In Progress, An Unfinished Church

So I’m doing this: My glasses are taped to the sugar canister in an attempt to stretch them. I’ve been doing steady at-home close work and so I’ve been wearing them more than usual… I ended up with a swollen and very sore scalp, which is painful even to rest on a pillow. My elbows […]

Mannequin and Doll Musing

It’s the startlingly lifelike mannequin that has been standing at the shop’s window for the past 85 years. According to local legends, the mannequin is in fact the preserved, mummified corpse……

My 101st blog

WILHELM: This has the distinction of being my 101st blog; which is more of an achievement to me than having completed my 100th blog, because 101 has two ones in it and as such is a better number than 100! That said I wanted to mention the infamous Wilhelm scream. It can be heard […]

CAN WE TALK? (about pet peeves)

You know that book: “Eats Shoots and Leaves” (by Lynne Truss)? I used to think it was about some kind of mammal, maybe a panda, that eats shoots and leaves. Then I put on my glasses and noticed the comma: “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.” Now that implies that someone eats, then shoots, then leaves… Entirely […]

Interpretting White Roses

salus in ardunis sancte et sapienter Alice In Wonderland Syndrome…(or as it’s also called: Todd’s Syndrome or Lillipution Hallucinations) sounds made-up but it’s a very real condition. People seem fine optically, but they have weird visual perceptions. They have what’s termed a “rare form of migraine” (migrainous ischemia?). All of their senses are strangely distorted. The […]

IF

If it weren’t for the moon, to slow Earth’s spin, we’d have 6 hour days instead of 24. If Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t been carrying his speech in a metal eyeglasses container that October night in 1912 when John Schrank shot him, the bullet would’ve killed him. If Al Capone hadn’t compulsively carried his trademark mirror […]

I will always see W’s on Bulldogs now

“She has double-u’s all over her,” said my two and a 1/2 year old granddaughter. “What? Minnie the dog has ‘W’s” all over her? Really?” I replied to her, laughing. At first I thought that this was a form of Onomatopeia (which is Greek for making up words to explain noise; but in […]

A more interesting word without “U”

Obscure: the state of being unknown, inconspicuous, or unimportant. I forgot the library’s closed on Mondays and it was there on my shelf so I picked up my memoir. For some obscure reason, (imagine ME obscure? Right, I know) I decided to reread my book “Under the Banana Moon.” Well actually it can be […]

Rantings of a logophile

I’m into obscure things. If you’ve read this blog you already know that. This forum, for me, is kind of an information purge of sorts. It’s like a safe place where I can say things like moon pigeons and alphabet juice and electric ketchup. Oddball conundrums keep my brain cells happy. Let me explain the […]

Life is a Fractal; RIP Maya

The essence of living things are cascades of fractals. Related patterns recur enthusiastically at progressively smaller scales… seemingly random but decidely chaotic. Deoxyribonucleic acid, (DNA) with its double helix entwined like a ladder. Cells. Fractals are seen with the “naked” eye, as in this beehive: And they are unseen (as in this close-up view of […]

Work ethic, Dr. Suess and if I was a Tree

I ‘met’ someone recently who used to work in retail and I did my share of that too so I was reminiscing about my years ‘working with the public.’ I told him that I did my best. That’s all anyone can do. I found lots of expired merchandise in my “Health […]

it’s that month again, here’s what I’ve been up to, in part

the infamous puzzle piece? Yeah I know, it’s very cliche Here’s what I’ve been up to: (Keep in mind there are several links on this blog. Don’t forget to come back and read the rest…Or click them when you finish reading…) http://barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/current-issue/ The above link is from a “neurodivergent” sister site on wordpress who […]

Young Women making a difference: Amy Gravino, Dani Bowman, Erin Clemens

Living in the eastern part of the U.S. in this cold winter of ’14 (if you are anything like me) has made me somewhat of a bibliobibuli; that is to say; lost in books and not too involved in nature or in ‘the world.’ My standard book consumption […]

Some of Crows’ and Ravens’ Roles in Fairy Tales and myth and Literature

I think of ravens and crows interchangeably. I can’t help it; I just do. Ravens are bigger in size although there are other differences too; like their voices. Supposedly the crow can say ‘uh-huh’, ‘caw’, ‘eh-aw’, ‘kow’, ‘aww’, and sound real nasal, whereas the raven is harsher and says things like ‘kraa’, or it makes […]

weather patterns, Donna Williams, fruit salad, Buddha

Donna Williams says (in a brilliant analogy) that autism is a fruit salad, which I infer to mean, that everyone’s fruit bowl looks a bit different. Mine has Aspergers bananas in it, with selective mutism lemons, sensory processing dysfunction prickly pears, and dysthymic mangos. There are other fruits in there too. Like anxious horned melon […]

10 Genius Minds With Surprising Habits and Pasttimes

EINSTEIN: The lake was as smooth as a sheet of glass. Not a breeze stirred. Who would take their sailboat out with nary a breeze to stir a nostril hair? Einstein. He said, “I like the challenge.” I would suppose that’s how new solutions unveil themselves to attentive minds. An attentive mind he surely had. […]

Here Be Dragons…When Pipes Are Not Pipes

Stephen King once wrote a short story about the heyday of youth with all it’s freshness and trials. He called youth: Pony days. We all have a brief time as ponies. There were two times during my pony years that I was given horses and both times my father said no, absolutely not, she can […]

Christmas is… and isn’t

Do you get a little sick of all the warm-fuzzy hoo-ha this time of year? I’m not embarrassed to admit that I buy into all the good cheer to an extent and then slowly I feel like…where’s the New Year? I want all this behind me now. I wasn’t even going to get a tree […]

Digging In Boxes

Digging In Boxes There are ‘noun friendly’ languages like English and then there are ‘verb friendly’ languages like Korean, Hindi, and Japanese. In the latter languages, nouns are frequently dropped and names for activities are emphasized in the earliest years of life when parents are teaching children to speak. On the other hand, parents […]

Fascinating modern architecture to 1700 manor houses…it’s all good

Recently I’ve been reflecting about architecture. I’m reading a historical book called The Manor: Three centuries at a slave plantation on Long Island by Mac Griswold. This 70 year old woman, Mac, is a cultural landscape historian, a fascinating job. When she was a little girl in the 1950s growing up in New Jersey, […]

Feeling around in a flowery diction

Have you ever felt you resided inside that place in a harmonica where moist breath and music meet? Have you ever felt like one of those perfectly imperfect pine trees that grow sideways on golf courses? Ok well have you ever felt like a collection of soft blue, pink, white grey lint, like the kind […]

Magic and Innovative Art in A Sisyphean World

This poster is an example of some unusual art I came across quite by happy accident some years ago. The Empty Set Project Space was active sporadically as a gallery between 2001 and 2008. It […]

Fun fun fun Playing With Words

A shot in the dark. —– A dot in the shark. A self constructed riddle or—– A self constricted ruddle? Hmmm, twisting words. A deliberate error of speech or sometimes simply the accidental play on words with corresponding vowels, consonants or morphemes ( smallest grammatical unit in language) are switched within a phrase. These fun […]

LOST ART of Dr. Suess, Books, Mosaics and Pleasure in Broken Pieces

Why mosaics? I like the shiny full color allure of “coffee table” books. The large exotic collection of pictures I never tire of. There are three such books I am finding myself picking up over and over. I’ve owned them for years. I share them with visiting children, I open them for peaceful […]

Contemplation on Dead Greyhounds and Women’s Rights; Ultimately Life Lessons

Some people are surely meant to be in our lives, but not necessarily to be in them for a lifetime. I think of course of those people in my own life who came and went on in death before I would’ve liked. My spouse left three children whose ages were 23, 14 and 9. I […]

My Personal Yellow Journey, from Plastic Cups to Coldplay

My mother and I spent a few weeks each summer, and sometimes on school vacations, with her mother; a fragile sprite of a woman who was deaf and lived in a huge white house in Vermont sprawling with cats and houseplants. At bedtime I would take ‘my’ yellow plastic cup from the ‘cupboard’, which was […]

A Kinship; A Means of Communication

Growing up, I never bothered looking at people long enough to see them as anything other than blurry models out of Matisse paintings; jumbled but interesting. I especially hated pictures of relatives hanging on walls. You could never ever avoid their staring eyes. I’d have to dash past them. I […]

Slipper Mopping and Negative Place Association

I still do things outside my comfort zone and that’s got to be a healthy thing, right? Recently we went to Tweed to pick up a friend from the airport who’s staying with us this week. My good friend was driving (I don’t drive at 49 yrs. of age, more about that later!). Anyway he […]