Tuesday Tidbits

I suppose when I get up to the Cabin it will be mild, melted and dirty.  In about three weeks I will be arriving in Northlandia to babysit whilst the parents are cruising.  It will not all be work, however.  As usual, this Mercer County boy will be breathing in all the wonders of the North until I complete my own escape plans.  

I've forgotten to post this since my last trip up.  This is one of the landmarks going into K-Burg.  The oft stolen, now permanently cemented stone of an old locomotive engineer.  Whenever the folks would go to the Burg and take us with them that would be the thing we would first try to find as we whisked past the cemetery.  The nest would be the taste freeze.  No wonder we have a cemetery/ice cream addiction.

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An historic footnote. 

In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine. She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence, but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.

In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siècle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty. The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mouleur, whose shop I pass every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door. [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”

Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR. Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”

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Adventures In Babysitting

"She may be wee, but she be fierce..."

A touching but brief act of fidelity between the girls.

It is time.

I don't even remember what the problem was.

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Sunrise last week.  My poor iPhone's puny sensor couldn't manage the brilliance. 

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My favorite breakfast place, the Sunrise Grill, had the heaters going and the flaps down on Saturday.   

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That journalist/reporter who kept asking Trump after he signed the MLK, Jr proclamation, "Mr. President, are you a racist?"  should be fired/reassigned or sent back to journalism school.  What an inane question, as if he'll admit to it.  Unlike the prez, I respect the press, but stupidity like that has no place in the news media.

Addendum after the above was written:  Well, what do you know?  He was asked the same question and he answered it by not only denying it but then adding he is the least racist person he knows.  His ex and his daughter also chimed in saying he is not a racist so I guess that clears it all up.

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A teacher recently put up on the board one of her puzzles for her students to ponder.

What was usually a pretty energetic and fun part of the day, a kid said, "death" which pretty much put an end to the fun while the rest of the students began thinking about it.  As I understand it the teacher didn' have the heart to say that the real answer was "e".

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Imagine being here...

...and wanting to be here. 

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I minimally understand the craft of writing.  You think thoughts and apply it to paper (or more precisely Microsoft Word, or something like it).  Painting is the application of a medium to paper or canvas.  Pottery is the forming of clay and baking to hardness.  All of the above could be done with varying degrees of skill by the unschooled.  There is one artistry I cannot fathom:  sculpting.  So you stand in front of a block of rock.  How do you go about the chipping of stone to form the contours of the human body?  Is there a secret art?  A formula?  A blueprint?  Are there measurements hat correspond to your particular rock?  It baffles me how one goes about the process of sculpting, let alone the sheer talent of it.  Without exacting inner measurements how many rocks have been discarded when an arm was carved that was too large for the rest of the body?

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Proof positive politicians are lying sons-a-bitches:  4 senators in room when infamous "shit hole" remark is made, 2 say he didn't say it, 2 say he did.  No wonder most of us say Congress is a shit hole.  But you know what?  We'll continue voting the bastards back in.  

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Back in the day, this is how they handled blizzards.  They didn't blade snow off the roads, they rolled it.

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And finally, while at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Pete this past weekend I saw something that I decided to purchase.  I'm a sucker anyway for original art but a piece that features a flower sniffing dragon is one to keep.  It is now mine. 

Till next week.