‘Now that I have your attention’

by


I’ve been traveling the past few days on a Presidents’ Day holiday trip. No, I didn’t know there was such a thing, either! I will be home in the morning, and I will try to post something a bit more ambitious then.

Buy the new book, "Beaucoup Arlo & Janis!"Today's "Arlo & Janis!"

84 thoughts on “‘Now that I have your attention’”

  3. Posted this on wrong thread:

    Jackie-sending you good wishes for your taxol treatments. My mother was the first person in Oklahoma to get Taxol for her ovarian cancer way back in the early 1990?s. Her treatment was also not without problems. At first an arithmetic error resulted in her doses being smaller than recommended, and when that was corrected she also had some reactions to the drug. Nevertheless, when the treatment was complete, her CA125 readings were back to normal and her cancer did not recur in the almost 20 remaining years of her life. That drug is hard on your body but harder on the cancer. You may never be able to tolerate the full dose, but what you have, may be enough to do the job. Keep hanging in there – we are all pulling for you.

  4. Thank you for good wishes. My blood pressure went back to normal this morning and my blood sugars got out of the high 300s and down to 172. That is huge improvement.

    They loaded me up with tons of steroids and I have been trying to flush out with gallons of water. Good hydration has been one of my best characteristics my doctor says.

    My hair is returning but perhaps white?

  5. Most of you know that this pair of peregrines live on this approx. 30 story ledge year round. Baltimore doesn’t get too cold in winter, and there’s a year-round food supply of starlings and rock pigeons [unwanted introduced pests]. Both adults are around but no eggs yet. Nice [for us] that peregrines don’t build nests, just lay eggs on a ledge. If both the hawk [female] and tercel [male, not Toyota] are there at the same time and equidistant from the wide-angle webcam, you can tell them apart. He’s smaller, which is true of most spp. of hawks. Eagles are hawks.

    https://chesapeakeconservancy.org/explore/wildlife-webcams/peregrine-falcon/

    If you copy and store that website, you won’t have to depend on me to keep you up to date.

    Peace,

  8. It looks suspicious like it is coming back curly. It had some curl but I wore smooth and flatironed or permed until had to stop perming and dying due to lupus.

  11. Mark:

    Guilt trip City: Most male villagers may not be as bad as that couch potato in “Herman” but how many of us can say we actually do [or did] our share? Some rise to the occasion, as Ghost is doing now.

    Peace,

  16. Happy GW and Arthur Schopenhauer Day. [Just learned the latter.]

    Schopenhauer, Arthur, phil. (22 Feb 1788-1860). Men are the devils of the earth and the animals are its tormented souls. AWAD180222

    Peace,

  19. Good morning Villagers……a a damp and cold one at that…

    Had a good supper last night….teriyaki pork loin. spinach, an Asian salad (pre -made of course). Husband came for supper; Ian’s friend who is asst mgr at Subway brought a container each of broccoli and cheddar soup and a container of ‘tater soup’.

    in the meantime, I’ll leave you with this 🙂

    https://i.chzbgr.com/full/9128998912/hBBF2315B/

  20. Today is Miss Charlottes happy 85th birthday!

    Ghost and I send love and hugs and 85 birthday kisses from Dickens who specializes in kissing and licking!

  29. Thank you for your thoughtful birthday wishes! You are so nice to think of me. It’s been a great day — son Steve and daughter Amy came out from Ithaca NY yesterday, and today in spite of light snow, we drove to the University of New Hampshire, where Chris and I met in 1951. Stopped and looked around one of the old buildings where a lot of memories were made. Then on to the Seacoast… actually to Dover, an early settlement on Great Bay. I would NEVER drive that far for fried seafood, even though it’s a favorite, but it seemed okay as UNH is near the coast anyway. We could watch snow falling from the grey sky into the grey water and onto some seagulls who didn’t seem bothered. Big windows in the seafood place.

    There will be a party Saturday, which I will tell you about if my energy level stays up. Wish I could invite the Villagers!

  31. I just saw that something adverse did occur at Berry College: one of the eaglets – only about a week old – fell out of the nest, fatally. Pshaw. No details available.

  32. 1. c x-p: Sorry for your loss.

    2. I get Hi and Lois via Comics Kingdom, and am apparently out of the loop. How is the difference btw Greek and Roman mythology like “Marvel vs. D.C.”? Wait: Are those two comics syndicates?
    Also, what about asking a grade schooler for that distinction. Only major differences that occur to this unlettered prof. are a. the gods have different names [e.g., Aphrodite vs. Venus], and b. Perhaps in the Empire, the gods were more incorporated into official affairs, though it was not really an established religion in our current sense.

    Peace,

  33. emb, those are the two largest comic book publishers. DC has Superman, etc and Marvel has Spiderman and the like. DC was strongest in the late 1930’s-1960’s, and Marvel has been gaining ground since the early 1960’s.

  35. The differences are also philosophical, strange as that may seem. The Romans were building an empire, so their versions of the gods had more authoritarian, perhaps militaristic traits. The Greek Ares was more about war for the sake of it, while the Roman Mars was more focused and involved with discipline and conquest.

    DC comics reflected the times of their beginnings, with the nearly perfect heroes often depicted in WWII scenarios. Marvel fed off the 1960s’ counterculture, with troubled characters dealing with their personal issues — and then with societal ones, with racial themes supplemented with mutant issues. For a while many of the Marvel characters had to cope with being outlawed or regulated by government. DC comics picked up on those themes a decade or two later, but by then Marvel had picked up more than half the market.

  36. Thanks. So the kid is just saying one is earlier, the other later. You continue broadening your liberal ed, or you never actually started in the first place, no matter what courses you took. I got much of mine, as noted here before, team-teaching an intro honors course at BSU with a psych teacher and a Shakespeare scholar. So did they.

    This morning’s Pioneer: just lost a former neighbor, woman who made the classical mistake as a teen, eventually divorced the two-timer, managed to turn her life around, w/o a college ed and never rich, but socially mature, net contributor to the community. Funeral w/b later, in nice weather. “Kids” she could be proud of. Expect Elaine has welcomed her.

    Peace,

  38. emb, I don’t think it is one is earlier, the other is later. It’s like TruckerRon said, they both have similar subject matter but they diverge in characterization and action.

  39. Mark: granted, I realize what Trucker is saying. But a kid that age doesn’t likely know much re the changes in society that occurred in the latter half of the 20th C. He may know one outfit is older, or maybe just that the two exist. OTOH, it is hard to know what is in the head of a grade-school kid who has been that age for decades. Time to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the comic.

    I know what calico is, and how it has long been applied to cats. Must look up gingham, which perhaps is only applied to dogs in this nursery rhyme.

    Peace,

  41. Or, if it was the younger of the two, that its sib pushed it out. Often, nature is not pretty. When it is, we can find ways to make it less so. Peace,

  42. The only gingham dogs I could find were stuffed animals, with the appropriate checked pattern.

    Nature outside is pretty today; sun on snow. I have to be careful, / stupid behavior about 12 yr. ago; residual snowblindness.

    Hi, right about now is 26F, but temps will plunge, and more snow in the offing. Happy Lent. I’ve given up snowball fights.

    Peace,

  43. I did not know the parent would do that, Sideburns; makes sense in nature, though.

    I do know of sibs’ actions. In the same abode as today’s crop of barn owls, there were 4 owlets about 3 or 4 years ago, and the two older ones quite systematically killed the two younger ones by keeping them away from food and by standing/sitting on them at every chance. When they died, the operator of the cameras stopped showing the family for about a week or so. My guess is that, during that span, s/he managed to get into the nesting box and clear out the bodies…without being attacked by the parents.

    Good to hear the neighborhood ruffians will be safe from eMb’s snowballs until April 1st.

  46. Dear emb, I bet you do miss the seafood and the ocean. Amy graduated from Cornell in the 1980’s; she followed her boyfriend out there when he was getting an advanced degree; now they’re married, still live and work on one of Ithaca’s hills. Steve, our oldest child, and his wife and daughter live in Lansing, a town farther up Cayuga Lake.

    Would you believe there is a very large salt mine in Lansing! It’s associated with the ancient lake in some way I’ve forgotten. I was surprised to learn this. But it makes me think of Mozart, in Salsburg.

    For eighty years I have been reading that poem by Eugene Field. Have lots of poetry books, mostly anthologies, and often dip into one or another. Field was a tough newspaperman who also wrote sentimental and/or amusing poetry; Little Boy Blue, and Wynkin, Blinkin, and Nod are/were very popular a hundred years ago.

    Nice to read of the Ithaca connection in the Wikipedia article! Thanks to Mark for finding this — what an amazing talent you have. I will show this to Amy tomorrow; she will be interested; Steve too, he is awfully literary.

  49. First things first …. HAPPY BELATED 86TH BIRTHDAY, MISS CHARLOTTE 🙂 (PSST,,YOU WOULDN’T BE INTERESTED IN AN 86 YEAR OLD MAN?)

    I pray the rest of you have a dry Caturday…..cause we aren’t

    later gaters…

    Jerry, you still with..I pray so

  56. Ms. Kirk, yes, I remember gingham and calico. I also grew up on that poem. My chief education on poetry was not at my public school—which I very much regret to write. America has never matched the education in the humanities that our forbears on other continents have accomplished routinely. Though my elementary teachers did try to teach a little poetry. But they had had scant training. That has not changed in teacher training.

    Instead, my poetry education came primarily from one book: “The Golden Treasury of Poetry,” edited by Louis Untermeyer in 1959. I was given a copy by a dear aunt in 1963. That’s where I learned some poems by Eugene Field (though not “The Duel”) and the names of Alfred Noyes, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, and others. A huge, wonderful book for a child!

    Though it did not teach me about iambs, trochees, or poetic meter, so sad to say, which are dirt easy to learn. I never did have an education proper in that.

    And now what I think is a $64,000 question: Where did Mr. James Johnson learn this literature? And, actually, I can’t say where I learned “The Duel,” for it’s not in Untermeyer’s book. But it gave me the education to read more widely.

    Alas that U.S. newspapers stopped printing poetry as they used to!

  83. Ref naming of certain geological features, I can imagine an explorer tramping through the wilds for months, either alone or with a couple of other smelly guys, when suddenly he sees topology that reminds him of certain lady parts. The rest, as they say, then becomes history.

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