WKRLEM: Wedding Song?

The older I get the less I know.

Stuffed.....and not in a good way!

 So I have to go to a wedding in two weeks. Lisa is going to officiate. She got a mail order degree so she can marry her Wiccan girlfriend and her atheist fiancee in their backyard. Actually it is a hand-fasting which is an ancient ceremony. Which is fine but there is really a fucked up component to it.

I have to wear a suit.

It's been about a year since I tried one on. I did yesterday. It wasn't good. 

You can wear shorts, flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt to a hand-fasting  I think I read about that in the Wiccan bible or something like that there.

The Broken Scarlet Sky

 I was sitting at my desk contemplating a blue berry scone when he walked into my office. He was around six feet tall but he looked like he had lost a few inches since his prime. He gave off the aura of an athlete in his twilight years as he limped up to my desk favoring one leg.

"You Spencer."

"That's what they tell me."

"Names Mcgee. I want to hire you."

"That's what I am here for so it seems you came to the right place. What do you need? Have a seat and let me know what this is all about."

Bikes & Lions

For all you bicycle fans out there. Apparently bikes and lions go together; I'm not sure why.

From a nice post on old bicycle advertising posters at the AbeBooks blog.

Sometimes you can skip the long, boring set-up

. . . and go straight to the punchline.

          "Pardon me, Roy -- is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?"

          "I come to seize your berry, not to praise it."

          "The squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sum of the squaws on the

           other two hides."

Woman Tazed and Arrested at Middle School Football Game For Not Wearing a Mask

This is what it has come down to. The rest of the sheeple just sit there and let this woman who is with her kids get groped, abused, tazed and illegally arrested for not wearing a mask. Someone who they know. As she said someone they got to PTA meetings with every week. Someone that they go with to their kids games.



What is her name? Kitty Genovese?

Dick loves Pat and Pat loves Dick

 

"Say Donald do you know my friend John Bolton? He is a bright young fella who is interested in Foreign Policy. He might be helpful if you are really going to run. What to you think about our endless wars?"

"Menza menza Mr President. I am not a big fan of getting our kids killed unless we get something out of it like a lot of oil or maybe a casino. Anyway nice to meet you."

"Ok Bolton get lost. I told you to grow a mustache."

"I don't think you have tiny hands Donald. Dick's hands are a lot smaller."

"Shut up Pat."

WKRLEM: Life on Venus? Who gives a shit? I want to know if there is life on Gor!

Specifically if there are Slave Girls?

WKRLEM-TV: Serpentine Shel!

Remember Serpentine! Wadda guy!

More Bathroom Books

This is from a gallery of bathroom bookshelves at the decoist website. It makes me want to yell, "Get those damn books away from all that steam and humidity!"

In the same gallery is this hidden secret-door bathroom in a library:

This one annoys me for a different reason: the "library" is fake. It's just a random collection of trash books. Two old encyclopedias, a calculus textbook, a lot of book-club fiction and biography (at least a couple of volumes shelved upside-down), and a whole shelf of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Nice wallpaper in the bathroom, though.

Life on Venus?

Maybe. Not giant lizard-fish, but possibly, conceivably, microbes way up in the atmosphere. Here is a good look at the story.

It won't be easy to confirm the existence of those microbes, but if it can be done, it will have large implications for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. If I know that you own a television, that tells me almost nothing about your neighborhood. But if I know that both you and your next-door neighbor have one, it's a good bet most of the other houses do as well. Finding that life arose on Venus as well as Earth will strongly suggest that life on rocky planets is common.

Which has implications for this:

That's Drake's Equation, which will be 60 years old next year. It's a way to estimate how many technological species are in our galaxy. Each of the seven variables is the answer to a question. We're working toward solid answers to the first three; for the others, we just have no idea. Finding life on Venus would move one of them -- fl, "on what fraction of suitable planets does life appear?" -- from "wild-ass guess" toward "solid answer" and push the equation's result in the "sentient life may be common" direction.

Which in turn would bring up Enrico Fermi's famous question, asked in 1950: Where are they?

The Ultimate Bathroom Book

I found this oddity while sightseeing in Andrew Rickard's old blog. It's a fold-out wooden portable toilet stool disguised as a large (18.5 x 13 x 3 inches), nicely bound book. I've seen books hollowed out to conceal valuables or flasks of liquor, but nothing like this.

The blog post suggests the user might have put a chamber pot underneath it, but I suspect it was strictly for travel. Travelling by carriage looks pleasant and civilized in a Jane Austen movie, but I guess in an emergency you had to tell the driver to stop, and scurry behind the nearest tree or hedgerow; it would be good to have something sturdy and elevated to sit on.

It was sold by a Paris auction house in 2012. Following back the links, I see it was expected to go for 200 to 400 Euros, but actually went for 2,000.

The fake book's title is Voyage aux Pays-Bas, "A Journey to the Netherlands." Is there a sly joke there, referring to the "nether regions?"

RBG

With the death of RBG, we'll have a shot at the first Conservative Supreme court since Franklin Roosevelt. That's 80 years, kids. A long time. Maybe time enough to strike down Roe, Lawrence, and a lot of other Lefty impositions on the American character.

Ginsburg, in some ways, was one of the worst of the Lefties, justifying her opinions on European law and tradition when the court is supposed to be checking on Constitutionality. That's how bad it had gotten. I remember being on a cruise a few years ago and heard some Masshole bragging, "Baaston is probably the most European city in America".

That's the Lefty rap these days. We must be more like those "advanced" nations in the British Commonwealth and the EU.

My forebears didn't come here, braving high seas, backbreaking labor, indentured servitude, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the British Army (twice), starvation, discrimination, the Confederate Army, the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, the California Gold Fields, and assorted sneers from the WASPs to be Euros.

That said, she was one tough bird.

The Culture's Always Greener

. . . on the other side of the Pond.

Back in the 80s I took a two-week vacation in England -- your stereotype American Anglophile tourist on a pilgrimage. In London, I stayed at a cheapo hotel in Bayswater: shoebox rooms, communal bathroom on each floor, TV lounge off the entrance. Walking in the neighborhood one night, I saw a neon sign that just cracked me up. It read:

"Texas Lone Star West Saloon & Wine Bar"

It was the "& Wine Bar" that made it perfect.

Days later, somewhere in Southwest England (I don't remember which town), I spotted an ancient-looking stone church with a sway-backed slate roof. I later found out it was built in the 14th century. It looked sort of like the Old Post Office in Tintagel:

but smaller and plainer. I crossed the street and walked up to it, ready to breathe in the misty Olde-Englysshe-ness. There was a flyer tacked to the door, a notice for an upcoming Square Dance, illustrated with a drawing of a cowgirl wearing fringed buckskin and holding two six-shooters.