Shh! Don’t tell gubmint or they’ll ban the Tao Te Ching!
If only.
Category: oddities
You’re a completely different person…
And maybe that’s a good thing — me at 17:
And my first painting, at age 17:
I proposed this a a 10′ x 20′ mural for the game room of my prep school as my senior project. Happily the headmaster rejected the design as “too negative,” and it devolved into “just” a painting. Thus, today at eight feet wide, it hangs in our living room (one of only a few possibilities in our house). As a mural, I doubt it would have lasted five years.
I occasionally toy with the idea of doing a 50-year-later version. Because you’re not the same person….
South America 1826
Election day, Uruguay
An old computer monitor enclosure repurposed.
Hard over to starboard!
Tracking the arrival of a friend on a cargo ship. Looks like we might hear about an exciting overland excursion of a 79,000 ton sea vessel?
Our country palace
A feather…
…in the yard, standing upright in the grass. How — ?
It’s time
Almost eight years! This blog has been real, it’s been fun … and yet after a certain point, not real fun. When your fascination runs out of steam, when there’s no more juice flowing, it’s not time to mourn, but to move on.
My Day in Uruguay
Some funny stuff,
some pretty pics,
some oddities.
Thanks for your attention!
Reviewing the stats, I found 1,218 posts listed, but only 1,217 published. Aha!
The digging dog
26 February 2018. This is from a month or so ago. Kiya, a dog obsessed with digging, makes a cave in the bank of the swimming hole (which at that point had no water). Benji looks on, and – are you ready for this? – there’s a third dog in there as well.
As a closing comment, I think that image says it all.
Or nothing at all.
Perfect!
Simply inexcusable
I saw this at Tienda Inglesa, and was absolutely appalled.
No, not that the ham was upside down. That only made it worse. Can you see it?
OK, let me give you a clue:
Ah yeah, you’ve got a point: that’s not much of a clue. That’s me in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1983. On the right. I have absolutely no memory of the photo being taken BTW (by someone named Lisa Ebright).
Having extricated myself from teaching at a vastly under-studented international school in Malta, I spent a few years working as a school yearbook rep out of West Germany, consuming multiple Eurail Passes with a job that took me to 14 countries.
Not bad, but: in the twilight of my 20s, in an “is this all there is?” moment, I signed up for a School of Visual Arts (New York) summer course in North Africa, whose teachers were Milton Glaser, Marshall Arisman, Ed Benguiat, and Eileen Hedy Schultz (not to be confused with Eileen Caddy, founder of Findhorn, whom I met a year or two later in Germany). All very cool people – well, for the first and most famous, perhaps that’s too strong an adjective – a couple of whom I later visited in New York.
Powerful stuff which, alas, did not exactly lead me down the path to a career in typography, illustration, graphic design, or stock photography, though all kept singing sweetly in the background over the next few years.
So, back to the ham, oddly less offensive now right side-up. But still egregious – what the hell is this? Do you let your ten year-old do package design?
Yes, I’m talking about kerning….
RIP GoT
OK, fair enough if you’re not into Game of Thrones, but I spotted this in the parking lot of Tienda Inglesa shortly after the final episode aired, and it struck me as oddly appropriate.
Years ago, I was maybe a hundred pages into the first book of George R R R R Martin’s (I may have a couple too many Rs there) Song of Ice and Fire series, when a British friend revealed it was an HBO television series. Thus ended the reading.
For all its gratuitous gore, the show was fascinating and complex for several years. However, when Season 7 ended, with Season 8 not slated to appear for two years, it had become silly enough that I wasn’t sure I’d watch any more. But I did, and it’s over, and good riddance: its descent into silliness (and stupidity) charged forward, oblivious to a large audience that was apparently more intelligent than the series’ writers.
Or perhaps the series’ writers were simply under the gun to wrap things up, come hell or high water. Which they did, as if from plot-device to-do list. Check. Check. Check.
Anyway, a single meme for Season 8: the coffee cup.
You spend $15-20 million on an episode that included 55 nights of battle scene shooting, and leave a Starbucks cup on a banquet table?
It kind of sums things up.