Chamblee54

At 1838, February 19th 2025, I shut the cover on Didion & Babitz. Say what you will about author Lilliane O’Lick, she is one helluva storyteller. D&B was easy and fun to read. The book ends with a description of Joan Didion’s memorial, a star-studded celebrity event. Page 339 had one final bit of tackiness: “On the day Joan’s obituary appeared in the New York Times, journalist and podcaster Maris Kreizman took to Twitter. “I want to believe that Joan Didion lived an extra week out of spite so that she could officially outlive Eve Babitz.” p.339
The dedication page to Eve’s Hollywood mentions Steve Martin (the car.) The car is a 1965 VW, which Mr. Martin gave to EB. She later said “Linda Ronstadt was his girlfriend and I was his girlfriend and we were both doing him wrong.” EH was released in March 1974, about the same time I saw Mr. Martin open for Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at the Great Southeast Music Hall. Nobody in the Nitty Gritty crowd had any clue who this white suit wearing banjo player was. John McEuen kept stumbling into the microphone, saying “this guy cracks me up.” p. 215
“Huntington’s disease (HD) is named after George Huntington, who described it among residents of East Hampton, Long Island in 1872. It is a hereditary neurodegenerative disease.” HD claimed both EB, and her father, Sol Babitz. EB was aware of her fate for many years. The most famous victim of HD was Woody Guthrie. Many speculated that son Arlo would get HD, but he never did. “Woody’s most productive time artistically was in the 5 years immediately preceding the onset of overt symptoms of HD. I hypothesize that subclinical HD may have been an important driving force behind Woody Guthrie’s creativity.” p. 244
We know little about LOL. She was 32 in 2010, and went to Princeton, after doing high school somewhere else. LOL has the same last name as her Manhattan Doctor husband, but leaves no clues about her maiden name. We do have “A note my older boy, Ike, left on my pillow Valentine’s Day 2020” “DEAR MOM YOU AR WORM AND COTULY AND YOU HAD SEX WITH BREAT ESTIN ELIS BUT DONT TRY TO HIDE IT FROM ME NAW LETS GET DOWN TO BUSINESS I WANT TO GO TO THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM THIS WEEKEND AND I WANT NO ARGUING ABOUT IT”
Page 290 marks the return of Bret Easton Ellis. EB tuned in to “Less Than Zero,” which made BEE a star before he was old enough to (legally) drink. EB compared BEE to Jim Morrison, … another way that People Are Strange. BEE met EB for dinner about this time. There is no word on whether BEE was EB’s dessert. This was about the time AIDS was becoming obnoxious, and EB decided to tone down the whore-of-babylon act. The bi-leaning-gay Paul Ruscha had been a long playing EB boyfriend, which probably has nothing to do with any of this.
On May 7, 2000, JD appeared on In Depth, a PBS talk show. After a polite discussion, and a chance to promote here most recent book, the show was opened up to callers. One of the callers was EB, who introduced herself as “a friend of Joan’s from Hollywood.” JD dropped her stone face once, when EB said that JD’s house “was the first time I ever saw Spode china.” JD did not show much pizazz in that brief clip. I don’t know about the rest of the show, because I am not bored enough to watch it. JD was never known as a vibrant personality. p.306
There may be one defining difference between author and subject. EB wrote a piece about her near-fatal fire titled “I used to be charming.” Recently, LOL did an interview promoting D&B. “I always think of the last line of a Salinger short story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” … “I was a nice girl once, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?” I think about that all the time, because I used to be so polite. And now I’m just used to getting yelled at and told I’m a jerk or to go away. I just don’t mind at this point.”
Page 332 has EB in her final years. In 1997 EB was badly burned, and never fully recovered. That story is available elsewhere. By the time Donald J. Trump was President, EB had become a talk radio consuming conservative, to go with HD. LOL went to California frequently to have lunch with EB, and talked to her on the phone. In one of these conversations, EB asked “Where can I find a blouse the same shade of blue as Melania Trump’s eyes?” When I asked AI that. I found a description of the Ralph Lauren dress FLOTUS wore to her first inauguration. “She looked simply flawless.” … This is the final installment of D&B. Part one is available. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. Arthur Rothstein took the featured photograph in June 1940. “Brooklyn NY. Red Hook housing development. Jimmy Caputo, seven years old, and Annette, three years old, at their nightly prayers.”

This repost is part two of a book report on “Hollywood,” by Charles Bukowski/Hank Chinaski.
13 – Jon Pinchot needs to move out of his house, and lands with Hank and Sarah. They get to drinking and hanging out, and Jon tells a movie financing war story. This wealthy lady in Russia wanted to work with him, but only after Jon goes to church with her, and fucks her. “please understand I have nothing against the old the aged but it was like kissing a sewer hole.”
This afternoon, I took the book with me to the Kroger parking lot. The idea was to read, while waiting for my brother to finish shopping. When I went in for my groceries, i got in the checkout line behind a lady with WIC coupons. By the time I got through, and returned by shopping cart, the checkout line was cleared up, and Mac was almost ready to go. I did not get to read, and peruse the cosmic comic insights of alkies in movieland.
I did get to drive home. The Kroger parking lot is a nightmare on the best day, but I got out, and on to Clairmont going north. I am going to be turning left in a couple of blocks, and there is no point in being in the right lane. This is a problem for some drivers. People on Clairmont road drive as though they were still on I85, and are very annoyed when someone does the speed limit in front of them.
14 – Hank and Sarah see a movie about skid row degenerates. It turns out to have clean cut, well dressed actors playing broken down drunks. Inevitably one of them gets Jesus, which may have been the point of the movie all along.
These facebook fuddy-duddies were talking about Joe Rogan. I had enough of the negativity, and decided to find some of the content that makes Mr. Rogan the most entertaining man on the internet. I found this: “black people didn’t know what plastic surgery was, so the deal was you take that government butter and you rub it on your titties on your ass and they said it’ll make it grow yeah … that’s what we used to do back in the day.”
This is the person Nikole-Hannah Jones was talking about when she said, in response to a tweet from: @AllMattNYT “Joe Rogan is what he is. We in the media might want to spend more time thinking about why so many people trust him instead of us.” @nhannajones ” With respect, I don’t get this. We need to understand why millions of Americans don’t mind the open racism? It’s not a mystery. Been reporting on it for years. So what do we do with that?” IOW, giving a comedian the opportunity to tell us about using government butter, to make your titties bigger, is open racism. TBH, to say that government butter will make your titties bigger probably does qualify as misinformation.
15 – “Something went wrong. Try again in a little while.” I am trying to find the motivation to write about a boring chapter. Hank is trying to force a screenplay out of his typer, and it is not happening. There is a letter about how to play the horses. There is a trip downstairs to plead for mercy from Jon Pinchot, who responds by saying that François is coming back from France, and they are going to move out to somewhere.
The fifth letter of François is c-cedilla. Ç “is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish, Zazaki, and Romance alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Friulian, Ligurian, Occitan, and Portuguese as a variant of the letter C.” To make Ç, you hold down the alt key and type the numbers 0199. Or you just find someone else who typed it, and copy that. If you want a ç, the code is alt+0231.
16 – Jon and François have moved into a ghetto, and they think it is the coolest thing ever. Hank is not so sure, but he gets his knife, puts his money in his shoe, and drives down there. I have known lots of people who lived in “those” neighborhoods. They are usually happy to get out, even if they don’t say so out loud. You have to wonder how long it will take the romance to wear off with these two Frenchman-living-among-the-natives.
17 – Let’s see if the electronic section robo secretary is working hey it’s working too bad I’m not. So I boot the computer now the robo secretary is working. Chapter 17 is kind of boring. Hank and Sarah go to a party at John and François’s place in the ghetto. They’re having a cookout in the backyard and cooking chicken. François doesn’t know how to cook chicken. It turns out hard as a rock. Hank can’t eat it. Someone steals the wheels off of François’s vehicle, and sells them to him for $38. The robo-secretary hears “ghetto life” and gives me “get a life.”
18 – There are these two characters. Wikipedia tells me that it’s Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper. The story is that Sean Penn wants to be in Barfly, but insists that Dennis Hopper direct. Barbet Schroeder ( robo secretary: Barbie show drunk Schroeder) hates Dennis Hopper. He hates him so much, he calls Paris and talks to his lawyer. A clause is written in his will. If Mr. Schroeder dies in the production of Barfly, Dennis Hopper cannot direct this movie.
The story took place when Sean Penn was married to Madonna. The fake name in Hollywood is Ramona. “All’s fair in hate and Hollywood.”
19 – Hank and Sarah go to meet an actor who wants to play the part. Mickey Rourke eventually played the role, so it is probably him. He lives in this broken down bachelor pad. “there were springs sticking out of the sofa, and there were pillows on the floor, used magazines, paper bags. “This is a real male hangout” Sarah laughed.
They mentioned that Francine Bowers was the female they were trying to get to play some role in this drama. Francine Bowers is a great name for Faye Dunaway. There was a person at Cross Keys named Mr Bowers, aka officer dibble. He was this guy that went around in the halls, before school, making trouble for everybody. Later, I had a friend that thought he was a musician. One of his stage names was Harry Bowers. Francine Bowers is a good name for the ultimate diva actress.
20 – Hank is going to a party for some sleazy Hollywood type and he goes by the Chateau Marmont to pick up Norman Mailer. Hank asks Norman if he has anything to drink. Mormon … calling Norman Mailer Mormon…. Norman has the bottle of wine, but no Corkscrew. Hank says that he was an amateur drunk. Hank is not a purist, and drinks the wine.
21 – Hank goes to this party for a producer who may or may not be Harvey Weinstein. IMDb doesn’t say that Weinstein produced BF, but the character at this party was certainly acting like you would expect Harvey Weinstein to act. At the end of the night, Hank has decided that he likes Mr. Weinstein. John Pinchot says that he’s the nicest person he’s ever met, including Idi Amin.
Other parts of this series are available. one three four five Pictures are from The Library of Congress. John Vachon took the featured photograph in August 1941. “Farm boy in beer parlor on Sunday afternoon. Bruce Crossing, Michigan”

Didion & Babitz has hit the streets, as anyone who reads instagram knows. Lilianne O’Lick knows how to sell the soap, as well as a dirty story that leaves many readers wanting a bath. This is not my first time with either Eve Babitz or LOL. D&B is the story of Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. … Neither lady had a middle name. Chamblee 54 has written about EB on several occasions. 123021 032622 010523 This is not the case with JD. There was once a paperback copy of The White Album … I never got past the abandoned gas station being the authentic west.
“Finishing Didion and Babitz has become a Herculean effort on my part. Lili Anolik clearly hates Joan Didion and continually criticizes and condemns her. This book should be called Loving Eve Babitz, Wench, Whore and Failed “Artist”. Anolik seems to fashion herself as a therapist, making some drastic, others ridiculous, excuses for Babit’s tawdry behavior. … This seemed to be an exercise in “look at my big word vocabulary. I’m going to repeat what I just said using big words that no one ever uses just to impress you. “ From an Amazon one-star review, “Loving Eve Loathing Joan,” by NFox.
(“The seventies in LA weren’t a decade under themselves but an extension of the previous decade: the Sixties the flower child, the seventies the juvenile delinquent that the flower child—a Bad Seed all along—grew into.” p. 124) The sixties were special, too beautiful to live, to profitable to die. Being a kid in Georgia was just one way to see it all. I had little notion of what was going on then in California, and by the time I started to get hip, California had Mansoned its way into a permanent Altamont. EB was playing the game, and the players.
Carrie White was a celebrity hairburner, who wrote a book Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life. She is probably not the same Carrie White as the telekinetic teenager at the center of “Carrie” but one cannot be too certain. The CW in D&B went to Hollywood High with EB, and was in the glamor sorority that EB missed out on. CW remained close to Rosalind Frank, who was the fairest of them all in High School. Alas, life after graduation did not work out, and Miss Frank died an early, drug related death. This untimely demise got EB busy writing.
Page 168 sees the first appearance of Bret Easton Ellis, who simply had to be in this book. The first time I heard of EB was on the BEE podcast, which later had an appearance by LOL promoting her first book about EB. BEE idolized JD, and was a close friend of JD’s daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. It is rather poignant that BEE enters this narrative as part of a discussion about JG Dunn’s apparent taste for male company. John Gregory Dunne is the husband of JD, and the younger brother of Dominick John Dunne, … another bicoastal fudge packer.
I was trolling google, looking for dirt on JD … there is a small mountain of dirt on EB … and I stumbled onto a bit of clickbait, “It’s Time To Retire Joan Didion’s Most Famous Line”. The line is “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I had probably heard it before. I process a lot of commodity wisdom these days. It goes in one eye and out the other … assuming that useless knowledge leaves the head the same way it gets in. Which brings us to page 211, where LOL ends a chapter with JDMFL.
There is a line about EB, whose inclusion in this feature is required by law: “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.” Credit/blame for this tidbit is usually given to Earl McGrath. When “Eve’s Hollywood” came out, the line was on the blurb page, written by “anonymous.” The book “came out” in March 1974, with a glamor girl cover photo by Eve’s number one lady lover, Annie Leibovitz. D&B does not have any hint that EB and JD were cleaning carpets together. … Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. The featured photo: “Unidentified soldier in Confederate nine-button frock coat.” · Part two of D&B is available.

This is a repost from 2017. John Cooke passed away September 3, 2017. … John Byrne Cooke, the son of public television star Alistair Cooke, had gotten a liberal arts degree from Harvard. He stumbled into a job filming the Monterrey Pop Festival. Like the rest of America, he was impressed by Janis Joplin. Soon, Mr. Cooke got a job as the road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company. One result is a book, On the Road with Janis Joplin.
The management of Big Brother did not want the band filmed at Monterrey. After their saturday afternoon show, the film makers realized that Miss Joplin was important to the film. A second show was arranged for sunday night. This show was filmed. When you see Cass Elliot saying oh wow, that was saturday afternoon. The film crew filmed the crowd during that show.
Mr. Cooke arrived in San Francisco as the summer of love was playing out. Many old timers on the scene were already getting out. At first it was an uneasy fit with the band … the eastern bluegrass player, and the hippies. There was one meeting, where Mr. Cooke thought he was going to be fired. Things were patched up, and the show went on.
There were a lot of people who knew each other. Mr. Cooke had been trying to romance a California girl. It turns out she was a friend of someone, possibly Linda Gravenites, the roommate, and close friend, of Miss Joplin.
Peggy Caserta was another connection. Supposedly Miss Caserta had a lesbian thing going with Miss Joplin. Whatever did, or did not, happen, Miss Caserta wrote an awesomely trashly book, Going Down With Janis. The opening line: “I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin, and between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin.”
“Peggy Caserta whose candid revelations about her romantic relationship with rock star Janis Joplin were revealed in a groundbreaking if often sordid 1973 tell-all book that she later disavowed as ghostwritten exploitation, died Thursday, November 21, 2024, of natural causes at her cabin on the Tillamook River on the Oregon Coast. She was 84. … Her first memoir, written she later said for the sole purpose of funding the ferocious heroin habit that would dog her for decades, has over the years been both reviled as a tawdry invasion of privacy and revered as an LGBTQ souvenir from an era and milieu that offered few.”
The year spent with Big Brother was 1968. Miss Joplin was staying in an apartment on Noe Street. Robert Kennedy made a campaign appearance on nearby Castro Street, with Miss Joplin in the crowd. When Mr. Kennedy was killed, after winning the California primary, the band was in Los Angeles. Mr. Cooke sought solace with Judy Collins that night.
Around this time, some people convinced Miss Joplin that she should leave Big Brother. There was three weeks between the last Big Brother show, and the first show as a solo artist. The Kozmic Blues band never really worked. Miss Joplin felt she was a failure. Miss Joplin started to use heroin frequently. Except for a European tour, 1969 was a bad year.
In 1970, Miss Joplin quit using heroin, and started to play with Fult Tilt Boogie. Things wer going well. The band was in Los Angeles recording an album. One night, Miss Joplin got some extra strong heroin. Mr. Cooke found the body.
This book report leaves a great deal of the story out. Miss Joplin broke a whiskey bottle over Jim Morrison’s head, and got into a fist fight with Jerry Lee Lewis. There were three appearances on the Dick Cavett show, 1969, 06-25-70, and 08-03-70. At 1:12 in this video, Miss Joplin observes “you’re a real swinger I can tell by your shoes man.” (Here is a screen shot from 1969, with heroin, next to another from clean 1970.)
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Charles R. Rees took the featured photograph in 1862. ‘Captain James H.M. Neblett of Neblett’s-Coleman’s Virginia Heavy Artillery Battery.”

If I don’t start dictating this thing now I never will. This is a book report about the The Days of Anna Madrigal, the last book in the Tales of the City cycle. DOAM was written by Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. There might be a spoiler alert in this book report; that’s what book reports are for. DOAM is a wonderful book. However, like all of AJM books, you have to have a suspension of disbelief, because some of these things are just too weird to be true..
One way to prepare for a book report is to listen to videos of the author. I saw an AJM event, at the Decatur First Baptist Church in pre-pandemic 2018. Finally, I found a lovely quote.
The DOAM characters all go to Burning Man. I’ve never been to BM, and probably never will. I’ve been to many faerie gatherings, so I have a slight taste for intentional community. From all indications BM is much much, much, more intense. The BM aura is a bit off-putting. I could probably get into it but I’d have to I’d have to be prepared, and that probably is not going to happen. Fortunately, AJM had a younger husband, that dragged him there kicking and screaming.
When you make YouTube clips, you have to guess when it starts, and when it finishes. This entertainment does not have a transcript, or a cis-script. After consultation with the law firm of Trial and Error, I made this clip. It starts at 1970 seconds, and it ends at 2100 seconds. There’s a synchronicity to 1970 – 2100. These 130 seconds start with the acknowledgement that it was autobiographical. We’ve always suspected that Michael was really AJM. So he goes to BM. The last words of this clip are there would be rules.
DOAM ended much too soon for my taste. It goes into a bit of the back story for Anna Madrigal. For those who are new here, AM is the landlady at the house where the TOTC players lived. It seems like AM was raised in a cathouse in Winnemucca, NV. There was a real family named Madrigal. Part of the DOAM story is how Anna goes back to Winnemucca, and meets a player in this narrative. It’s a of a tearjerker, but most AJM stories are from time to time.
As for the fantasy of being raised in a brothel … when I was a young man I had this friend going by the name of Raven (not Wolfdancer.) He later went through several other names in the time that I knew him, and I never did find out his real name. This makes looking for him on facebook difficult. I first met Raven, his story was that he was raised in a brothel at the end of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Being the naive young idiot that I was, I believed him. Once, we went to a house on McLendon Avenue, where this old lady was introduced as being his grandmother. I said something about the business you were in, which went over her head. Anyway, Raven … then known as Harry Bowers … moved to New York in 1983, and was never heard from again.
There will be no more TOTC books, and probably little more of the characters. DOAM was set in 2012, when AM is 92. The “boomer” characters are starting to draw social security. Since Mouse is a stand in for AJM, it is safe to assume that he is alive. It is tempting to re-read some of the TOTC books, but there are so many other books to read. The current selection is Hollywood by Charles Bukowski.  It will be fun, until it is done. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.

This is a repost from 2018. Dorothy Allison passed away November 6, 2024. … Bastard Out of Carolina is a much praised novel. Dorothy Allison wrote it. When I saw it at a used book sale, I hesitated. The lady taking the money said, “if you don’t want that book, I will take it.” I went ahead and gave the lady one dollar, and took home BOOC.
Bone is the illegitimate hero of BOOC. Her birth certificate has ILLEGITIMATE stamped across the bottom, in “oversized red-inked block letters.” Anney, the mother, makes repeated visits to the county courthouse, trying to get the certificate de-bastardized. Finally, when Bone is 12, Anney succeeds. By then it is too late.
The Boatwrights are a large family. They live in Greenville, South Carolina. BOOC is set in the fifties. PG was never really sure how many aunts and uncles Bone has. Maybe that is the idea.
The characters in BOOC are what some people would call white trash. Money is always a problem. The men drink and fight. The women do what they can. The kids are kids, until it is their turn to get locked up, or knocked up.
After Anney has two girls, she meets Glen Waddell. He is the villain of BOOC. An all around fuck up, Daddy Glen sexually abuses Bone. This is only spelled out in two episodes. The verbal/physical abuse is there all the time.
An Essential Novel About Poverty, Bigotry, and Sexual Abuse, Twenty-Five Years Later is an article that googled its way into this book report. Some urban writers are fascinated by racism. Dorothy Allison keeps racism in its place. There are no black characters in BOOC. The Boatwrights say n****r. The reader comes to learn that the Boatwrights would have been just as poor, just as drunk, and just as trashy in an all white county. Whiteness is part of the story, just like the muddy river flowing past Aunt Raylene’s house.
BOOC has a lot of details, and atmosphere. In a radio interview, Dorothy Allison says something. “Oh, I want that — you know what Nabokov called it, that sob in the spine, that where you’re reading and suddenly it just stops you, and you’re like ah! That’s what I want. I want you to take a deep breath, and if I’m really lucky, I want you to throw the book at the wall.” Paperbacks do less damage.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Russell Lee took the pictures in Missouri. The date was August, 1938.

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This is a repost from 2019, before the world went into a spiral. … Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas finished it’s performance in front of my glasses. Like most Tom Robbins books, HASP does not have a satisfying ending. The author/auteur creates characters, throws them into troubling situations, and makes word jokes about their plight. Unfortunately, books come to an end, and what serves as a plot should have a termination. For this wordsmith, the journey is so much fun that the destination is reduced to an ad in the travel guide. (Author and auteur both come to us through “Middle English auctour, from Anglo-French auctor, autor, from Latin auctor promoter, originator, author, from augēre to increase.”) Neither noun is as important as it used to be.
The best way to approach HAFP is to forget the plot God, and go directly to the details, where she can be found. Like page 333, which is half of 666, but with a fraction of the opprobrium. There is this exchange, between Gwen Mati and Larry Diamond. They are the *star crossed lovers* in HAFP. “Wait a minute. You have to get the government’s permission to get an enema?” “This may be the land of the free, sweetheart, but you’re deluding yourself if you think your ass is your own.”
Larry Diamond is probably the stand in for Tom Robbins. He is full of conspiracies, hypotheses, feces, and other aromatic arcana. Considering that HAFP was published in 1994, and presumably written before then, the reader wonders what was in his crystal ball. Consider this item on page 315: “If global warming melts the polar ice caps, as some predict, we will have little choice in our resumption of an aquatic life style.” LD talks about frogs a lot in HASP, but very has little to say about pajamas. Do you say pa JAH muz, or pa JAM muz?
HAFP is full of semi-plausible conjecture projection. Consider the part on page 318, about magic mushroom spores coming to earth, from the star Sirius. Fair enough, but how did the extraterrestrial spores find their way to cowpies? The star Sirius is a key player in the morpho-mythology of HASP. How much is true, and how much was created in the mental compost of the Robbins mind? When I read HAFP in 1996, I could only wonder. On the 2019 reading, Google is ready when you are.
The tale LD weaves involves the Dogon people of ancient Timbuktu. Here is what one source says: “The Dogon stories explain that also. According to their oral traditions, a race people from the Sirius system called the Nommos visited Earth thousands of years ago. The Nommos were ugly, amphibious beings that resembled mermen and mermaids. … The Egyptian G-ddess Isis, who is sometimes depicted as a mermaid, is linked with the star Sirius.”
Isis has a PR problem these days. For some reason, an armed terrorist/freedom fighter group is killing people in the middle east. Depending on the day, and campaign contributions, ISIS is seen as an enemy of the American people. What does this have to do with a Goddess? Will a rebel army be named for Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, or Inanna?
“The Nommos, according to the Dogon legend, lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system. They landed on Earth in an “ark” that made a spinning decent to the ground with great noise and wind. It was the Nommos that gave the Dogon the knowledge about Sirius B. The legend goes on to say the Nommos also furnished the Dogon’s with some interesting information about our own solar system: That the planet Jupiter has four major moons, that Saturn has rings and that the planets orbit the sun. These were all facts discovered by Westerners only after Galileo invented the telescope.”
“The system is also known to the Bozo, who call Sirius sima kayne (literally: sitting trouser) and its satellite tono nalema (literally: eye star).” Lately another Kayne has become popular. He is hardly a sitting trouser. Has the Kardashian husband been gifted to us from a distant solar system?
At some point in HAFP, Larry Diamond makes plans to go to Timbuktu. He will lick the belly of the toad, and take a magic carpet ride. Gwen Mati was grossed out. “It sounds like a drug.” “Its a hallucinogenic bufotoxin. Aspirin is a drug.”
“Bufotoxin, a moderately potent poison secreted in the skin of many anuran amphibians, especially the typical toads (genus Bufo.) The milky fluid contains several identifiable components: bufagin, with effects on the heart similar to those of digitalis; bufotenine, a hallucinogen; and serotonin, a vasoconstrictor. The composition of the poison varies with the species of toad. Taken internally, the poison causes severe, even fatal reaction in many predators, but some animals (e.g., hognosed snakes) are not affected. The poison does not normally affect human skin, but it does irritate the eyes and mucous membranes.” There was no word on spores from outer space.
This is enough fun for one day. Part one of this series is available at an internet near you. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.

This is a repost from 2015. Tom Robbins is still alive after 92 years on the planet. … There is a quote on page sixty nine of Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, by Tom Robbins. Yes, that magic number, representing mutual oral gratification when it is not the product of twenty three skiddoo times three. The line is from a poem, “Fruits and Vegetables,” by Erica Jong. Before we get much further, maybe we should hear the line. If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.
This is synchronicity in living color. Tom Robbins and Erica Jong have been two of my favorite authors for thirty seven plus years. They both gave readings in a converted auto dealership on Pharr Road in the early nineties. I was at both, even if all I saw of Mr. Robbins was the author sitting down autographing books. The thought that these two confirmed heterosexuals might have performed reproductive acts sends literary gossipmongers into zipless fits. And to have this quote dropping on page 69, about a red juicy fruit/vegetable/berry… it just takes the pizza pie prize.
The humble tomato is a much written about food product . A disagreement over pronunciation provides lyrics for a hit song. It is dandy for throwing. Some say it is easy to grow. (I have tall trees surrounding my backyard, and no luck at all with ‘maters.)
The structure of the word… to, as in direction, ma, as in mother, another two letter to… tomato has a symmetry unknown to chocolate or pineapple. The oh sound at the end makes tomato easy to rhyme. Tomato spelled backwards is otamot, which is total nonsense. Whatever it’s other virtues, tomato is neither a palindrome nor a weapon of mass destruction.
When I saw the tomato quote, he asked Mr. Google for more information. One of the results was a page by Jason Webley. This is a musician, who used to write about oddities on his web page. Mr. Webley is currently on tour in Europe, which might not be the comfortable thing to do at this very moment. His commentary was instructional.
“The tomato does have a funny history. It, like many of the vegetables we eat is a New World plant. Somehow the Itallians made do without tomato paste until realtively recently (likewise with the Irish and their potatos.) When the plant was first discovered by Europeans in South America is was believed to be deadly (a member of the Nightshade family) but pretty. Rumor has it, the tomato was believed to be the apple of forbidden knowledge from the Garden of Eden. It was brought back to Europe purely as a decorative plant and actually made it all the way around the Mediteranean and back across the Atlantic to North America before people got up the courage to eat the thing.”
Mr. Webley is full of arcane knowledge, From him we learn: Lahnaphobia: Fear of vegetables. (spell check suggestion:Islamophobia) ~ The difference between a fruit and a vegetable: In accordance with a US Supreme Court ruling in 1893, the difference between a fruit and a vegetable is as follows: ‘Any plant or part thereof eaten during the main dish is a vegetable. If it is eaten at any other part of the meal, it is a fruit.’ ~ Have you ever noticed that the Bible is full of references to corn? Doesn’t this seem a bit unusual, considering that corn is a new world grain developed in the region now known as Guatemala and was completely unknown to Europe and the Middle East until at least 500 years ago? Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.