Promises of Fruit

The cherry blossoms arrive.
If there's no more snow, they might survive!

At Last

It's nice to see Spring become an actual thing, instead of an abstract date in a winter that ran too late.

Endurance

A journey of a thousand miles, begins they say with just one step, and hopefully a bunch of pep, since you'll be stepping for quite a while.

Mistakes Happen

This mistake happened in Brazil:

Bruno Coutinho was cleaning his harpoon gun at his home in Petropolis when he accidentally triggered the apparatus, sending the harpoon through his left eye and into his cranium.

Miraculously - except for losing his left eye - he seems to be fine. There's a scary copy of the X-ray at the link, showing that the harpoon went all the way to the back of his skull.

But... how did he do this? I guess it must have started with him staring right at the point of a loaded harpoon gun.

I mean, if you were trying to have a stupid deadly accident, that would be a good start.

His Darwin Award will never arrive.
He cleverly managed to survive!

According to Legend

King Canute, in his pride,
tried to regulate the tide.

For this feat,
he got wet feet,
and met defeat.

Exoskeletal

Tiny creatures with exoskeletal features have invaded our house. I mean ants. It's a spring thing around here, but this year, I fear, there are more than ever. The guy at the hardware store said everyone in the neighborhood is being driven crazy this season. Could record rainfall be the reason? I don't know. But I want them to go!

It occurred to me that we in the vertebrate subphylum actually retain some key exoskeletal features ourselves - namely our skulls, which protectively encase our brains - and our spines which protectively encases our spinal cords, the other part of our central nervous system.

I wouldn't want my brain
exposed
to wind and rain.

I like it very well
enclosed
in this hard shell.

Noah Counting for Record April Showers

Drought washed away - that's the positive slant. But the farmers say it's too wet to plant.

Prisoner's Lemma

If your partner in crime is already dead, always insist that he was the head, while you, a mere hand, just obeyed his command.

When You ACHOO

Do you ever have issues with regular facial tissues? Is it the case that your nose, when it blows, just goes right through two-ply on the fly? If so, then you have sympathy, from me.

Question

FBI, I'm wondering why you didn't keep more of an eye on this guy.

The Mother, by Brecht

I just got back from a musical celebrating Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution.

Yes, really, The Mother, by Bertolt Brecht, based on a novel by Maxim Gorky. But this production had all new music.

It was a real split brain experience for me. It was well done, with charismatic actors with great voices and nice tunes. The staging was wild. The theater was set up as rows of wooden table which the audience sat at - but then the actors walked and sang on the tables. Katherine Keberlein, as the mother herself, was excellent. That's her to the right in the photo.



Sarah Pretz, to the left was a finely intimidating czarist police official. (I assume the part was written for a man, but there are a lot more actresses than actors at auditions in Chicago, and you learn to expect to sometimes see women-playing-men in storefront theater here. It's sort of the reverse of what happened in Shakespeare's time, where one expected to see males-playing-females on stage.)

I thought Stephanie Polt, as Masha, had an extra bit of star quality for some reason.

Alas, I know how Bolshevism ended.
And don't really feel that it can be defended.

Squish

What a way to go - run over by your bro! Sort of a poetic way to die, and it couldn't happen to a more appropriate guy.

Hopes Dashed

They thought they were such smarties,
blaming terrorist tea parties,
thinking it would be majestic
if the bad guys were domestic,
but alas, the news we're fetchin' ya
is this: they're both from Chechnya.

Global Warming Delayed

I walked out of rehearsal, and into a mid-April snowstorm.

Well, I play the cold-hearted villain in Jane Eyre, so this may be my fault.

On the bright side, this will melt shortly, in tomorrow's warmer weather,
as hearts must melt when Jane and her man finally get together.

Caught

I have friends who are upset about the heavy handed display of SWAT team stuff.

But I am not upset.

This was exactly what the SWAT stuff is supposed to be for. These were bombers who were demonstrably eager to kill and maim just about anyone they could. They'd proven pretty effective at it too.

It's worth noting that it was a citizen, checking on his boat, that actually found the guy. These police dragnets aren't quite what they're cracked up to be. But the cops did a nice job of answering the citizen's 911 call.

You can argue tactics after the fact all day.
But in the end he didn't get away.

Argument from Moderation

I'm not sure I'd heard it called that before, but I've sure encountered it a lot. Wikipedia describes the argument from moderation as:

an informal fallacy which asserts that the truth can be found as a compromise between two opposite positions.

Consider: Did O.J. kill his wife? Let's not argue the point, but let's agree the answer is not: kind of.

It seems the truth
does not always fall
between extremes.

Gun Control Undone

I actually expected the gun control measure to pass in the Senate, rather than to go down in flames.

I mean, there's a Democratic majority. And a few Republicans, including my own Republican senator, were willing to give it an "Aye".

But, no, a bunch of Democrats defected and gave it a "No."

A visibly angry President Barack Obama blasted the Senate’s rejection of a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks on gun sales, a vote that essentially ends any hope for major gun control legislation for the time being.

Anyway, I figured it would pass the Senate at least, partly because I kept reading that polls indicated the law had popular support.

Afterwards, trying to make sense of it, I reminded myself of 2 things:

1) Every state, no matter how thinly populated and rural, gets 2 senators. That means there's a bias toward places where people are comfortable with gun ownership.

2) The popular support for the new law was probably thin - including lots of gun-undecideds who had been nudged into supporting it by weeks of media campaigning, but who aren't really that enthused about it. I mean, everybody would like to do something to prevent another school massacre, but this bill didn't seem like it would have stopped the last one. On the other side of the ledger book, there were a lot of pro-gun voters who were going to be really upset about the new law - seeing it as an infringement of their rights. In other words, it was a low-reward, high-risk sort of vote for a politician.

Thus the law went on to meet
bipartisan defeat.

Airbrushed

A friend of mine has told me more than once, over the years, about a deadly bombing he witnessed - and nearly walked into - in Dublin, back in the Seventies. He recalled it as taking place by the Gresham Hotel.

The Boston bombing yesterday brought that memory to his mind once more, and he tried to Google about it, using combinations like Gresham Hotel Bomb. It proved strangely hard to find, and he began to wonder if he had mis-remembered the precise location.

But by steadfastly Googling different combinations, I found a clear reference in an old Russell Kirk column, which ran in the Prescott Courier on June 20, 1974:

Atrocities, most of them attributed to the IRA, have commenced south of the border - the most recent big one being the death-dealing explosion before the Gresham Hotel, in Dublin.

So, why is this hard to find? I rather suspect that this represents Search Engine De-Optimization. In other words, I suspect the hotel operators have worked to remove online references to their hotel having been the location of such a disaster. The hotel remains in business.

Who wants to have a hotel
recalled as a site of hell?

Marathon Terrorism

That's the logo of the Boston Athletic Association, which puts on the Boston Marathon each year, for over a hundred years now. A peaceful event. Until now.

My son and my daughter-in-law-to-be, who live in the Boston area, are fine. I hope, if you are reading this, that no one you know has been killed or maimed or even traumatized.

But this is a terrible day. Whoever did this deserves what they get. And, whatever does happen to them, they will never get to a point where they have "paid their debt to society" as the old phrase had it.

Ideological fanatics, or lone loon,

I hope they catch them soon.

Grave Matters, Continued

Yesterday I mentioned a local cemetery in disrepair, but today we have a wild story of an individual grave vandal, in England:

Clare Burke, 79, trashed grave of Jill Wilks and one-day-old granddaughter Widower's £150 CCTV camera caught her replacing flowers with dead ones

The 79-year-old perpetrator of desecration was jealous about some relationship issue!

Her practice of dumping gravel

on the grave began to unravel

when the widower planted a cam.

Now she's in a jam.