haiku for 9/11

birds, shorn of their feathers
they fall...
9/11

'Don't Miss A Sec' exhibit in Switzerland...unusual!

This public toilet was created by an artist in Switzerland as an experiment. People feel comfortable with other people they may not know well seeing them doing some private things, but not others. Going to the bathroom is one of those others. The first photo is of the public toilet seen from the outside, constructed of the type of glass used to observe without being observed.



In the second image you can see how it looks being inside. You wonder...can they really see?


Snopes goes into more detail and the images can be made larger there but copying a teaser phrase from the site isn't allowed so go to SNOPES to read the article. I was searching for another urban legion when this came up in the choices. This one isn't an urban legion. It's true.

Update and yes, a poem

I got to the doc. It seems I've had two kinds of infections going on at the same time so started on a new med last night to get rid of the other one. Right now the med has me very swimmy without any relief kicking in yet. I promise I'll stop moaning and groaning on my blog when I feel a little better. In the meantime, here's a poem I wrote. You can see that my state of bodily being was reflected in this one. It's one of my 'Sara' poems, my younger, wilder alter ego. Yep, I took her down in this one.


Sara in the Sky

Sara's tired all the time,
can't run with the boy.
She falls into walls, she's dizzy.
Words drift like snowflakes when he chatters;
she tries hard to catch them.
Her body's a stone, her mind, mud.
The boy pours his own cereal,
heads to school, shirt inside out.
One blue sock. One white one.
Doctors frown, tell her she's crazy.
Friends just want the old Sara,
say it's blocked energy, too little roughage,
maybe suction from a roving Black Hole.
She's glad Norman pays rent, sends money.
Nights she dreams she's dancing again,
skirt filled like a parachute.
The moon paints her hair gold.
Stars etch her face into the sky.

Not only can you hear Les Paul and Mary Ford but you can learn how to cure halitosis!

I know their music but never saw their tv show. This excerpt is priceless, not to mention Les Paul's guitar work. The man is fantastic!

Would this make YOU stop drinking?:-)

A friend sent this today. I needed a smile (that's his comment up above). We have Ike down there with us in the possible cone and Hanna passing to what looks like will be our east. Another storm is behind Ike. I feel like a bowling pin hoping the bowler misses! Thanks for all the messages below. I still don't have the infection under control but think it's improving. It has to. This isn't the season to be dealing with health issues.

The straw that breaks...

It's one of those times. I'm already doing my juggling act with the different things wrong with my body, then comes one...two...more and I'm up at night with the pain from it, am allergic to the med that fixes it, so had to try an alternative that hurt today. Yes, I'm being vague. Nobody needs to know the details. In the years of CFIDS I try not to cry anymore. It doesn't do anything but inflame my sinuses. Anyway, the dike burst today. I've had barely any sleep due to this mess, I'm tired of doctors poking into me. I need a break. I need some sleep. I need for the treatment I had today to kick in and help.

I'll be back. Send fairy dust.

Pris

Yearbook yourself. From a Kim Komando recommended site

From THIS Kim K site




The above looks more like a hat I would've worn than my hair!

I never can resist these. What's really uncanny is how much I actually looked like this is some of the different 'yearbook' shots except my hair was pale brown, closer to the second one down. :-)

Your ten most famous Americans

The May issue of Smithsonian Magazine reported on a poll they'd given to 11th and 12th graders, as well as people in their forties or above. They handed them a sheet of paper with 10 blanks and and asked who they thought were the ten most famous Americans beginning with the days of Columbus until now, excluding Presidents and first ladies. The teens, to their surprise didn't name ten pop stars or other entertainment celebrities as those ten. In fact, the lists in both age groups was surprisingly similar.

Rather than post the top ten named overall in both groups, I'd be curious who YOU would pick. I'll post the names from the poll in a few days. It's a difficult choice

THURSDAY NOTE:
Okay, here are the results of the poll:

Martin Luther King
Rosa Parks
Harriet Tubman
Susan B Anthony
Benjamin Franklin
Amelia Earhart
Ophra Winfrey
Marilyn Monroe
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein

Read this and gnash your teeth, then do something!

I just read Collin Kelley's post from yesterday about Stacy Brown's horrendous experience with a book of poetry, winning a contest and how the publsher then not only jerked her around, but... well go to Collin's blog HERE and follow his links to her story. If it bothers you as much as it did me, pass the story on.

(I'm referring to Collin's August 25 entry)

Pris

Hurricane Gustav

Well, hurricane season has started in earnest now. So far, it looks as if Gustav will stay to our west but may hit Louisiana and Texas again, still not recovered from the 2004 and 2005 devastation. Only time will tell what it'll do. This is the time of year for sweaty palms, supplies gotten in, and hoping your shutters hold and the roof doesn't get a tree on it or blown off.

So, what do you think of Biden on the ticket??

Think he'll help the Democratic ticket win? I would love to hear replies and reasons you think he will or won't.

Patsy Cline ...one of a kind!

In admiration of Odilon Redon

The mystery and the evocation of the drawings (by Redon) are described by Huysmans in the following passage:

"Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium."[3]
Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

"My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."[4]
Redon's work represent an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to "place the visible at the service of the invisible"; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased."

Read the entire article HERE.



(note: Tropical Storm Fay is passing in waves over us now. So far, so good)

Tropical Storm Fay

We're on the SE coast of South Florida. Looks like this could bring extra wind and rain. Let's hope that's all.