Sheepish

My last post was in no way saying we should not read grown-up books. Since it had to do with sheep, let's have an adult comment on sheep-ishness as well:

The big field was full of wary ewes and spanking new lambs. The lambs tiggered up close, bleeping like those crap Fiat Noddy cars, idiotically pleased to see me.---A couple of the mother sheep edged closer. They didn't quite trust me. Just as well for sheep they can't work out why the farmer's being so nice to them. (Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.)

~ Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

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I think D. Mitchell calls to mind Hornby and Hopkins at the same time.

Lovely book.

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And if all this sheep talk has put you in a smallholder mood, but you have no place to act out your gentleman/woman farmer impulses, try this: http://www.sheep.com/adopt-a-sheep.htm and this: http://www.sheep.com/sheep_sounds.cfm

Childish

Sometimes children's books are just as insightful as the novels we studied rigorously in our Eng 400 classes. They make their points much more succinctly. And the illustrations are a bonus.

From The Cat Whose Whiskers Slipped by Ruth Campbell
copyright 1925

Inscrutable

Being funny is a means of avoiding scrutiny. It's a deeply concealing activity that invites attention while simultaneously failing to offer any detailed account of oneself. The reason humor is so popular today is that it provides the comfort of intimacy without the horror of actually being intimate.

~ from Andrew Stott's academic treatise Comedy, exploring the philosophy of humor. Quoted in Slate.com http://www.slate.com/id/2149976

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picture from: http://www.devotedbee.com/

Bike-Slapped!

This is indicative of how a good portion of Portander's view biking:

And, for the most part, we are very evolved in bike etiquette and it feels civically safe and beneficial to get on a two-wheeler instead of backing the trusty Hummer out of the garage.

But as of last night: Cars 1, Bikes 0

BECAUSE, you can't have someone run up and SLAP you across the face if you are in a car (if the windows rolled up).

My friend Shannon and I were biking to a show at Dante's yesterday evening. Gorgeous September night, warm breezes, bright stars. We were waiting for a light to change on N. Vancouver when young woman waiting at the bus stop decided she knew Shannon and needed to slap her. Which she came over and did.

We were, of course, later than planned to the show. It felt appropriate the song we came in on was CWK’s Hospital Beds.

I don’t try to interpret meanings much, but I think the words are indicative of our time down here, in that, we are randomly thrown together, sickly and shambling along, doing what we can to bear with one another (or not) despite our terminal conditions:

I’ve got one friend laying across from me
I did not choose him, he did not choose me.
We got no chance of recovery,
Here in hospital,
joy and misery
joy and misery….

(The third line is up for grabs, can’t make out the first words—here in hospital? sharing hospital? German hospital? Figure it out for yourself here: http://www.myspace.com/coldwarkids)

http://www.coldwarkids.com/

Oh! That It Were So Simple!

I found this old textbook at an antique store in Lostine, Oregon.

The text is dry, pompous and unintentionally hilarious. The illustrations are an odd mix of non-PC cartoon drawings explained by wordy phrases, but the pictures and words don't sync up unless you stare at them a while. I think the illustrator also did the Harold books with the purple crayon and carrot seeds.

The phrase below is: Your learning is helped if you are stimulated from without by praise or blame.

Next picture:

The tagline:

And some closing thoughts:

You have learned that you are born with certain potentialities. These inherent characteristics make it possible for you to be stimulated constantly and consistently by your inner drives and urges and by people and things in your environment. To these stimulations you respond either satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, and thus develop patterns of behavior which become habitual.

You can achieve the kind of personality which will earn for you admiration and respect if you are careful in all the apparently unimportant responses which you make from day to day. Know yourself--your strengths and your weaknesses. Attack everything that you do in a positive, constructive way, so that the action will be of definite assistance to you in your personality development.

And there you go. Get out there and win that admiration and respect! You'll be the better for it!

A Reminder From Pepsi, circa 1953

Before we head into autumn and start reveling in warm foods and hot toddys, let's remember what makes life truly pleasurable, both to ourselves and others:

And this, I kid you not, was the text that accompanied:

Today’s stylists are doing wonders for the looks of modern woman. But give some credit, too, to the woman herself. For the modern figure is her own creation. Her greatest care and pride is to keep that figure young. Her taste, therefore, is for lighter foods and lighter beverages. This is the way of living that gives her the slender lines that fashion insists on, that men admire, that health authorities and insurance companies applaud . . .

I am not sure how to process this....it's wrong on so many levels that my brain hurts.

And that reminds me—I recently picked up a copy of Bust Magazine, the preferred reading of the hip, young-ish, quasi-educated alternative market. (You know it’s hip because some women in the pics don’t shave their armpits and the writers rely on flippant/crass verbiage, rather than crafting out a complete thought process.)

You would think that over 50 years later, we would have this liberation thing down. But no, Bust manages to tie everything with equality and strength right back to what to buy and how to look pretty. They had a photo spread of models dressed as key women’s rights icons, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gloria Steinman, Kathleen Cleaver etc. and the only sidebar to this was all the places you could purchase items on the models. I mean, REALLY.