The pumpkin carving jokes remind me of yesterday's "Bizarro" -- if you missed it, find the cartoon in your favorite paper today, check out the Frankenstein panel, then go back to 10/30 (since the link I tried to post doesn't seem to work).
My own lame contribution to the day's humor: Why did the chicken (roadkill) step into the road? To get to the Other Side.
joanna(#129): We don't use air conditioning much at all, and only turn the heat on when it gets consistently cold by my Bay Area standards (under 60 in the daytime), so our cat does experience seasons of sorts in this mile-high central AZ town. It drives him to spend summer days in my closet, colder nights on the bed with us, and he sheds more in warm weather. Hairballs are definitely a problem -- not sure they're worse at any particular time. But he certainly looks *made* for winter, with the hairy ears and extra-fuzzy paws!
joann (#95): This morning I couldn't get through on your picture link -- my creaky old machine froze -- but now I've come back to enjoy it. No need to demonstrate tummy fluff to *me*! Our Emperor (AKA Tuxedo Cat, Noisebox, and Fluffball among other things) seems to be mostly Norwegian Forest Cat, and drifting white tummy fluff is oh so familiar, espec. when warm weather starts.
Cleaning up is worth it, though!
This whole story is more or less "local" news here in Prescott (same county, different town), and what has struck me most is the recent charge of homicide. What con man posing as a guru, or even deluded type who thinks he *is* one, would want to do away with any of his well-paying followers?
The "spiritual warrior" element mentioned above might have something to do with it, but as for the official charges I can only guess (without further evidence at present) that they're thinking in terms of negligent homicide, since people have gotten ill during previous retreats even though no deaths seem to have occurred.
It's all a sorry mess, and pollutes a beautiful place in a beautiful season (once known as Indian Summer).
Odd mix of warmish and coolish days here in Prescott AZ, with more warmish to come. Not a proper haiku (and it includes non-native plantings in the yard outside this window), but here's a bit of poem:
Cottonwoods green-gold
Pampas spears erect
Snow on the distant peaks
Come and gone
Another grieving song, I think (without going so far as to play the CD and be sure): Jeff Buckley, "Corpus Christi Carol".
(Getting back here after two weeks of watching US Open tennis on TV, then one writing book reviews for Locus)
Here in Prescott AZ, the sunny morning of September 11th brought an interesting sight. Far over the semi-wild gulch across from my mom's place, I saw two dozen hawklike birds soaring -- far more than I'd ever seen at one time before. A week later, a guy who writes a column about birds in our local paper did one on migrating flocks, including Swainson's hawks and turkey vultures. If the spiralling birds *were* vultures, they looked more majestic than ominous, despite the date! I suspect they were hawks, though. After a few minutes, nearly all of them flew off, still together.
Meanwhile, the NY tennis got rained out (appropriate weather), disappointing but it allowed me to read a big new book that had just arrived, one I ended up reviewing for November. So things went OK in *this* household, despite the somber anniversary.
I don't know if anyone around here bothers to watch "Nova" on PBS, but last night's show about fractals was great fun. ("Euclid be damned -- *this* is the way the universe works!")
The only thing that bothered me was all those beautiful color images, and no mention of paisley fabrics. Whoever came up with those a long time ago had the right idea, if not a formula to describe it.
Speaking of off-color (innuendos, not eyes), did anyone else see Turner's combo* of Red Dust and semi-sequel (setting changed from Malaysian rubber plantation to African safari) Mogambo last night? Aside from the aging of star Clark Gable from one to the next -- early 30ish(?) hottie to graying established star, still with that twinkle in his eye -- it was interesting and amusing to hear the various ways the films' respective floozies, Jean Harlow and Ava Gardner, baited him. No "is that a gun in your pocket..." query from Jean here, but I think Ava had that line beat when she told Clark the friendly young elephant lifting his little trunk "reminds me of you."
*a lot easier to see them both during prime time in the West
Mark Fiore has a great animated cartoon about the loonier paranoid fantasies. (The bit about Guerilla Obama coming to cut out your heart really had me giggling.)
Thanks for the cat tales!
Our big old boy, Emperor Horton, is a Norwegian Forest Cat -- top weight, when he was younger, about 20 pounds -- and he definitely gallops (thundering hoofbeats in the dead of night).
As a longhaired "tuxedo cat," he gets furballs that can induce vomiting without our prompting, but a certain chunky wet cat food seems to speed the process -- always, like his noisier demands for feeding, when humans would prefer to be asleep.
He does *not* like getting wet, but in our mile-high but hot Arizona summers he spends a lot of time sleeping on the bathroom floor, looking like a very large, fuzzy doorstop.
SFGate columnist Mark Morford, of the similar name but very different disposition, has an amusing column about Sanford today.
This is a bit of an aside, but when I recently saw a TV reshowing of Bladerunner I was surprised to realize that the date is now quite near-future, maybe 10 years off. That made the space colonies, flying police cars, etc. all the more ironic -- and the clunky computers, characters smoking like their Forties Noir counterparts, total absence of all our current hand-held devices, lousy office security, and so on all the more blatant.
Still a very watchable movie.
After Liza called me with the news yesterday morning, it did leave a gaping hole in things, and that vacuum still hasn't filled despite 20-plus years of memories returning. Tom Whitmore and Lizzy give a good picture of his complex personality -- something like a force of nature back in 1981 when I joined the small staff as a newbie.
I still have dreams about those early days at Locus, but now Charles seems most present in the magazine itself as it carries on. (And I'm grateful for that for more than a reviewer's selfish reasons!) It's *his* dream, manifest and evolving.
Maybe there's a lively discussion of this somewhere on site, but I can't find it, so I'll pass along the word here: today's New York Times has an article on the French bakery owner's visa flap in New Hampshire, as discussed here last month.
Did anyone here watch "Nova" on PBS last night? Very cool show where the indie rock musician (and math ignoramus) son of the guy who invented the many/parallel worlds theory explored his late father's life, throwing in some music along the way. Well, I liked it, at any rate.
When I was a kid, I loved visiting Mount Diablo, the boulder-strewn mountain on the other side of the Oakland hills. Now I live not far from the Granite Dells, Prescott AZ's close cousin of Joshua Tree Monument. (For photos, Google "Granite Dells AZ" -- I tried to give a link to one site, but for some reason the directions didn't work this time.)
There's also a big distinction between the 20th-century's favored Adultery-in-Suburbia brand of LitFic and somebody like Dickens, whose novels were originally serialized as entertaining adventures rather than submitted to the reader as exercises in Serious Brooding. In Dickens, the world tends to be a lot bigger than some dreary neighborhood. (Ditto Tolstoy, in War and Peace mode.)
It's completely irrelevant to the current discussions, but abi, I thought you might be interested in this bookbinder interview from today's SFGate. (He works in Emeryville, my old hometown.)
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