Clone of handdrummer

One of the interesting joys of Scotland was seeing many people of my general phenotype in great abundance on the streets and in the shops. Due to our culture of many immigrants from many places, it isn't often in the US that we see ourselves reflected in those around us. That said, this particular fellow was carrying it to an extreme. I mean really. I had to check in a mirror later to make sure I hadn't beeen magically bodyshifted or something.

Poem of the Day

Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg by William Wordsworth


. When first, descending from the moorlands,
I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.
When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves that had begun to shed
Their golden leaves upon the pathways,
My steps the Border-minstrel led.
The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,
'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;
And death upon the braes of Yarrow,
Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes:

Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its stedfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;

The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!

Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber
Were earlier raised, remain to hear
A timid voice, that asks in whispers,
"Who next will drop and disappear?"

Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,
Like London with its own black wreath,
On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth-looking,
I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath.

As if but yesterday departed,
Thou too art gone before; but why,
O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered,
Should frail survivors heave a sigh?

Mourn rather for that holy Spirit,
Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep;
For Her who, ere her summer faded,
Has sunk into a breathless sleep.

No more of old romantic sorrows,
For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid!
With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten,
And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead.

Cartoon of the Day

Happy Birthday

Barbara Eden (1934- )
Actress

My longest held crush

Poem of the Day

Caledonia by James Hogg

Caledonia! thou land of the mountain and rock,
Of the ocean, the mist, and the wind-
Thou land of the torrent, the pine, and the oak,
Of the roebuck, the hart, and the hind;
Though bare are thy cliffs, and though barren thy glens,
Though bleak thy dun islands appear,
Yet kind are the hearts, and undaunted the clans,
That roam on these mountains so drear!

A foe from abroad, or a tyrant at home,
Could never thy ardour restrain;
The marshall'd array of imperial Rome
Essay'd thy proud spirit in vain!
Firm seat of religion, of valour, of truth,
Of genius unshackled and free,
The muses have left all the vales of the south,
My loved Caledonia, for thee!

Sweet land of the bay and wild-winding deeps
Where loveliness slumbers at even,
While far in the depth of the blue water sleeps
A calm little motionless heaven!
Thou land of the valley, the moor, and the hill,
Of the storm and the proud rolling wave-
Yes, thou art the land of fair liberty still,
And the land of my forefathers' grave!

Hume Reconsidered

A statue of David Hume participates in that peculiar Scottish art form,
the repositioning of traffic cone.


A joke making the rounds of the Scottish Worldcon last week:

Three philosophers on a train journey in the lowlands of Scotland notice a cow through the train window.
The first, a famous Chinese philosopher, says, "Note that the cow is black. This allows us to observe that all cows in Scotland are part of the eternal dichotomy between black and white, good and evil and that all cows partake equally from this balance."
The second, a renowned German philosopher, replies, "Nonsense. All that we may say is that at this particular time on this particular train looking out this particular window at this particular cow is that it is particularly black."
The third man, a most important Scottish philosopher, responds, " I am sorry, but ye both are wrong. All that we may say with any certainty from this observation is that the cow is black on this side."

Truly the essence of the Scottish philosophical tradition.

Happy Birthday

Ray Bradbury
Author, Fan, Poet, Screenwriter
And a gentle and wonderful human being

A Favorite Place

Fleshmarket Close, Edinburgh

Tea Time in Glasgow

The Mackintosh Tea Room
Glasgow, Scotland

With an interior designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Tea Room is a superbly civilized place to take a break from the slog of sightseeing and over- indulgence in vivid cultural phenomena. Sadly, with prices in the stratasphere, it is also a place I could only afford once during my 10 days in Scotland. Well worth the 25 quid, though. Once.

A Favorite Place

Another photo of the kirk in Ettrick.
Taken this trip.

Ettrick is about as remote as one could get in southern Scotland. 45 miles due south from Edinburgh, 5 or 6 miles away from the next nearest village, my family left in 1675 when our smallholding was enclosed by the local laird.

Happy Birthday

Aubrey Beardsley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (August 21, 1872 – March 16, 1898) was an influential English artist, illustrator, and author. He was born in Brighton, England.

Beardsley was aligned with the Yellow Book coterie of artists and writers, and produced many illustrations for the magazine. He was also closely aligned with Aestheticism, the British counterpart to Decadence and Symbolism.

Most of his images are done in ink, and feature large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones, and areas of fine detail contrasted with areas with none at all.

Aubrey Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and the grotesque erotica, which themes he explored in his later work. His most famous erotic illustrations were on themes of history and mythology, including his illustrations for Lysistrata and Salome.

Beardsley was a close friend of Oscar Wilde and illustrated his play Salomé in 1893 for its French release, it was release in English the following year. He also produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines (e.g. for a deluxe edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur) and worked for magazines like The Savoy and The Studio. Beardsley also wrote Under the Hill, an unfinished erotic tale based loosely on the legend of Tannhäuser.

Beardsley was also a caricaturist and even did some political cartoons, mirroring Wilde's irreverant wit in art. Beardsley's work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster Art Movement of the 1890s and the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists like Pape, Mucha and Clarke.

The Peacock Skirt

Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair."

Beardsley died of tuberculosis in Menton, France at the age of 25, working right up to the end.

]

Poem of the Day

Scots Wha Hae by Robert Burns

Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed
Or to victorie!
Now's the day, and now's the hour:
See the front o' battle lour,
See approach proud Edward's power---
Chains and slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?---
Let him turn, and flee!
Wha for Scotland's King and Law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or Freeman fa',
Let him follow me!

By Oppression's woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain your dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!---
Let us do, or die!

Hell Is Other Customers

Those of us who have done our time in the retail mine will find much to agree with in this savage little muttering from the NYT Book Review. And the rest of you would do well to ponder as you laugh. Are you the guy with the cell phone yakking away in the meditation book aisle or the amoeba-like creature flowing across the row and stopping me from reaching the poetry shelf? If so, cut it the hell out, or I will take action. You have been warned! [;>)>

from NYT via ksm:

Hell Is Other Customers
By CHARLES TAYLOR
Published: August 21, 2005

WHEN did bookstores turn into flophouses? Just try to navigate the aisles of any of the big-chain booksellers on a weekend afternoon, or a weekday evening for that matter, and you're apt to feel like Vivien Leigh in that famous shot from ''Gone With the Wind'' as she attempts to get through the streets of Atlanta, which are choked with the sprawling bodies of the Confederate wounded.

The bodies at Barnes & Noble or Borders aren't wounded, but they're so immobile they might as well be. Finding an aisle not littered with outstretched legs, or a bookcase without someone leaning back against it and blocking the bottom three shelves, is like trying to step back for a good gander at the art in the Guggenheim. The chain bookstores have been designed to accommodate lots of people, and to make each one comfortable for hours. That's precisely the problem.

The new-style ''mega'' complexes in which the shopping mall meets the community arts center have bred a new bookstore culture where it's virtually impossible to do the thing that used to lure most of us to bookstores: browse.

It's not just books on sale anymore -- it's CD's, DVD's, greeting cards, stationery, sundry gifts, coffee and baked goods, and very likely health and beauty aids or tires in the not-too-distant future. More products means more to advertise. Trying to browse or, for the really hearty, trying to actually read is to enter an endurance contest in which your ability to concentrate is pitted against whatever new CD the chain is pushing. Is that new novel worth the 25 bucks the publisher is asking? Which travel guide best provides the information you'll need on your vacation? You'd like to find out, but who can tell while ''Kristin Chenoweth and Bryn Terfel Do It to Frank Loesser'' is blasting in your ears?

If music isn't playing, that's likely because the store is sponsoring a reading, amplified of course. Instead of browsing to music, you find yourself listening to the live sounds of the volubly disaffected cheering Chuck Palahniuk as he reads from ''Conniption: A Fit,'' or agreeing in righteous indignation as Nancy Grace declaims from ''String 'Em Up!''

These, though, are mere distractions. The essential Sartrean lesson that modern bookstore shopping teaches us is this: Hell is other people.

The comfy chairs Barnes & Noble and Borders have placed around their stores, objects that daily inspire the equivalent of the Oklahoma land grab, are limited in number. Therefore, aisles and floors become the designated drop zones. The unlucky chairless sprawl against the shelves or between them. Often it's impossible to stand within three feet of these living obstacles since, arrayed around them, they have their cellphones, their Blackberrys, their coffee, 10 or 12 books they've pulled from the shelves (whether or not there are other copies of a particular title and whether or not they are looking at those titles), and frequently there are accompanying boyfriends or girlfriends with the same accouterments splayed around them."more

Returned from Scotland

The kirk in Ettrick, my family's home village.
(about 45 miles south of Edinburgh)
(obviously taken on a previous visit)

Home at last!

I have successfully flown back across the Atlantic.
(After being bumped twice in Detroit and having to stay overnight Wednesday)


jetlagus extremus

More later.

Hoot Mon!

Ettrickbridge, Borders.
about 6 miles from the farm my family left in 1680

Off to Scotland for two weeks.

First to Glasgow for 6 days at
the World Science Fiction Convention.
Then 4 days at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
And on the way back, thanks to airline hubs,
3 days in Amsterdam.

I'm sure you all share my pain.

I will try to blog the Hugo Awards Ceremony on Saturday.

I will have many photos and stories on return.

Strip Search

from Kolchak:

The Web may be the cutting edge of mass media, but there are times when it definitely has a retro look. I like the way that the Web has sparked new interest in seemingly lost diversions, such as journaling and comic strips.

Some established strips have their own sites, while others can be found on sites operated by the syndicates that own them. In a few cases, strips that I thought were defunct proved to be still active. If you go to www.kingfeatures.com, you can read a recent Flash Gordon Sunday strip, written and drawn by Jim Keefe. Only one strip is available to casual visitors, though, and that strip comes from the first week of the previous month.

Along with the strips that can also be found in newspapers, there are comic strips that are available only on the Web.

Not surprisingly, the Internet gives the creators ofthese strips more freedom in subject matter and formats than they would have, if they were aiming for a spot on a family-friendly comics page. Some creators are using this freedom to model their strips after the classic Sunday strips of the 1930s, and ‘40s, providing more story and more detailed art than you can find in a modern strip, where two or three panels each week are designed to be jettisoned.

Because these strips are labors of love, they are updated according to varying schedules, although these schedules can sometimes turn into Whenever I Get a Chance.

Here are a few original webstrips that you might want to check out; if you want to recommend a strip, just let us know:

• Fans of the original Dick Van Dyke show--and fans in general-- will appreciate the set-up of Greystone Inn , written and drawn by Brad J. Guigar. This series is about the backstage antics at a comic strip called (you guessed it) Greystone Inn. In this world, though, strips are produced like television shows, with actors, directors and writers. The star of Greystone Inn-- both versions, in fact--is a rowdy gargoyle named Argus. When the strip was launched in 2000, Mel Cooley--Richard Deacon’s character from The Dick Van Dyke Show-- was the producer but he soon left to take over Blondie. ARGUS: Good Lord, man! What is she--70? 80 years old? COOLEY: And she’s still got it!
  This arrangement gives Guigar the freedom to mix and match elements from pop culture, such as introducing a zombified Nancy and having one of his regulars team up with Godzilla for a stand-up comedy act.
  Access to the web site is free. As of late July, there is no archive of older strips, but paperback collections of Greystone Inn are on sale.
  
• For another sort of workplace comedy, take a look at Midnight Macabre, another free site. The main character in this strip is a stand-up comic who has been hired to host horror movies at a very eccentric UHF station. Midnight Macabre is written and drawn by R.K. Milholland.
  
• Supernatural Crime features
  both strips and text stories, set in the dark and dangerous city of Port Nocturne. Fighting the forces of evil though are pulp-style stalwarts like the mysterious woman known only as the Blonde and the dark avenger called Brother Grim. Other pulp archetypes who live in Port Nocturne are hard-boiled detective Red Nales; gentleman adventurer Dean Paladyn (also known as the Peregrine) and Rod Riley, a police detective with a yellow overcoat and a jaw line that will look familiar to those of you who remember Dick Tracy. The stories set in the world of Port Nocturne come from Christopher Mills and Ron Fortier, comic book veterans with a taste for old-school pulp action. The art is provided by other veterans: Joe Staton, Del Barral and Dario Carrasco. (Along with the adventures in Port Nocturne, the archives include unrelated stories--both graphic and text--by Mills, with art by Darren Goodheart and Fred Harper.) Access to everything in Supernatural Crime is free.
  
• Another pulp icon is invoked at Tom Floyd’s Captain Spectre and the Lightning Legion. Thisstrip follows young Jim Moore as he discovers that Captain Spectre, a Doc Savage-like figure appearing on radio and in magazines, is, in fact, real. In addition to the strips, Floyd has created some clever extras, including a poster advertising Captain Spectre’s radio show and a downloadable membership card (So you too can join the Lightning Legion!) The only thing missing is a decoder ring.
  
• Ted Slampyak’s Jazz Age also has a pulp feel to it, but there’s quite a bit of humor too, mostly coming from the interaction between the main characters, straight-laced Professor Clifton Jennings and the perpetually rumpled “Ace” Mifflin. Jennings and Mifflin are agents of a secret society that fight various supernatural menaces around the world. Along with being entertaining stories, Slampyak has done considerable research on Boston in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, where his heroes are based, and it shows in the artwork.
  Jazz Age recently moved to the Graphic Smash website, which hosts a number of strips. At Graphic Smash, the current installment of each strip can be viewed for free, but access to the archives requires a $2.95/month subscription.
  
• Speaking of humor Realm of Atland, written and drawn by Nate Piekos, is a funny fantasy adventure strip--the main character is a barbarian called Barry the Brave-- which boasts world-building that some serious fantasy authors would envy. Full access here is also free.
  

Poem of the Day

I Saw the News Today by Loyal F Ramsey

On the screen the words read
A FATHER BEAT his 3 year old SON to DEATH because he THOUGHT he might be GAY.
I'm still trying to grasp these words.

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.
The words don't parse even when I type them myself.

Father: v. tr.

• To be the male parent.
• To create
• To acknowledge responsibility for.

Father: n.

• A man who begets or raises or nurtures a child.

I cry for this child I did not father and know that it means nothing.

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.

Beat: v. tr.

• To strike repeatedly.
• To subject to repeated beatings or physical abuse; batter.
• To punish by hitting or whipping; flog.
• To strike against repeatedly and with force; pound:.
• To shape or break by repeated blows;
• To make by pounding or trampling:
• To defeat or subdue

Beat: n.

• A stroke or blow, especially one that serves as a signal.
• A pulsation
• A throb.
• The sound of the human heart

How can this be counted as human?

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.

Son: n.

• One's male child.

How could one so damage one's own?.

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.

Death: n.

• The termination of life
• The state of being dead
• Bloodshed
• Murder
• Termination
• Extinction
• Execution.

How could the progenitor so quickly become the executioner?

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.

Thought: n.

• The action of thinking
• Cogitation
• Consideration
• Reasoning
• Intention
• Plan

Do you think this father planned to kill?

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.

Gay: adj.

• Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement
• Bright or lively

Gay: n.

• A man whose sexual orientation is to men

A man child killed for something he had not a glimmer of understanding.

Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.
And still I cry for this child, this son, this bright and lively boy that his destroyer fathered.
Father. Beat. Son. Death. Thought. Gay.
I try, but the words on the screen still do not make sense.
Father. Beat. Son. Death.
I refuse to believe that this is human behavior
Father. Son. Death.
And I remain ashamed of being a man.
Father. Death.
I ask myself again, how can the progenitor be the executioner?

Beat. Death.
Beat. Death.
Beat. Death.
Death.

A Favorite Place

Hostigos

The Kingdom of Lord Kalvan, His Good Queen Rilla and Her Father, King Ptosphes

An Alternate Earth Central Pennsylvania

Piper's knowledge of these hills is so good that one can read the novel and trace the action on the ground. I have spent many wonderful hours following Lord Kalvan on his adventures through central PA.

Happy Birthday

handdrummer
1950-

Blogger, bookseller, curmudgeon, geographer, poet, science fiction fan

Founder:

• Penn State Science Fiction Society (1969)
• Zen Druid Lunatics (1974)
• Central PA Science Fiction Association (1976)
• Twice Told Tales Bookshop (1984)
  
• Seven Mountains Books (1993)
• Webster's Bookstore Cafe (1999)
• Wordstock, A Festival of Language (2001)
• Committee to Defenestrate the President (2004)
• Holy Fool Press (2005)

• Chief Book and Wattle Cosher, CPaSFA Alumni Association
• Convenor, Spring Creek Slammers poetry group
• Roommate of HRH, The Lady Xanthippe, Feline Ruler of the Universe

• Player of ashikos, djembes and other hand percussion
• Amateur chef and professional eater
• Lover of all things hop flavored
• Friend to all dogs
• Servant to all cats

• Loyal to friends, Kind to strangers and Unforgiving of idiots

A Favorite Place

Wonderland

Created by Lewis Carroll
Home of The White Rabbit, The Red Queen and the immortal Mad Hatter