Cold Murder

I'm out of town working nights, but this past week Portland got something like a a foot of snow, the most we've gotten since 2008 and, of course, slamming the entire metro area into a cold hell of clogged streets and downed powerlines.

We don't do snow well in Oregon.

Earlier in the winter my wife and son came home excited that they'd seen an enormous flock of crows swirling over downtown. "Like a movie!" was the Boy's comment; I'm not sure which movie he meant. The corvid invasion has been a thing this winter. One of the local news channels had a story about some outfit that "rents" hawks to harass the crows, which appear to be something of a noisy, messy nuisance (because, "crows", right..?) in the central Park Blocks.

Sometimes, though...

Sometimes when you combine snow, and crows, and night you can produce an image of surpassing beauty.

"To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying."

~ Ted Hughes

And that's really all I had to say today.

There's no future in England's dreaming...

This caught my eye over at Nancy's place:

Just for the record, I have no particular problem with the idea of a "constitutional monarchy". It seems to me that modern Britons have no fewer "freedoms" as "subjects" than modern Americans have as "citizens" which, for those people in my social milieu and income bracket, are largely the freedom to starve and sleep under bridges once their jobs are offshored or eliminated.

No, the interesting thing to me about this is the degree to which this picture - deliberately, I'm sure - could just as easily be Fildes or Sargent or, for that matter, Gainsborough or Reynolds. Nancy observed that the benefit of Diana Spencer's death prior to the photograph is that the People's Princess lacked the goofiness to fit into this little royal family portrait.

And it is pretty goofy, but I think it's a very peculiar quality of goofy that has nothing to do with Diana's own astrologist-and-aromatherapist-and skeevy-lover sort of goofy.

The goofy here is the Classic Old School British Goofy, composed equally of exaggerated self-worth, lack of introspection, hauteur, and noblesse oblige, the Stuff of Empire Goofy that doesn’t see any humor in pretending that it’s still 1894.

Diana had her own massive Goofy but it was a thoroughly New Age Goofy incomprehensible to the stodgy House of Grammy Windsor. The Goofy on display here is a Goofy of centuries of "breeding", a sort of stud book of Goofy that values humans for their lineage rather than their accomplishments.

Sad when you consider that the clan threw out the perfectly good surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, too. Sigh.

The idea of keeping a nice old granny around out of pure nostalgia is hardly worse, say, than the idea of Donnie Trump or Ted Cruz as Chief Executive of a nuclear superpower. But as government it's a very, very peculiarly goofy idea, an idea the presumes that the worth of one person or a small group of people is higher than the worth of many.

(Mind you, our own "system" that purports to exalt the worth of the many over any individual is kind of odd, too...)

But the only real issue I have with the British system is that it really only works if you can pretend that it's still 1894 and the King or Queen actually matters. It's kind of like spending a fairly sizeable chunk of cash to keep a long-running reality show on television and then insisting that everyone pretend that that's really important.

So I used to get a chuckle out of the ridiculous royal pantomime across the Pond, thinking that We the People had, at least, nothing equally ridiculous.

Then, of course, this Republican primary came along.

And now I feel kind of like that stone parrot, the one on the bottom that's clearly getting its psittacene conge' in the form that The Donald plainly intends for his own daughter and God help me how I wish I could scrub that image out of my brain.

Wars and Lechery

Part of the genesis of this post was a leftover image from the "Philippine Sea" writeup. I went looking for "WW2 Imperial Navy poster" and found this:

Which I thought was perfect; ships, flags, pretty pin-up girl...there you have your basic "Join the Navy, see the world and get laid" appeal that had probably been a central feature of every recruiter's spiel since the first Sumerian sergeant told lies to a bunch of dumb hicks straight off the farm.

The thing is...one of the other images Google showed me was this one:

Wrong country, right period, but...damn. Talk about a different way of looking at the whole "guns/girls" thing.

I find it hard to believe that even in 1944 an 18-year-old Japanese kid, male or female, had instincts much different than an American teenager. Different manners and mores, yes, but the hormones? Right in there pitching. Look at a picture of a pretty girl? He's thinking "I'd like to get next to that..." (and she's probably thinking "I'd like to be that so he will want to get next to me...").

But the WAVE practically radiates sex - she's a Petty pin-up, y'think..? - as opposed to the very G-rated patriotic Japanese gal in the IJN poster. No wonder so many other cultures think we're obsessed with our genitals.

Not that I think we really are - I think ALL humans spend tons of time thinking about putting Tab A into Slot B. Americans are just more upfront about it and it seems were were seventy years ago, too.

Mind you, the Japanese appear to have made up for lost time:

And that's pretty mild compared to the whole "tentacle rape" thing.

But that's a whole 'nother story.

The Short Sobs of the Violins of Autumn

The violins of autumn don't get much of a solo around here. More like a two-bar bridge and then it's off to the drizzling continuo of winter rain. "Fall color" lasts from about 2:45 to 4:50 on November 1 every year; after that the rains knock all the bright leaves down to where they form a glutineous mass in every catchbasin and a slimy coating on level ground.

I still love the autumn. But the Northwest version isn't the sort of thing that inspires poets and balladeers. It's just the introduction to the Dark Ages of winter, and much as we try and enjoy it the pleasure is fleeting.

Carmen

I really have no excuse for this other than a) it's a truly miserable rainy day, and b) Rita Hayworth - Margarita Carmen Cansino - was an exceptionally lovely actress.

(Although let me pause for a moment, however, and just grouse: what the fuck was wrong with the official female "dress code" of the Forties through the early Sixties? Specifically, the red granny panties that come up to Rita's waist. Gah! Was a woman's navel some sort of mid-century erogenous zone, or what? Whatever it was, women in pictures and films had to wear these awful Depends^TM well until the surf films later in the Sixties introduced the notion that you could appear in public with your belly showing and not corrupt the children. Sorry. /rant.)

The saddening part of the combination of beauty and rainy days is that poor Rita's personal life was a dreary as the day today; she was a drunk with serious emotional issues and a career of finding lovers and husbands who were weapons-grade shitheels.

She also suffered from Glamor Girl Syndrome; "[M]en fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me." she said, and might well have been speaking for every public beauty whose partners take the parts that they played for the women they are. While it's very human to see what you want to see, when you do that with another person there's no real alternative but unhappiness.

So here's to the happy laughing Margarita of her glory years in the Forties when she was young and strong and lovely - awful swimsuit panties and all - who floated across our lives as a pair of legs long enough to bestride a chasm of troubles and a smile bright enough to lighten a gloomy day. If only you could have turned that brightness inwards, Doña; "Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, Multa recedentes adimiunt"

Hard Drive Housekeeping

Mojo is feeling poorly and has taken to her bed clutching her vinagrette, the Boy with his PS2 is being a mighty slayer of pixels, and the Girl is waiting impatiently to go to our little rock and gem shop to purchase some agates.

I am trying to do some light housekeeping, cook breakfast for everyone, and do a little gentle browsing.

Among with my other tidying I've been tidying my image files and ran across some odds and sods I saved just...well, just because I liked them. Thought you might, too.

I just liked the contrast of lights and darks, and the composition of the image:OK, this one was just strange. Not even erotic, unless your eros revolves around circus contortionists.Like they used to say about Nike: it's gotta be the shoes.

This was just for the prettiness:and nothing more.

I wonder how they find these pictures?Mind you, I suppose that if I had a camera and the opportunity to point it at some shapely woman's backside, I'd probably do it. Yes, yes, I know. I'm scum. It's true. Sigh.

A friend took this little snapshot of a chickadee getting a last bit of evening suet.Just liked the colors, particularly.

This was just...odd.Although did you know that there's a whole sub-genre of porn involving cooking and eating women? Google "Dolcett cartoon" sometime. It's beyond weird. But I will never underestimate the kinks that lodge in the folds of the human cerebrum.

One of my favorite characters is Sun Wukung, the Monkey King; here he is, from one of the talented illustrators at deviantart.Tough guy, huh?

It must be hard to sit in a hole underground with multiple megatons of nuclear devastation. It must help to have a sense of humor about it:An empty silo, one mushroom-shaped cloud, and it's Miller Time.

Just for the pretty:Now THAT's a speeding ticket:And speaking of pretty:Another in the wonderful series of images produced by Brent Diskins as part of "Diskin's Timbers Propaganda". Rose City 'Til I Die!In case you don't get this, the point is that she's wearing her PT uniform; she's supposed to be exercising, not gutsing pogie bait:One more funny:And one more just for the pretty:Looking this stuff over, I have to accept that I have a very pack-ratty sort of mind. I have no idea what binds these together, other than my peculiar tastes in pictures.

Oh, well; off to find some agates. Hope you're having a peaceful and pleasant Saturday.

I Am a Camera: Sunny Black Friday

Nothing profound. Just had some nice snapshots of this past week.

We had our first frost last Saturday morning. I wanted to capture some of the images.
Love the delicate frost tracery on the grass. But this sort of thing is terribly ephemeral here - by ten o'clock it was raining again and all the fragile beauty was gone.
Last bit of frost-art, this one from "Lake Amherst", the low spot in the curb where the rainwater pools up.
The Peep took this on the way down Hawthorne from Grand Central Bakery. That's the "Bluebird of Death" hanging from the mirror, by the way.
a very Portland sort of November - stone and rain and fallen leaves.
Missy loves her some ginkoes. "They come from China, like me!" she enthuses;
This is another of Missy's snaps, and a good one to close with; our shadows toddling companionably along the street towards a sunny day together...
Hope you and yours are also enjoying this time together.

Podgarić

This is the monument in Podgarić, in the Bjelovarsko-bilogorska district of central Croatia.The photograph is from a book by the Dutch artist Jan Kempenaers entitled "Spomeniks, apparently the Serbian for "Monuments".

These things - and there are several more good reproductions of the Kempenaers photos here - were constructed by the Yugoslav government in the Sixties and Seventies to commemorate various events in the partisan campaigns of WW2, as well as the usual sort of "Monument to the Revolution" sort of thing. They are all very abstract, and, as you can see in the collection pictures in the blog "Crack Two" here, range from fairly well maintained to utterly destroyed.I don't think there's a deeper meaning here. I was just fascinated by the images; these vast, contextless, desolate things, a sort of abstract Ozymandias in the Balkan hills. You wonder what a passerby will think a hundred years from now, if there is anything left of them. Will they be pointed out to the tourist, their provenance described and meaning explained? Or will they be forgotten, to be chanced upon by the adventurous journeyer standing mute and incomprehensible as Linear A?

Random Images from Around the Internets...and More...

I am a sort of beady-eyed packrat of the Internets, scampering about with my whiskery nose all a-twitch finding images I like; some pretty, some odd, others awful, but shiny and glittery to my rodent mind and dragging them into my midden of a folder on the laptop. Every so often I paw through them, muttering "Preciousssss...my preciousss."

I figured it was time to dump out the picture folder and give you a look.

Let's start with this one: it's a hat.



Well. Shit.I knew we'd overlooked something in the pre-Cana counseling. How do we explain Mom's execution to the kids..?

Ah.Very few actresses - very few women, I daresay - managed the insouciant charm of Audrey Hepburn.

This lovely graphic is by someone called "Phobs", whose page over at deviantart has some gorgeous and fascinating - and some truly disturbing - stuff in it.This is a part of an image that I believe is meant to represent Poland in the 1940s, but looks to me more like the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the roses. Do you know the story?

Well, St. Elizabeth, then merely Elizabeth of Thuringa, was taking bread to the poor, in contravention of her stern husband's orders. He suspected her secret charity, and had her watched, but could not catch her in the act of largesse. Finally he managed to apprehend her coming from the castle bakery; he halted her, frowning down at her full apron from which the smell of fresh-baked bread emanated like a good deed in a sinful world.

"What have you there, woman?" he rasped. She replied; "I have been in the garden, lord, and I have cut the roses for my chamber."

"Roses!? Let me see them, these...roses...then." he sneered.

So Elizabeth slowly opened her apron...and the roses tumbled out, spilling down her dress and across the paving stones red as, well, as roses; fragrence sweet as love, blooming fresh as life, petals soft as a kiss.

(Wasn't true, mind you; they tell the same story about some saint in Portugal, and as far as we know Elizabeth's husband was all in favor of her charity.)

But it's a wonderful little story, isn't it?

Your National Guard - the Modern Minuteman; Defender of the Homeland, Bulwark of Democracy......circa 1992. Try and find the fire direction chief in the middle of this elite strike force. Ahem.

Yikes.Just...yikes.

Yeah, I know, I haven't forgotten the Rape of Nanking, either. But if you have a moment check these fascinating images of Bakumatsu and Meiji Japan of the 1890s and early 1900s......by enigmatic photog Enami Nobukuni. Intriguing glimpses of a world in some ways as vanished as Knossos or Technoctitlan.

Anybody else love "A Hole Is To Dig"?One of my favorite books from my childhood - a kids book that I actually loved as a kid.


Well, THAT explains a lot...
"Called the “Nice Cup In Bra,” the lingerie consists of a grass-green top that, when removed, conveniently unfurls into a 1.5-meter-long putting mat."When the user sinks a putt into one of the cups, a built-in speaker pumps out a cry of “Nice shot.”I know that Japan is a very different culture and all, and that the Japanese have their own ideals of value, but this is...is...it just makes me glad I don't golf.

Is this cool, or what?Apparently it is, or is going to be, called an "asperatus" cloud, a type of cumulus congestus (I think). Scary looking, neh?

Oh, yah, fail.Yes, I play videogames with my son.

But not "Grand Theft Auto".
Found this one at The Bins.I've been reading this on the can and enjoying Fr. Kelly's advice.

My personal fave was his suggestion on your basic can't-miss method of selecting a bride: "There is much to be said for the wisdom of the man who laid a broom across his threshold; the first four women who entered stepped over it. The fifth picked it up, and he married her."

Father, forgive me, but...WTF???

Ooh. Epic fail.Came across this one sorting out old photo albums.This is from some damn miniature golf place on the Jersey shore about 20 years ago. That's me on the right with She Who Is Always Known As Pre-Mommy. Kind of sad, this being the highlight of the vacations the six of us used to take in that time. The other truly screwy thing is that all three couples (the husband of the woman on the left is taking the snapshot) are now divorced. Bad luck coming in threes? Poor premarital counseling? Men are assholes?

Who knows.

Odd, nonetheless.

Hmmm. I've heard it said that everything is sexier in Paris.Seems to be the case.

Bye, now.