Fifty years ago...................................

The Murmaids.............................Popsicles and Icicles

Like blogging.................................

Verse............................

23.  Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men;

-Colossians 3:23
The Holy Bible
New American Standard Version

Actually, it's fudge swirl ice cream, but you get the general idea..................

Sing along................................

David Gates and Bread.............................Guitar Man

Opening paragraphs....................

People set out early, harnessing steaming horses in the post-dawn chill or walking across stubbled fields still drifted in mist.  The veins of frost in the rutted trails Virginians called their "High Waies" returned to mud under the pale wintry sun, and farm wagons and the gentry's coaches alike struggled across the hilly, broken ground of Prince Edward County, through the long stretches of pine forests separating the tobacco and wheat fields and the peach, pear, and apple orchards not yet in bud.  They came from thirty miles around, fording creeks or the meandering Appomattox, then climbing one more ridge to the crossroads hamlet that was Prince Edward Court House.
-Henry Mayer,  A Son of Thunder:  Patrick Henry And The American Republic

So, did you know this........................?

"We don't really know much about him.  Patrick Henry's fame rests upon a single resounding sentence that rattles somewhat emptily in our heads, devoid of context and separated from the man.  We know, vaguely, that his oratory helped propel the colonies towards independence, but we have forgotten that a dozen years later his dissenting voice, directed against the proposed Constitution of 1787, nearly defeated the measure and forced its proponents to adopt the conciliatory amendments known as the Bill of Rights."
-from the preface to A Son of Thunder

The timelessness of Patrick Henry....

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” 

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” 

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.” 

“It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains.” 

“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense?” 

“Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts.” 

"Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?"

Fifty years ago.................................

The Cookies....................................................Chains

Undiminished.............................

All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,
is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt
the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve
undiminished the land and the people.  If national conduct
forsakes these aims, it is one's patriotic duty
to say so and to oppose.  What else have we to live for?

-Wendell Berry
Sabbaths  VIII
2003

"The play's the thing"......................................*

*courtesy of the Prince Hamlet

It's "let's pick on the accountants" day...

first seven cartoons from here

Hate it when that happens..............

Gone, but not forgotten..........................

Jim Croce.....................................Time In A Bottle



It was a sad day, forty years ago today, when 30 year old Jim Croce was killed in a plane crash.  I saw him perform live at the Main Point in suburban Philly in the very early 70's.  It was a great show.

Opening paragraphs................................

Both of Hemingways's grandfathers fought in the Civil War and the family was proud of its military traditions.  Ernest Hall, a tall man with gray eyes and dark hair, was born in Sheffield in 1840 and had some comical troubles with constipation on the ship that brought him from England in his late teens.  In August 1861 he left the family farm in Dubuque and enlisted in the First Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.  He furnished his own horse and saddle, and agreed to serve for three years.  In Warrensburg, Missouri, in April 1862, Hall received a gunshot wound in the left thigh.  The bullet remained lodged in his leg, rendering him incapable of riding on horseback; and he was discharged with one-tenth disability a year after his enlistment.  When offered a military pension by the government, he proudly refused it.  "I gave my services to my adopted country.  I did not sell them."  Hall later cultivated the appearance of an English gentleman - complete with muttonchop whiskers and a white Yorkshire terrier - and prospered in the wholesale cutlery business in Chicago.
-Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway:  A Biography

Well, have you read any Hemingway lately?

    Johnny Goodner's cruiser, Narwhal, where they were waiting for Roger Davis, was headed into the ebbing tide and astern of her in the same slip, made fast so that the two cabin cruisers lay stern to stern, was the boat of the party that had been at Bobby's place all day.  Johnny Goodner sat in a chair in the stern with his feet on another chair and a Tom Collins in his right hand and a long, green Mexican chile pepper in his left.
     "It's wonderful," he said.  "I bite just a little piece and it sets my mouth on fire and I cool it with this."
     He took the first bite, swallowed, blew out, "thew!" through rolled tongue, and took a long swallow of the tall drink.  His full lower lip licked his thin Irish upper lip and he smiled with his gray eyes.  His mouth was sliced upwards at the corners so it always looked as though he were about to smile, or had just smiled, but his mouth told very little about him unless you noticed the thinness of the upper lip.  His eyes were what you needed to watch.  He was the size of a middleweight gone a little heavy; but he looked in good shape lying there relaxed and that is how a man looks bad who is really out of shape.  His face was brown but peeling across the nose and the forehead that went back with his receding hairline.  He had a scar on his chin that could have been taken for a dimple if it had been just a little closer to the center and his nose had been just perceptibly flattened across the bridge.  It wasn't a flat nose.  It just looked as thought it had been done by a modern sculptor who worked directly in the stone and had taken off just the shadow of a chip too many.
     "Tom, you worthless character, what have you been doing?"
     "Working pretty steadily."
     "You would," he said and took another bite of chile.  It was a very wrinkled and droopy chile about six inches long.
     "Only the first one hurts," he said.  "It's like love."
     "The hell it is.  Chiles can hurt both ways."
     "And love?"
     "The hell with love,"  Thomas Hudson said.
     "What a sentiment.  What a way to talk.  What are you getting to be?  A victim of sheepherder's madness then on this island?"
     "No sheep here, Johnny."
     "Stone-crab herder's madness then,"  Johnny said.  "We don't want to have you have to be netted or anything.  Try one of these chiles."

-a brief excerpt from Hemingway's Islands In The Stream

Hemingway on writing...........................

"My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements."

"Fuck literature."

"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."

-more quotes from Hemingway can be found here

Fifty years ago..........................

The Orlons.....................................Don't Hang Up



The Orlons were another Philly group.  Released in 1962, Don't Hang Up reached #4 on the Billboard Top 100.  The song was still in the top twenty in 1963

On advice................................

Mixed....................................

via