Oozings

 

From time to time I find want to argue with Words With Friends (WWF) about words such as this one:  "Oozings" is TOO a word. (blowing Raspberries) As evidence I offer an example of its use by on of the greatest poets of the English Language, John Keats who wrote of "Autumn" (in her personification or as a goddess) "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours."  (notice too his use of apostrophe which I may have mentioned in a recent FB post)

I suppose the problem lies in forgetting about the use of participles as nouns, and as a noun it could be plural and that is how Keats uses it.  So many apples we can watch dozens of pressings and oozing after oozing--that would be more than one, so yes, oozings will work.

You might also note the over abundance of vowels I had to choose from in this round of WWF left me with few options from for maximum point which added to my consternation.  And what, exactly, is one to do with four Es?  

I will relent and repent on my stance on the word "frack."  "Frack" is another word I tried to use that WWF outlawed, band, dismissed or failed to recognize.  My logic is that if the participle "fracking" is a word then "frack" must be a word.  However, I now consider the word a lexical aberration.  The base form of the word actually comes from "fracture."  However, I would still argue that in popular culture the word "frack" was used constantly on the TV series Babylon 5 (1993-1998) so it should be a word if it has any kind of common use as a replacement for the other "F" word.

Rant over.  Thanks for your consideration.

Blogger, my old friend, How have you been?

This is the Windmill on Windmill Island.  I love this picture
because it looks like it's out in the country.

     I can't believe it.  I've recovered my old blog!  It is like a long lost friend.  I haven't been able to use in in years.  I deleted a post I didn't like from 2018, and that was the last time I used it.

    Some people don't like blogs anymore since they've kind of gone out of fashion.  When was I ever concerned about fashion? I love this because it is a both journal and photo record of things I've done and a remembrance places I've been, and it has lots of musings, stories and poetry.  It is an everything kind of place.  I'll have to get out my vacation pictures from 2019, the trip I took to England, Spain, and Morocco.  Ah, I'm so happy!  See you again soon with lost of creative stuff!

Flying Things

It was made of broomsticks and rags and old, old wires, but—it flew!  YES, it flew!  Only for a moment, that is so, but it flew!! Flying Thing #1 did fly and young Tommy Malloy was ecstatic.  It fell and crashed to the ground and broke into a hundred pieces; but that didn’t matter, because it HAD flown, and that meant that the possibility had become an actuality even if it was only for a moment.  Tommy danced about the wreckage of his Flying Thing #1. which was in pieces and scattered about in the field.

            Tommy then set out to build Flying Thing #2.  He poured a great deal of time, money and enthusiasm into this project. At night he dreamed of this marvelous machine in flight—and he saw himself in all the papers: “Tommy Malloy creates Flying Thing!”

            When he finished it, he looked at it and thought it was a thing of great beauty.  He started it up.  It wobbled and ran about the field.  It sputtered and strained and popped, but it wouldn’t take to the air.  He adjusted a few things, refueled it, primed it, turned it toward the wind and started it up again; and again it wobbled and sputtered and strained and popped.  Then after many tries, Flying Thing #2 hissed, screamed, choked and died never having, left the ground.

            Did I mention that Tommy was a very religious person?  When he was crestfallen for the failure of Flying Thing #2, he blamed himself for his failure—Not that he was wrong to build Flying Things, no, NO; he felt certain that God had given him a great gift to build such marvelous contraptions as the world had not seen!  No, not that, his error was his arrogance, ego and pride—his heart was not right, he decided, and that led him to dismantle Flying Thing #2 because, as he said to himself over and over again, “God has shut me down! And there is nothing I can do about it.”  He believed that he would have to purify his heart, and when his heart was right, God would call him, in the right time and place, to build Flying Things.

            And so Tommy became even more religious and spent his life trying to purify his heart so that when God called him to build his Flying Things, he would do so successfully and with purity of heart!  He married dutifully, but lovelessly, raised his children according to the will of God, worked hard at a job that he didn’t care for, with a boss that over-tasked him and paid him enough to keep him barely above poverty—for which he gave thanks to God in all things.  And he continued to spend years of devotion to God and to his church. 

Time passed by and Tommy was getting older and older.  Once in a while he thought about his Flying Things—even toyed with an idea for building Flying Thing #3—a little less weight here, lighter materials there, a different angle--but no, he would think, God had shut him down for his sinful pride and his many imperfections.

In time, Tommy died never having built his Flying Things.  He came before Almighty God.  It wasn’t quite like he imagined.  God was in a bar and looked like he would be more comfortable among bikers than preachers.  He was smoking a cigar and drinking shots of bourbon.  The piano player was playing “Stairway to Heaven” on a honky-tonk piano in the background while God poured a shot of bourbon into to Tommy’s glass.  Tommy, being religious, refused to drink, so God, being God and all, gave it to him straight:  “Tommy,” he said, scratching his whiskers, “I gave you a gift!  Son, you could’ve built the most amazing flying things to the joy of everyone, IF ONLY YOU HADN’T BEEN SO DAMN RELIGIUOS!!!

Pasteboard Masks

Here's the passage from Moby Dick I'm reading in the video if you need it:

Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer.  All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.  But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts for the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.  If man will strike, strike through the mask!  How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?  To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.  Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.  But tis enough.  He tasks me;  He heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.  That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.  Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.  For if the sun could do that, then I could do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.  But not my master, man, is even that fair play.  Who's over me?  Truth hath no confines.

The Dark Side of the Mountain

The Fates slept.

What can I say? They are old women after all, and old women have a right to doze off. I know, I know, they’ve always been old so what difference did it make on this particular day?  

Who knows? The spinning, measuring, and cutting must get pretty old after a while, and if it gets to be a little too rhythmic and monotonous, then who can blame them if, on one hot afternoon in the underworld,they just kind of nodded off.  

The point is, they weren’t watching when Sisyphus suddenly heaved that boulder over the top of the mountain.

Well.  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Sysyphus blinked.

It took a second to take it all in.  He looked down and watched that great boulder, that he had worn smooth and stained over the years with his old blood and sweat, tumble and bounce down, down, DOWN that incline which he had referred to once, in his silent thoughts, as “the dark side of the mountain.”  By that he meant that he had never seen that side before--like the dark side of the moon--the unknown, mysterious land that had offered such promise if that damn stone ever made it over the peak.

He watched its clumsy descent for what seemed like forever until he could see that boulder no longer but could only hear its great thunderous crashes echoing throughout the vales of Hades’ domain.  Then it was silent.

A great smile cracked across his face, and soon his voice ripped the air with a great howl of triumph such as had never been heard before in all the universe so that it reached even up to Olympus.

It did not, however, wake the Fates; and the great resonance of his voice altered nothing there in them as they slept.

Still, the joy born of thousands upon thousands of years of persistence and pain tarried in him a little while as Winged Victory swooped in and kissed him.

Then as quickly as she came, Victory left him in sober silence on the mountain top.

Haunting thoughts wanted to bubble up from the depths of Sisyphus’ mind.  He tried to suppress them--shove them back down again with all the strength of shoving boulders, but it couldn’t be helped; they bubbled up anyway, and they bubbled up grotesquely, like hundreds of dead bodies, muddy, stinky and rotten, surfacing almost instantly in the Stygian River--too many they came, and too fast to shove back down. The thoughts shaped themselves in an almost visual smell, a kind of a great stench blending itself of all rotten things, and they all somehow began to murmur together as they formed into one, single terrible thought, a whisper, it was, and then a hiss like a demon:

“Now what?”

Unable to answer the question, Sisyphus sat down on the precipice of that mountain and spent a long time thinking.  The clouds of the underworld swirled past him. Overhead a chill wind circled down around him and pushed his hair from his face.  His brow was deeply furrowed, and his mighty, calloused hands stroked his beard.  Then he stood quickly and resolutely, and he hiked down that “dark side of the mountain”--a journey of many days.  

He found his boulder.

He stood beneath it.

He gave a great heave and started rolling the boulder up the mountain.

When the Fates woke, they looked down and thought it odd that Sisyphus was on the wrong side of the mountain, but they were satisfied, after some deliberations among themselves, that nothing had changed at all in the Underworld.

Passion

Mother Jenny

Mother Jenny is the first riddle I ever made.  It was back in about 1983 or 1984.  I was working in the Meis Department Store art department in what was called, "the Sign Shop"  It didn't pay a whole lot, but it was one of the most fun jobs I ever had.  I got to actually create a lot of the signs and silk screened posters for the entire chain of the Meis stores through out the midwest.  It was such a fun creative place to work.  The rest of the department involved about 4-5 artists (the ones that draw the sketches in ads for the clothing sales) who were really fun and creative people that I loved working with.  I started pinning my riddles to the bulletin board every week and challenged people to guess them for a candy bar.  I made an illustration for each riddle and when I was finished them, I sent them or gave them to my best friend at the time, David--now Father David who pastors the Romanian Orthodox Church in Indianapolis.  He and his wife Janene (Orthodox Priests can be married) have been good friends of mine forever and I think he still has those riddles somewhere around his house after all these years.

Just as I've always done with my illustrations for the riddles, I make sure that my illustrations have nothing to do with the answers to the riddle, so it won't help you to try to guess based on the pictures.  This video is shorter than the others, but it is my first attempt at a fully animated cartoon.  I think I've got about seven or eight hundred frames--a lot of drawing!  And a lot of mistakes that I had to correct and then timing it to the music--Whoa, do I have a new appreciation for the old-time animators!

Here are the words:

Mother Jenny has four,
to help her through the door.
Mother Jenny has nine--
that's why she feels so fine!
Mother Jenny has three--
what could they be?
Those three with their twelve in a basket
Must lose twenty-seven to see a casket.

Musical Chairs

 I don't really exactly think of myself as a liberal.  I like to think that I just think.  I do acknowledge that my views most often agree with those people who are categorized (by themselves or others) as liberal.  Being somewhat self-reflective (also a characteristic of liberals) I have started to ask myself, "How did I get to get to be this way?"  Is being liberal genetic?  Is being liberal the result of early influences? (my mentor was cool and liberal so I want to be cool and liberal)  Is being liberal just going along with the crowd where liberals hang with and liberals are just plain old conformist--thinking liberal to fit in with liberals?  Or is being liberal the result some deep underlying set of values that makes someone a liberal?

I don't know the answer to that for sure, but I know when I first realized I was a liberal.  Oh, I don't know that I could have put it into solid words since I was only three years old at the time--and just barely three at that.  It was at my birthday party.  My Mom and some other adult lady set up games to play.  One of those games was called Musical Chairs.

You remember Musical Chairs don't you?  It was a lot like a reality show--slowly eliminating people until you have only one winner left.  I didn't fully understand the rules when we started playing.  It seemed really fun at first marching around the chairs to the music like a dance, and then the music stopped.  Everyone started sitting down.  I was lucky because chair was right in front of me and I plopped down because everyone else did.  But two little girls had to go for the same seat and were pretty aggressive about it, but one did beat the other out.

I freaked.  What an awful game!  I felt so bad for the little girl who didn't have a seat.  Hey!  somebody set the game up that way--that's not right!  I didn't like this game as it was, but then--oh my gosh--the adults took yet another chair away!  Even though one little girl had to go without a chair, you'd think, well, at least there are enough chairs now--but NO!  THE GAME WAS RIGGED!  There would NEVER be enough chairs for everyone.  More and more children would be eliminated until one clever fat cat was the only one left with a chair.

What makes me a liberal is that I have this crazy idea that everyone should have a chair!  I don't care if it is the nicest chair in the room, or the wobbly folding chair.  I don't expect absolute equality.  There will always be rich and poor in this world, but by golly, everyone needs to have a job, a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, the ability to go to a doctor when they are sick and something to live on when they get old or become disabled--that's the chair--that's what it is.

What we need to ask ourselves is, who is taking those chairs away?  And, yeah, who is hoarding up those all those chairs anyway?  Man, if you've only got one ass to sit on, what are you doing with all those chairs you don't need?  Okay, so, you don't like taxes, I get it.  But what are you going to do about the chairless, then?  What?  What do you mean that's not your problem?  That the Chairless just need to work harder?   OOOOOOOHHHH that makes me mad.  You took their chair in the first place!  YOU FATCATS with all the chairs set this game up!  It is the nature of the YOUR game to ensure there are NOT enough chairs!

So off I go on my liberal ranting and people start whispering to each other "Don't bring up politics when he's around."

An elder in our old church once asked my dad, "How can you vote democrat and be a Christian?"  My dad is too nice of a guy to ever express his feelings directly to that elder, but I heard him mutter afterward, "How can you be a Christian and a Mason?"  Not that there is anything wrong with people being in the Masons necessarily--it is a form of Rosicrutianism with private secret beliefs.  Mostly it was, at that time, kind of a good old boy's network.  Sorry about the rabbit trail there, but the point is that, in a great twist of irony, and in spite of conservative fundamentalists, I am a liberal in part because of the Bible.  That whole business about human beings being created in the image and likeness of God, means you see God in every human face.  Would you seriously not find a chair for God if he walked into the room? 

God is on the street corner holding a sign and we call him a bum, and we shout, "hey, get a job" and accuse him of fraud.

God is in a Palestinian child.

God is a Central American Child crossing the Mexican Boarder into America.

God is stuck on a mountain in Iraq and running out of food and water.

God has cancer and he has no health insurance.

People say they believe in God as they take his chair away from him and blame him for his own situation.  "Should have been quicker"  "Should have worked harder."  "Should have made better decisions."

But the God, I know and love is just the opposite.  "You have no chair;" he says, "here, take mine."  He doesn't seem to like Musical Chairs either.