Garrison

Years ago I was living in Rumford. I went out for a walk in the evening and passed a woman who was walking her dog. The dog immediately got hostile and began snapping at me at high volume. He was apparently keyed to threats to his mistress, but it also seems like the working definition of  "threat" that had been impressed on him was "someone walking on the same sidewalk." Making matters worse, he was on an extremely long leash that she had extended all the way out. The only way I could avoid the dog was to trespass on private lawns, which were luckily not guarded by vicious attack dogs.

There's a house I sometimes pass by. When I do, a perky female robot voice informs me that I'm being filmed. Minor annoyance in some ways. I'm out of range within a couple of seconds, and it's better to be told than not to be told. But why am I being filmed when I'm not on the stoop or anywhere near an entrance? The house, to give you a picture, is on a higher elevation than the sidewalk. The camera just spies on pedestrians going about their business.

See the underlying similarity here? The world is partway full of threats. It is absolutely chock full of security consultants. Suspicion is its own justification.

Monkeyshines

There's an old Bob and Ray radio skit called "Galaxy of the Baboons" that I was hoping to find but wasn't sure I'd be able to. Well, turns out it was easy, and it's the very first piece on this audio "video" clip. Feel free to ignore the SubGenius-y graphics, which don't really add anything.

But it's brilliant for exactly the reason I remembered it being brilliant. The fantastic premise is of course a spin on Planet of the Apes. But this being Bob and Ray, they veer in the opposite direction from sci-fi melodrama.

Munchable menagerie

Animal Crackers are ubiquitous. They're the classic snack if you want to keep toddlers occupied. And it feels like Animal Crackers have been around forever. Which, it turns out, isn't that far from the truth. Nabisco started marketing them in 1902, but Stauffer's had beaten them to the punch by about thirty years. And the idea goes back a good deal of time before that. It's interesting that they may be derived from Springerle, which are frequently gorgeous.

One thing that amuses me now is the look of the classic Nabisco Animal Crackers box. It's made to look like a cage wagon housing a tiger, a lion, a bison, and a polar bear. This is not an arrangement I'd count on to last. As the only herbivore of the bunch, the bison would be on everyone's menu, but it won't go down without a fight.

The answer, my friend

 

If it's not the most elemental sound we know, it's close. At times it means that the weather will be cooler or colder for a while. It may dry things off after a rainstorm, or spread the rain if the storm continues.

At bottom, though, wind means that the world continues. That the silent beat still runs under nature. In its simplicity, wind is a beautiful sound. Something that belongs to us all.

Way to here

Over the years, the old woman's skill, knowledge, and experience had kept the group going. She knew when to move, the trails to follow, and where to find good drinking water when there was none. She knew all about the animals and plants. She knew which plants and plant parts were edible, the preparation some plants needed to make them edible, and where the animals and plants could be found. She also knew many uses for plants, ranging from which plants healed to which could be used for construction and cord and packaging material. Fortunately for the group, the knowledge the old woman had of the land, animals, and plants didn't die with her. It was passed on to her grandchildren. The old woman also passed on her habits, those everyday things she did that made everyone's life in the group easier. 

She had picked up the old woman's habits, although she was not always aware of it. Whenever her actions reminded her of the old woman, she would think of the handful of cherries and smile.

From The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, created by G. J. Sawyer and Victor Deak. 

The above passage is just the end of a chapter, and much of the chapter is quite lovely. It seems to depict the daily life of Homo georgicus, which may have been the first hominin in Europe. 

When you look at reconstructed pictures of ancient hominins, you can see different tendencies. Some looked like apes, but a feature or two gave away that they were something a little different. Others look like people, but again there are unusual details. Little things that remind you of how far you are from home. The georgicus people were somewhere in between, it seems. A retroactive hybrid. 

But it probably is true that they experienced a lot of the same things we do. It's hard to imagine ourselves in the Million BC range. Still, we had things in common with the people alive back then. 

Rolling...

Newsflash: Snakes have pretty odd eyes. Which I guess you might expect after all. We named a dice roll of two ones after them. They must strike some kind of unusual response.

I like the idea that their eyes regressed as a result of their burrowing underground and developed once more when they moved back to the surface. Sometimes you just have to find another way in. Imagine the first generation of snakes, seeing the world in color, with eyes that hadn't done that in some time.

Big ones

World War II warped our worldview in a number of ways. One of the chief ways it did this was to create a bottomless demand for Pearl Harbors. That is, one big thing that monopolizes everyone's attention and makes them feel like part of something larger than themselves. Ignored is the possibility that we might be better off tending to smaller interests.

About twenty-four years ago, 9/11 became the big thing. Suddenly everybody had to do their bit to fight off terrorism. The biggest and most immediate effect was that the American government got to do a big raid on Iraq, based on lies and cooked evidence, and everybody had to follow them.

More recently there was COVID, a disease so big and monstrous that it upended all of the established protocol for dealing with pandemics, as well as most of culture. Of course staying at home and avoiding everyone isn't what I'd consider being something larger than yourself. But that's me.

The great schism

I remember seeing an interview with John Cleese where he said―and I have to paraphrase here―that what's funny isn't someone acting crazy. It's when you see someone else seeing that person act crazy. He said this in relation to Fawlty Towers, which exploited that principle to the hilt. 

There have been three American attempts to remake Fawlty Towers and they've all been miserable failures. Of course the original only ran a dozen episodes, so it's not like the US versions fall all that short on that front. But there's the question of how those episodes are remembered, and that's where the original is so far ahead.

And I think the problem is that the characters and concept don't translate from one side of the Atlantic to the other. America doesn't have the same sense of propriety, that silent, invisible straight man. If Americans see someone acting nuts we ignore it, confront them, or run. Stiff upper lip doesn't enter into it. It's notable that Connie Booth, Cleese's wife at the time, was from the US and still spoke in her native accent in real life. But she was cast as Polly, one of the less stuffy younger generation.

#4

In 1965, the Mariner 4 probe beamed images of the surface of Mars back to Earth. It showed a pocked, cratered ground more similar to the moon than to our home planet. While later probes would show more detail, Mariner essentially killed the notion of Mars being home to complex, intelligent life.

Killed it as science, anyway. In those terms it had been hanging by a thread already. In Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles a Martian character insists that there can't be life on Earth because there's too much oxygen in the atmosphere. The premise that aliens might consider paucity of oxygen a prerequisite for life is shows science fiction in the postwar era in the bargaining stage when it comes to life on Mars. But then, Bradbury was very much a storyteller rather than a scientist. 

Other creatives were also having fun with the idea. Chuck Jones gave would-be destroyer Marvin the Martian Roman getup like the actual god Mars. And the Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" showed saboteurs from not only Mars but also Venus, soon to be revealed as a corrosive acid pit that even NASA probes can't survive.

The thought of having close alien neighbors who for whatever reason hadn't (openly) visited or invaded served a psychological need. It wasn't about to just evaporate.

☃☃

The weather forecast is calling for snow in a few hours. It's gotten pretty chilly, so I can believe it's on the way. On the other hand, it's still a few degrees above freezing, and it will get warmer during the day, so I don't think it will stick around for very long.

Even if not, I'm sure there will be people not happy to see it. Drivers and such. But what can you do? This is at least a chance to get reaccustomed to it.

Have a cigar you're gonna go far

 

Of course this ad would never air anywhere today. Naturally. You can't advertise tobacco products anymore.

You have to hand it to Chuck Biore Creative Services, the makers of the ad. Getting the listener's attention is everything. And this is expert trolling.

Krazy, man, krazy

 

The details of George Herriman's life―his Creole background, his connection to New Orleans―have become better known than they once were, which is as it should be. But they don't fully explain Krazy Kat. It's simply its own thing.

Born in 1870, Herriman was of the generation that basically invented daily comic strips. And if you look at samples from Baron Bean, a strip he actually created after Krazy Kat, you see accomplished art, but in the style of turn-of-the-century comics like Mutt and Jeff.

Krazy Kat had some basis in that old style as well, but it also incorporated methods from outside the mediums established rules. It was strange then and it's strange now. Funny and poignant as well, if that need be pointed out.

Misterioso

I was at the laundromat and sitting on the side of the place where the TV is set to a Spanish language station. Not paying all that much attention to it, since I was both washing my clothes and reading a book. But I did look up at just the right time. There was a story about a luchador who'd had an accident in the ring. One of the reporters talked to him in his hospital bed. Yes Virginia, he still had his mask on.

Hispanophone media in America is different. Is it better? I don't know. But it certainly adds some variety.

Dreams and cups

In My Dreams
by Stevie Smith

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not, nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And the sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye,
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad that I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.

.----

Thanks to Outis for the shift + enter tip.

Very brief poem by Stevie Smith, from England's North Country. The relative length of the lines, though, adds to the feeling of always riding on. I think Smith understands that there's something in us that doesn't really want to be understood.

We don't often hear about stirrup cups and that's a shame, because a lot of them are wild and beautiful.

Salute to the spooky

Now that Halloween season is just past, I have to reflect that it's been fun to walk around and see the decorations. I've seen tableaux with simple yet effective witch figures. There was a house with a couple of skeletons propped up in chairs on the lawn. At least one porch was decorated with giant spiders, which I wouldn't have been happy about if they were real, but they weren't. And of course there have been some nicely made and creative jack-o-lanterns.

How many trick-or-treaters have there actually been? Got me. I live in an apartment building which is logistically not suited for it. But the nearby neighborhoods have looked nice.