Chamblee54

-02 Some facebookers were using an app (or being used by an app) called 21 questions. If you want to play, Mr. Google will help. PG didn’t want to play, but saw a fun topic to write about. Today’s pictures are from The Library of Congress. Videos are from wtf japan seriously.
-01 There is a highly commercial blog called Cocktails With Mom (A Mom Blogs from Texas: Product Reviews, Giveaways and more!) This is a weird concept to PG, whose mother didn’t drink, and was a total Baptist about it. CWM fit a tasteful feature in between the ads one day, 21 Questions to Ponder. They are repeated below, with possible answers supplied.
01 Why isn’t 11 pronounced “onety-one”? It sounds like twenty one. It might want a drink.
02 Why do people who know the least know it the loudest? They know the least because they are hard of hearing. Since they can’t hear others talking, they don’t bother listening.
03 Who closes the door when the bus driver gets off? The kid who is in trouble.
04 Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead? If the battery was alive it would push back.
05 If money doesn’t grow on trees then why do banks have branches? When you are through at the bank, you leaf.
06 If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing? Not if it is a trial, or an error.
07 Why don’t they call moustaches “mouthbrows”? Because mouthbrow is easy to spell.
08 Why do they say “an alarm goes off” if it’s really going on? The same reason a person who is buzzing is said to “get off”.
09 Do married people live longer than single people, or does it just seem longer? Only if they both star in a John Waters movie.
10 Why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up a project, I end it? If you don’t quit whining you are in trouble.
11 Why is it that people say they “slept like a baby” when babies wake up 10 times every hour? The same reason people said easy as pie, before you could buy pre made shells.
12 Does a clean house indicate there’s a broken computer in it? Only if a dirty mind is involved.
13 Do Lipton employees take coffee breaks? There is a family in Germany, Sechshauer.(spell check suggestion:Schopenhauer) It is pronounced Sex Hour. Most people are happy to get a ten minute coffee break.
14 Why are a “wise man” and a “wise guy” opposites? Not much is known about the wise men, except that they came from a fire.
15 Why is bra singular and panties plural? Because you have two nipples and one reproductive facility.This was a gender inclusive answer.
16 If the plural of tooth is “teeth,” why isn’t the plural of booth “beeth”? You say boo when you don’t like something. Maybe a booth should be a yayth.
17 Why is it that when you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? The same reason you call a ban on product an embargo, whether the product drinks or not.
18 Would a fly without wings be called a walk? A fly without wings would be called an insect.
19 Why are you “in” a movie, but you’re “on” TV? With the digital age, it gets even weirder. In the old days, you could possibly be on a tv set. Unless you are very small, there is no way you will be on netflix, aka the popup ad king.
20 Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavoring, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons? If you think that dishwashing soap is made with real lemons, then there is a mountain resort in Florida waiting on you.
21 What is a free gift? Aren’t all gifts free? This is like the ketchup packs you get. Have you ever gotten non fancy ketchup?

It is a truism that new media borrows content from old media. Stories, told orally from genration to generation, are compiled into books, which are then made into movies. Plastic panels try to look like wood. The newest new media that old fogey PG knows about is twitter. People tell little stories in 140 characters or less, which go around the world in seconds. With this abundance of media, there are not always enough messages to feed the beast.
On twitter, there are people producing twitter feeds from dead authors. Maybe these wordmongers went to a place with internet access. Kurt Vonnegut (three hours ago) “Busy, busy, busy”.  Mark Twain (three hours ago) “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint”. Brautigan’s Ghost (twenty two hours ago) “I cannot say to the one I love, “Hi, flower-wonderful bird-love sweet.”
The deceased content maker best suited to twitter might be Conway Twitty. One slow day two years ago, Yahoo asked peeps Do you think Conway Twitty would have used Twitter? ~ He gave them the idea ~ I think Twitty would tweet, Twitter would be Conway’s, way of of communicating to the world, Twitty would be tweeting his little Twitty head off, ~ I better send out a Twitty Tweet ~ Cute, but a serious answer, probably. A media hound, he’d want to get his name plastered everywhere. ~ If he did that would have made him a ‘Twitty Twitter” ~ Who cares, he’s a twit anyway”.
There are four Twitty Twitter feeds. @ConwayTwitty  (Oct. 21,2009) “The Conway Twitty Musical is getting great reviews in Branson!!! . @TwittyTweats (January 12, 2012) “In Twitty City, it never snows. All the men wear gold medallions and blazers. And the women never cry. Unless you hold them.” @Conway_Twitty (February 20, 2012) “My cock is an amphibious assault vehicle” @conwaytwittier  (April 28, 2012). “@JasonIsbell How’s the English weather treating your hair? I had the hardest time keeping my pompadour in tiptop shape there.”
@twittybirdmoda is written in Japanese.
The original concept for this post was to spotlight twitter feeds borrowing material from Charles Bukowski. Hank is the beer bard of Los Angeles. He is a hero to many. Out of the millions of worthless drunks populating bars, at least one could write poems. It gives you hope for mankind.
The front page of a google search for “charles bukowski on twitter” yields eight feeds. The original plan was to ignore any that were not updated in 2012. An exception will be for @hank_bukowski (Yeah it’s good to be back). (January 25, 2009) “Yesterday I met Adolf H. in hell. He is fuckin stupid.” “too lazzy these days, too drunk to twitter”.
With the 2012-only rule in effect, we are left with three Bukowski thieves. @BukowskiDiz  (May 1) “Curiosidades sobre Charles Bukowski http://migre.me/8UhRf“. @bukquotes (May 8) “all the mules and drunken ladies gone the bad novels march…”. ~ “I always read when I shit and the worse the book the better the bowel movement.” @bukowski_lives  (one hour ago) “Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

In the next quarter century, the surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it.”
As could have been predicted, it started with a post at Dangerous Minds. The feature was about the late Charles Bukowski, who was called Hank by those who knew him. The writer/drunk had always been a bit of a fascination to PG. Out of the millions of useless drunks feeding the urinals of planet earth, at least one will turn out to have had literary merit.
A trip to Google city is made, quotes from the bard are found, along with the wikipedia page. All of this leads to a New Yorker piece about the gentleman. After nine paragraphs, and two poems, there is the phrase that set off PG…graphomaniacal fecundity.(spell check suggestion:nymphomaniac)
As best as we can figure, g.f. means that Hank wrote a lot of stuff. This is a good thing. PG operates on the notion that if you keep your quantity up, the quality will take care of itself. Hank seems to agree, spitting out product “like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.” He seemed to take pride in doing what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac…he doesn’t write, he types.
If you google the phrase graphomaniacal fecundity, you can choose from 71 results. The top six apparently quote the article in New Yorker. A blogspot facility called poemanias quotes the paragraph from the New Yorker, with the title “On Bukowski’s afterlife”, while Fourhourhardon reprints the entire thing. Neither provide a link back to the original.
Goliath and Petey Luvs Blog take the same copy-paste approach. The first tries to get you to pay for more reading material. This forum also does the control A-C-V approach, but yields this comment : “He was a contemporary of the Beats, but not quite one of them because he was darker and not as willing to smoke a joint and sing Phil Ochs songs on the lower east side.” The truth is, Hank hated marijuana, and had the classic alcoholic attitude about it. And so it goes.
Keep and share copies the complete New Yorker feature, but has some other thumbsuckers about Mr. Bukowski. It may be fun to read someday. Pictures today are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. This is a repost.

99 percent invisible put up a dandy show recently. The title of the show was “The Xanadu Effect”, which was such a cool title that it was borrowed for this post. It was based on an article by Edward Tenner, with the same title.
The concept is that big, showy buildings tend to turn up in the latter stages of building cycles. The buildings are planned during the boom years, when it seems like the party will never stop. They are finished after the crash, and often wait until the next boom to gain tenants. The Empire State Building was conceived during the prosperity of the Twenties. It was finished during the depression, and was known as the empty state building. In Atlanta, the joke was about the Biltmore hotel … it was too big, they built more than they could use.
The article by Mr. Tenner was published February 19, 2001. One of his examples was the World Trade Center. “The pattern: Giant buildings go up, markets go down. The energy crisis and speculative fever of the early 1970s saw the World Trade Center (1972-1973) and Sears Tower (1974).” A few months later, the markets went down, and the World Trade Center went down.
Sometimes you need to take a long view of these things. Mr. Tenner’s article begins with the opening of The Market Site tower, with the largest sign in Times Square. Soon after this sign was lit, the technology stock boom crashed. That was twelve years ago. Today, the NASDAQ sign is a New York icon, and how are you reading this post?
The producer of the 99PI feature lived in Dallas during the good times. This post is written 4km outside of Atlanta GA, another example of capitalist construction run amok. PG used to work printing building plans, which means working for the emperor’s tailor. In 1990, he was redo blue’s representative in the office of John Portman Associates. At the time, JPA was building a sixty story tower, then called One Peachtree Center. The creditors were getting nervous, and there were many worried people in the office. This building was seen by many as a reckless move. The economic doldrums of the time did not help.
Atlanta has seen a few boom and bust cycles. While building the original Peachtree Center complex, a dinner theater was built in the courtyard. When PG worked in the JPA office, it was located in the former dinner theater. The auditorium was a room for the architects. The dressing rooms, with makeup mirrors, were used as storage rooms office supplies.
The name Xanadu comes from “Citizen Kane”. The real life Kane, William Randolph Hearst, started an enormous castle in California. It drained resources, which became a problem during the depression. In an ironic touch, Mr. Kane sold a chunk of land to the US Government, providing the location for Fort Hunter Liggett. The castle is a popular tourist attraction today.
Mr. Hearst was a larger than life figure. “However, he still retained enough clout with his remaining newspapers (and their ability to publicize movies) in the early 1940s to make life miserable for Orson Welles after the supreme insult of his roman a clef Citizen Kane (1941). Allegedly, Hearst wasn’t so much incensed at Welles as he was at Mankiewicz, a friend who had betrayed his secrets. (“Rosebud,” the name of the Charles Foster Kane’s childhood sled that supposedly is the key to his psychology but is actually a “McGuffin” around which to structure the movie’s plot, was allegedly Hearst’s nickname for (Marion) Davies’ private parts.)
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.

Bead 073 It is a boring friday afternoon. The knee is not any worse, and PG should be able to walk from the parking lot to the doctor’s office tuesday afternoon. The mental state is abysmal. Maybe it would make PG feel better to write something. There are a few chapters of the Bali part of Eat, Pray, Love that are ready for the PG treatment.
But first, there needs to be some background music to work by. It cannot have singing, because lyrics will interfere with the ability to create text. The folder called “discomixi” looks promising. There is a file created by the dj at a New York cha cha palace called the Saint. Even though it has people singing, it should be a dependable background sound, at least unti that break where the eighties disco remix of “Lay all your love on me”, by Saint Abba, kicks in. That break is two hours into this file, and if we work directly through to that song then it should be a productive afternoon.
In this bead, Miss Gilbert arrives in Bali. It turns out she has made no plans. There is no place to stay, and no one to hang out with. There is a vague invitation by a medicine man to come stay at his place, which does not impress the customs agent. She is granted a one month tourist visa.
Bead 074 Miss Gilbert takes a taxi to Ubud. It is a small, culturally important town, and is not near the beaches. Miss Gilbert makes friends with Mario, who picked that for a nickname because he likes things that are Italian.
Mario’s “real” name is Nyoman. It seems like most people in Bali have one of four names. They are Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut. They refer to the birth order, and mean first child, second child, third child, and fourth child. Most people have a nickname. The healer who invited Miss Gilbert to stay with her is a Ketut. Mario knows him, and agrees to take Miss Gilbert to see him.
Bead 075 Miss Gilbert did not plan the Indonesian part of her trip very well. She arrives at the compound of Ketut Liyer, and he doesn’t remember meeting her. After a few tense moments, Miss Gilbert mentions that she is a writer, and the medicine man remembers.
PG was listening to the Mike Gallagher show , waiting for Chris Wallace to come on. There was a rant. The New York Times published a wikileaks report, a week before the murder of Osama Bin Laden. To hear Mike say it, if OBL had read the NYT, he might have known that the USA knew his location. OBL could have moved, and BHO would not get his trophy.
An alternate theory hit PG… what if the handlers of OBL were tired of him? The old buzzard was a figurehead, and increasingly irrelevant. What if they decided to let the old man become a martyr? A corollary of this was that AQ wanted BHO to remain in office, for whatever reason. PG thought he should call the show to push his theory. On the second call, he got through. “Turn your radio down, don’t say good morning”
After a few minutes of listening to commercials, the producer came on the phone line. ” Mike has decided (unintelligible). Thank you.” When Chris Wallace was through, Mr. Gallagher had another subject. PG found something else to do.
Bead 076 This bead is a lesson about Bali. It is an island in Indonesia. While the host country is aggressively Muslim, Bali is Hindu. The people are highly religious, with a system of rituals. Seven volcanoes are on the island, so there is something to pray about, other than the rice harvest. Family ties are crucial, and conformity to the norm is strongly encouraged.
The post is almost ready to be published. Yet another glance down the page reveals a space which needs to be filled. This is discovered after formatting the last eight beads of this post. This involves going through the paragraphs, adding bold letters to the first few words, and giving each section the correct color. The key to this is to remember that the beads that are divisible by three are always purple. When PG was formatting these beads, he got to number ninety, and discovered it was blue. That is how so many nit picky things work. If it is off by one, it is totally wrong. And usually, if there is a problem, it is off by one. Email addresses are like this. If you get one letter wrong, it will not work, and it usually is just one letter.
Bead 077 Miss Gilbert buys a bicycle, and rides to see Ketut. He is treating a baby for teething pain. The family gives him twenty five cents. Since the G-ds made him a healer, he is required to see anyone who comes by. The next patient is a bit wealthier, and brings a bountiful offering of fruits balanced in baskets above her head. Carmen Miranda is rolling with envy in her grave.
Find a grave is a website that does exactly what it says. It has a header ad for General Mills children cereals. Maybe they know the graves of serial killers. This is what they say about Carmen Miranda.
Maria do Carmo Miranda b. February 9, 1909 d. August 5, 1955 Renowned Actress, Dancer, and Singer. Born in Marco de Canavezes, Portugal, her family moved to Brazil when she was still a toddler. She was singing at her hatmaking job as a teenager when she was discovered by a local promoter.. … She died of a heart attack after performing a dance number on a Jimmy Durante TV show. Buried in Cemitério São João Batista, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Also buried there is her sister, Aurora Miranda. The most famous role for Aurora Miranda was “Disney Studio’s “The Three Caballeros.” She was Donald Duck’s dance partner in the Bahia sequence.”
Bead 078 Ketut Liyer tells Miss Gilbert his life story. He is the ninth generation of men to practice medicine. He wanted to be a painter, and rebelled. One night he was painting by an oil lamp, it blew up, and severely burned his arm. The doctors wanted to cut the arm off. He went home, and his family healers fixed his arm within ten days. After this, his father and grandfather told him he was required to practice medicine. He still paints, at three in the morning when no one is around.
Comment four of Top 10 Thought Catalog Comments For The Month Of April was a reaction to a lengthy copy about the horrors of commercial meat production. The winning comment was “You must be charming at dinner parties”.
Bead 079 Miss Gilbert finds a fabulous little house to live in. It costs less than she used to pay in New York for taxis. What do you mean privilege?
These facebook comments are referring to this story, Anderson Cooper To Rush Limbaugh: ‘You Might Try The Gym From Time To Time’ . Sorry to burst your (birthday) balloon. . .Cooper may have taken Limbaugh to task, but too bad no one was watching in order to hear it. Limbaugh has about 50 times more listeners than Cooper has viewers. // Limbaugh may have fifty times the ears that Cooper has. If you count the brain cells between those ears, they are probably even.// Ah, yes, Luther. . you libs are just so much smarter. I bow in your awesomeness.
Bead 080 Bali has a bloody history, that does not quite line up with it’s image as the place where policemen wear flowers. There is also corruption. This works out to the advantage of Miss Gilbert. She pays off the right person, and her visa is extended to four months.
When PG was a youngun, he worked summers at a golf course. One afternoon, a man missed a putt. He threw down his putter, and shouted “shit, piss, and corruption”. Chamblee 54 has used this story three times.
Bead 081 Ketut Liyer is not certain how old he is. When he feels good, it is younger. At other times, he is older. He was an adult when Japan invaded Bali in World War II. What he does know is that he was born on Thursday. Evidently, this is a big deal in the Balinese scheme of things.
PG suspects that he was born on a thursday, but was not sure. A trip to Google city, with a couple of detours, led to a site, What Day Of The Week. May 6, 1954 is the 126th day of the year 1954 in the Gregorian calendar. There are 239 days remaining until the end of this year. The day of the week is Thursday. A person born on this day will be 57 years old today. (Assuming this person is still alive and kicking) PG is alive, but with his right knee torn up, tries to avoid kicking.
Bead 082 The wife of Ketut Liyer, Nyomo, is very suspicious of Miss Gilbert. The two become buddies after Miss Gilbert takes the medical notebooks of the doctor to a printshop in town, and makes beautiful xerox copies of them.
PG looked at the clock. If he was going to eat, and join his friends at a downtown coffee shop in one hour, he needed to get moving. However, he was playing a musicplayer. The music was a piano player named Issac Shepard. A number called “Elation” was playing, and PG had become fond of the song. Dinner would have to wait another minute. The coffee drinkers are never on time anyway.
Bead 083 Yudhi is from Java, another island in the archipelago of Indonesia. He works for the lady whose house Miss Gilbert is renting, and has become her friend. The story of Yudhi (You-Day) is interesting, if just a touch unbelievable. He was working on a cruise ship, and wound up in New York. Yudhi did well, and married a lady named Ann. After 911, the authorities became suspicious of immigrants from Moslem countries, even those from Christian families. Yudhi was deported from the USA, and lives in Bali.
Eat, Pray, Love got 2821 reviews on amazon. 613 were one star. Some of the titles were Eat Pray Shove (It), Glib, narcissistic and lightweight, A ME-moir, not a memoir, Symptomatic Of The Downfall Of Western Civilization…, and Trite, Terrible, Vain. One negative review says things that are relevant to this bead.
On to India. At the Ashram, she learns to meditate and still broods over her lost marriage and subsequent realtionship. Probably the most boring part of the book, except for her conversations with “Richard from Texas” — a down home, larger than life character who speaks in folksy platitudes that would make Andy Griffith proud. He also bestows our author with her nickname “Groceries” because she was emaciated from grief from crying for the millionth time over her beloved David. As one reviewer from Amazon said, “What kind of nickname is Groceries?”
I honestly believe she made these people up. Reminds me of “Go Ask Alice” — supposedly the real story of the drug-addicted Anonymous — until it was revealed that the protagonist was a fictitious composite of the author’s psychiatric patients. Boo.
Bead 084 Ketut Liyer is teaching Miss Gilbert bits and pieces of what he knows. A person in Bali is guarded by four spirit brothers. They are named Ango Patih, Maragio Patih, Banus Patih, and Banus Patih Ragio. They represent intelligence, friendship, strength, and poetry.
These comments were made regarding 5 Legitimate Reasons To Not Celebrate Cinco De Mayo I halfway expected at least one of these to be “you’re not Mexican”. POST-RACIAL AMERICA FTW // It’s a pretty much manufactured holiday anyway. It celebrates defeating the French, which they didn’t really. // everyone beats the french, no need to celebrate.
Bead 085 Miss Gilbert is hit by a bus. The worst damage is a cut on her knee, which becomes infected. Ketut Liyer, for some reason, tells her to find another doctor. This turns out to be a turning point in the story of EPL.
There is a current story about Georgia politics. If Georgia political parties were a railroad, no insurance company would allow freight to be shipped on them. There is litigation involved in this story, so no links will be used. These comments are about this story. The self-immolation of the GA Democratic party is nearly complete. GOP Nirvana awaits. Yet spending is the same, my taxes are higher and metro traffic still sucks. But I can take comfort that poor people will have to pee in a cup before they get their scraps from the table and I can pack heat if I want to the next time I dine at Longhorns. // I don’t “beg” the “White Man” for s—. The “White man” knows that either he gets down with my program, or I will take my talents to his competition and crush him… or do my OWN thing…because I got it like that! By the way, I got a “BIG STICK” you can bite… but only after your old lady gets off of it. She’s working overtime. Amen?? // Another example of an African-American male who can’t keep his fists down or his zipper up. I’m pretty tired of that myself. Until the community holds such losers accountable for their actions expecting racism to ease up is pretty much pi$$ing in the wind.
Bead 086 The number 86 has a few meanings. In restaurant slang, it means you are out of an item. It is also a verb, meaning that a person has become personna non grata at an establishment. When PG worked at redo blue, he chose 86 as the speed dial for the cell phone of his stupidvisor.
In bead 86, Miss Gilbert meets Wayan Nuriyasih, a Balinese healer. The infected leg is healed in the time it takes to say Multivitamin Lunch Special. After healing, the girl talk begins.
There are three questions which Balinese like to ask. “Where are you going today? Where are you coming from? Are you married?” For a single person, the correct answer to number three is “not yet”. Under no circumstances do you admit to being divorced. So Miss Gilbert is tap dancing around her story, when Miss Nuriyasih admits to being divorced. Apparently this is a worse ordeal for a Balinese woman that almost anything imaginable, even marriage to a no good man.
The two women bond. It turns out Miss Nuriyasih is a talented healer, with a charming daughter. She is also stone broke, after paying the lawyer who got her custody of her daughter. Mother and daughter live in a small room in back of the place the healing takes place, which doubles as a snack bar. After lunch, Miss Nuriyasih examines Miss Gilbert’s good knee, and says she needs to have sex. The hormones from sex lubricate your knee joints.
Bead 087 Miss Gilbert settles into a routine. She spends her mornings with Wayan Nuriyasih, and her afternoons with Ketut Liyer. In the evening, she stays at her house, to drink tea in the garden and be happy.
One item stuck out from 97 Things You Didn’t Know About William S. Burroughs. 17. Burroughs graduated with a degree in English literature from Harvard University in 1936. He was known for keeping to himself, and spent most of his free time with a .32 revolver and his pet ferret.
In 1982, PG lived in an apartment once with three people, seven snakes, a cat, and a ferret. The ferret was named Tara, and was kept in the bathroom. PG got tired of closing the door behind the ferret, and complained. This led to his leaving the apartment. PG discussed the matter of living with a ferret with a friend, who said in horror, “thats a weasel”. Ferrets are not bad pets if you don’t have to close the bathroom door behind them.
Bead 088 There was another woman of the world at Miss Nuriyasih’s salon one morning. Armenia was from Brazil, used to work with refugees for the United Nations, and has some sort of business to do in Bali. She is going to a party that evening, hosted by another Brazilian, and invites Miss Gilbert. You probably know what is about to happen.
This was on facebook. Note to self: never again go through airport security on that day of the year when the moon is closest to the earth. A woman with yellow/gray braids in line in front of me in a wheelchair refused to crate her little dog. She made a ruckus. Her son or grandson told her to put the goddam dog in the bag. Suddenly she was miraculously cured of her immobility and ran out of the terminal. The TSA agents were preoccupied with another highly cantilevered woman perched on cha cha heels, with oiled tower of Babel hair, and palm trees and sunsets painted on her two inch nails. She kept expressing surprise at each verboten thing they fished out of her bag, like she was a contestant on a game show. I lingered to watch the pat down, like a train wreck, and for the agents, like a Lewis and Clark expedition.
Bead 089 After months of South Asian asceticism, the party was like falling off a wagon. Miss Gilbert got dressed up, in the one pretty dress she brought with her. She got drunk, and flirted with a few men. The host of the evening, Felipe, took her home at the end of the evening. He said you are going to enjoy yourself here. Miss Gilbert protested that she only had one pretty dress. Felipe replied “You’re young and beautiful darling. You only need the one dress”.
While producing this cycle, PG felt an obligation to listen to the TED talk given by Miss Gilbert. At the time, it had 3,608,721 Views. PG googled the phrase “3608721 views”. It was mostly phone numbers, the last seven digits being 3608721. PG remembers a time when seven digit phone numbers were exclusively used. Then people started to use modems, cell phones, and fax machines, and the number of phone numbers had an exponential increase. Now, it is universal (At least in Atlanta) to give people the ten digit phone number.
Bead 090 Miss Gilbert wakes up, hungover, after barely sleeping a wink. She feels old and out of practice, feeling that she has forgotten how to relate to men. Felipe is one pleasant thought among many, on this morning after.
The following is from the TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert: centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And they were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I’m talking about, because I know you’ve all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn’t doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.
And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, “Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God.” That’s God, you know. Curious historical footnote — when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from “Allah, Allah, Allah,” to “Ole, ole, ole,” which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, “Allah, ole, ole, Allah, magnificent, bravo,” incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.
PG wondered if the last part was true. He sent an email to a friend, who teaches Spanish at a local university. Here was the answer: There are a variety of explanations for the origins of the word olé in Spanish: from Arabic (from Wa-(a)llah, meaning “by God” or perhaps from a similar phonetic construction, iálla, meaning “let’s go”); from caló, a Gypsy dialect; even a now discounted theory that the word derives from Greek ololizin, meaning to shout with jubilation. The hypothesis about Arabic origins seems to be most accepted.
Parts one, two, three, and four of this series have were previously published.

May 6 is a day in spring, with 35% of the year gone by. It has it’s fair share of history, some of which did not turn out well. In 1861, the Confederate Congress declared war on the United States. In 1937, a German zeppelin named “Hindenburg” exploded while trying to land in New Jersey. In 1940, Bob Hope did his first show for the USO, somewhere in California.
In non metric news, in 1954 Roger Bannister ran the first sub four minute mile. The current record is 3:43.13 by Hicham El Guerrouj on July 7, 1999, with a party with Prince to celebrate. Since most track meets now use 1500 meters, the mile record is more or less obsolete.
On this day, Georgia has strapped two notable prisoners onto the gurney of no return. In 2003, Carl Isaacs was put to death. Mr. Isaacs was the ringleader in the Alday family killing, in Donalsonville GA, 1973. Five years later, in 2008, William Earl Lynd was poisoned by the state. This was the first execution  after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that execution by poisoning was constitutional.
The sign of people born May 6 is Taurus. Included are: 1758 – Maximilien Robespierre//1856 – Sigmund Freud//1895 – Rudolph Valentino//1903 – Toots Shor//1915 – Orson Welles//1924 – Patricia Kennedy Lawford//1931 – Willie Mays//1937 – Rubin Carter//1945 – Bob Seger//1953 – Tony Blair//1954 – PG//1961 – George Clooney.
To make room for these folks, someone has to die. For May 6 this would mean: 1862 – Henry David Thoreau//1919 – L. Frank Baum//1992 – Marlene Dietrich. This is a repost.

PG is running out of things to say. Never mind having something good to say about anyone, he doesn’t have anything to say, good or bad. Fortunately, archives are forever, as Richard Grenell found out. PG found this list in his archives. It is based on 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Death, at Discover Magazine. This is a repost. These statements have not been verified, and may contain inaccuracies. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
1) The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.
2) There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including “to be in Abraham’s bosom,” “just add maggots,” and “sleep with the Tribbles” (a Star Trek favorite).
3) No American has died of old age since 1951. That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
4) The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the “agonal phase,” from the Greek word agon, or contest.
5) Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.
6) Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year. Cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.
7) Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.
8) More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered.
9) It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.
10) A Swedish company, Promessa, will freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and seal the resulting powder in a cornstarch coffin. They claim this “ecological burial” will decompose in 6 to 12 months.
11) Zoroastrians in India leave out the bodies of the dead to be consumed by vultures. The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.
12) Queen Victoria insisted on being buried with the bathrobe of her long-dead husband, Prince Albert, and a plaster cast of his hand.
13)  In Madagascar, families dig up the bones of dead relatives and parade them around the village in a ceremony called famadihana. The remains are then wrapped in a new shroud and reburied. The old shroud is given to a newly married, childless couple to cover the connubial bed.
14) During a railway expansion in Egypt in the 19th century, construction companies unearthed so many mummies that they used them as fuel for locomotives.
15) English philosopher Francis Bacon, a founder of the scientific method, died in 1626 of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow to see if cold would preserve it.
16) For organs to form during embryonic development, some cells must commit suicide. Without such programmed cell death, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks.
17) Waiting to exhale: In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It’s not.
18) Buried alive: In 19th-century Europe there was so much anecdotal evidence that living people were mistakenly declared dead that cadavers were laid out in “hospitals for the dead” while attendants awaited signs of putrefaction.

As some have noted, today is the National Day of Prayer. If you can’t say anything good about something, you copy a story by Mark Twain. He was a keen observer of the symbiotic relationship between church and state, when it came to wasting the foreign devil. These stories came from Positive Atheism. There are a few more samples of Samuel Clemens talking about religion there, if you have the time and inclination. This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress .
One hundred and six years ago, the United States was involved in a war, that did not want to end. This conflict was in the Philippines. Although there had been an official end to the war, guerrillas continued to fight the Americans. The war was a nasty affair, with many atrocities.
The War against the Philippine people was a souvenir of the Spanish American War. There had been a rebellion against Spanish rule in the islands. After the American forces routed the Spanish, the rebellion shifted to the American occupiers. It was a war stumbled into, and difficult to end.
Mark Twain was horrified. He wrote a story, The War Prayer . Lew Rockwell tells the tale “Twain wrote The War Prayer during the US war on the Philippines. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper’s Bazaar rejected it as “not quite suited to a woman’s magazine.” Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.” Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish “The War Prayer” elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923.”
Getting back to “A War Prayer”, the story starts in a church. A war has started, and is popular. The troops leave for glory the next day. The preacher has an emotional prayer to send them on their way. Unknown to the minister, there is a visitor. “An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there, waiting.
With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal,” Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”
The stranger motioned to the preacher to step aside. The stranger stepped into the pulpit, and claimed to have a message for the worshipers, sent directly from G-d. The preacher’s message was for support in time of war, and implied that G-d and the preacher support the same side in this conflict. There is an unspoken part to a prayer like this. This unspoken part was what the stranger was going to put into words.
O Lord our Father“, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
Ye have prayed it“; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Mark Twain wrote a lot during the American Genocide in the Philippines. Many of his words could apply today. War has gotten more high tech…for our side…, but the bottom line is the same. No matter how fancy the weapons get, the casualties are just as dead. The investors, and heroin merchants, make money.
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps —
His night is marching on.
I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!”
We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her retreat;
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our g-d is marching on!
In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom — and for others’ goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich —
Our g-d is marching on.