I’m still mining Sundays from 10 years ago. I thought you might be interested to know that the big Web-page makeover that I’ve talked about recently (and have talked about off and on in the past) might really happen this time. If it doesn’t, I just wasted money on a retainer I paid to some fine young people who’re going to help me put it all together technically. Of course, I learned I’m still going to have to provide the content. Sheesh! It isn’t scheduled to roll out until spring, possibly even late spring, and I have no idea what it will look like, because I’ve yet to come up with a concept and the artwork to support it—that “content” bugaboo I mentioned. However, I will keep you posted as events warrant.
Literary Achievement
By Jimmy Johnson
Recent Posts
Ghost of Christmas Past
This holiday Arlo & Janis comic strip from 2022 is similar in concept to the new strip that ran yesterday. I thought the latter ...
Spearhead
I have produced a number of comic strips related to Veteran’s Day. Especially in latter years, I have tried to emphasize the universal experience ...
Dark Passage
Remember: it’s that weekend. The return to standard time can be a bit of a shock in the late afternoon, but I rather enjoy ...
What’s old is old, again
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to build a web site, but there are similarities. Everything needs to be just right, or ...
Back to the ol’ drawing board
I don’t have a lot of time this morning. I wasn’t going to post anything, but I’m tired of looking at that old photograph ...
Thursday’s Child
On Sunday, I teased you with the suggestion there are more changes coming here. There are. They will appear soon, and I think you’ll ...
442 responses to “Literary Achievement”
Debbe, think Pokey Rider6 would say this is his Carly favorite..http://www.singers.com/people/images/CarlySimon.jpg
Or burn them one by one. Or make a paper boat and launch one by one in a moving stream.
Mark, I haven’t done that in centuries! Platonic and pure love, returned the same way. I am almost a saint and almost a nun! Which is why our past troll just annoyed the p…s out of me with all the pretense of piety and joining an “order”. Some do have that call or gift but he/she wasn’t one and neither am I!
On a separate note, Sand you are a most interesting person. What a concept, thinking as a form of free enterprise! And Loon is your partner.
I had/have two good friends with a similar job description, sometimes n’er do well and free range chicken farmer. Both highly degreed and intelligent men who have been married once and lived on opposite coasts. Both liberals and I am more of a Texas conservative, sort of. One was friend whose funeral was in my back yard.
We don’t need any stinking support groups, we have the Village.
Love, Jackie
Here, in N Illinois, we have had over a foot since 8:20 last night. News program says to expect another 6″ of so of the blankety-blank stuff. Winds are steadily in the 30-40 mph range, hence our official blizzard warnings. Drive and walk have been done twice (plus a partial time) so far, and will need a third blowing tomorrow. This is getting to be a drag, to say the least.
Good comment about the declining quality of mirrors over the decades from Sand; thanks for the spot of humor.
GR…dedicated to you: pokie mon 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaV-6qerkqI
Jackie…we all need support groups, this Village included. But my most important support “group”..underwire bras 🙂
Jackie, tread carefully in the destruction of documents ; those kinds of actions never look good to the jury.
Only problem with a thinking enterprise is that you never can get away from the office. I just used Murray Gell-Mann as my role model. Once I learned the you could get a Nobel prize for thinking; it became clear any one could do it. 😉
Good night….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXrEJfeuz2E
“trying to rationalize why a 21 year old mother of a three month old baby girl was killed in a head on collision on Thursday.”
Sorry, but you cannot rationalize, “Why her?” or “Why me?” Faith is, among other things, how you deal with a physical world that doesn’t care about you. I pray that will help for you. Years back, I posted an extract from a column / that kind of thing. I’ll do it again, if I can find it.
Peace, emb
enb,,, “Faith is, among other things, how you deal with a physical world that doesn’t care about you. I pray that will help for you.”
…and you are so true.
“Inside every 80-year-old is a very puzzled 20-year-old.”
Jackie, you’ve paid your dues. Go crazy. A little. We’ll tell you when it’s too much. 🙂
“Find” sure is a useful tool. I knew it contained “of spades”. This is from late ’01 or early ’02.
“Beryl” wondered what we thought. Here’s part of my reply: “I don’t think nature is rigidly deterministic, though it is causal, not capricious. Also, I accept possible divine inspiration (without understanding how it works), but none of those positions is testable. The probability of being dealt the A-K-Q-J-10 of spades is infinitesimal (one over 52 factorial, I think). The probability of ANY other PARTICULAR poker hand is equally low. (Four-of-a-kind is not a particular hand, as there are many possible combinations.) Your friend has described a particular situation, analogous to being dealt the A-K-Q-J-10 of spades. Any equally complex sequence she could have described, made up of individual events of the same probabilities, would be equally unlikely. The special thing about her tale was its desirable outcome. That’s when we say, ‘it was a miracle,’ or ‘God must have intervened.’ That she overcooked her okra the night before resulted from a comparable chain of events, but is unimportant, so we don’t blame God.
“Does it make a difference? I think so. Last September [9/11], many such situations occurred. Isaac made it to work. Patrick did not, because he missed his commuter train. Isaac died in the WTC atrocity; Patrick lived, and credited God. Should Isaac’s widow blame God? Did God choose to save those who were saved? If Patrick later develops Alzheimer’s, should his family wish he’d made it to work? They wouldn’t be tortured by watching Dad lose it, and the government would have paid them well. Suppose Isaac’s wife was cheating on him and she and Lothario were plotting Isaac’s murder anyway, but now they have the million bucks. Isaac himself was also deceiving his wife, and Ruby, a floozy with no talents outside of the bedroom, and no other means of support, was pregnant with his child. A novelist might make a best seller of this. Is God a novelist with a sense of irony, a puppet master who likes to watch the evil prosper and the good suffer, a sadist who lets Satan have free rein? [Cf. the Book of Job.] “It makes a difference because believing that God intervenes lessens our responsibility to behave sensibly in a natural universe that itself does not care about us. God cares, I think, but generally opts not to monkey with the events of our lives. If we think God is responsible for significant events, or that other super-natural forces influence such events, we can end up doing nasty things, or failing to do good things, like getting our sick child a blood transfusion. I preached on that once.”
Peace, emb
Agreed, EMB, I went through that same attempt to ask “Why Me?” One horrific thing after another happened to me as a relatively young woman and on my knees in church, I begged for some reason. What had I done? Why me? Would it ever end? I felt like Job, crying in the wilderness and not getting an answer. Was I being punished? Certainly knew I had sinned, so maybe this was cosmic retribution?
Sorry, it isn’t any of those and in my humble experience I don’t think there are answers. Not any you will get right away in a voice from on high. They will come from deep within you and arrive but not on a schedule or very fast. And if they do, it may be when you realize you did survive it all, you weren’t to blame, you weren’t being punished and somewhere down the line you know you are a better person for it.
Sorry, Super Bowl always puts me in a philosophical mode and I think of the bigger meaning of things. It isn’t a game, of course.
Sailors are not especially Super Bowl watchers either, so I am over waxing philosophical about boats and the Zen of boat building and sailing. Getting my mojo back probably.
Love, Jackie
Denise: Yes, I still want you to write my obituary…but, as I said, just not too soon. 🙂
No, not octogenarian! Not yet.
This is where I stop what I am doing and go read a book. Dozens of watch caps, a dozen Tillys, Aussie leather hat, Stetson so fine it was my personal job to keep it from flinging onto floor on trips, sunblock woven hats, ventilated hats, but a white Clark Gable plantation woven hat? A
woven Outback Plantation hat? And I have memories of one or two. I bought the Hawaiian woven hat and the sewn pheasant lei hatband myself but when did he buy some of the others?
And the sailing caps, the ones I am looking for? Can’t find. I was an indulgent woman it seems!
Keeping a few of the sailing clothes with an unlikely hope I might fit into them someday, since I have NEVER been a medium at any time in life. Looked at one of windsurfer body suits and that would be the impossible dream!
Off to read a real book with a hard cover and paper pages.
Love, Jackie
I’m sure that I’ve shared this here before,but it is fitting in regards to gifts. My Dad was constantly reminding me to “leave the world a little bit better than what you’ve taken from it” Or in other words always give more than you receive.
When Dad was in the hospital for the last time, just before he slipped mentally, I told him I had tried to live my life to his motto, but I wound “the more I give, the more that I receive, which means that I have to give some more. It’s an endless cycle!” My Dad looked at me and smiled and said “Now you’re getting it”
That is one fine looking possum outside my desk eating. Healthy diet of cat kibble and canned cat food! With a prehensile curved tail. Looked like a snake in window but the munching gave it away. Snakes don’t crunch and munch.
Steve, if we all got that, think what the world could be like?
Jackie, there is a thing called Freecycle on the net. It’s supposed to be a way for people to list things they want to give away, like the clothes you are clearing out. In Tennessee, it worked very well. Here in Tuscaloosa, I signed up but all I ever saw were people wanting, but not giving much. Anyway, it is better than throwing away useful items if you don’t have a Goodwill or Salvation Army collection center.
If you have books you want to get rid of, and of course there are more you want to read, try this site: http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php
You post books you want to trade out. When someone requests one of your books, you send it to them (you can print out a mailing wrapper from the site). When the person tells the site they got the book, you get a credit to order a book from what’s available. It works well. When I used it, the deliveries were pretty quick and I only got the wrong book once, and never got a really bad copy.
Horrors, a “blasphemy”! MPR apologized and bleeped it in the rebroadcast. Somebody or two [“Bless their hearts”?] objected to “Elohimdarn” which is one of the words in a presumably copyrighted song. See below.
http://www.farces.com/blasphemy-right-up-here-on-the-far-edge/
On the other hand, we should maybe be thankful no masked gunmen shot up MPR HQ, or the onstage radio show at the Fitz. Our zealots aren’t as bad as some. But then, there was Oklahoma City. Well, at least they’re not as common or violent, today.
Peace, emb
Mark, I am a recycler from way back and always donate. One time I showed up at the God’s Helping Hands shop with a truck load of my mother in laws excess (which she really thought I was storing I think) and the sweet little ladies were so happy and grateful I asked if they could use more? Six truck loads of stuff and they were in tears because they had been praying for more merchandise for their little charity and I was sent. They moved out of our town and I need to find where they are located now? We also had a local women’s shelter that needed help as many of the women arrive with nothing.
I just always ask if someone cannot use what I give that they pass it on to someone who can.
Many of our boating/sailing friends may not be as supplied as we are and I will give away Mike’s sailing clothes to them. And many just may want them because it was Mike.
Thanks for idea, I find it inspiring what suggestions come through A and J.
Love, Jackie
Oklahoma City and the Murrah building will always stand out as a homegrown terrorist for me.
Most of my old agency died or was injured in the blast, they were right at front of building.
Since most of us had retired or taken reassignment rather than come to OKC my personal friends were not in blast range, but still it makes no difference.
Here I am in Oklahoma anyway and the horror of watching it unfold on television live is still very much in my memory.
Thank you, Mark, for the book trading site. Jerry had SCADS of books. I’ll check with his daughter about it.
Jackie, someone in our office was on a call with Murrah when the line went dead. Was our first warning. That April 19, like 9-11, was a day of mass confusion.
Sand, we used to get so many bomb threats, it was after all in a period it wasn’t especially a crime to threaten us. We’d evacuate, they’d search, we’d go back.
Nor was it a crime then to threaten a federal employee verbally or in letters. You probably know all this. People got angry at me for decisions and I got lot of threats, When we shared a giant office, co-workers practiced a “hit the floor under the desk” routine for me, yelling “It’s her you want!” Black humor.
Moved me to a private office with a secretary-receptionist who was always being borrowed. Joke was she volunteered to get out of line of fire. Coworkers would say they would put up signs and arrows directing people to my office.
All black humor stops being funny when it becomes real. I think you know this already.
Love, Jackie
Debbe 😉 I’ll bet that back in the day you were just plain sweet, weren’t you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBin9qC5dKg&list=RDbBin9qC5dKg#t=46