Any mention of Zimbabwe reminds me of part of a song:
Courage, brother, you do
Not walk alone
We walk with you, and sing
Your spirit home.
Sing that silently as a mantra and your life will get better.
A job interview question is "If your life had a piece of music as its sound track, what would you like it to be?" I think I'd like the guitar accompaniment to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant." The Hallelujah Chorus is probably already taken.
Happy Thanksgiving Reynolds thinks the name her parents gave her has been a boon. She has had job interviews because people wanted to meet someone named “Happy Thanksgiving.” Christmas Eve Oberlander feels similarly about her name.
Big Moe will soon announce a run for the presidency on the basis that Big Moe’s got the Big Mo.
A Grinch described a traditional Thanksgiving as a “time to invite your neighbors to dinner, kill them, and take their land.”
You can call a Thanksgiving celebration “Aramaic” if attended by the twin maidens Qualitha and Quantitha, which translated means “Goodness” and “Abundance.”
George Wallace summed up his political career late in his life: “We made ‘em skip.” It seems that many voters in both major parties want to make the establishment's knees knock this year.
How annoying life’s little mysteries can be. I lost a credit card a few months ago and replaced it with a duplicate, checking daily to see if someone were charging up a storm. No activity. Eventually I stopped worrying, but still wondered where the heck the thing went. Then yesterday morning I couldn’t find my glasses. That’s weird -- I had them the night before. I tilted my easy chair to look under it. Out fell the long-missing credit card. The ungrateful phrase “wrong serendipity” came to mind. Later I found the glasses but now the phrase "the wrong serendipity" is stuck in my mind, bringing up recollections of the Wallace and Grommet movie, "The Wrong Trousers."
Is the sign in British Railway lavatories, "Gentlemen Lift the Seat" a sociological definition of a gentleman or an invitation to upper-class larceny?
How slender the threads of our well-being, and how small the changes that would make things much better or much worse. How important, then, to cultivate an active sense of gratefulness, so that one is grateful for the good times during the good times, and grateful for the good times during the bad times. To be grateful for the bad times requires a higher level of spiritual maturity. Solzhenitsyn wrote a poem of gratitude for his time in the camps of the Gulag Archipelago -- he felt it had transformed him as nothing else could have from a Communist aristocrat into a human being, as so was worth the horrific price.
Pinnochio longed to be a real boy. Many Pinocchios don't; they are content with wooden hearts.
Some songs are “cotton candy,” by which I mean "made from tiny materials." Here’s an example:
"Mama, take this badge of of me
I can't use it any more.
It's gettin' dark, too dark to see
Feels like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.
"Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can't shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin' down
Feels like I'm knockin' on heaven's door."
Here’s what a blogger said in 2004 about that song:
geez. no one pays attention to the real history of a song anymore. This movie is NOT an anti-war song, or anything like that. This was a song written FOR A MOVIE, thus, to tie in with the script.
In the movie, entitled Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (i think that’s the right title), the song is about Pat Garrett, and outlaw who is made into a sheriff and ordered to hunt down his old friend billy the kid. "Mama, take this badge off of me, I can't use it anymore." It's the sheriff's badge, he has no desire to be one when it becomes clear that he must help kill the lifestyle he truly loves.
Those are the facts, but in a specific sense I take the knockin' on heaven's door to be about how close Garret is to being an outlaw again, his heaven. In the non-movie related sense of the song, I think it's about a man deciding to be killed rather than fight back, and he's going to die, but he thinks his decision puts him at heaven’s door.
--dikoduck dec 5, 2004
I’m not sure the song has any more to do with the movie for which Dylan wrote it than “Mrs. Robinson” has to do with “The Graduate,” but it’s interesting to see how people interpret things that are tantalizingly obscure.
Here’s another example of interpretation of an obscure piece of writing:
“Suddenly [during King Belshazzar’s great feast],
the fingers of a human hand appeared,
writing on the plaster of the wall in the king’s palace.
“When the king saw the wrist and hand that wrote, his face blanched; his thoughts terrified him, his hip joints shook,
and his knees knocked.
“Then Daniel was brought into the presence of the king.
The king asked him, ‘Are you the Daniel, the Jewish exile,
whom my father, the king, brought from Judah? I have heard that the Spirit of God is in you, that you possess brilliant knowledge and extraordinary wisdom. I have heard that you can interpret dreams and solve difficulties; if you are able to read the writing and tell me what it means, you shall be clothed in purple, wear a gold collar about your neck, and be third in the government of the kingdom.’
“Daniel answered the king: ‘You may keep your gifts, or give your presents to someone else; but the writing I will read for you, O king, and tell you what it means. ….
“‘This is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, TEKEL, and PERES. These words mean: MENE, God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.’”
That story may come as a revelation to anyone who thought Mene Tekel Peres was an Hispanic politician.
Two psychiatrists are walking down the road. They come upon a man in a ditch, who has been beaten to a pulp. He is bleeding, broken, and moaning. One shrink says to the other, “Quick, we have to find the people who did this. They need help.”
Quiz: “Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is (pick one):
(1) A beginner’s typing exercise
(2) The jubilant cry of the Argentine gaucho
(3) The name on the picture on Vladimir Putin’s dartboard.
“We’re better than everyone else because we believe in universal equality much more fervently.”
"No matter at what level of detail you discuss a thing, it's more complicated than that."
From the Bozeman, Montana police blotter:
😇 An officer warned a construction crew that was working at 1 a.m. to meet their deadline. The officer educated the crew on related city ordinances.
😇 A pile of cardboard had been set on fire at a Main Street property. The fire was put out prior to fire and police arrival.
😇 A black cat had been stuck in a tree on 29th Avenue for more than a day.
😇 A caller who had reported a beer theft by two high school kids called wondering if there were any updates on the case.
😇 A man had questions for an officer about construction noise late at night.
😇 A woman turned in a small container she found outside of her apartment door that she thought contained marijuana. An officer was unable to determine what was inside but destroyed the container anyway.
😇 A saddle was stolen from a utility trailer on Seventh Avenue sometime in the previous week.
😇 A caller had questions about openly carrying weapons while at work.
😇 The doors on a broken down Streamline bus would not open to let passengers on or off. The driver requested law enforcement assistance.
😇 A woman complained that construction workers next door were using a roller compactor and vibrating her home so badly that it was “unbearable.” An officer told her that as long as the crew was operating between proper work hours, they could use the equipment they needed to get the job done.
😇 A man reported that he had his glasses Wednesday night but couldn’t find them Thursday morning. He didn’t expect the police to do anything, but wanted to report the fact so if others called up with similar reports, the police would know it wasn’t an isolated thing.
😇 Officers responded to 138 calls.
2015-11-28-Sat
1 comment:
"...I think I'd like the guitar accompaniment to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant..."
I love that idea. Then when someone wonders why you're not just moving on with your life you can say, "I'm just waiting for it to come around on the gi-tar."
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