What? Is this a joke?
Stop laughing at me right now!
I'm Frickin' SERIOUS!
---
Never forget ~ a
roomful of smiling children
transcends color and class
---
before corruption
before the teaching of hate
love is all they know
---
Chinese children smile
American finance crashes
Factories closing
-
Globalization
does not make the children smile
anywhere in the world
---
Humor like beauty
is very much in the eye
of the beholder
-
"Look Li, the children
haven't laughed like this since the
old clown caught on fire..."
---
simple happy joy
how the hard world changes you
to become like us
18 comments:
Okay, so last week's was a bit of a dudbash. I was amused sure, but that's not really why I made this blog. Perhaps the low turnout was because everyone's on holiday.
In the meantime, I can't really tell you why I chose this picture. I wanted something light and I found this irresistible. BTW, the fact that they're Asian is, um, a red-herring (so to speak). It was the universality in this pic that I grooved on. Yoroshiku.
PS I recommend clicking on this and seeing it at a higher rez. It's worth it.
What? Is this a joke?
Stop laughing at me right now!
I'm Frickin' SERIOUS!
schutte
Never forget ~ a
roomful of smiling children
transcends color and class
...
Completely tangent here, but our little village in the Eifel celebrates the feast day of John ("Johannesfest") every year on the 27th of December, starting with a mass in the chapel (which this heathen cares for, how massively ironic) to perform the annual blessing of the wine and finishing up with a mad party in the old school (across the street from our long stable and orchard) which thumps away into the wee hours.
This year, with temperatures below freezing, this morning finds the usual detritus scattered about, only this year all the spots along our sidewalk (which I am also tasked with keeping clean) where the revellers tossed their cookies as they wandered off towards home are flash frozen to the pavement.
My wife crossed the street for a couple hours at the invite of some old school chums, but I abstained this year, being fully toasted after back-to-back twelve-hour days feeding and watering and cleaning up after a rotating collection of friends, family and other relations passing through like a parade of hungry smiles.
Now we have five lovely days of restful peace and quiet ahead of us, and all I have to contemplate are getting together a couple interview transcripts for the first week of January, picking up the rest of the Porcupine Tree catalog from the little local CD shop Ikeep in business, long walks through field and forest and chilling with my sexy wife. Ahhhhh.
And you know, the more I think about it, the more I realize I should probably get my digital s**t (the rest of the way) together and toss the "best of" my photo archive online, if only so you can plagarize some of my work as well... =)
Happy Holidays to one and all, however you choose to celebrate and dedicate them.
Thanks Miraculix. It is, as always, a pleasure to have you here. I do love these tales of elsewhere.
Me, I'm currently sitting at the internet cafe 100m back from the beach. I have no wife, sexy or otherwise. Which is the kind of thing one could mope about, if one weren't endlessly distracted. And the distractions of high Summer here are hard to ignore, what with it consisting of an endless parade of semi-naked flesh. As is my wont, I view the whole thing in a satyrical fashion, ha ha.
Oh great physician,
wary of the infectious,
Did ye get healed?
*Apologies to Van Morrison, sure.
before corruption
before the teaching of hate
love is all they know
hey noby:)
i just couldn't get it together for the last pic.
too many stones (thoughts) in my head..
daughter's operation is the 8th... we chk in on the 7th...
needless ta say, i'm preoccupied w/tryin to live in denial about it.... *weak smile*
enjoy the eyecandy of your summer ;)
k*
Hey Kikz,
Well if you are in denial, may I offer a paddle? A symbolic one sure enough. Hope everything goes well for your daughter.
Elsewhere indeed.
As for sitting one hundred meters from the beach, the sexy wife is now oficially jealous, as she is definitely the beach creature of the two of us. I like the sand and strand as much as anybody, but I'm a mountain man by nature, with zero irony or satyre in play.
We spent a couple of our final years in eL-Ay living directly above Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro (locals say "pee-dro"). Falling asleep every night to the surf was a major highlight, and our parties were always well-attended. Even plugged in a live band on Memorial Day weekend on the front patio and serenaded thousands for about 45 minutes with Blue Öyster Cult before the city's finest arrived for negotiations.
Weasled another 45 minutes despite the neighbor who called, in fact with her assistance as she got pretty demanding with the cops and I know the lingo, so being a holiday and all we snuck in a full set -- without permits and with only one short intermission. The cops even stayed and rocked for a tune (the band gave 'em Cities on Flame) in the cruiser, before duty called.
But that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away where distractions come from -- which are a specialty of mine, the wife being the biggest one of all. I'm a lucky fellow there, on all counts. Doing my damndest here to hold up my end keeping the family traditions going another generation, as well as the building. Having a good time doing so. No beach, but ridge and valley and canyon and stream and field and forest for miles in every direction.
Mittelgebirge in the local lexicon. What we'd call "hills" back in the Seattle area (Issaquah), as in Queen Anne and Capitol and Beacon. Foothills were bigger, like the summits and trails of the "Issaquah Alps" (2000-3000 feet) abutting my beloved Cascades.
Things aren't quite so alpine here, but we do have a couple small local ski areas, one of which even blows a little snow when it's below zero. It reminds a great deal of the valleys among the foothills back home, all dairy and timber and country inns and farmers and small industry like smithing and building materials, especially in the Vulkaneifel just to the east of us, Gerolstein being the best advertised of the old Roman settlements due to its prolific mineral springs. We make two or three runs a year there to fill several cases of flip-top bottles (think Grolsch) for the cellar. The best hangover remedy known to mankind.
Why did the Romans worship regions with mineralquelle? How do you keep your hard-drinking army fit to fight between engagements with the bloody Belgae? Where else can you build heated mineral baths?
Our nearest local German town is Prüm, where the CD laden lives. The abbey there was founded by Charlemagne's grandmother in 720. St. Vith in Belgium is actually the closest town, and the father-in-law went to school there learning French and German, before he was hoovered up by the desperate Wehrmacht in 1944 and thrown at the advancing Allies just a few miles south of here.
The cultural adjustment continues as it should (must!), but at times it is hard to escape the feeling of living between the pages of a very large and dusty volume of recent world history. It's an adventure!
What a lovely jaunt, from the Philistines of LA to the Belgae of Ancient Europe. You don't own a metal detector do you Mir? Roman coins, Napoleonic musket rounds, WWI belt buckles, all manner of pirate treasure. Kind of thing.
Hey Schutte (speaking of guys with cool wives, ha ha). I got your number mate -
You rotten children!
My dignity all at sea,
dissolved in laughter.
Neither of us were native to the Los Angeles basin, as is often the case there, me being out of the Pacific NW and she from this pile of local stones we now call home. It's pretty cool to be able to show people the tiny quarry that gave up the stones to build it in 1751.
When I first visited the village in 1997, it was April and we were joining up with the family to make a group "pilgrimage" to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the "Celt" corner of northwestern Spain.
We'd been on the ground about three hours, are were taking a long walk around the small town to combat the jet lag from LAX --> Brussels. As I shuffled along between two large fields, heading toward a large forested area, I looked up at the leaden sky which SO reminded me of where I came from (green, brown, gray and wet) and said, "when you're ready to move back here, I'll be ready to go."
Five years later we began the long process.
There are deep holes right here on the property today sure to set off that metal detector -- excavated and filled years ago with munitions left laying about after the second war. I am in possession of two fixed bayonets and a US canteen stamped "1944" on the bottom, as well as a couple pieces of old brass from large caliber rounds. One is suspected to have been from an aircraft and the other is a small artillery round with an unfired primer and no projectile. Also several pieces of shrapnel from tank rounds, one of which was used on a monument we erected for the 60th anniversary of the Bulge (16-17 Dec. 1944).
The first German 88's fired the morning of the 16th, toward American positions in our village from German positions on a ridge just a few kilometers east and visible out the window to my right, struck our "backyard" and house. Combat occured in our hallway.
Over the years, we've befriended a number of US veterans who fought here during the war, as well as family members traveling with them, and as a result have some great location-based stories from the guys who were here to share with guests, as well as the local perspective on how the Nazi's social controls actually operated, as this region retains a strong Mosel-Frankish influence not very friendly with the Prussians who reclaimed the region from the French in the 19th century. Local dialects are akin to Luxembourgish.
Think Lotharingia. Lothar's bones are in Prüm. As is a t-shirt Jesus apparently forgot to pack, if you're into Catholic reliquary.
Basically, a disputed border region since year zero -- in a strange way a little like Gaza -- it's just that the serious shooting stopped here (not counting your GLADIO ops) in 1945. Of course, what no one wants to talk about is the fact that Germany remains an occupied nation in 2008, from the now-automated Prüm Air Station up on the Schwarzer Mann to Ramstein and Spangdahlem and the US command in Heidelberg and so on. I've lost track of how many times I've had to say: "Ich bin kein Soldat".
...
Chinese children smile
American finance crashes
Factories closing
...
Globalization
does not make the children smile
anywhere in the world
Combat in the hallway? Good God. Well let's hope you don't end up collecting any 'treasures' newer than WWII. If you can dig it...
Otherwise mate, how morose you are. I pick the happiest pic I can find and you run 180 degrees in the opposite direction, ha ha. Next week I shall post the gloomiest thing I can find and see if that cheers you up.
Morose? It does look that way by the time you reach the end of my last little stream of consciousness ramble there, but that's mostly a product of the state of mind the subject matter left me in when I determined to wrap up the otherwise off-topic reply with an actual haiku. Or two. That's where the head was located when the words came out. Hey, at least I didn't mention Dutroux.
Or maybe it's just that I'm sad that nobody (ha ha) is posting to this latest heartwarming image of radiant faces. Unless Schutte has it right and we can't see the man being attacked by the monkey...
The striped macaw grips
his arm as its teeth slowly
sink into his flesh
...
"Look Li, the children
haven't laughed like this since the
old clown caught on fire..."
...
Humor like beauty
is very much in the eye
of the beholder
...
I really am in a good mood. All is currently frozen outside, but the winter stocks of food and firewood are in great shape, we don't lack for beverages or entertainment and the net connection remains live. What more can a guy ask for at fifty degrees northern latitude on the 31st of December?
Still, having lived by the sea, it is easy to close my eyes and there I am, sitting in a mental internet cafe of my own creation watching the parade go by as the sunshine warms the pavement and the surf crashes lazily in the distance.
i'm coastal folk.. and living landlocked inland w/the temps 30' lower than my usual, and the ambient humidity down in the single digits...
i'm in a sinus funk!
hot/dry is one thing.. cold/dry = screamin sinuses...
well anyway... tonite we kiss off '08, even though my new yr began at solstice.
we'll have a fire outside and burn lastyr's mistletoe, and toast wishes to a better yr.
night b4 last the kids and i saw a large meteor burn thru... about 5 seconds, was great.. we were all trying to find the big dipper, and all happened to be looking in the same direction.
i made a wish, a couple actually :)
haven't chkd to see if we should be having a shower... most probably some space junk burning up on reentry.. but a nice light in the sky none the less :)
happy new yr y'all!
oh and p.s. thanks noby for bringin up pablo's 'goodbyecruelworld' over on mirrors... les has left comments for you :)
Well I have to admit that this line of thought didn't occur to me. But that's what's great about this blog. I've mentioned several times about how ideally everyone should be seeking something, I don't know, um, 'not trite' in these pictures. 'Not obvious' might be better. And if it takes me by surprise, so much the better. Laughing at misfortune didn't occur to me beyond my own willingness to make a complete fool out of myself if it will make kids laugh. When I taught nine year olds in Japan my chief weapon was self-effacement. And a fanatical devotion to the Pope. Wait, I'll go out and come back in again. (Sorry non-Python fans, I went on a bit of a jag there)
Anyway between the two of you, you've hit on another aspect of the thing. And I like that.
And thanks Kikz. BTW have you popped over to Nina's? She saw a UFO the other day. Or more accurately - a thing in the sky that behaved in no sensible fashion. Anyway I'll search my sky and see if I can spot anything beyond the Southern Cross.
ciao ciao
Oh, and Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとう!
Hey R, that was for Na's benefit. Ciao Ciao.
am I late?
simple happy joy
how the hard world changes you
to become like us
It's never too late for haiku John. Oh wait! I just realised it's Saturday. New Picture soon. Ciao ciao.
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