Musings

We took a Sunday-really-Wednesday drive, just to get out of the city. We really didn’t get far.

We stopped in a small town, now well within the metro area, and strolled down the high street…parallel with the railroad. Look: a cell tower; there’s really almost no farmland—the terrain is either floodplain or waiting to become housing and business developments, and the web of connecting roads and parking lots—if not already built on.

See: the small town has a bank. Or was-a-bank, with an oozing-financial-security chandelier. It’s now a restaurant and salon, but maybe the restaurant is covid-closed? Didn’t check; moved on.

Posted at 8:43 PM | Comments Off on Escape

Of course, I took this picture for the momentary jab the play of light and dark and the mesh grid pattern generated in my not-yet-awake brain.

And, when I selected it for today’s fun photo, I thought: material culture…then: aesthetics…then that aesthetics are a learned value…and, pfft, I was descending into an anthropological abyss.

Recommendation: stick with the first paragraph.

Posted at 9:00 PM | Comments Off on Before coffee

Here’re some perfectly fine titles I’m not currently making progress reading. I’ve been intending to read “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1941) for years…Rebecca West tells of her six weeks in Yugoslavia in 1939. Multiple discriminating writer-readers say it’s among the best travel books ever.

“The Overstory” is Richard Powers’s 2018 novel I’ve started and just stopped like it wasn’t good, yet it’s terrific. And complicated. In the best way.

“Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun” (1997) is Charles Hudson’s most-excellent telling of the cultural clash when Spanish explorers invaded southeastern North America. What a superb scholar and writer he was.

Mr. Salyer’s new-new, thoughtful, timely book…. He’s the reason I don’t call The Guru JC. Mr. Salyer was the JC in my life when I met The Guru, and I couldn’t handle two, although most everyone then knew him as JC.

Yes, another history of the west…pretty much starts with the Lewis/Clark expedition, to discuss the AMERICAN West…there’s plusses and minuses to that; it’s another cultural history, I guess. Picked up HW Brands’s “Dreams of El Dorado” on our way through Austin last year–his hometown, so signed copy.

And all of them essentially collecting dust at the moment. Speaking of which: seems to me there’s extra dust in the house in these Covid times; however, nothing like the nastiness in the air in the western air with those huge wildfires. Yikes!

Posted at 8:15 PM | 1 Comment »

Our current junk fiction series on the TeeVee is “Hamish Macbeth,” set in small-town Scotland. It’s an odd (uncomfortable?) mix of serious and silly. Some of the bridging music is a solo penny whistle, and the closed captioning describes it as melancholy, bright, and sometimes pensive.

Posted at 9:16 PM | 1 Comment »

Apologies for turning to commands. But, it’s often a good plan to think 🤔 about what a sign says, and its particular context. 😀

In the first photo, the sign to the left of the door is promoting Impossible Burgers. The sign to the right is advertizing for a leasee. And, indeed it is impossible to get burgers here. 😢

And this: Sotheby’s advertises the FINE homes it sells. This, with the boarded up windows, is not a fine home. It’s a junker. And, IMHO, it’s a poor lot, with an apartment complex uphill to the left, at least a dozen units, students and young professionals…so, not a quiet block. Maybe there’ll be a Sotheby’s fine home here in the near future, but “fine” is degraded a bit, I think. 🙄

Posted at 8:21 PM | Comments Off on Read. Think.

At least, that’s my explanation for why these two signs are four feet apart in the same cheese-case.

What doesn’t make sense is that not far away is a huge zone of multiple well-stocked buffet tables with at least sixty-seventy bins of food (partly) protected by a sneeze guard that was there pre-Covid.

Another example of logic in 2020.

Posted at 8:40 PM | 2 Comments »

Painted public errors can haunt you.

Antenna problem with temporary fix.

Posted at 8:42 PM | Comments Off on Oops times two

This tale revolves around the Ridler brand…and silvery shininess.

This tale is centered on moving back in to your house after it’s been rehabbed to become a different house, but only partly different.

I haven’t found the tales yet, and I haven’t composed them either. You?

Posted at 6:48 PM | Comments Off on Tales of details

I think I’ve done this before in this “space”: my hypothesized taxonomy, this time for fungi.

The first would be “wet” fungi, and this would be “dry” fungi. Although it looks like there are a few “wet” fungi encroaching on the decorative, “dry” fungi.

Okay, hypothesis is muddy, and therefore: nope.

Posted at 9:05 PM | Comments Off on Observation “science”

I think of Cincinnati as the place where we have to slow down…either on I-75 or by taking an evasive route because the traffic flow on the Interstate is hosed. That is: greater and metro Cincinnati. This time problems were downhill into town and across the I-75 bridge over the Ohio, so we checked out some of the old timey infrastructure along our alternate route. We had a good time on the grey roads!

Back on the Interstate zoom zoom, we encountered this…in Tennessee?. Some miles along, we found cattle transporters with moo-capable cattle, yet this specimen was the most unusual.

We arrived in ATL under changeable skies. Spotty rain inbound…and of course rain during part of the unloading. Of course. We are home and all is well. Yay!

Posted at 7:41 PM | Comments Off on Yay!