Dissecting me

Hmm....

The magnet high school I graduated from was only for students with an IQ of 145 or higher, so, if the above test is accurate, I've declined at least one entire standard deviation since I was sweet 16.  Bummer.  But then again, considering all the physical insults my poor brain has suffered, that's not bad.

Haha!

And I'll be the torch singer in a slinky

dress slit up to here!

A Song for the Age of Corona

I'm sittin' here in the boring room
It's just another rainy Sunday afternoon
I'm wasting my time
I got nothin' to do

I'm hangin' around

 But nothing ever happens and I wonder
                                                       Isolation is not good for me
                                            I wonder how
                                            I wonder why...

Summertime

A sultry southern summer night, too hot to sleep...

That clarinet's got attitude! And that trumpet...!

From my favorite era

Everyone dressed properly, the men in suits and ties, 

and everyone reading sheet music and 

playing real musical instruments with skill and panache.

Weather and pleasure

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
― Herman Melville

I'm by nature a northern person and can only take hot weather in small doses, especially hot, humid weather.  The cool dampness of the Pacific Northwest, up to and including southeast Alaska, is my ideal climate.  I've lived on tropical isles in the western Pacific and in East Asia and Central Asia.  Tropical isles can be nice because of the trade winds blowing and the frequent rain squalls, but hot, humid East Asia and hot, dry, dusty Central Asia...no thanks.  
And the southeastern states, with all that muggy heat, I can hardly stand to wear clothes.  In a way, there is a certain pleasure in relaxing on the porch of an old house of a southern evening, wearing as little as possible, sipping something with ice and lemons and gin in it, with the night air like black velvet on your skin, listening to crickets, frogs and night birds.
As to what Melville wrote, I agree completely.  Even in winter I sleep with the window open a crack.  Once, I slept in an attic with poorly sealing windows and cracks in the roof through which snow flakes drifted and swirled.  There was a skim of ice in the glass of drinking water on the table by my bed.  I snuggled deep in my down comforter, toasty warm as I watched my breath make clouds.  It was delightful.

Thank you, Corona-chan!

I've been to a few far away places, no doubt

 “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.” 

― Herman Melville 

Um...what?

I was browsing the comments to some on-line article and came across a couple of guys discussing the practicality of skeet shooting using a 20-pound baby and a machine gun.
What relevance this had to the contents of the article was unclear to me, as was the sanity of the commenters.
This world often completely baffles me.

Sigh...

Well, I think it's funny...

My tastes in humor are simple and I like it clean and fun.  I don't care much for dirty jokes -- I used to think they were "edgy" but not anymore.  They're just crass.  And I don't care much for the "they're wrong" type of humor, nor does the "did you ever notice..." angle do much for me.
So what kind of humor do I like?
Well, stuff like this from a Fibber McGee & Molly radio show broadcast in 1945 at the end of World War II.
It's of the "deliberate misunderstanding" variety of humor.  Gracie Allen of Burns & Allen was a master of this type of humor, but the most famous example comes from Abbott & Costello.  Their "Who's on first?" bit is the classic of the genre.
Anyway,  this gives me a chuckle (it's about thee minutes long):

Fibber McGee and Molly

Gale Gordon (Mayor LaTrivia)

From a novel I wrote

(•‿•)

Sent to me anonymously...

 

My job kind  of requires me to be like this, although in another field, but definitely a male-dominated one that is all equipment and high-T mental and physical performance, although I am not a participant but an...hmm...advisor, assistant, analyzer...I guess.

Darn Corona-chan!

Mission Accomplished!

Encounter

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld....

~ Longfellow

This is how I dress on my days off when I go out.
Americans take no notice, but Japanese stop and stare.
And I'm really not a Disney person, much preferring Warner Brothers.
Well, okay, I do like Goofy and Donald Duck.  But Bugs Bunny is da bomb, and Daffy Duck knows where it's at.
And I'd like to go for a ride in the Wolf's car.

Another one

I thought I'd make applesauce cake today, so I got out my grandmother's old cookbook, published in 1942 by Good Housekeeping, to look up the recipe.
The book is more than 900 pages and crammed with all sorts of odds and ends placed between its pages -- newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, photographs, letters, bird feathers, four-leaf clovers and flowers -- accumulated through the generations.  Sometimes I look at them, musing at the odd things I discover; other times I ignore them as almost a nuisance.
Today, the item above caught my eye.  It's a remembrance card for my great- or maybe great-great uncle, who was killed in action in France during World War I.
The printed copy lists his date of death as October 1, 1918, but someone has penciled in a 6.  I don't know if that means he was killed on October 6 or October 16.
Kay Tusing is the third of my ancestors that I know of who was killed in action during World War I.  One of the others was killed in September, 1918, I think on the 29th.  The other was killed in April.  He survived the sinking of his troop transport by a German U-Boat in January, 1918, making it ashore to the Isle of Islay in the Irish Sea from which he was rescued and sent on to France where he was killed.





















I don't know the circumstances of Lt. Beach's death, only that he had graduated with a degree in engineering from Stanford, enlisted when America entered the war and was assigned to the 1st Engineering Battalion of the 32nd Infantry.
I know something of Pvt. Kayser's death because his sister Henrietta wrote to his unit commander and asked what happened.  Major Lucius Salisbury, 106th Infantry Sanitary Detachment, 27th Infantry, replied:
"Following over the top with the company, your brother stopped near the Knoll, and, exposed to heavy machine-gun and shell fire, had dressed the wounds of one man and started to dress those of another when a shell exploded and killed all three.  Your brother offered his life for the cause without regard to personal danger...."  There followed some lines of sympathy.
Reading a little bit of history of the war, I found that during the night of September 24 – 25, 1918, the 27th Division relieved the British 18th and 74th Divisions near Ronssoy, France. At 5:30 a.m., September 27, 1918, the 106th Infantry attacked as part of a major frontal assault in what was called the Battle of St. Quentin Canal, its assigned objective the capture of Bois de Malakoff, or as the troops called it, the Knoll.  During that battle, more than 13,000 American doughboys became casualties.  Pvt. Kayser had a lot of company.
Well, Pvt. Tusing, someone remembers you and wonders about your life more than a century after your passing, if that is any comfort to you.  Oh, and the wars continue.  Even the girls serve in combat these days.  Trust me, I know.  Progress!
(I may seem flippant in these comments, but my eyes have tears welling up as I type.  I want to write more about what I feel, but I can't.  I just can't.  Listen to the song.  Oh, and I lost interest in making an applesauce cake.  Maybe tomorrow.)

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?

                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.

                                          Let me work.

~ Carl Sandburg

"On the Wire," by Harvey Dunn

 

 “I tramped through the country
To get the feeling
That I was not a separate thing from the earth.
I used to lose myself
By lying with eyes half-open in the woods.
Sometimes I talked with animals….”

― Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Walking

I like walking more than just about anything. I'll walk anywhere, but I prefer walking in forest and field, hill and dale, seaside and riverside, and, of course, the mountains.
I can walk for hours and never notice the time passing or feel tired, and certainly never bored.
Sometimes people ask me what I think about when I'm walking.  All I can say is everything and nothing.  It depends.  If I have some problem or some issue to work out or resolve, my mind may dwell on that.  Or I may observe where I am passing through and what it is like.  Other times, I think of nothing at all, my mind as empty as a cloud drifting along the sky.
I prefer to walk alone, though I enjoy company when it's available.  I do prefer a silent companion, one who speaks rarely, unless there is something to talk about.  But mostly I prefer silence.
A dog makes the very best companion to walk with, because not only is a dog silent, but he notices things that you would not.  Of course, you need to have a well-trained dog who obeys you and does not rush off chasing wildlife or livestock.
I don't care to meet other people when I walk, and if I do I pass with a "good-day" and little more.  I'm not walking to interact with people but to leave the world of people behind for a while.

 “How did one begin an adventure? Almost any road you took would lead there, if only you went on far enough.” 
~ Barbara Newhall Follett

“The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, … but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.” 
~ Henry David Thoreau

Pick your heaven

If I had my choice of heavens, I think I'd pick one one where I could just hike as long as I wanted, as far as I wanted to go.  I would want to be physically fit, with good wind and stamina for uphill climbs, but I'd want to naturally get tired and be able to find a cozy spot in the sun and out of the wind to doze off at, waking up hungry to munch on an apple and a bit of cheese, maybe a cracker, and drink some water.  Not much of a meal for heaven?  Well, enough is a good as a feast.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Midnight to lonely midnight, each night until the dawn, the sad set...