Poetry Sunday

Later on today I'll be headed out to Dance Studio Lioudmila here in Alexandria to emcee the Spring Showcase, at which 70 couples will demonstrate their skills in front of an audience of their friends and fellow dancers. I'll have the easy part - just announcing their performances and keeping the show moving - but the stars of the day will be those who have worked so hard to perfect their ballroom talents. I think this poem by William Butler Yeats is appropriate for the day ...

Sweet Dancer

by William Butler Yeats

The girl goes dancing there
On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth
Grass plot of the garden;
Escaped from bitter youth,
Escaped out of her crowd,
Or out of her black cloud.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!

If strange men come from the house
To lead her away, do not say
That she is happy being crazy;
Lead them gently astray;
Let her finish her dance,
Let her finish her dance.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!

There's a lot to be said for a sport that involves taking a beautiful woman in your arms and holding her close as the music drives you around the floor. It surely beats lifting weights in some smelly gym.

Have a good day, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. More thoughts tomorrow, when Musical Monday returns.

Bilbo

Cartoon Saturday

Okay, who forgot to pay the Spring Bill for NoVa, eh?

Two Air Force members are dead after an apparent murder-suicide at Lackland AFB, Texas; a security guard at Walt Disney World and a janitor at SeaWorld's Discovery Cove were among 18 men arrested in a sex sting dubbed "Operation April's Fools;" the first attempted uterus transplant performed in the United States has failed because of a yeast infection; police in Belgium have arrested a man suspected of participating in terror attacks in Paris and Brussels; and in Maryland, a Montgomery County man charged with kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl told his friend she was “fresh meat” before the friend raped her as well.

After a week like this one, cartoons are a must. No theme this week, just ten ya-ha's selected at random from my collection ...

I can see Indiana Jones pulling this one ...

If you've served in the military, you'll get it ...

I guess the second one just works when you chant your cash mantra ...

There are some things you just don't tell the boss ...

He probably needs to demonstrate that he's not one of those despised "royal insiders" or "professional politicians" ...

But he probably has his own, private, ideas about it ...

Do you suppose even devices need counseling? ...

There has to be at least one marvelous pun per week ...

Revenge is a dish best served cold. And wet ...

It's funny, but remember that 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats are in play this year. Don't bitch about how awful the incumbents are ... make them the formers ... 

And that's it for this week's edition of Cartoon Saturday ... I hope it helped you shake off the debris of the past week and get ready for the weekend.

We'll be busy this weekend ... my brother Paul is in NoVa and may try to stop by for a quick visit, and this afternoon Agnes and I will be headed down to the climbing gym to watch granddaughters Leya and Elise (and their mother, too) demonstrate their skills ... I have a fancy telezoom lens the size of a 155mm cannon that I've been itching to try out while the girls are waaaaay up the wall.

And it's a good day to remain indoors, anyway. The dreaded polar vortex has returned with a vengeance, and there's supposed to be rain and even a possible inch of snow in the course of a day more suited for February than April. I think we'll be using those nice, big quilts Agnes keeps churning out!

Have a good day and a great weekend, and come back tomorrow for Poetry Sunday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

The Right-Cheek Ass Clown for April, 2016

It's a new month ... well, it's eight days old, but that still counts as "new" ... and that means it's time to designate a new Right Cheek Ass Clown!

This being an election year, it's been easy to focus this award on the posturing buffoons of our political classes, but I've been feeling a little guilty about ignoring all the other deserving ass clowns out there who also deserve recognition. And so it is that I have decided to bestow the award for

Right-Cheek Ass Clown for April, 2016

on

Jamie Gilt

You may recall that last month, Ms Gilt - a Florida woman known for her very strong pro-gun attitudes - was admitted to a hospital after her four year-old son shot her in the back with a .45 caliber handgun he found in the back seat of her car.  

Ms Gilt was and remains a very outspoken supporter of gun ownership and Second Amendment rights, and has a Facebook page titled "Jamie Gilt for Gun Sense" ...

On her personal Facebook page, Ms Gilt once bragged that "Even my 4 year old gets jacked up to target shoot with the .22." This was, of course, before she left a loaded handgun in the back seat of the car where said four year-old could play with it. Nevertheless, despite having been shot by her child, Ms Gilt reportedly has not changed her pro-gun attitude ... her mother, in an interview with a local newspaper, said that her daughter would not change her opinion about owning guns and planned to keep the gun with which her son shot her, saying that “This was an accident and nothing more.”

The local Sheriff's Office asked prosecutors to charge Gilt with allowing a minor access to a firearm, a second-degree misdemeanor which carries a penalty of up to 180 days in jail.

For her criminal negligence in creating a situation in which a child was able to get his hands on a loaded weapon and use it to shoot her, and then defending it as "an accident and nothing more," Jamie Gilt is designated as our Right Cheek Ass Clown for April, 2016 - an award that is ... uh ... right on target.

Have a good day, and come back tomorrow for Cartoon Saturday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

Never Let Your Wife Pick the Paint

Yesterday and today, my Big Project has been to paint Agnes's sewing room. Well, not exactly ... three of the four walls are panelled, so there's only one to paint. Easy, right?

No.

First of all, there's no way to paint the entire wall without moving multiple work tables, chests of drawers, and bookshelves (all piled high not just with books, but with piles of fabric) out of the way. And then there was the big, ugly patch in the center of the wall where we had to cut through several years ago to fix a leak in our outside hose bib. Oh, and the two windows. And the valence*.

The end result was that we moved whatever we could, and I painted a bizarrely-shaped section of the wall that will look silly if we ever have to move the Immovable Tables and Chest of Drawers out of the room.

Oh, and the paint.

Agnes chose a color called Green Peridot, which is a Ralph Lauren Polished Patina finish that requires both a base coat and a topcoat. The base coat is okay ... goes on with a brush and roller, although it took forever to put up all the masking tape around all the things that weren't supposed to be green. The top coat, however, is very thick - almost a paste - and needs to be applied with a specially-designed Ralph Lauren Polished Patina Application Tool**, which is cleverly designed to be too large to get into some of the areas around the windows and the Immovable Table and Chest of Drawers.

As Kermit would say, it's not easy being green peridot.

I guess it's going to look great when it's finally done. It had better.

Next time, I'm picking the paint. And I'm only painting bare walls. Or nude models.

And if you run into me in the next day or two and I look a little green, it's paint ... not food poisoning.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* If it'd been a liberty valence, I'd just have shot it.

** Which looks suspiciously like a common broad-bladed putty knife without a handle, but costs the GNP of an average third-world country ...

'Nuff Said, 2016

That's all.

Have a good day. Expect more. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

High-Tech Hiding

In an article I saw online yesterday, a pair of scientists suggested a novel way of hiding the earth from hostile aliens using lasers to mask the earth's transit across the sun. Since earth's scientists use the fluctuations in a star's brightness to detect the presence and size of its planets, some concerned exobiologists have become fearful that terrifying aliens more deadly than Mexicans or Syrians ...

... could detect our planet and send high-tech, conquering armies to lay waste to the Earth before we can finish the job ourselves.

For myself, I'm less worried about little green men than I am about the self-styled "good guys with guns" who think they're heroically protecting the rest of us by packing ostentatious heat in the local five-and-dime.

But I digress.

If we can use lasers to hide an entire planet from evil extraterrestrials, what can we use to hide America from the horrifying hordes of illegal aliens pouring in from the less-desirable parts of our own world? Mr Trump has suggested building a gigantic wall along the Mexican border and forcing Mexico to pay for it ... an idea that has not been enthusiastically received by the Mexican government, although a similar idea worked fairly well for a few years for the East German government to contain the ghastly threat posed by West Berlin ...

Could we use lasers or wild light shows to confuse aliens trying to cross from Mexico into the US? How about if we erect huge loudspeaker towers along the border to broadcast Chinese music and trick would-be border crossers into believing that they made a very bad wrong turn somewhere? Or instead of a wall, we could put up miles and miles of screens on which we could project images of fierce dinosaurs devouring hapless immigrants?

I'm sure there are other ploys we could use, too ... anyone else have any ideas?

Have a good day. Deter an alien invasion today!

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Musical Monday

Last Wednesday, March 30th, we celebrated the birthday of singer Tracy Chapman, and so I thought that for this week's Musical Monday we could look back to one of her greatest songs (in my humble opinion, which is correct) ...

And that ought to be one reason to keep visiting me on Musical Mondays.

Have a good day and a good week to come. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

Poetry Sunday

Later this morning, Agnes and I will be headed out to a quilt show at the Prince William County Fairgrounds down in Manassas, at which three of Agnes's quilts will be on display. She is a master of handicrafts of all sorts, from cross-stitching and stained glass to sewing and quilting, and she never picks a simple project to do ... I greatly enrich my not-for-general-use German vocabulary listening to her figure out how to sew her latest impossible quilt design.

Quilting is a traditional American hobby, and the tradition of the quilting bee still exists among people (yes, men do it, too) not too busy with the daily rat race to create things of beauty. And there are actually quite a few poems about quilting, too ... this is a particularly nice one ...

I Think God is a Quilter

By an Unknown Author

I think God is a quilter
Who takes His needle and thread
To piece our world from nothingness
And give it form instead.

I think God is a quilter
And everything I see
Are pieces from His careful hand
From tree to bumblebee.

I think we see God's stitches
His texture everywhere:
The velvet moss, the grainy sand,
The silky strands of hair.

I think God is a quilter
Stitching tight and tiny rows
Adding to my scraps and pieces
Seaming everything He knows.

I think he cuts the pattern
From what I'd throw away.
He shows me how to use each scrap
In His redeeming way.

I think God quilts a pattern
From everything I live;
But He can only stitch the quilt
From what I choose to give.

I think God is a Quilter
Stitching strength where I am weak.
Showing me that life He touches
Embraces everything I seek.

I think God is a Quilter
From the patience in each thread;
Proving length of time no barrier;
Treating time a gift, instead.

I think quilts are lessons
God uses just to teach
That our pieces and our remnants
Have kaleidoscopic reach.

So, in the life I'm living
With pieces everywhere
I'll give them to the Quilter
To stitch with loving care.

I'll give them to the Quilter
Unwanted though they be
And with his work of quilting
He'll make a quilt of me.


I think that a quilt is a perfect metaphor for the patchwork of a life. I hope the pieces of your quilt and the stitching that holds them together remain colorful and strong.

Have a good day, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Cartoon Saturday

Welcome to April ...

A highway overpass under construction in Kolkata, India, collapsed onto the roadway below, killing 22 people; a mysterious object, probably either an asteroid or a comet, crashed into the planet Jupiter earlier this month, shown in video footage released this week; citing its responsibility for protection of the candidates, the Secret Service has turned down a petition that garnered more than 20,000 signatures, demanding the open carry of firearms at the GOP national convention in Ohio later this summer; in Washington, DC, the city’s Metro transit authority is considering shutting down entire lines on its rail system in order to catch up with decades of deferred maintenance; and new scientific studies released this week show that seas fed by melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could rise as much as six feet by 2100, devastating coastal cities around the world.

With April Fools' Day over and plenty of days remaining until All Fools' Day on November 6th, let's cheer ourselves up with some cartoons ... this week featuring cartoons about art and artists ...

We lead off with three cartoons that look at how the younger generation approaches fine art ...

before there was PhotoShop, there was oil and watercolors and tempera and ...

Even children can be technologically challenged ...

Good question ... I never knew what that meant, anyhow ...

Everyone's a critic ...

We all know about the mind-blowing art of M.C. Escher ... and so do cartoonists ...

And ...

 

Medieval artist annoyances ...

Trust me, it's funny ...

And somehow, someone is always willing to pay a lot of money for art, no matter how offbeat ...

And that's it for the first Cartoon Saturday of April! I was inspired to this topic because later this morning Agnes and I will be headed out to a student art show at which our granddaughter Leya has a picture on display. She's not quite up to the DaVinci level yet, but it's coming. We'll follow that up with lunch with our friends Ken and Nadja, and then this evening I'll be emceeing the spring dance showcase at Forever Dancing. These relaxing weekends will be the death of me yet.

Have a good day and a great weekend, and come back tomorrow for Poetry Sunday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

Great Moments in Editing

Happy April Fool's Day! There being no shortage of fools to honor, and today being the off-week for our Ass Clown Award, let's just peruse our latest collection of editorial gems ...

I wonder what the other 50% is ...

I'm glad they clarified that ... 

What a steal ...

Police blotters are always a good source of interesting tidbits ...

As are Chinese menus ...

Well, this will certainly sweeten the deal ...

Truth in advertising also applies to job announcements ... 

Can a bird play possum? ...

Somehow I wish I had a problem like this with menacing neighbors ... 

Those data thieves are getting more creative every day ...

And there you go - another collection of first-class editorial gems to finish off your week. Enjoy your Friday, and be sure to come back tomorrow for the next edition of Cartoon Saturday ... more thoughts then.

Bilbo