YIKES!
This news, this news → HERE ← does not bode well for incurable Canadian Starbucks addicts like myself!
What am I going to do if they start closing down around me? Why don't they just ask for a government bailout... everyone else is! MAY ONTARIO BE SPARED!
[I am going to have nightmares tonight….] ********
Adult readers have the right to expect and demand that writers not condescend to them but treat them with respect -- challenge them, unsettle them, refuse to talk down to them. Personally I don't want false comfort, I don't want to read writers who flop in to join me in the shallow end where, like most people, I sometimes find myself cowering out of fatigue or disappointment or the natural human aversion to spiritual deep waters. I want to read writers like Franz Kafka or Mary Shelley or Mavis Gallant or Cormac McCarthy who grab be by the hair and haul or pitch me out into the deep end of the pool and say Swim, you bastard, your life depends upon it.
-- Steven Heighton --Have a great Tuesday!
********
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
-- Marcel Proust –
Have a great Monday!
I may have mentioned this before, but I'm reading a really fascinating, wonderfully interesting book.
I'm into the last three-quarters of it – Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.
GO OUT AND GET THIS BOOK!
It’s about…. nearly everything!
So I am at this section for a while now, [I’m a fastidiously slow reader…] about pre-history, it’s all about trilobites and whatchamacallits and Cambrian this-and-that-creepy-crawlies -- fossils, basically!
I felt that this one slab of text from chapter 22 was worthy of regurgitation –
If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic fauna… At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. [← Unless you are real smart, you must read the preceding chapter to know what this is]. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land
. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single lifetime barely an instant.
In the next paragraph he goes on to restate it thus:
Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch out your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian.
All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”********
Drummers To believe in a different set of principles. We say one person is marching this way and another, that. The while, our self lockstep with everywhere it has been, ever seeing all it has seen, walks. What does the person distant hear? Too often mere rumble, echoing through the trees or against the walls. As rhythmic as anything they’ve beaten, surety travels. Conviction and loyalty -- Discord, reeking of tribe. If civilization means a thing, it involves a heart loving harmony. An ear hearing that it cannot produce sound. A mind knowing that all are equally wrong. Drummers drumming, not in a different way, but in an other way.© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009
Have a great Friday!********
It is a very drizzly, rainy day out there, and I am sitting at a Starbucks after work. The internet signal is quite weak so I'm not sure if this will even post at all, but I'll try.
← This is a picture of my mom, having a snooze, many years ago.
I am not 100% sure but I think we were camping somewhere when this was taken.
She is asleep, and I am just a kid.
As many of you already know, my mom passed away just a few hours into the New Year, a few months ago now. I miss her.
Today is her birthday.
So I’ve been thinking about her all day.
She would have been turning 77 years young.
Recently I wrote a little poem for my mom. Originally, I guess because of its personal nature and all, I was not going to post it.
But sitting here, the rain outside the window seems to be telling me to do it… Sleep Peacefully Mom So bravely you gave yourself to the New Year, lips unmoving, singing with your children, even as their tears fell upon an earth you were tired of living upon. A calm peace given unto you, not as the world gives. Perhaps a day may come, a time when every one of us will be reunited in a heavenly picnic. Where Dad will surely complain that you didn’t pack nearly enough hot-dog buns. And why bring good forks when he had bought the plastic ones? Under such pressure, how can love survive? Anyone else would have lost their marbles and given up. Yet you were a rock, not only to him, but to us. Mother’s Day will forever be an empty day on our calendars. And that other day, in March, a remembrance of your gift to us. You.© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009 Just a few words for a remarkable woman.
My mom!
[Note: The first letter of each line spells out the title.]**********
Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions – not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?
-- Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation (1988) --Have a great Thursday!
Dear Readers!
All of you who have entered The First Annual St. Patrick’s Day Bookpuddle© Book Giveaway Event…. Thing!
← TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT!
As you can see, I have faithfully made sure that everyone who submitted their name was entered into the draw.
I wish you all luck!
The luck of the Irish!
[Now, the trick is going to be to somehow camouflage these pieces of paper as food pellets, and then convince my cat that he’s hungry.]
← Even though I deliberately starved him all day in preparation for his role in these proceedings, he initially was not all that enthused about these white foreign objects in his food dish!
But finally he moved in and nudged at a few.
He glanced at me to see if everything was on the level.
I said, “Go on Jack, pick one of those.”
So he did, and then he ran away a bit and I had to grab him quickly and extract the thing from his mouth.
It was full of cat spit. And so, as you can see below, the lucky winner of the Geraldine Brooks book People of the Book, is…..
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
-- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) --Have a great Wednesday!
Hi friends.
← Guess what this is?
I am at Starbucks, just sitting here and thinking about stuff.
For one thing, I wish I had way more money.
Secondly, I wish I could read all day instead of work. Thirdly, I wish beer was just randomly distributed everywhere.
But back to the picture…. guess what it is.
That’s right.
It’s my underground parking space at my apartment building.
Basically just a few feet of concrete where I stash my wheels every night.
Every month I pay $50 for the privilege of parking there.
I moved into my place back in June of 1997.
Hence, according to my quick calculations on my Starbucks napkin, I have now paid that $50 fee → 106 times.
That amounts to $5,300.
Which just goes to show you -- in the big city, everything, literally everything costs money one way or another.
Even empty space.********
Have a great Tuesday!********
Dear Friends:
When I inaugurated the First Annual St. Patrick’s Day Bookpuddle© Book Giveaway Event… Thing, I failed to put a time-limit to it!
So… let’s say Wednesday evening!
Two nights from now!
This means you all only have well… there’s no time like the present, like RIGHT NOW to add your name to the list of entrants in the quest to win one of three great books!
Jack is getting all primed up to pick the winning name from his food dish!
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
You’re wondering, “What's the deal with the ol’ gal and the fish there?”
The answer is umm… I just really love that picture, and have been waiting for a reason to post it, but no reason ever emerges. So I’m sitting here at Starbucks right now and I can stand it no longer. I had to post it.
Please, if you have not already entered the Book Giveaway, just CLICK ON THE FISH and I wish you the luck of the Irish!*********
Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall.
-- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924) --Have a great Monday!
Have you ever gone to COSTCO, just thinking you were going to walk around in there and not buy stuff, and then what happens is you buy half the store?
It happened to me today.
Everything looks so good! All of a sudden you feel like you NEED so many things that [minutes ago] you had no idea you needed so badly… because there it all is, on some kind of exaggerated plastic-wrapped armageddonous level.
I found myself actually feeling that I NEED a bulk supply of canned tuna… and salmon! My God, I just stacked away into my shelves here enough canned fish to last me for at least five of the seven years of The Great Tribulation! [Now that I’m a heretic, there’s no way I’m going in the Rapture, so I’ve got to be prepared.]
I’ve got enough Stagg Silverado© chili to get me through those last 24 months.
OK, enough with the theology.
The point is, I even bought new plates and bowls, [see above photo] to eat all of this stuff in!
And the thing is, I already have enough plates and bowls.
See?
That’s what COSTCO does to you.
It makes you do mental things!
Just in case I turn into a werewolf at some point in the near future, I bought the bulk package of Gillette shave cream. And enough Excel peppermint flavor gum to last a veritable lifetime of halitosis.
I must admit though, these plates and bowls? I like the simplicity of them… they’re all about efficiency.
They’ve got some great capacity. They’re big. And I like my supper to be…. big.
I can hardly wait till tomorrow morning when I fill that blue-edged bowl with a few bushels of cereal from my ten-pound box of COSTCO jumbo End-Times Flakes©.
Reminds me of Jethro from that old show The Beverley Hillbillies.
Uncle Jed walks into the kitchen where Jethro is literally shoveling cereal into his face from one of Granny’s big huge mixing bowls….
“Boy, how many bowls of that cereal have you had?”
“Just one, Uncle Jed. Filled it four times.”*********
Oblivious Three kids are in love with their sandwiches. The one in an olive-colored shirt alternates between cookie and sandwich and pop and laughter while cramming it all into his freckles he marries a monstrous beast develops liver disease plastic tubes keep him alive until not. The one with thick glasses and mustard on his laughing lip secures a fortune in the stock market loses it all night watchman finds what he was on the sidewalk. The one in the red jacket with the laugh like rain falling her only child dies in the womb after a long bout with cancer she too succumbs to life. It is beautiful to watch them with their sandwiches.© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009
Whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.
--Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1992) –Have a great Friday!
Recently I said to a friend, “I fear that I’m reading so much material I’m forgetting the relevant aspects of the contents.”
And this, especially as it applies to general fiction and short stories.
What I meant was that sometimes you can read so much that your mind tends to muddle the combined stories together, in a sort of blur.
Months, or a year later [or longer] you can’t really recall details about what you have read.
To this, she said, “They are a part of us - even if we forget about them - they are still with us somehow.”
This was encouraging.
But not only so.
I think it is also very true.
What we read, what we interact with on such a cerebral and heartfelt level, enters into the amalgam of who we are.
And the benefit is not based on regurgitation.
It’s based on absorption.
Like the blood coursing through my veins, I neither understand its function, nor would such an understanding help it along its way.
It just does what it does.
And without it, I cannot continue being who I am.********
Somehow the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it is their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold (1964) –Have a great Thursday!
Expensive clothes are a waste of money.
-- Meryl Streep --
I agree! In fact, I advocate the re-directing of your entire clothing budget into your book fund!
As for clothing, just keep buying books until you are reduced to crawling around in your very last dustjacket!Have a great Wednesday!
YIKES!
Adult readers have the right to expect and demand that writers not condescend to them but treat them with respect -- challenge them, unsettle them, refuse to talk down to them. Personally I don't want false comfort, I don't want to read writers who flop in to join me in the shallow end where, like most people, I sometimes find myself cowering out of fatigue or disappointment or the natural human aversion to spiritual deep waters. I want to read writers like Franz Kafka or Mary Shelley or Mavis Gallant or Cormac McCarthy who grab be by the hair and haul or pitch me out into the deep end of the pool and say Swim, you bastard, your life depends upon it.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
I may have mentioned this before, but I'm reading a really fascinating, wonderfully interesting book.
. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
It is a very drizzly, rainy day out there, and I am sitting at a Starbucks after work. The internet signal is quite weak so I'm not sure if this will even post at all, but I'll try.
Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions – not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?
Dear Readers!
← Even though I deliberately starved him all day in preparation for his role in these proceedings, he initially was not all that enthused about these white foreign objects in his food dish!
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
Hi friends.
Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall.
Have you ever gone to COSTCO, just thinking you were going to walk around in there and not buy stuff, and then what happens is you buy half the store?
Whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.
Recently I said to a friend, “I fear that I’m reading so much material I’m forgetting the relevant aspects of the contents.”
Somehow the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it is their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.
Expensive clothes are a waste of money. 
