I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.
Creating MORE members of Congress, with the requisite expense, does not seem like a winning scenario.
I read, from Evanier, but also elsewhere, that some joker has promoted a ballot initiative to split the Golden State into six states. Even if the ballot initiative somehow won in November – and I have relatives there (sister, niece – Don’t Vote for This Nonsense!) – it still wouldn’t go into effect. Evanier noted, in a conversation about whether Texas, which had been its own country briefly, and would theoretically have the right to splinter:
“You have to consider Article IV, Section 3 of a little document called the United States Constitution. That particular section says…”
New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.
If you are a US Senator from a small state, populationwise, such as Delaware or Alaska, would you want there to be 12 US Senators from CA when there were two? And if you were from a large state, say Florida or Illinois, why would you want them to have many more Senators than your state?
Given the disdain with which most of the American people see Congress, creating MORE members, with the requisite expense, does not seem like a winning scenario.
The FIRST person I thought of was Amy Biancolli, who I’ve met, whose husband – I have a signed copy of one of his books about faith – was a very public suicide. I wondered how she would react to the news. Unsurprisingly, she dropped her phone “onto the kitchen counter and wept. Really wept.” And at that moment reading that, so did I.
A friend of mine of 20 years wrote a lengthy piece that began: “My grandfather, aunt, and father committed suicide… Clearly, we must be more connected in a true, loving, helpful, connected way; we must reach to those who are struggling.” I had had no idea; I was slack-jawed.
SamuraiFrog was “rather surprised by the depth of the emotional reaction” he was having to the news. Me too, actually. (Here’s his follow-up.) It’s damn disconcerting that the comedic mask hid such despair.
I saw him in a LOT of things. His last TV show, The Crazy Ones, I caught only about 15 minutes of. 2008 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (TV series – episode) Not a show I tend to watch, but he did well.
2006 Night at the Museum – as Teddy Roosevelt
2006 Happy Feet (voice) 2002 One Hour Photo – good in a serious role
1998 Patch Adams – cloying, but that seemed to be what was called for. CLIP. 1998 What Dreams May Come – for the life of me, I don’t remember how this ended. 1997 Good Will Hunting – liked him in this a lot. CLIP. 1997 Deconstructing Harry – a small role. 1996 The Birdcage – actually played the more straightlaced part against Nathan Lane; liked that. 1995 Jumanji – I bought into the schtick
1994 Homicide: Life on the Street (TV Series – episode) Here’s an interesting remembrance. 1993 Mrs. Doubtfire – I totally related to this, a desperate situation required desperate measures. CLIP. 1992 Aladdin – brilliantly wacky as the genie. CLIP. Plus the Williams-Disney fight. 1991 The Fisher King – plays a person trying to find his way back quite convincingly. CLIP.
1990 Awakenings – he plays a doctor convincingly. CLIP. 1989 Dead Poets Society – I liked him as the inspirational teacher. Hear some music from the film. PLUS this CLIP. 1987 Good Morning, Vietnam – he was great as the crazy DJ; I have the soundtrack on LP, I just recalled. CLIP. 1984 Moscow on the Hudson – a tad hokey, but I enjoyed it anyway. 1982 The World According to Garp – strange film, as I recall, but I liked him.
1978-1982 Mork & Mindy (TV Series) – was there ever a better season of comedy than the first season of Mork and Mindy? Got strange later, especially Jonathan Winters as their son, but before that, quite entertaining 1980 Popeye – don’t think it worked 1978-1979 Happy Days (TV Series, as Mork) – funny stuff
I have this hairbrush, and it looks a bit like a hedgehog.
Some website had this list of words that you “never see in a blog post.” That was practically a throwdown.
The word erinaceous means “pertaining to a hedgehog.” Appropriate because, as we ALL know, the scientific name for hedgehog is Erinaceinae.
I have this hairbrush, and it looks a bit like the back of the creature. It feels really nice on my scalp.
There is an animated creature called Sonic the Hedgehog that only mildly looks like a hedgehog.
Conversely, the protein sonic hedgehog, which “functions as a chemical signal that is essential for embryonic development, through cell growth, cell specialization, and the normal shaping (patterning) of the body,” sort of DOES look like a hedgehog, if you look at it in a microscope. “This protein is important for development of the brain and spinal cord (central nervous system), eyes, limbs, and many other parts of the body.”
The Daughter was startled by a noise she feared was a bat.
A friend of mine recently saw a bat on his screened-in back porch. He ducked out onto the “porch where said bat was pinwheeling in the air madly,” opened the door, and the creature departed.
From having bats in our house EVERY YEAR from 2002-2007, I find that my racquetball racket was good at stunning bats without hurting them, putting a cardboard box over the creature, some sort of plastic or metal tray underneath, take ’em outside, then kick the box away.
My friend expressed concern that with brown bats near extinction in the Northeast due to ‘white nose’ fungus, it was against his nature to use such a tool to down a bat. But another guy agreed that “swat, stun, put outside, leave ’em alone, they fly away.” The Wikihow says: “A tennis racket is an appropriate tool to catch one in flight, but use gently.” You needn’t swing the racket. For whatever reason, a racket screws up their echolocation and they practically run into it.
While it is true that if you do get bitten & you don’t catch the culprit the health authority will insist on you getting rabies shots – I can say with painful recall – it seems that fewer bats are rabid than was generally thought.
Three days after that discussion, at about 3:30 a.m., the Daughter got up to go to the bathroom but was startled by a noise she feared was a bat. It is true that one can hear the bats outside, and they sound like they’re inside the room. So we prepare, with head covered, hands covered (I had oven mitts, she rubber gloves), arms and legs covered. We closed all the other doors in the house.
We meticulously went through the towels hanging up, the bathroom shade, and the shower curtain; no bat. At least when she IS confronted by the creature, she’ll be prepared.
Those particular creations represent a certain impermanence, not unlike life itself in general, and my father’s life, which ended August 10, 2000, in particular.
Back in May, I participated in this ninety-minute writing class from a woman named Diane Cameron. Among many other things, she’s a freelance writer who appears in the local newspaper regularly.
The directive was to think of three doors that were important in your life. Then you write about one of them for four minutes. And by “writing,” this means not taking the pen off the paper, not editing, just letting the words take us where they would.
The first door was the outside door at 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY, the house in which I lived for the first 18 years of my life. We lived in a two-family dwelling, so this was the door to the hallway. It was very thick, as I recall, painted white, with green trim.
Inside the first-floor dwelling was the living room, very tiny by today’s standards. The remarkable thing, though, was the fact that my father painted on the walls. I don’t mean he hung his paintings on the wall, but that he painted art directly ONTO the walls.
The picture above was located between two of the windows in the front of the house. I think it was a re-creation of some painting he had admired, though I couldn’t tell you what. It seems that the colors were muted oranges, and tans, and maybe greens.
On the opposite wall was a sharp contrast: a mountain scene, all blue and black and gray and white. Very forceful and bright, where other painting was subtle and subdued. (The woman was dad’s mother, Agatha, who lived upstairs with her husband, and would die less than two years after this photo was taken.)
The feeling I got from the writing exercise was of some significant sadness. Those pictures are long gone, like the solar system he painted on my ceiling, or the Felix the Cat he created for my sisters’ bedroom. Other paintings and drawings and writings he created live on. So those particular creations represent a certain impermanence, not unlike life itself in general, and his life, which ended August 10, 2000, in particular.
I had thought of those paintings many times before. But only after this writing exercise did they resonate so greatly. Thanks, Diane, I think.
I read, from Evanier, but also elsewhere, that some joker has promoted a ballot initiative to split the Golden State into six states. Even if the ballot initiative somehow won in November – and I have relatives there (sister, niece – Don’t Vote for This Nonsense!) – it still wouldn’t go into effect. Evanier noted, in a conversation about whether Texas, which had been its own country briefly, and would theoretically have the right to splinter:
