dual personalities

October 5, 2015

O friends, in gladness let us sing, supernal anthems echoing*

by chuckofish

[FYI supernal means a) being or coming from on high b) heavenly, ethereal.]

I went to church twice on Sunday so I am feeling the supernal vibe. I read at Evensong, but I had to go to a meeting after the 10 a.m. service, so that is why I also attended that service. I am “mentoring” one of our confirmands, so I was getting the lowdown on expectations for the coming year. My assignment is a girl I have known since she was a tiny tot and not someone who is too cool for me. No piercings or dyed black hair either. All ~~should~~ will be well.

The boy came over after church and knocked down an old fence for us.

The OM and I would have wrestled with this for who knows how long, so once again, how grateful we are to have his manly help.

It took him all of 10 minutes, so we went out to lunch at Steak ‘N Shake.

On Friday night the OM and I went to a work-sponsored party at the zoo. I got to see the new polar bear in his swanky new environment.

He growled at me through the glass. He was up-close and personal, right? I wanted to see him swimming, but he did not oblige.

We also saw some penguins

and we rode on the empty train.

We ate a hotdog and went home. It was an evening well spent.

I am reading the new mystery by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling)–The Silkworm, which I am enjoying very much. I am not a big mystery fan, but the characters in her series are real (not cardboard) and I like her P.D., Cormoran Strike.

I watched Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which I did not particularly like, and Send Me No Flowers (1964) with Rock Hudson (“Is it a sharp pain, is it a dull pain, or does it grip like a vice?”), which I liked very much.

Also, this is pretty darn great:

How was your weekend?

*Lasst uns erfreuen, #618

7 Comments

October 3, 2015

Cultivate the Merry Heart*

by chuckofish

Recently I learned that on Sundays my DH doesn’t read his email. That conscious policy — an act of defiance if ever there was one — gave me an idea. After I post this, I’m going to turn off the internet — at least for the rest of the day! I don’t know about you, but I am beyond tired of the reductionism rampant on the internet. Everything (especially politics) gets reduced to dumb slogans and simplistic, black and white equations: If you believe X, then you are Y (apply whatever values to X and Y you want). The lack of depth or simple logic is deplorable. Yes, it’s so bad that it inspires me to rant.

Admit it. You’d love to say that to loads of people. Sigh. But no. We are going to laugh at all that self-righteousness, right?

And cultivate a merry heart. It’s so much healthier for the blood pressure.

Have a deep, complex and entirely satisfying weekend and when the world makes you mad, laugh like Errol 🙂

*Norman Vincent Peale

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October 2, 2015

Friday movie pick: “He’s the last guy in the world I woulda’ figured.”*

by chuckofish

Thirty years ago today, Rock Hudson died after a 15-month battle with AIDS . He was only 59.

So in his memory, I suggest we watch one of his movies tonight.

We could go with Rock Hudson and John Wayne in The Undefeated (1970)

or Rock Hudson and Doris Day and Tony Randall in Pillow Talk (1959)

or Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida in Come September (1961).

His 1950s melodramas are a little heavy-handed for my taste but they’re not terrible. And he was great in his later career playing stand-up military types like Cdr. Ferraday in Ice Station Zebra (1968). But I like his romantic comedies best. He was perfect in them.

Indeed, he was just kind of perfect.

Have a great weekend! You go, Mike Matheny!

Yes, the Cardinals clinched their third straight division title, their fifth straight playoff appearance and their 12th postseason trip in the past 16 seasons. 100 wins. Central Division champs! Home field advantage!

*Fred in Lover Come Back (1961)–Hudson’s comedies are peppered with lines like this, as if his gayness was one big private joke in Hollywood (wink wink). I guess it was.

7 Comments

October 1, 2015

“Salutations!” said the voice.”*

by chuckofish

Well, here we go. Ninety-one days left in the year!

It will be Christmas before we know it. Plans are full-speed ahead for 2016 at work. 2016! But the millennium was yesterday!

Well, time marches on and all that.

Today, in memory of E.B. White, who died on this day in 1985 (30 years ago!), let’s have a moment with our favorite spider Charlotte.

“Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’

‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

When the book was published in 1952, Eudora Welty reviewed it in the New York Times, writing, “As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.” I concur.

As you know, I have a love/hate relationship with spiders, but I do love Charlotte.

And, OMG, this year marks the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas! So buy your commemorative Christmas stamps today!

And the Cards won the division! There is joy in Mudville again!

*Charlotte

4 Comments

September 30, 2015

Big Time flyover news and some other stuff

by chuckofish

Well–yay–now we have our very own IKEA store in our flyover town. Woohoo. This is big news for us, but since I have been to the College Park store many times, I’ll wait ’til the crowds thin out a bit before I venture down to see it.

Of course, there are always some ~~weirdos~~ zealous shoppers who camp out for days so that they can be the first ones in when the store opens on the first day. Prizes are usually involved.

Free meatballs for a year–not an incentive for me. But far be it from me to judge–to each his own.

Speaking of to each his own, here is something from the Advice-I-Don’t-Need Department via Apartment Therapy:

Without logos, brand names and stores taking up free advertising real estate in your bathroom, the whole place looks cleaner. A little more streamlined and a lot more elegant. Here’s what you need to do:

Peel the labels off. Take your hand soaps and lotions and peel the sticky labels right off, cleaning up any stubborn pieces with a solution like Goo Gone.
Re-pot anything that needs a new container. Shampoo in a brightly colored bottle that’s totally messing with your chi? Funnel it into a shatter-proof bottle with a cork pour spout.
Use glass jars and bowls to wrangle small items. Take cotton swabs out of their cardboard boxes and cotton balls out of bags. Arrange bobby pins in a neat little bowl (IKEA is great for these).

Okay, I admit I already put cotton balls and Q-Tips in a glass jar and bobby pins etc in a variety of little bowls, but who has time to peel the labels off their shampoo bottles? Get a life, people!

I wonder why people are so obsessive these days about their living spaces. I blame social media.

Speaking of social media, here’s a funny picture I found on the John Wayne Facebook page.

You gotta admit: That. is. great. Have a good Wednesday!

6 Comments

September 29, 2015

Like a flash of light*

by chuckofish

Conversion_on_the_Way_to_Damascus-Caravaggio_(c.1600-1)

“And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

Today is the birthday of the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571–1610). I am not a big fan of his art, but I have always liked his painting of the conversion of Saint Paul. It is realistic and dramatic and the light–wow. Clearly something big is happening to Saul of Tarsus under the hooves of his horse.

Anyway, it gives us an opportunity to think about conversion today. Here is Frederick Buechner on the subject:

There are a number of conversions described in the New Testament. You think of Paul seeing the light on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19), or the Ethiopian eunuch getting Philip to baptize him on the way from Jerusalem to Gaza (Acts 8:28-40). There is also the apostle Thomas saying, “My Lord and my God!” when he is finally convinced that Jesus is alive and whole again (John 20:26-29), not to mention the Roman centurion who witnessed the crucifixion saying, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Luke 23:47). All these scenes took place suddenly, dramatically, when they were least expected. They all involved pretty much of an about-face, which is what the word conversion means. We can only imagine that they all were accompanied by a good deal of emotion.

But in this same general connection there are other scenes that we should also remember. There is the young man who, when Jesus told him he should give everything he had to the poor if he really wanted to be perfect as he said he did, walked sorrowfully away because he was a very rich man. There is Nicodemus, who was sufficiently impressed with Jesus to go talk to him under cover of darkness and later to help prepare his body for burial, but who never seems to have actually joined forces with him. There is King Agrippa, who, after hearing Paul’s impassioned defense of his faith, said, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian” (Acts 26:28, KJV). There is even Pontius Pilate, who asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) under such circumstances as might lead you to suspect that just possibly, half without knowing it, he really hoped Jesus would be able to give him the answer, maybe even become for him the answer.

Like the conversions, there was a certain amount of drama about these other episodes too and perhaps even a certain amount of emotion, though for the most part unexpressed. But of course in the case of none of them was there any about-face. Presumably all these people kept on facing more or less the same way they had been right along. King Agrippa, for instance, kept on being King Agrippa just as he always had. And yet you can’t help wondering if somewhere inside himself, as somewhere also inside the rest of them, the “almost” continued to live on as at least a sidelong glance down a new road, the faintest itching of the feet for a new direction.

We don’t know much about what happened to any of them after their brief appearance in the pages of Scripture, let alone what happened inside them. We can only pray for them, not to mention also for ourselves, that in the absence of a sudden shattering event, there was a slow underground process that got them to the same place in the end.

–Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

Discuss among yourselves.

*”Like a flash of light, I realized in what an abyss of errors, in what chaos I was.” (John Calvin)

4 Comments

September 28, 2015

Exercise daily: walk with Jesus*

by chuckofish

I finally made it back to church this weekend and was a lay reader. I read a good long piece from Numbers about Moses having a “Kill me now, Lord” moment when his whiney brethren were remembering the good times back in Egypt. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic…but now there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” People never change, do they? It is good to go to church and be reminded of this. We also received a finger-shaking piece of the assisting priest’s mind during the announcements. She scolded us for not singing loudly enough. This annoyed me somewhat, but I also know from whence she comes. Some people just never sing; they never even open their hymnals and pretend. C’mon now. Sing out.

The OM and I planted twelve iris bulbs that someone had given me in the hopes that they will be blooming when my birthday swings around in April. Wasn’t that thoughtful? The least we could do was plant them! We indulged ourselves afterwards with a trip to Shake ‘N Shake.

I watched Seven Seas to Calais (see Friday’s post)–having paid $1.99 on Amazon to do so. It was not as terrible as I feared, but it was pretty bad. I tried to watch some of those old James Dean television shows (see Thursday’s post) and they were basically unwatchable. Mostly I continued with The Wire season one, which I started watching when daughter #2 was home last weekend, despite the boy’s admonition not to. I am really enjoying it.

I think Bal’more and my flyover hometown are very similar, so it is kind of fascinating to me. It is very well done, and once you get over the fact that every other word is the f-word or the mf-word, it’s okay. (It is important to cleanse the palate so to speak by listening to something like the above youtube video after each episode.)

The Cardinals continue to get closer to winning the division, but yesterday’s game was a debacle! Don’t get cocky, redbirds! Onward and upward. Have a good week!

*Seen on a church sign this weekend.

6 Comments

September 26, 2015

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”*

by chuckofish

And he will. Happy Birthday to my youngest son, who turns twenty today!

My, but how time flies. He was just a little peanut barely big enough to sit on the front steps of our house.

I’m happy to see that he hasn’t lost the mischievous smile or the twinkle in his eye. Long may it be so!

If, while you are contemplating your own past, you want a good read over the weekend (or maybe several; it’s long) and you haven’t already read it, dive into Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Its quite wonderful and deserves all the accolades it has received over the years. Yes, it could have used some editing — it’s a little long-winded in places — but I applaud her point; beautiful things — art, literature, music, knowledge — make life worth living. The truth is, “that fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.” Amen to that.

*Herman Melville, Moby Dick

2 Comments

September 25, 2015

True glory

by chuckofish

On this day in 1580 Sir Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation of the Earth.

Can you even imagine such a thing? In the sixteenth century?

Drake’s expedition was the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, from 1577 to 1580, and was the first to be completed with the same captain and leader of the expedition throughout the entire circumnavigation. (Ferdinand Magellan died in the Philippines and the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation did not make it up to North America.)

Yes, Sir Francis Drake was quite a guy. Why, I ask, didn’t they make a movie about him starring Errol Flynn?

Well, according to IMDB.com, there is a movie called Seven Seas to Calais (1962) starring Rod Taylor as Drake, which was Italian-produced and originally called “Il dominatore dei 7 mari”.

In this dubious flick “Sir Francis Drake goes on an expedition to the New World and steals gold from the Spaniards. After making a daring getaway, he returns to England where he protects Queen Elizabeth I from a network of spies who are plotting to overthrow her.” You can see the whole movie on Amazon and I may have to check it out this weekend.

Meanwhile, let us not forget that there is a new show debuting on Sunday night starring Don Johnson.

I’m sure it is terrible, accent on really bad, but I have to give it a try. I mean c’mon. Don Johnson.

I will close with this great prayer by Drake which I know I have quoted before, but it certainly bears repeating:

“Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little,
when we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the waters of life,  having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity,  and in our efforts to build a new earth,
we have allowed our vision of the new heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas,  where storms will show your mastery,  where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.  We ask you to push back the horizon of our hopes,  and to push us into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.  This we ask in the name of our Captain, who is Jesus Christ. ”

Have a great weekend!

4 Comments

September 24, 2015

“Oh he’s real abstract. He’s…different.”*

by chuckofish

Tomorrow (Friday) is James Dean day on TCM–so set your DVR! And wait–they aren’t showing the usual three movies–the only ones he made before dying at age 24. They are presenting a selection of performances that he gave on live television that are rarely seen. All the programs are TCM premieres.

Born in Indiana, Dean moved to New York City in 1951 to study at the Actors Studio. While in NYC he performed in stage and TV dramas, and these are the roles to be showcased. They include a thief who finds redemption in Something for an Empty Briefcase (1953) for NBC’s “Campbell Soundstage”; an accused murderer in Sentence of Death (1953) for CBS’s “Studio One”; an ex-convict struggling for a new life in the Rod Serling teleplay, A Long Time Till Dawn (1953) for NBC’s “Kraft Theatre”; the restless son of a farm couple (Dorothy Gish and Ed Begley) in Harvest (1953) for NBC’s “Robert Montgomery Presents”; a waiter suspected of stealing in Run Like a Thief (1954) for NBC’s “The Philco-Goodyear Playhouse”; a lovestruck stable boy in Sherwood Anderson’s I’m a Fool(1954), with Natalie Wood, for CBS’s “General Electric Theater”; a “hepcat” killer in The Dark, Dark Hours (1954), with Ronald Reagan, for the “General Electric Theater”; and a wealthy man accused of robbing his family in The Thief (1955), with Diana Lynn and Mary Astor, for the ABC “United States Steel Hour.”

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait! (My apologies and regrets to those of you who do not get TCM or have DVR capabilities. So it goes. Why not watch Rebel Without a Cause–always a fine idea!)

*Buzz Gunderson in Rebel Without a Cause

3 Comments