Odd Odds and Even Ends

Flannery O'Connor joined us on this day in 1925.

'You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."

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When I got home today Emma told me that Gretel has some big news from school, and that I couldn't guess it in a million years. She was right.

Gretel is in an after-school club and she's been working on a project that raises awareness for eating bugs instead of meat to help save the environment.

Do you want to guess who donated $100 to it? Incorrect. The correct answer is Rick Moranis.

We got our first VCR when I was about as old as Gretel. How many times did I watch Strange Brew on it?  I'm not sure if I can guess within a hundred. Could have been every day after school for a year? My memory is hazy, perhaps partially because I may have watched Strange Brew everyday after school for a year.

At 11, if I could have seen 40 years into the future, my mind would have melted.

March 25, 2025

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Zuzu found this sign humorous. If there are any $6 Shrimp Tackle Boxes out there looking for a job, this might be your lucky day.

March 25, 2023

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Ted Cruz tried to make a spectacle of himself at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, then was caught immediately searching his own name on Twitter to see if he made a splash. What a dipshit, haha. The word backpfeifengesicht comes to mind.

Republican senator Ben Sasse complained about "jackassery" and people mugging for the spotlight during their camera time. Ted Cruz has just been Sassed. You know what Al Franken said about Ted Cruz?

"Here's the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz. I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz."

March 25, 2022

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Backpfeifengesicht- a face that wants to be punched

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First Gretel started laughing, then she laughed harder, then she started farting, then she spit her yogurt out all over me, then she started laughing even harder, then she started farting again. I'm pretty sure that somewhere in there is a direct analogy to the current state of American politics.

March 25, 2018

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Republicans are taking on tax reform next. The healthcare bill didn't have much to do with health, it was a massive tax break for the already-rich. Maybe tax reform will focus on healthcare? Then infrastructure will focus on energy? Education will focus on trade which will focus on the environment. I'm being absurd, everybody knows they will all focus on massive tax cuts for the already-rich at the expense of every issue. Everybody knows it, some like it, some don't.

March 25, 2017

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If yes- the answer yes couldn't be true. If no- supposing it is dead, neither yes nor no wouldn't be acceptable answers. Mind spinning? Have no worries. The true truth about the truth is that it's true, truly. (And if that's not a fact, we're fuct.)

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Saturn's largest moon, Titan, was discovered by Christiaan Huygens on this day in 1655.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford on this day in 1811, for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

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In 1957, the United States Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds. Imagine! That is recent! And it begins with the greatest run-on sentence in the history of run-on sentences. 

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." followed by two thousand ninety-six words.

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David Bowie bestowed us with the best mugshot in history on this day in 1976.

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The Outsiders was released on this day in 1983. The first time I saw it was one of the best movie experiences in my life. I came across it flipping through the channels in the middle of the night and was blown away. 

Can you spot the true rebel?

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Doug Stanhope was born this day in 1967.

"You never hear in the news, 'Two hundred killed today when atheist rebels took heavy shelling from the agnostic stronghold in the north.'"

And then there's this classic:

Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you’ve never met. All of a sudden you take pride in accomplishments you had no part in whatsoever. If you’re American you’ll go, ‘Fuck the French. If we hadn’t saved their asses in World War II, they’d be speaking German right now.’ And you go, ‘Oh, was that us?’ Was that me and you, Tommy? We saved the French? Jesus. I know I blacked out a little after that fourth shot of Jägermeister last night, but I don’t remember… I know we were going through the Wendy’s drive-thru to get one of them ‘Freshetta’ sandwiches that looked so alluring on the commercial, but then we ordered it and realized we had no money, and we had to ditch out before the second window, and those douche-bags in line behind us with the bass music probably got our order and we laughed about that. But I don’t remember saving the French at all. I went through the last ten calls on my cell phone and there’s nothing from the French, looking for muscle on a project. I checked my pants; there’s no mud stains on the knees from when we were garroting Krauts in the trenches at Verdun. I think *we* didn’t do anything but watch sports bloopers while we got hammered. I think *we* should shut the fuck up.

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Other natable birthdays- David Lean (1908), Jim Lovell (1928), Gloria Steinem (1934), Aretha Franklin (1942)

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Buck Owens died on this day in 2006.

"Their going to put me in the movies.

Their going to make a big star out of me 

They'll make a film about a man who's sad and lonely,

And all I have to do is act naturally."

Songwriting perfection.

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Larry McMurtry left us on this day in 2021. From Lonesome Dove:

"He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”

Born in Archer City, Texas, died in Archer City, Texas. Did he take the exact opposite lesson away from The Last Picture Show?

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"Florida kayaker has close encounter with enormous shark"

This is why I always kayak in Florida with a cyanide capsule handy.

https://technorati.com/player/article/x323oam/player/DailyMotion/vendor/Stormsummary

March 25, 2011

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One of the strangest things I've ever seen.

https://calmingcharms.com/products/ironic-buddha-statue

March 25, 2021

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No big whoop, just a little kid blowing bubbles.

https://fb.watch/ju2rv-SSU_

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Interviewer- Werner Herzog has said that he doesn't understand irony at all, while you said that irony is a kind of religion for you.

Errol Morris- Herzog would tell me one of his Nazi ubermensch stories: how he single-handedly battled 400 man-eating pygmies in the Amazon jungle or walked across Mongolia hopping on one foot. In turn I would counter with a Jew-boy story: how I cried myself to sleep every night because I lived at home with my mother, had no friends, and wet the bed. I'm pleased to say that these stories never failed to irritate him.

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Garry Winogrand

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Bertrand Russell- “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

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Andy Warhol- “My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous."

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Bruce Lee- “Are you going to let the obstacles in your life be stumbling blocks or stepping stones?”

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Epicurus, The Art of Happiness- "He who is not happy with little will never be happy with much."

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Jim Jefferies- "After you die nothing happens. Stop being a fucking child."

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Morty, from Rick and Morty- "Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV."

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Seneca- “It’s ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest—by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things.”

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Bukowski- "There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."

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Dumb Short Joke of the Day:

I have an EpiPen. My friend gave it to me when he was dying, it seemed very important to him that I have it.

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Addendum 

From a NY Times review of a recent biography of Larry McMurtry:

On the one hand, this biography suggests that his life was rather deluxe. He was the American president of PEN, the literature and human rights group. He ate caviar at Petrossian with Susan Sontag. When Sontag was sick with cancer, he sent caviar to her bedside. He hunkered down for long stretches in a suite at the Pierre Hotel (when in New York) and at the Chateau Marmont (when in Los Angeles). He wrote for The New York Review of Books. He had intimate friendships with Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd; Shepherd has called him the love of her life. He attended his agent Swifty Lazar’s fabled Oscar night parties. He knew his way around Georgetown dinner parties, and even more so around rare books.

On the other hand, he’d grown up on a ranch. The ochre mud never entirely came off his boots, nor did he want it to. He wasn’t entirely comfortable on the coasts. He was a sloppy dresser; his belts tended to miss some loops. He loved Fritos, Dr Pepper, peanut patties and Hershey’s chocolate bars. He had a method with the Hershey’s bars. He liked them warm. He’d let them melt on his car’s dashboard while driving, then lick the goo off the wrapper. He could read and drive at the same time, he claimed, at least on the Texas plains. Once, stopped for speeding, he explained he’d been writing in his head and got excited. He was good at friendship. He liked gossip, dirty jokes and taking his slick Manhattan friends to stock car races.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/books/review/tracy-daugherty-larry-mcmurtry-a-life.html