Never Too Old To Be Gone Too Soon

Neil Armstrong joined us on this day in 1930. He'll be remembered for as long as there is a human race.

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

...

Jerry Seinfeld:

I was at the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution.

They have all kinds of exhibits about the astronauts.

They show you the food they ate and everything.

They even had Neil Armstrong’s toothbrush on display, in a glass case.

Underneath it said,

“On loan from Neil Armstrong.”

And I’m thinking, “Neil, give them the brush.”

I mean, they flew him to the moon. No charge.

Get. Another. Brush.

So they asked him for his toothbrush and he says,

“... I could lend it to you.”

Is he coming in at night and using it?

Bathrobe, slippers, Colgate in his hand.

“I’m going to need the brush ... if everyone’s done LOOKING at it ...”

...

A perfect breakfast this morning! I poured a bowl of Grape Nuts, sliced up a banana on top of it, then a strawberry, drizzled it with honey, topped it off with some rancid, chunky almond milk, and dumped the whole thing down the drain. A perfect breakfast for a garbage disposal...

August 5, 2014

...

Something that was missing in the coverage of the prisoner exchange was Paul Whelan's joke. After returning from 5 1/2 years in a Russian penal colony where he was wrongfully imprisoned for espionage, he said, "I'm glad to be home. I'm never going back THERE again." I'll bet! Good material.

August 5, 2024

...

...

Wendell Berry joined us on this day in 1934. He married his wife in 1957, and they are both still alive, presumably rocking in chairs on a porch somewhere.

They Sit Together on the Porch

They sit together on the porch, the dark

Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.

Their supper done with, they have washed and dried

The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,

Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.

She sits with her hands folded in her lap,

At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,

And when they speak at last it is to say

What each one knows the other knows. They have

One mind between them, now, that finally

For all its knowing will not exactly know

Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding

Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

...

Other notable birthdays- Guy de Maupassant (1950), Joseph Merrick, "The Elephant Man" (1862), John Huston (1906)

...

Other notable deathdays- Spotted Tail (1881), Alec Guinness (2000)

...

Very excited for CNN's History of Comedy tonight. The theme is Gone To Soon. Of course they'll focus on Mitch Hedberg and Bill Hicks. But I'll be damned if losing George Carlin at 71 and Don Rickles at 90 aren't tragedies in their own right. If you don't agree, then go put some skates on your face and skate.

August 5, 2018

...

Anybody else notice the inverse proportion between the stock market increasing and the president's poll numbers dropping? It's as if we're becoming more confident as more of us recognize the emporer has no clothes... or rather, as we realize the emporer is an egomaniacal, unbalanced, thoughtless, bully with no clothes.

August 5, 2017

...

Gretel's favorite "possession."

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10152383455908512&id=741063511&mibextid=NnVzG8

...

Harry Houdini performed his greatest feat on this day in 1926, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping. He would have less than three months to live.

...

Marilyn Monroe's entrance in Some Like It Hot could be the best in the history of movies. On this day in 1962 though, news broke of her exit.

https://youtu.be/npJlqMdsAfM

...

...

Yahoo article on people criticizing the Onion on Facebook for an article about Sears extremists flying a plane into the Willis Tower. I thought it was a perfect joke.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/onion-sears-plane-willis-tower-facebook-chicago-165320530.html

August 5, 2012

...

The Young Ones' 5th roommate. Unbelievable. 

...

Good news!

http://bit.ly/1npTw5J

August 5, 2014

Postscript: Bad news! That movie sucked!

...

I always thought the unspoken truth behind the NRA was that guns need to be unlimited in case we ever need to overthrow the government. I guess I gave them too much credit, their newly spoken mission is to come after the press, apparently on behalf of a right-wing government. This is ominous...

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/345403-nra-spokesperson-to-nyt-were-coming-for-you

August 5, 2017

...

The fans have been giving Trea Turner a standing ovation each at-bat since blowing the game for them the other night. He accepted his responsibility and admitted that the loss was on him. Despite terrible numbers for the year after just signing a $300 million 11-year contract, the fans are telling him that they are still behind him. The Phils just went up 8-6 over the Royals, thanks to his 3-run home run. The crowd went nuts. John Kruk just said something like, "Son of a gun, I just love this place sometimes." He might have been crying!

This all reminds me of the last line of Woody Allen's Manhattan- "Look, you have to have a little faith in people."

August 5, 2023

...

...

Pythagoras- "No man is free who cannot control himself."

Or perhaps rather- A person is free to the degree which they can control themselves.

...

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale- "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing."

...

James Baldwin- "Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

...

Stanley Kubrick- "About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn’t help writing the screen-play, but I think it’s an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn’t, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what’s going to happen, and there’s a great satisfaction when it’s all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled."

...

Addendum

1.

A fantastic excerpt from Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods:

There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane. Ours was a baby blue Pontiac Trans Am, which flew past, then screeched to a stop on the shoulder a hundred yards or so down the road, in a cloud of gravelly dust. It was so far beyond where we stood that we didn’t think it could possibly be for us, but then it jerked into reverse and came at us, half on the shoulder and half off, moving very fast and a little wildly. I stood transfixed. The day before, we had been told by a pair of seasoned hikers that sometimes in the South drivers will swerve at AT hitchhikers, or run over their packs, for purposes of hilarity, and I supposed this was one of those moments. I was about to fly for cover, and even Katz was halfway to his feet, when it stopped just before us, with a rock and another cloud of dust, and a youthful female head popped out the passenger side window.

“Yew boys wunna rod?” she called.

“Yes, ma’am, we sure do,” we said, putting on our best behavior.

We hastened to the car with our packs and bowed down at the window to find a very handsome, very happy, very drunk young couple, who didn’t look to be more than eighteen or nineteen years old. The woman was carefully topping up two plastic cups from a three-quarters empty bottle of Wild Turkey. “Hi!” she said. “Hop in.”

We hesitated. The car was packed nearly solid with stuff-suitcases, boxes, assorted black plastic bags, hangerloads of clothes. It was a small car to begin with and there was barely room for them.

“Darren, why’nt you make some room for these gentlemen,” the young woman ordered and then added for us: “This yere’s Darren.”

Darren got out, grinned a hello, opened the trunk, and stared blankly at it while the perception slowly spread through his brain that it was also packed solid. He was so drunk that I thought for a moment he might fall asleep on his feet, but he snapped to and found some rope and quite deftly tied our packs on the roof. Then, ignoring the vigorous advice and instructions of his partner, he tossed stuff around in the back until he had somehow created a small cavity into which Katz and I climbed, puffing out apologies and expressions of the sincerest gratitude.

Her name was Donna, and they were on their way to some desperate-sounding community-Turkey Balls Falls or Coon Slick or someplace-another fifty miles up the road, but they were pleased to drop us in Hiawassee, if they didn’t kill us all first. Darren drove at 127 miles an hour with one finger on the wheel, his head bouncing to the rhythm of some internal song, while Donna twirled in her seat to talk to us. She was stunningly pretty, entrancingly pretty.

“Y’all have to excuse us. We’re celebrating.” She held up her plastic cup as if in toast.

“What’re you celebrating?” asked Katz.

“We’re gittin married tomorrah,” she announced proudly.

“No kidding,” said Katz. “Congratulations.”

“Yup. Darren yere’s gonna make a honest woman outta me.” She tousled his hair, then impulsively lunged over and gave the side of his head a kiss, which became lingering, then probing, then frankly lascivious, and concluded, as a kind of bonus, by shooting her hand into a surprising place-or at least so we surmised because Darren abruptly banged his head on the ceiling and took us on a brief but exciting detour into a lane of oncoming traffic. Then she turned to us with a dreamy, unabashed leer, as if to say, “Who’s next?” It looked, we reflected later, as if Darren might have his hands full, though we additionally concluded that it would probably be worth it.

“Hey, have a drink,” she offered suddenly, seizing the bottle round the neck and looking for spare cups on the floor.

“Oh, no thanks,” Katz said, but looked tempted.

“G’ won,” she encouraged.

Katz held up a palm. “I’m reformed.”

“Yew are? Well, good for you. Have a drink then.”

“No really.”

“How ’bout yew?” she said to me.

“Oh, no thanks.” I couldn’t have freed my pinned arms even if I had wanted a drink. They dangled before me like tyrannosaur limbs.

“Yernot reformed, are ya?”

“Well, kind of.” I had decided, for purposes of solidarity, to forswear alcohol for the duration.

She looked at us. “You guys like Mormons or something?”8

“No, just hikers.”

She nodded thoughtfully, satisfied with that, and had a drink. Then she made Darren jump again.

They dropped us at Mull’s Motel in Hiawassee, an old-fashioned, nondescript, patently nonchain establishment on a bend in the road near the center of town. We thanked them profusely, went through a little song-and-dance of trying to give them gas money, which they stoutly refused, and watched as Darren returned to the busy road as if fired from a rocket launcher. I believe I saw him bang his head again as they disappeared over a small rise.

And then we were alone with our packs in an empty motel parking lot in a dusty, forgotten, queer-looking little town in northern Georgia. The word the clings to every hiker’s thoughts in north Georgia is Deliverance, the 1970 novel by James Dickey that was made into a Hollywood movie. It concerns, as you may recall, four middle-aged men from Atlanta who go on a weekend canoeing trip down the fictional Cahulawasee River (but based on the real, nearby chattooga) and find themselves severely out of their element. “Every family I’ve ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary,” a character in the book remarks forebodingly as they drive up. “Some of them are in for making liquor or running it, but most of them are in for murder. They don’t think a whole lot about killing people up here.” And so of course it proves, as our urban foursome find themselves variously buggered, murdered, and hunted by a brace of demented backwoodsmen.

2.

Myspace Blog 

August 5, 2006

A Sick Blog

So, I was sick as hell and I'd like to tell you about it.

About a month ago my kidneys went berserk, as they do every year or two. They decided to get rid of my protein and keep my water. Over the next week I gained 30 pounds. Want to know what that's like? Imagine unscrewing a cap on top of your head and pouring in 4 gallons of water. Or just pick up 2 gallons with each hand and walk around a bit. Fun init? The hilarious part was when I woke up each morning with my face puffed to the splitting point. (See the pic.) Through the day gravity coaxed the water to my legs. Curse you Newton! As a point of reference, one of my thighs was as big as Emma's waist. And my ankles were as big as... my thighs. They were as big as my thighs too, yes. Tree trunks. Oh, it was a hoot! But it gets better. You see, I tried to stave it off for awhile because I was in between health insurance and I didn't want it to be considered a dreaded "pre-existing condition." If I could last 6 months from my last doctor visit I was home free. I didnt' make it, and it turns out that waiting was a bad idea because my pills wouldn't work. For two weeks I walked around puffed up, unable to squat, unable to sleep comfortably, risking blood clots in my legs, taking tons of medication- steroids and water pills. The pharmicist said that he never saw such a high dosage. Pleasant dreams! I went to bed a few times hoping to see the sun in the morning.

So why am I telling you this? Do I want your pity? Nonsense! It's because I feel better than I've ever felt! The more clearly you see what you can lose, you more you can appreciate what you have. My pills finally kicked in and I'm back to normal. For the record- I was in no danger. But let's face it, the sun's burning out in a billion years and we're not even going to last 100. Let's make the most of it.

Kickball tomorrow? If not, then baseball.