Why do I keep this blog? This is why

A bird, nesting, right over the doorway.

I first saw the bird in the nest a couple of days ago, above the door I generally use to get to the sidewalk. The bird didn't move, so I figured it must be artificial. Some kind of garden decoration somebody had planted up there either for a gag or because they just liked the way it looked. Although the nest was a little messy for that.

But today I came back and the building's Russian handyman pointed the bird―which looks like some kind of columbiform―out to me. It's real. She's real, and had a chick next to her. Maybe there's a daddy bird out there getting food for them? We don't know. 

Late afternoon, early evening, we had a thunderstorm. I went downstairs to look at the bird through the little window over the door. This time I did see her head move. And later on, at night, her head was turned so she could look inside. 

How could this not be a blessing?

You beat everything, you know that?

Here's another story from while I was out getting breakfast. A man―he was black, and that's a relevant detail for reasons I'll make clear―was sitting with a young woman and talking to her. From context I don't think she was his daughter, but I don't think they were an item either. Maybe a niece. He was telling her about The Andy Griffith Show, and he was a big fan. When he talked about Deputy Barney Fife I said "Don Knotts" and he was glad to have someone else who knew about the show. Which the waitress did as well. 

At this point it feels like anyone writing about The Andy Griffith Show for a magazine or a website would have to keep an arm's length from it. They'd call it out for its overly rosy portrayal of the Jim Crow South, or for its lack of characters of color. From what I understand Griffith was a desegregationist and didn't want the cast to be all white, but the network thought they understood the South better than he did and overruled him. Of course if Mayberry had been a friendly integrated town, someone would be complaining about that, too.

Anyway, my point is that while the internet is everywhere and seemingly in everything, people in real life are still different.

Well-nested

Matryoshka, those Russian nesting dolls. You ever think about them? Sure you do. Ever wonder if they're still made by hand? Well, someone has to ponder things like that.

Actually, the process, if this video is any guide, is still refreshingly physical. Of course these dolls are huge. Real statement dolls.

Proof

With the realization that I can be kind of a broken record on this topic, I'll keep it brief.

Do you remember "15 Days to Slow the Spread"? I do. In at least one business that was closing down for that period of time on government orders/strong suggestions, I remember saying "See you in a couple of weeks." Because as dismal as the idea of a central authority ordering all face to face social activity suspended was, at least they'd put a time limit on it.

Of course the fifteen days came and went. Without a word of explanation, the suspension was extended. Now there was no fixed endpoint, and no admission that there ever had been. Anyone who spoke or acted with the expectation of being allowed to return to their regular life was shamed into silence.

That's why, outside of some limited hangout, there will be no reckoning on the COVID era. Nothing actually went wrong. It was an experiment, and at root it had nothing to do with masks or vaccines, very little to do with COVID itself. The object was to see how much the population would tolerate gaslighting, Orwellian memory-holing, and leonine contracts. A lot, it turns out. Experiment successful.

Fool your friends

Have you heard of puzzle jugs? They were essentially joke shop fare, regardless of whether there were actual joke shops back then. The most popular tended to be something like a dribble glass. The unwary toper would lift them to take a drink, and then find himself drenched.  But there were other variations. According to Kovel's American Antiques (2004 edition):

One jug, the simplest of puzzles, had a frog on the bottom. When the unwary tippler drank his grog, the frog appeared―a startling, lifelike visitor. Many hard drinkers must have had a real fright from this jug.

The urge to prank goes back far, further than this entry might indicate. It's a healthy instinct, in the right context. One hopes that the wags have not been forever stilled.

Penned up

Out of curiosity, and looking around for ideas, I've been doing some research into inventions that either never caught on, or which had their day and then were forgotten. This search led me to the baby cage, which was an eye opener.

The theory behind it was that babies and very young children need fresh air, and needed to be exposed to the elements in order to give them a healthy metabolism. This is true. The developers also said that not all families have sufficient outdoor room as part of their homes. This was true then and is very much true now.

The solution was a small structure, enclosed but open to the air, aka a cage. And it was to be placed outside the window. It raises questions. How firmly is the cage attached to the building's facade? How much do you trust the structural integrity of the cage itself. These are important matters, given how high some of the cages were placed. 

In any case, enough parents had enough anxiety about dangling their babies out the window that the fad soon died out. In retrospect it seems like an imperfect and perhaps unworkable solution to an ongoing problem. In the real world there probably isn't one fix that will work for everyone.

Artist of the Second World

 

Aleksandr Gerasimov was not just a Russian artist, he was a Soviet artist. It's not a coincidental distinction. He was intimately tied to the regime during its most autocratic stage. Aside from some operatic depictions of Lenin, he also painted official portraits of Stalin, some of which could make one wonder whether Gerasimov had to paint them over to erase apparatchiks who had fallen out of favor.

But whatever his political role, he was still an artist. A very good one, too. "Boat Trip", seen above, has long been one of his most sought-after works. Several kinds of sensuality are at work here. The mist and spray that rise from the water feel real enough to make you think of the way flecks of cool water feel on the skin. There are also the Russian women relaxed in the sun, one extending her legs, the other leaning forward into the wind. They're mostly turned away from us, enrapt in a grand picture of their own. The man had a real feel for his subjects.