For the Yellowhammer State

This song has an interesting history, in that it was written as an answer to Neil Young's "Southern Man", but basically with Young's own approval. And while I've known that for a while, what just recently struck me was that Lynyrd Skynyrd was from Jacksonville. Not a one of them could actually call Alabama home.

Which makes me wonder, was Ronnie Van Zant messing around on his guitar and singing "Sweet Home Florida"? "No, damn it, that's not quite right. We need another syllable."

sɥʇʎɯ uoᴉʇɐǝɹƆ

Though greatly ashamed of what he had done, Julunggul was even more ashamed of his evasions. In his embarrassment he raised his body high into the clouds until only the tip of his tail remained in the water hole. "I have done wrong," he admitted. "I ate the Wagilag sisters and their babies."

Aboriginal Australian mythology is fascinating because it came to maturity in isolation. No one knows what legends the original emigrants from Asia to Australia were like, but the myths of Australia represent a splitting off.

Aboriginal Australian art is also fascinating. People have long described it as "primitive", but in its geometric stylization, it seems more like it's modern ahead of its time.

Time Before Morning is a book compiling these myths by Louis A. Allen. Allen isn't an anthropologist or social scientist in general. His biography, in fact, describes him as a management consultant. And there are some awkward passages in this book. He basically starts the book by saying, "So the Aborigines aren't all naked cannibals. Who knew?!?"

But more important is that he's out there trying to learn. Allen's got real enthusiasms, especially for Australia and its ecosystems.

...0:49, 0:48, 0:47...

Have trouble being creative and productive? I'm pretty sure that at least one of my valued readers has a good handle on that, but for the rest of you...

One thing I've found works for me is using a timer. If you have an egg timer or something like that, that's cool. If not, there are online resources. I use Online Timer, but there are a bunch of options.

Time constraints reduce stress, paradoxically enough. Having an hour or two to do something general and amorphous can be a crushing amount of pressure. Giving yourself fifteen minutes to do something very specific gives you some comfortable grounding.

Neat thing: I'll run out of time and then reset for another period of about fifteen minutes. Then after that I might have so much momentum that I don't need the timer. But it helped get me started.

Digital oddities

Okay, a weird couple of things happened recently.

To start with, I've in recent months been sort of behooved to start a secondary email account with GMail. That is, of course, a Google service. I already had a Google account, but had never used GMail. before. Long story slightly shorter, since I had to start a whole new Google account just for the mail, I figured I'd download another browser, which it never hurts to have anyway.

I'd been using Beaker for a couple of months, and then it just sort of stopped working. Digging further I found it wasn't really there anymore. The whole app just sort of erased itself and left a blank icon.

So now it's been replaced by Pale Moon, which looks pretty good and has a cool name. When I did log into GMail through that I got an email later on that someone had logged into my account on an unfamiliar device. When it was really my laptop, a very familiar device, just using a different browser. With this knowledge I could probably hack a few unscientific polls if I had the desire. But of course that's not surprising. It's one of the things that makes them unscientific.

Just one man's silly opinion

I sometimes hear people saying, "I like chocolate, but I don't like dark chocolate." And this concerns me because they don't seem to realize they've just made two directly opposite statements. Short term memory loss? When I hear a statement like that, what it sounds like to me is, "Can I have waxy sugar with brown food coloring and call it chocolate?" Well I guess it's your life.

I'm what you could call "lucky", I guess, that Ryan Adams has never meant much to me. Yeah, yeah, innocent until proven guilty, but carefully worded statements issued through your lawyer don't really inspire a lot of confidence. So yes, my enjoyment of his music probably begins and ends with hearing one of his songs as background music in a coffee shop and noticing that it was well put together, so my life is easier in that way.

Still, he has fans, avid ones, and only they can decide what to do with this. Suddenly not liking what you like because of what you know about who created it isn't natural, and isn't really necessary either. It doesn't provide any benefit to the victims. On the other hand, the information is there, and will factor into your thinking as it will.

The squiggle

This stoat (not actually a rare stout, which I assume would be a hard-to-find dark beer) is just bopping around a rock garden. A lot of the available videos show stoats on the hunt for bunnies, ducks, what-have-you. This is something a lot of us have trouble dealing with. Cute animals kill other cute animals for food. Sometimes for other reasons. With nature as with people, you often have to withhold judgment.

Also they're really good at what they do.

Polarity

My current nonfiction read―and it's a pretty hefty one―is Jared Diamond's Collapse. Subtitled "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", the book details a number of failed societies, some of which weren't entirely at fault, or could be forgiven for not seeing what was coming.

The case of Norse Greenland is an interesting one. The settlement of Iceland, despite some turnarounds, was basically successful, in that most of Iceland's current population is descended from Medieval Norse, probably Norwegians. Not so, Greenland. Settlers did arrive from mainland Scandinavia, and they had ideas. But the subarctic climate and rocky soil didn't support their farming economy at all. In this and other ways they tried to keep going as if they were still in Europe, but they weren't. Inuit settlers actually got there later but their methods of hunting and their innovative kayaks gave them the advantage.

William Vollman's novel The Ice Shirt is a fictionalized account of this history. I read it a while ago. It's pretty vivid. 

White & black

We got snow today. Seems to have started around noon. Substantial, but was turning to (cold) rain by 4:30. I wouldn't say overwhelming, in a physical sense. But it takes surprisingly little to start getting stuff canceled. For example, the library closed around two in the afternoon.

On the plus side, this all meant that the evening sky was somewhat fluffy and light. Which meant that I was able to make out a black bird flying across. Crow? I think it just might have been. They stick around. Hope it had a warm and dry place to roost.

It's time to dress up right

Did you know that Paul Klee made puppets? If I ever heard anything about it, I must have forgotten. Which is a shame. The brilliant thing about this is that these look like the kind of puppets children could spend hours watching or playing with. They are that kind of simple puppet. But there's a little bit of dark expressionism that doesn't dilute the playfulness, or vice versa.

Nothing wrong with his paintings on their own, but the puppeting adds a new dimension to my image of the man.

Mid-Atlantic Murder

Reading now? Well, one thing I'm reading now is The Blunderer, by Patricia Highsmith. Written in the 1950's, it's about a lawyer who wants to divorce his life, which she doesn't want him to. But she gets murdered, so it doesn't matter what she wants or doesn't want. Which is convenient for him, as the police seem to notice. Also he makes a lot of stupid mistakes that don't help his case.

There's something that escapes me, maybe I'll understand when I finish. The detective investigating the case is on the Philadelphia PD. He questions the protagonist (can't really call him a hero), who's from Long Island, but the crime did take place in Philly, so that makes sense. He's also trying to close a murder case that happened in Newark. I mean, it's a legitimate case, but it's way out of his jurisdiction. Maybe Highsmith just didn't want to complicate things by bringing in another set of detectives.

Otherwise it's a good, tense story. Highsmith doesn't seem to be the kind of novelist who falls in love with her characters, but that's not always necessary. A little 'net research showed that this one was filmed just a couple of years ago as A Kind of Murder. I could have seen Hitchcock making it his second Highsmith adaptation, but he never got around to it.

MCMLXXXIV

When I was in junior high we learned about the stock market crash of '29 and the Great Depression. Our teacher, a very smart and dedicated guy, said at one point that there wasn't a big spike in crime because people were more pious and moral back in the thirties. He said he'd hate to see what would happen if the economy crashed in 1984.

Yes, this was 1984. Which is funny because that's now a long time ago. The Good Old Days, you might say. If you were a kid back then you get to pretend that you and people in general were just better back then.

The world has changed in ways that I personally find annoying, no doubt. But do people just plain suck now more than they used to? I can't imagine being comfortable making that claim.

Seen on the road

I saw a minivan today. It had the license plate TUTHDR. This puzzled me. "Tut hider"? "Truth or dare"? I was somewhat pleased with myself when, a couple of minutes later, I got "Tooth doctor." Ah, a dentist.

Anyway, to the extent that there's such a thing as a good vanity plate, I'm pretty sure they were all taken years ago.

Marches

little women from Abigail Eckstrom on Vimeo.

I've actually read Little Women, although I wasn't/am not the kind of reader the book is expected to have. I liked Alcott's tenderness and patience towards her characters.

This little animation is more suggestive than anything else. No characters actually appear. A little surreal maybe. Or just dreamlike. The house made up of newsprint is quite evocative.