• a friend
    A Panama hat resting on a plastic facsimile of an armadillo skeleton
  • Ventura County, CA
    A partly shaded unpaved hiking trail in Ventura County, California, USA
  • Loo Art
    stenciled skeletons painted on a restroom wall stenciled cowboys on horseback in silouhette painted on a restroom wall
    Lee Harvey's, Dallas. Tx
  • Well, yeah, I am. Thanks, mate.

    Ange Postecoglou: “I’ve loved my first six months as head coach of this fantastic football club. We are still very much in the early stages of our journey. We have been moving in the right direction in terms of the squad, style of play, results. Hopefully, you are enjoying the team we are becoming.” ⚽️

  • from The Other Side of the Alde | Reynolds Stone, Wood Engraver
    Wood engraving of wooden boat on a rocky beach
  • Year-end lists
    Without a doubt, my 2023 personal Word of the Year is "Ange Postecoglou".
    (Two words, but you get it.) Coming in at #2 is "mate."
    Come On You Spurs! ⚽
  • Pitiable, foolish, and cruel, all at once

    Louis Menand: “[Sontag] forbade her son to look out the window when they rode in a train; he needed to read about a place if he wanted to understand it. She never looked out the window herself.”

  • not so funny anymore
    Mike Godwin:
         ... has the sheer absurdity of so many hyperbolic Nazi comparisons in popular culture made us less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world? I think it shouldn’t — comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis...
         We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.
  • The Bloody Mary - Susan Donnelly
    Sunday in late December
    calls for one, with a celery stalk
    and faint taste of Worcestershire,
    to be sipped while eating
    poached egg and corned beef hash,
    in a hotel dining room
    with someone you love. Touch
    the hairs at his wrist
    as the warmth endorses
    all bed-lingering, non-churchgoing.
    It's the solstice, remember,
    when your frugal father
    would hand around dollar bills
    so the day would last longer. 
    Stir ice into the rich red
    and consider such Celtic rituals,
    as you watch, beyond the tall windows,
    pilgrims traveling the paths
    past snow-fringed trees in the park.
  • Christmas scenes 2023

  • O morning stars together
    Proclaim the holy birth
    And praises sing to God the King
    And peace to men on earth!

    Happy Christmas, friends!

  • Christmas Movietime: The Shop Around the Corner

    Black & white film still of Mr. Matuschek and the new clerk, Rudy
    Mr. Matuschek and Rudy are headed to Christmas Eve dinner. 🍿

  • handsome archie

    a tan mini-goldendoodle (Golden Retriever/Poodle mix) looking upwards
    🐶
  • 12.21  Happy Solstice!

  • Chores - Maxine Kumin
    All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
    out of the trailer truck into the chute.
    From time to time he’s clambered down to even
    the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
    Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.
    

    I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff he says, stripping nude in the late September sun while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks. I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn

    no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses burst through when snow avalanches off the roof. Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his, horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces. Fifty years married, he’s safely facetious.

    No garden pump that’s airbound, no window a grouse flies into and shatters, no ancient tractor’s intractable problem with carburetor ignition or piston, no mowers and no chain saws that refuse to start, or start, misfire and quit.

    But after a Bloody Mary on the terrace already frost-heaved despite our heroic efforts to level the bricks a few years back, he says let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset and off we go, a couple of aging fools.

    I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.

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