power. The commie-libs make demands, not because of the facts and the "progress" toward their utopia, but because if you do what they want you will be weaker and vulnerable to the next demand. Yet, the guileless Conservatives debate the merits of the details of the commie-lib demand, or they'll point out this latest demand is inconsistent with some past demand. The details and the consistency matter only to the Conservatives, yet that is what they spend 98% of their energy discussing. You might as well tell the con-men running the Three Card Monte you've detected the card switch or that taking someone's money isn't nice.

"When you debate the details with a commie-lib you are putting the "kick me" sign on your chest and back. You are signalling you still haven't cought on and you are still an easy target. Just because you prefer to discuss the details and the rules and the underlying principle doesn't mean that's effective. It's only when you recognize the commie-libs are engaged in a naked power grab and this fight is about power, not the details of their latest charge, can you effectively resist their tactic.

"Stop being willfully naive and be an effective soldier for your views. Stop rushing to talk radio so the conservative host can try and convince you not to raise taxes in a recession, not interfere in children's lunches, not break up families, not advance the goals of America's enemies. I know this is lost on most Conservatives because the world around the one characteristic of the Conservatives is a determined avoidance of conflict with the liberals. Better to discuss what the commie-libs are doing than to risk a fight with the commie-libs. It's Conservatives students and employees that hide their views in school or at work. You can't win while on defense. Commie-lilbs are always on offense, that's why they control so much. If our tactic was working we would run their institutions, we don't.

"You can return to Mayberry Rules when we win the fight. Right now we must play by Prison Rules, or lose."

Okay now, we've all been pretty patient with the Republican incarnation of the Pillsbury Doughboy, but he has clearly reached his sell-by date.

Not only is Gingrich promulgating posters that let the Democrats punch him in the chins, he's putting out posters where he is starting to look suspiciously like Chris Matthews after a long night of man love with Barack Obama.

Exhibit A: aka "And the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders."

Exhibit B [With a penalty of loss of down for using Chuck Norris and J C Watts twice + "Faith Coalition" myass!]:

Send Up 1:

Send Up 2:

Send Up 3:

That's three and he is out of here!

I submit that anyone who supplies this much mockery material this early on is in no way, shape, or form ready to be the candidate for the San Francisco Castro Distric Wholesale supplier of MRSA, much less President.

Newt, I'd tell you to "Get off the stage before the lights dim," but you are obviously already staggering about in a blighted night darker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp. As for those who are still wandering around said cypress swamp "supporting" this fellow... you should be ashamed of yourselves and probably are. If not, just hang around and Newt will fix you right up.

"Meth In Mexico: A soldier stood in a room full of barrels containing powder after the seizure of a small ranch in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, Mexico, Thursday. According to the Mexican army, 15 tons of pure methamphetamine were seized at the ranch."

15... Fifteen?... TONS? of meth were seized? A bit of calculation tells me that 1 short ton = 907,184 grams. Let's say that one gram of meth = one to four hits to a tweeker.*** That means that in one (1!) raid the Mexicans seized between 14 and 56 million hits of crank. Can that be real? Can that be true? Can that be what one Mexican meth operation is cranking out?

That exceeds the mind's capacity to boggle. Is everybody in this country wired except me? Is it really that out of control? Doesn't seem possible. Can the government of Mexico be lying? Can our government be lying? How can I think such a thing? I must be sleeping. I need something to wake me up from this nightmare.

---

***How much meth did you use?

By the hypercaffinated Grant Snider at INCIDENTAL COMICS

I was taught it until I knew it well enough to parrot it, but I never knew why. Until now.

HT: The American Scene

[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/36685192?title=0

Bioluminescent bacteria occur nearly everywhere, and probably most spectacularly as the rare "milky sea" phenomenon, particularly in the Indian Ocean where mariners report steaming for hours through a sea glowing with a soft white light as far as the eye can see. -- The Bioluminescence Page

There is another world above this one; or outside of this one; the way to it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke goes through. The ladder is the way through the smoke hole; the ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have been a tree or pole; I think it is merely a way. -- Gary Snyder- Through the Smoke Hole

These days she wakes before dawn. The sound of the automatic coffee grinder and its aroma is her alarm. Before first light today, out on the deck overlooking the Pacific, she was gazing at the sea and saw, across the flat miles of ocean stretching out to Catalina, bright flashes come and go like wet fireworks exploding under the waves. Binoculars brought the flashes closer but didn't explain them. They were scattered all across the wide water except where the full moon sliding down the sky towards the western horizon smoothed a bright white band across the slate sea.

Later, when he woke, she brought him out on the deck to see the place where she'd witnessed this strange antediluvian light show. After a few more minutes he noticed that, in the rising light, large patches of the sea were dark, as if secret islands had risen just beneath the surface. Secret until his 'compulsion to explain the mysterious' arose.

"It's most likely a large algae bloom," he claimed. "When it was dark and the algae was stirred up by waves, breaking combers probably excited and concentrated the algae. What you saw was bioluminescence."

"Bioluminescence," she said. "That's such a fine, soft word."

They watched the dark islands under the surface of the sea for awhile longer and he wished he'd seen the flashes in the pre-dawn dark.

Toward the end of his life, Carl Sagan wrote a book about how most of humanity still lives in a "demon-haunted world;" and how science drives us relentlessly out of the dark oceans of our ignorance until, like some stump-legged fish, we scramble gasping onto the thin, dry strands of our knowledge about the truth of this world.

One of those strands in his mind was 'knowing' that the miracle of rush lights within the ocean was caused by the phenomenon we label "bioluminescence."

Mystery seen, mystery solved.

Wonder summed by science, our youngest and most robust religion. A religion whose prime attraction is to transubstantiate the miraculous with the dependable; whose creed reverses the Eucharist by rendering the body and blood of God into bland bread and indifferent wine.

He'd long been a lay member of this fresh, muscular faith whose liturgies are written in arcane symbols of mathematics rather than arcane phrases of Latin. As a lay member and mere acolyte his understanding of science is as shallow as his faith in science is adamantine. He has worshiped the Saints Einstein, Darwin, Newton, and Bohr. He has believed that in time all will be known and, when all is known, all will be explained and all mystery resolved. He has not yet read The Testament of the Unified Field, but he hopes to before he dies and rejoins that Unified Field as empty matter glowing in the dark. Some of our current priests growing old in the quest assure him that he will. They currently hope to hunt Higgs-Boson to its burrow.

Yet still he wonders. Still he persists in his scientific heresy.

He wonders, "When we explain what we experience in life in the steel language of science, do we drive the mystery out or merely mix more mystery in?"

Sometimes he answers, "Perhaps neither. Perhaps what we do, through our relentless human need to explain, is to simply dive, as blindly as fish born deep below the light, ever deeper into the miracle. Perhaps we dive deep in the hope that the light from our minds and souls will, on some immensely distant day, grow large enough and bright enough to illuminate one crest of one wave rising once only out of the darkness. And that something, somewhere else in the immense darkness in which we dwell, will see our small fire and answer."

Thunder
Don't go under the sheets
Lightning
Under a tree
In the rain and snow
I'll be your fireside
Come running to me
When things get out of hand
Running to me
When it's more than you can stand

I said I'm strong
Straight
Willing
To be a shelter
In a storm
Your willow
Oh willow
When the sun is out

How about a gold facial for valentines day?: Viet My is one of a small number of salons in Vietnam that provides 24k gold leaf face mask therapy, said to help make skin whiter. A single facial costs 1.8 million Vietnam dong... --PhotoBlog

Most children are afraid of the dark. I know that I was. Parents who are too tough deny you the nightlight or the cracked door letting in a distant glow from the front room or from downstairs. Parents who are too kind leave the door ajar or plug in the nightlight. A lot of parents, tough or kind, help you learn a prayer familiar to hundreds of millions of people:

“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake....â€

It is not clear that the prayer helps allay the fear of the dark and of death in the dark, but as children we learn it anyway. It is probably the first prayer that is learned. Its lesson is that, parent or child, we are hostage to fortune or His will. It is one of the most fundamental calisthenics of faith.

Most children remain afraid of the dark but learn not to admit it. At some point you grow out of it. You become an adult and no longer a slave to childish fears without foundations. You tell yourself, “I’m not afraid of the dark.†You’re lying but, like so many other lies that let you get through the day, you lie so long that you forget it is what it is, a lie.

I feared the dark as a child and when I grew to be a man I still felt uneasy when consigned to a room that was “too dark.†I developed some manly and not-so-manly methods for mitigating the dark -- light curtains, dim baseboard night lights in the hallway, falling asleep with the television on a timer, votive candles, the whole inventory. After some years of sleeping safe within these rituals and relics I forgot that I was, in the core of my being, still afraid of the dark; afraid that “I should die before I wake.†And then I did.

The thing about dying and then being returned to life is that, like a ghost half-seen out of the corner of the eye or in a shadow on the stairs, the experience keeps coming back. You think you’ve pretty much exhausted what you think about it -- exhausted all there is to think about it -- and then you are presented with a new moment, a new cause for reflection.

A bit over a week ago, at around midnight, I decided to go to bed. I went through all my rituals and dressed in my pajamas and went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. As I lay there the old prayer from childhood appeared in my mind after many years of not being thought of at all,

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I shall die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

It appeared so vividly it was as if an alien, almost feminine, voice had recited it to my ears in that room. I lay there feeling anything but sleepy and thought about this prayer.

The prayer itself is a classic from the 18th century and it was included in most basic texts for centuries including The New England Primer. Like many other things from the 18th century it has been shortened to make it “more efficient.†The full prayer is:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.
The are four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head,
One to watch, and one to pray,
And two to bear my soul away.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

And, as I looked into the origins of the prayer I discovered that a “kinder, gentler†variant has lately been introduced as:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord, my soul to keep;

Guide and guard me through the night,

And wake me with the morning's light.

I suppose that’s a way of making the poem fit for a more secular society in which nothing fatal ever happens to children. Until, of course, it does. But that’s for another, younger, and more clueless generation. I’m stuck with the original in my memory.

As such it is one of my earliest memories. It was almost as certainly the very first rhyme or poem that I memorized. It would have been taught to me by my mother as she tucked me in in my childhood and calmed me for the night. I know that she, and hundreds of millions of other parents who have taught it to their children, wanted it to comfort me and I suppose it did. Thinking about it in my bed on that night last week, however, it didn’t seem to be comforting. Instead it seemed like a horror sandwiched into the middle of a plea for rescue:

“...my soul to keep.â€
“If I should die†“before†“I wake.â€
“... my soul to take.â€

At most times and in most places, this prayer was simply a tradition, not a reality. But I wasn’t in most times or in most places and it was terrifying.

It was terrifying because, as it occured to me then, I had experienced the reality of the prayer. I had actually died before I could wake. I continued in death for some unknown minutes and then was revived and kept in a deathlike coma for 13 days; a time that I, gratefully, have no memory of whatsoever. And, it came to me, I had died in the bed I was currently lying down in and thinking of this old childhood prayer. I had, without realizing it, gotten used to sleeping in my deathbed.

For awhile that evening this was a very disturbing realization. But then, as now happens to me daily, in time I drifted off to sleep in my deathbed. In time we all drift off there if we are lucky enough to find our way for out time of dying. I’d like to say that as I drifted off my final thought was,

If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

but I can’t. Like my first death, I don’t remember anything about those last moments, or the ones that came after. So I can’t say I said a prayer. I can only pray I did.

"Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.

"Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world.

"You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.

"Turn it whatever way you will---whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent." -- Abraham Lincoln. Speech at Chicago, Illinois | July 10, 1858

Didn't we almost have it all
When love was all we had worth giving?
The ride with you was worth the fall my friend
Loving you made life worth living.

The Sad Lady Vanishes

"The biggest devil is me. I'm either my best friend or my worst enemy," --Whitney Houston dead at 48

Well, this seems to have touched a nerve.

Now playing at:Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen. - YouTube

UPDATE: Attention Media Outlets "If we have anything to say, we'll say it here on Facebook, and we'll say it publicly, but we won't say it to a microphone or a camera. There are too many other REAL issues out there that could use this attention you're giving us. My daughter isn't hurt, emotionally scarred, or otherwise damaged, but that kind of publicity has never seemed to be to have a positive effect on any child or family." [HT: Joan]

American conservatives during the run-up to elections love to diddle themselves silly with all sorts of waking hallucinations about just what, for once, a really, really conservative candidate could do when finally elected president. These silly, silly people actually think that conservatism as a dreamscape can reverse the reality of decades of hard work on the part of the American left. One of the most cherished hallucinations of these couch dwelling conservatives is the idea that a pure conservative president can actually stop and then somehow reverse illegal immigration. To this proposition the most concise, rational response is, "Har-de-har-har."

I know that, like visions of sugarplums, visions of some sort of "fence" protecting America from the hordes of marching Mexicans dance in the heads of Americans who just want them all to turn around and march back. Alas, that thought can just be filed under, "It Ain't Gonna Happen."

As a rabid reactionary who is sometimes mistaken for a conservative, I know, believe me, all the designs for a kinder and gentler fence that will have hi-tech detectors and some sort of ready interdiction corps sitting on helicopter scramble pads across the southern border. I know all the arguments for expanding the ever-so-effective techniques used to stop the flow of illegal drugs to stop the flow of illegal aliens. None of these will prove any more effective than "The War on Some Drugs" we've be squandering billions on over the decades.

What would work would be some sort of East German wall 1,969 miles long. This monstrosity would have guard towers, mine fields, attack Dobermans, armored cars, and about 100,000 armed border guards with a shoot on sight policy (3 shifts of 17 guards per mile). After around 3,000 Mexican civilians were shot dead, this might have some effect on reducing the flow. I'm not quite ready for this draconian a solution. Are you?

Then there is the extended policy of finding those illegals already here and then, well, "Just deport them!"

Another 25-watt idea.

Deportation? Okay let's follow that concept home with the vision of hundreds of buses chock full of thousands of illegals (rounded up in armed swoops through the US barrios) departing daily for Juarez, Tijuana and all points south. To begin this process you actually have to get the said illegal Mexicans on the fleets of buses. Right? Right.

The first problem is finding and then imprisoning said illegals. That would mean raids into homes and apartment buildings around the country as well as stop and frisk identity checks on the street for the freshly minted crime of "looking Mexican." Then you'll have to refurbish those Japanese internment camps in the Owens valley and elsewhere as holding pens. Think the Manzanar Concentration Camp to the 10th power on the outskirts of every major American city. You start opening those up and the actual deportation Mexicans are going to be the least of your problems.

Your more immediate problem is going to be armed resistance in most of your major cities. Unlike cowed white people, Mexicans will not go gentle into that old blight. Male members of La Raza are not known for their submissiveness. The females are pretty tough too. No, not many of official armed roundups would be met with a tug of the forelock submission. This assumes that in said cities where you'd want the 'roundups' to take place you can get a trust-worthy fraction of the police departments (notable fraction is Hispanic) or a trust-worthy fraction of the Army and National Guard (notable fraction is Hispanic) to go along with the policy.

When attempting to implement fascist policies, it is best to remember that America is, first and foremost, a heavily armed country -- especially in the barrios. Are you ready for gun fights in cities across the US? I'm not sure I am. But that's what we'd get since many illegals, faced with internment and deportation on a mass scale, would decide they "don't got to show you no steenking badges."

Next, let's suppose that somehow the "roundups" succeeded but only after countless "regrettable" deaths (Each one of which is given the full "Pobre Maria Treatment" on NPR and in the New York Times. Yes, your head will explode.). Then let's suppose that after these deaths hundreds of thousands of Mexicans did indeed show up at the border one fine day in surplus Greyhound buses. (Don't kid yourself, we're going to need a lot of buses.) What if Mexico decided, "Hey, we don't recognize any of these people as ours, and just what do you mean 'looks' Mexican? We're the Mexican government/oligarchy and we've looked Castilian Caucasian Spanish for over three centuries."

Are we then going to use the armed forces to force Mexico to take back their huddled masses? And even if they did, do we really want a country as corrupt and unstable as Mexico to become even more unstable?

If you want to see a wall come up on the southern border overnight, just wait until a full-scale revolution breaks out in Mexico. Think "American Civil War" X 2 with automatic weapons and plastique explosives. If one side wins you get Nazi Germany to the south. If the other side wins you get Communist China during "The Great Leap Forward." Neither is what you'd call a "desirable outcome."

Either will make you wish for the status quo ante when decent yard work and tasty tacos everywhere were a staple of American life.

"Don't just practice your art. Force your way into its secrets." -- Beethovan

[Thanks, Bruce]

From "drive-by" to "drive-through." The phrase "located in Compton" is, shall we say, a dead giveaway: Inside LA's drive-thru (and bulletproof) funeral home

"Here's the pitch. He swings. It's a long one..... a long one..... it's..... OUTAHERE!"

This video is unlisted at YouTube. Only those with the link can see it. Pass it on.

UPDATE: And it just keeps getting better!

Clint Eastwood Opposed Bailouts Before Ad

Clint Eastwood Motor City ad 'not affiliated with Obama'

Seems reasonable. Who would want to spend any time in the open sewer of Detroit if he didn't have to? Certainly not a septuagenerian movie star.

"The Derelicts by ICON are known for being vintage classics refashioned into stylish modern vehicles. The hand made classics are one offs that boast a fully patina'd exterior. Jonathan Ward's upgrades and attention combined with a modern Art Morrison powder-coated chassis, unique interiors, and all new electrical components are what make the Derelicts so desirable. The 1952 Chevy Deluxe Business Man's coupe has a 430hp Camaro 6.2 LS3 engine while the 1952 Chrysler Town and Country custom wagon has a DeSoto front end with the power from a late model Hemi engine." -- Via eGarage - VIDEO

Here's more detail on one of the derelicts, a 52 Chevy coupe that is nearly identical to one that I owned in 1970. Could be the same one. I think I sold it for $250.

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Come now, gentleman, your love is all I crave.
You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing on my grave.
-- Memo From Turner

The monsters from the id that now control the Democrat Party have transformed that party into a mob of undead extras from The Dawn of the Dead. It's an indecent and disgusting spectacle and I suspect there's more than a few million long-time Democrats who are revolted by it. That certainly seems to be creeping into the polls. No matter the good it once did, the Democrats today present as sick and crazed political party that is so greedy and hungry for power that it will do anything, including selling its country down the drain, to get it back.

Regardless of the race of the Democrats' current leader and failed president, Martin Luther King's dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin has been transformed into a tawdry thing; a dried husk in which they wrap their skeletal remains, a hollow phrase spewed by the ascendent race hustlers of the party and lapped up by their acolytes.

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Severe cold continues in Europe

"A man walks past an ice covered car on the frozen waterside promenade at Lake Geneva in Versoix, near Geneva, Switzerland, early Feb. 5. The death toll from the vicious cold snap across Europe has risen to more than 260, with the winter misery set to hit thousands of those seeking to escape it as air traffic was hit."

How cold is the Winter of 2010-2011 in Great Britain and Ireland? Well, it has been "referred to as The Big Freeze by national media. In the UK it was the coldest December ever, since Met Office records began in 1910, with a mean temperature of -1°C. It broke the previous record of 0.1°C in December 1981."

And it obviously broke records for cold set before the "Met Office records began in 1910" as indicated in this souvenir:

Or this bookplate made in 1740,

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"In that Obama has rendered no act of contrition or repentance, and is at the moment, at liberty in the land, we do, here and now, separate him from the precious body and blood of Christ, and from the society of all Christians. We exclude him from our Holy Mother Church and all her sacraments, in heaven, or on Earth. We declare him excommunicate and anathema. We cast him into the outer darkness. We judge him damned with the devil and his fallen angels and all the reprobate, to eternal fire and everlasting pain!"

HT: Mabuse

If you're lost you can look and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you
I will be waiting
Time after time -- Cyndi Lauper

You can set out to make “great art,†but that’s almost always the wrong tack. Set out in that direction and it usually won’t happen. You'll often end up having to come about on a lee shore. “Great art,†art that endures and grows over time, is almost always a gift. One of its hallmarks is that the creators really aren’t that aware of what they’re doing when they do it. Greater forces than individuals are at play when great art is made. It’s that kind of thing that sort of dawns on you in the classical sense of light coming up slowly out of the dark.

It’s that way with Groundhog Day. Slowly and yet surely this initially unassuming although initially successful film comedy has been revealing itself to be one of the greatest American films. It’s certain that none of the principles set out to make that happen no matter how much its director, Harold Ramis, might like that to be the case. With this film, unlike a number of others, the greatness of it occurs not only through its creation but from what its hundreds of millions of viewers help anneal to the film itself. It’s through this strange symbiosis between creators and audience that the film has become what it is today. It’s the Velveteen Rabbit effect.

In Margery Williams childrens' classic, The Velveteen Rabbit a toy rabbit becomes real through the love of the boy who owns the toy. With Groundhog Day, the film has become real through the love of the people who've seen it; many over and over again. To take another literary metaphor, the reality of Groundhog Day is like Topsy: "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me.†No, nobody did. Everybody did.

There are lots of theories being tossed about concerning Groundhog Day. It seems that many philosophers and most major religions want to make the film their own:

But that all seems to me to be just much of a muchness. Internet pundits, as well as pontifical human beings of all sorts, are famous for blowing things, simple things, all out of proportion.

To my mind, Groundhog Day is a great film because it is a simple film; because it takes up, once again, “the supreme theme of art and song†as stated clearly by Yeats:

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
After Long Silence

The film, of course, takes this insight and inverts it. Wisdom enough to love is allowed to come, finally, to Phil Connors after a long time spent in the same day. How long a time? That’s subject to some dispute, but the best estimate for the timespan of Groundhog Day is “eight years, eight months, and 16 days, based on him spending three years learning to play the piano, three years learning to ice sculpt, two years learning French, and six months learning to throw cards into a hat.â€

It’s nice we have the Internet to help figure timelines like that out, but to me the "actual" time is also beside the point. The real point of Groundhog Day is that in life you will, sooner or later, have to learn to love, learn to really love, and the lesson on how to love will be repeated until you learn it. How long is that? As Groundhog Day shows us, and one of the reasons we continue to love it more, that time is “as. long. as. it. take.â€

Learning, at long, long last to love is why people everywhere love this film. What makes it great, however, is that in the end we do in fact see Connors, and by extension ourselves, learn this lesson. We find that, in the end, after a long time, love arrives. Sometimes in just one day.

Here’s the best video summation of the film I can find. It’s really the whole show in a time capsule.

"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book." --Northrop Frye

One of the recurring themes in the discussion of the "new media" (internet, blogs, databases, web pages, online encyclopedia's, Google's thirst to control and contain all the information in the known universe, the cloud, ebooks, etc.) is if bytes will "replace" books. To many, it certainly looks that way on any given day at any given rest stop on the Information Highway. After all, the current Holy Grail of Deep Geek Hipness is to have everything -- every scrap, note, frame, word, and image -- stored on one's iPad for display at the touch of a fingertip. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Be that as it may, the book is not going anywhere. Indeed, the book -- in form and concept -- is the foundation of the new media; it is contained within and yet contains it. The very way in which we discuss the new media ( web pages, web browsing, and that constant root of all places cyber, the place, space and file called "index.html" ) asserts that the book remains the dominant permanent record of all things worth keeping. Storage mediums come and go in the cyberverse ( One word: "floppy."), but I don't think that the age when all information and opinions and records and history is held in some immense GoogleServer pile is one which we should welcome. Distributed information is more powerful and more secure when it is distributed not only throughout the Net, but in more than one medium.

The way-new information universe, straddled by the ever growing hulk that is ("First don't be evil." ) Google is barely out of infancy and just about due to grow into "The Terrible Twos." The book, by contrast, represent a fully mature information retrieval system.

What is good about the book? What makes it persistently valuable in storing, not the trivia of the day, but that which is valuable to humanity over the long term?

Let's review:

1) No "advanced" technology required. Ability to manufacture present in all areas of the globe.
2 ) Crude but functioning units can be made by kindergartners with pencil, paper and glue.
3) Operating system and interface rock solid.
4) All types of information can be stored.
5) Has been demonstrated to be able to retain information in retrievable form across several thousand years.
6) Of the two, the User will often crash first.
7) All parts can be recycled.
8) All or part can be backed-up at any Kinkos.
9) Can be powered for hours with one candle.
10) All users receive up to 12 years of interface training free.

Add to that the tactile and aesthetic pleasures of fine books where art combines with craft, and you have something that will be with humankind long after today's high-tech toys are consigned to a museum and listed in their paperback catalog. Perhaps there may be some new innovation at the dawn of some new day that will really and for all time displace the book, but that innovation and that dawn of that day is not yet. For now, if it is a really important bit of knowledge or expression we put it in a book. Just to be safe.

Shall he not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
-- Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

This Sunday morning, visiting one of my favorite personal pages, Daughter Of The Golden West, I found her latest item, "At The Fruit Stand." It is very simple; very terse. This is it complete:

That's all. But what a wealth of wonder is contained in that single sentence; a wealth of ordinary, everyday miracles that are so common we barely remark them and pass on even though they should stop us in our tracks.

It is end of January, the very depth of winter, and yet we have -- everywhere -- not just grapefruit, but "a mountain" of grapefruit. Cheap grapefruit. A dollar -- which is the new dime -- will get you one. Maybe even two or three depending on the merchant.

A few dollars more and these grapefruit can come by the case and the crate to your door in a day though you be a world away. You see we don't mind distance anymore. We toss these grapefruit into aluminum tubes and blast them into the stratosphere from coast to coast, across mountains and rivers and oceans without end. Once upon a time a single piece of citrus, an orange perhaps, was put into the toe of Christmas stockings because a piece of citrus in the dead of winter was an exotic and expensive miracle. Kings had it if they had access to the Royal Greenhouses at Kew. And perhaps their friends. Not you. Not I. Not the Daughter of the Golden West who showed up at her local fruit stand to "a mountain of grapefruit."

Where did the grapefruit come from? Why it was "grown in the deserts." Grown. In. The. Deserts. Just like that. In the deserts, in the midst of the arid climes where, throughout most of the history of the planet Earth, nothing like grapefruit would ever grow. But now it does. By the mountain.

If you look at the picture you'll see these are Seley Reds from the Seley Orchards in the Borrego Valley of Southern California. Seley Orchards are irrigated by water from 300 feet below the surface pumped up with power taken from vast solar panels.

Seley Orchards are in the Anza-Borrego desert...

which is itself but a small part of California's oddly named "Colorado Desert,"

which is itself contained within the even more extensive Sonoroan Desert

And from this wasteland we get, without thinking it at all miraculous, "a mountain of grapefruit." But it is a miracle of the works and days of human hands. And of the American spirit and drive to make the deserts bloom. And of God who, when it comes to this nation on this morning it can still be said, "America, America, God shed his grace on thee."

How long will such luck and grace; how long will these days of miracles and wonders last? Well, that depends on the grace of God, doesn't it?

September, 2006
1. The Mystic's Dream
2. The Mummer's Dance
3. The Old Ways
4. Dante's Prayer
5. The Dark Night of the Soul
6. The Bonny Swans
7. The Lady of Shallot

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San Francisco, the nation's leading open air exhibition of failed social policies, never fails to instruct one in the infinite disabilities of social utopianism. Although large sections of this city still retain their charm in the far or middle distance -- the swooping helicopter pan shot in from the Golden Gate; the brightly painted Cable Car cresting a backlit hilltop -- most soon lose all charm in close-up.

Example: A clear and crisp dawn in a small side street near Laguna and Hayes. Plantings in all the window boxes, well but not fussily painted facades. A few, very small, very well kept front yards. Clean curtained windows. All in all a pretty and quiet moment in the city's morning. Then, between two of the cars on the street and a bulging shopping cart on the curb, I noticed a man who has obviously slept rough for at least 200 consecutive days turning in a slow pirouette and gazing intently at the ground. Then he lowered himself delicately down between an Audi and an SUV.

Seeing no real reason not to stroll on past, I did and noted that the man, pants to his ankles, was relieving himself. I was to see this behavior twice in a single day in San Francisco. And I was in the better neighborhoods.

In the course of a random walk of four hours through the most touristed sections of the city, this scene was only the most unhappily memorable of a serious of disturbing moments. Perhaps they only disturbed because they were playing out against the postcards of my memories of San Francisco during the six years I had lived and worked there in the early 70s; against even deeper images of the city in the Summer of 1968.

Against memory any present day moment would pale as nostalgia took its toll. You'd be prepared, at the least, to be disappointed since feeling that the past is preferable to the present is a common human instinct. What you're not prepared to be is disturbed but yet not shocked. After all, you've read and heard about it for years. No matter. The actual San Francisco of the present is a clear reminder that the rap is not the territory.

The extent to which the homeless, the hard-core unemployed, the drunk and the addicted, and general shabby personalities of all kinds are deployed about the city is something to bring even the most hard-core liberal from elsewhere up short. If the myriad policies and millions man-years of effort, coupled with untold billions of dollars in funding deployed in San Francisco over the last four decades have created the current visible result, something is seriously askew with the city's basic social engineering. It is as if the entire region has spent 40 years and 400 billion building a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge on Ocean Beach intending to span the Pacific. A good intention, but a city's gotta know its limitations.

Strolling San Francisco past the blanket wrapped souls that sleep upright in bus shelters, past the ad-hoc shanty towns of clustered shopping carts, past lone men swaddled in sleeping bags on a stretch of stained concrete with only a fence and a warning between them and a few meager blades of grass; all this gives one a deep sense of unease and unmitigated tragedy after the 20th exposure. After the 50th they just fade into the background body count, one more item of the city's detritus -- the sudden sirens, the litter shuffled about by the wind, the hysterical graffiti and the crass billboard ads and signs announcing yet another source of 24 hour lap dancing, the pockets of schizophrenic pan handlers, the others. All just part of San Francisco's rich tapestry of diversification through stupefaction.

Seeing so many driven so low -- and this in what still passes as "the better neighborhoods" -- you have to wonder what happened to, and what is still happening to, the billions of public funds being compulsively shoved at this problem. Where has the money and time and good intentions all gone.

The best that can be said is that it has provided lifetime employment in various government and private agencies for those who would otherwise be part of the problem they have sworn to solve. In a way, although it is commonly thought that poverty creates homelessness, it is also as correct to say that agencies set up to combat homelessness have a deep and abiding interest in preserving it. This interest and these agencies are now such a permanent feature of our government that there is virtually no chance of disbanding or eliminating them. Ever. The best that can be done is to slow, if possible, the growth of their funding since increased funding primarily swells the size of their employee pool and thus perpetuates and enhances their power.

A cynical person might believe that THISF ( "The Homeless Industry of San Francisco)", which recently merged with the Free Schizophrenics Movement (FSM), exists not to curtail suffering but to expand its scope. After all, were the number of the homeless to actually diminish in San Francisco, the number of those serving the insatiable needs of this group would also be expected to fall.

A cynical person would believe that an institutionalized, unionized group with excellent benefits and a fine pension plan would never knowingly do anything that would lower its customer base. Indeed, it would be much more likely to make the description of its customer increasingly complex so that ever more people would be discovered to be lacking in basic social services.

A cynical person would believe that the industry's customer base in San Francisco was booming. Booming to the extent that this year, and the next, and the years that come after the years after, the nation, state and city will all require more and more money from the citizens to continue to not solve homelessness.

But I am not that cynical person. I see hope in the small things, the little signs on the street that not all the homeless wish to remain so; that some of them still possess the classic American entrepreneurial spirit.

Example: At night in the same day as dawn above. I am walking down Laguna Street towards Hayes with an old friend. We have just been to a party and to drinks after and are feeling very in charge of the night. As we walk down the block I can see we are coming up on a parking lot behind a chain-link, razor-wire capped fence. I notice something odd in the fence.

When we get up to it I can see it is a used -- very used -- fishing rod of uncertain vintage and battered aspect. Instead of fishing line, rough brown twine comes up through the line loops on the rod and dangles down from the tip about 11 feet above the sidewalk. On the end of the twine, is a used -- very used -- large Starbucks coffee cup. The twine is very carefully woven into the lip of the cup. On the cup itself a grimy 3x5 card is taped. Printed on the card in hasty letters is the word "Please."

That's it. Just hanging there in the middle of the block panhandling for its owner well out of standard pan handling hours. We glance inside and it's working. There's about three dollars in change at the bottom.

Cynical men would have emptied it out to feed the parking meters for their Escalades. Not having Escalades we just chipped in and strolled on by.

Still, it was nice to know that somewhere in the vast and increasing army of the homeless now occupying The Streets of San Francisco was at least one soul who pushed aside total dependency and chose, instead, innovation in his or her chosen field of endeavor. You'd think that the vast apparatus that exists to keep people from begging on the street could learn a bit about begging from this constituent. But then again, why should they? Getting more money to do less from San Franciscans these days is like shooting fish in a barrel; a large barrel and a lot of very fat-headed fish.

For D. --who loves this city beyond all reason.

Other Voices Other Runes

The White House: laser-focused on making condoms easier to get than jobs
I cannot know whether my life makes ultimate sense. But I can live as if it does, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it does not. I cannot know whether my life is bounded by bodily birth and death. But I can live as if it is not, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it is. -- Vallicella @ Maverick Philosopher

The dead white males always said it only takes one aggressor to make a war.


"Just look outside at the Global Warming; if it was not for the propaganda lies of the Deniers we could have shut down electricity generation, the automobile, and smelters and be living in a normal snow filled winter." -- Mitchieville / White Atrocity Month
"no liberal complains about the runaway costs of public education, and the 45% increase in just 3 years in the cost of food stamps, too, is given little bad press. But heart surgery is somehow too expensive, as are treatments for cancer." -- Don Surber: Hey PolitiFact, here's your death panel
The models descended on the city, along with photographers, stylists, makeup artists, celebrities, editors and of course, fashion groupies during New York fashion week. And descend they did. You had models:
Then you had the unfortunate male models:
And then you had the lovers watching from the sidelines:
See more at: A glimpse of fashion week 2012 - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Available on the scroll at Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

Today at Facts and Chicks Dot Com

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers remarks at an event in recognition of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation -- Getty Images
Obama spent us into bankruptcy, most of the money went to cronies, and the job situation got worse. That's the real story, not a question of who pays for birth control, which doesn't cost that much anyway. -- Glenn Reynolds
Q: “Can you name a country that begins with a “Uâ€? A: “Europe?â€
[Warning: Do not view in a depressed or sober state of mind.]
Warren Buffett: Baptist and Bootlegger
There can be only one reason why Sebelius, Pelosi, and Obama decided to proceed.
"The Japanese crews will slough their skin and muscles, and bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media."

As the telescope swept across the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary,
How much is Sister Carol Keehan worth to the pro-Obamacare Catholic Health Association? Answer: $962,467.
No more certain sign exists that a nation has chosen to step off its historic upward path than the creation of wealth taxes. A nation imposes a wealth tax when it wakes up one day to conclude that it has become embarrassed, rather than proud of, its wealth, which is to say, its national success. -- Henninger: What Would Clint Eastwood Do? - WSJ.com
Dems propose 'Reasonable Profits Board' to regulate oil company profits Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits. Here directly from the proposed bill:

What sets the Fifty apart is its extraordinary scale.

Every morning, I look at my clock-radio with a mixture of sleepiness and mild revulsion.

Samsung took the wraps off its gigantic Galaxy Note,
in areas like Media Matters is that most of them have a life.
Ah, that would be Facts and Chicks . com, where the learning checks in but it doesn't check out:

Not only can you learn a lot but this summer they're going to introduce homework.
where the "right" to unfettered sexual gratification trumps all others,

"It was just easier and less unpleasantly racist," say American bishops. Obama Christ: 'My People, You Continue To Have My Blessing' | Sad Hill News
As such, just as liberalism is slow-motion socialism, Republicanism has tended to be slow-motion liberalism, or super slow-mo socialism. --One Cʘsmos: The Welfare State: Monument to a Barbarian
On the site of a former auto parts plant in the small southwest Georgia town of Americus, a factory is turning the abundant local hardwood trees into chopsticks -- €” for export to China. --PhotoBlog [Taste the irony of the phrase "On the site of a former auto parts plant...."]
Bangkok bomb: Iranian blows off his legs as grenade he hurled at police bounces back Stash of explosives blow roof off house occupied by three Iranians
This power grab was evidently made not so much to control the birth of untermenschen
I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. - Plato's Gorgias
Naked Football Coach
Where SWPL yuppies in a never ending battle against “the wrong sort of White peopleâ€
Ah, yes, the sunshine supercar!:
"and be loved in return. In a hundred years the most important man you ever met is anonymous.
And it’s not like this sneering condescension is any kind of a new thing, it’s been on parade since the beginning of 2009,
Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse;
Think about it. If a spaceship full of aliens landed on earth to observe human behavior,


I dearly hope a Charles Whitman-type autopsy someday reveals that Matthews’s obnoxious manner and twisted worldview
When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race
They might have concluded that a long-term campaign of subversion to insert assets into the US political system would pay far greater dividends
"Yes, legalized drugs would have killed her quicker." --Don Surber


"It's the same garbage from the same garbagemen. I'd like to say fool me once, but from nuclear winter to overpopulation to global cooling, they have yet to fool me." -- Global warmists throw in the towel -- Don Surber

The hat, cane and gloves of our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, born this day, in 1809. -- -- Daughter Of The Golden West
When I travel around the United States meeting people in the Tea Party who care -- black, white, gay, straight -- anyone that's willing to stand next to me to fight the progressive left, I will be in that bunker, and if you're not in that bunker 'cause you're not satisfied with this candidate, more than shame on you. You're on the other side." --Breitbart at CPAC: This Is Not Your Mother's Democratic Party

Jim Berger was 12 years old in 1956 when he put pencil to paper, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright and asked a favor.

In the latest, much celebrated, unemployment report, the labor force participation rate had plummeted to 63.7%,
"The weapon that Barack Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen. They welcomed Obamacare. They encouraged Senators and Congressmen who professed to be Catholics to vote for it. --American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil

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