“You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.”
American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, died today at the age of 82. I don’t often mention my favorite artists or the ones who have influenced my own work in any way, but Mr. Rauschenberg has always been at the top of a very short list. I am saddened by his passing.
The idea that drinking eight glasses of water a day is good for your health has been dismissed as a myth.
Scientists say there is no evidence drinking large amounts of water is beneficial for the average healthy person, and do not even know how this widely held belief came about.
I can tell you exactly when the idea that everyone needed to drink 8 glasses of water a day started. It started when they started selling water in little 8 oz plastic bottles. Shortly after that started, everyone was made to believe, whether they are thirsty or not, they needed to have water on them all the time and be constantly consuming it.
Don’t believe me? Lewis Black agrees with my theory. Watch this video of him ranting about water, and be prepared to laugh your butt off.
Warning: Mr. Black does curse. If you are offended by adult language, you should get over it or not watch the video. It is so worth it though. Really funny stuff!
I uploaded the video Lin took yesterday. The quality is a little lower than I’d like. I had some problems getting the movie compressed enough to upload to YouTube, and then YouTube compressed it even more. Ugh. But, oh well, it’s good enough, I guess.
Rather than just use loose catnip and a few treats to convince the cats that whatever evil scheme they were planning was a bad idea, I went ahead and made two new little crocheted toys for them … and stuffed them with the best catnip I have.
Myu was less than impressed, as she always is when it comes to catnip. The really funny thing is that while I was getting the camera ready to take photos and videos, I left the new toys up on the kitchen worktable, a place that is impossible for either cat to get onto without making some noise (or so I thought), and somehow, in the few minutes it took for me to get the camera, Myu got one of the toys off that table … silently. Of course once she had it, she didn’t really want to play with it.
Ronin, on the other hand, started going insane as soon as he saw me pull out the wool, the needle, and the catnip container. There’s only one thing he likes better than new toys and that’s new toys containing high quality kitty drugs. I’m pretty sure I should feel lucky to still have all the fingers on my hand after taking this photo.
Since Ronin was having so much fun playing in the living room, and it’s almost impossible to take photos of a fast-moving cat, I decided to grab some video (even though the lighting was weird), so there are now three short video bits over at YouTube of Ronin enjoying the new toys: Cat on Catnip 1, 2 and 3. Myu has a brief walk-on role in the first one, but these are really nothing but Ronin.
My plan to placate the monsters with toys and drugs must have worked, at least temporarily. Instead of following me around and staring at me, they are now passed out peacefully. Success!
You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell?
What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture of the sea anemone,
and you’ll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.
Pablo Neruda’s Enigmas as featured in the movie Mindwalk.
I am sorry this has taken me so long to get posted. I am soooo slow at doing transcripts, I have been seriously short on time, and I did agonize a bit about whether or not to post it. I mean, this is a person in my social circle and a friend of Lin’s. But then I decided that what’s on national morning news is totally fair game, and it isn’t like she has ever really been my friend anyway. There’s some negative history between us, so I think I am allowed to point, laugh and be catty.
It was taking too long to write it down on paper, and then transcribe it yet again onto the computer, so I used my camera to record it as a movie. That allowed me to sit at the computer with a nice pause button and a spell checking word processor, which made it go much more quickly. Doing so also means I could compress it and upload it to Youtube, which means, being that it is totally copyrighted material that I do not own may mean it gets deleted soon. Therefore, I also uploaded it to my server as well (7.5 mb mov). The quality isn’t the greatest, but it’s not bad. You can certainly see it and hear it (better then I thought it would turn out). If you want to watch it, please use the YouTube link for as long as it lasts to save me some bandwidth.
Behind the cut, the transcript, associated commentary, and for the truly lazy surfer, the embedded YouTube video. Continue Reading »
