No lions but tigers and bears

   Oh my! I've finally gotten around to adding a few more shots from the wildlife park day trip to the ever-increasing Photo Archive. Including the tigers, cool! They just make you wanna climb the fence and pet them and pat them, they're so big and fuzzy and cuddly... Well, it's like that with all the animals! At heart we all want to be their friends, not their enemies. Or their food! Like Mowgli in The Jungle Book. And Tarzan. And Dr. Doolittle. And Grizzly Adams. There's a reason for the constance of characters of fiction who can relate to and befriend animals, I believe. All of them representative of the 'collective conciousness' of what used to be; pretenders to the role of Noah who obviously had no trouble bringing every sort of creature aboard his giant floating box. Except for the unicorn, of course...

    And it's a bea-YOO-tiful autumnal day, bright and sunny and breezy and cool but not too cool. I gotta get out there! I've done about all the damage I can do at the keyboard for one morning, emailing and posting this and that, and Mums has a willow tree to go in the ground this afternoon. Small, won't take much to plant it. Besides, I still have one or two boot forms in the 'remote studio' of her garage to finish up before dragging the rest of that paraphernalia home.

    It'll be nice to save the drive time and fuel costs but it's gonna be standing room only somewhere in this tiny abode until I get that garden shed readied for habitation by the pop culture collections and rubber and paint workshop accoutrements. Hey, it's only been five months... A project like that requires careful planning and forethought, not rushing in and hurrying through it. And it might actually be helped along by the threat of snow in a month or two...

  Before I forget: I topped the Boggle board for once! Can you imagine it?!? First of a field of 150 players to find six measly words on a board. Yesss! Score, baby! I had to print the page to believe it myself!  It takes a crappy board like that, when there are sixty or seventy words to be made I end up at the middle or below!

   I'm tellin' ya though, it's my lame typing skills more than anything that keeps me outta the top ten... Yeah, right!

Things I noticed...

...this week include: Andrew Jackson on the twenty looks a great deal like Herman Munster. Or Fred Gwynne, the guy who played Herman Munster, to be exact. I think with a little creative pen work, Jackson could be made into a right and proper Herman likeness. Not that I'm encouraging defacement of currency, nothing like that. It just occurred to me, that's all.

   Also: Whereas some have the cool custom of putting their sunglasses on top of their head, I have a habit, indoors or on intermittently sunny days, of resting my sunglasses on top of my prescription frames. I often think it must look to passersby like a guy with two sets of eyes. Maybe. Maybe not. At any rate, I also notice the distance between the sunglasses resting on top of the prescription frames and my hairline... well, seems normal. In other words, if I had a way to disguise my eyes as part of my cheeks and then drew cartoon eyes on my forehead probably no one would notice.

Maybe. Maybe not.

   And speaking of hair, I have to make mention- and I don't mean to gross anyone out here, it's just a sad fact of life, that's all -of the disturbing habit of one particularly aggressive nose hair of repeatedly showing itself to the world. It's not a shaggy growth but just one mutant swinging in the gentle breeze of breath when it's least expected. Like a single blade of grass that towers above the rest of the lawn, daring, perhaps even demanding to be noticed. And it's snowy white on top of that. And it tickles. I hate that. Is there Nair for nose hair, I wonder?

Or ear hairs, for that matter?!?

Why does hair grow where you don't want it but not where you do? These are the questions I'd like answered, by gum!

   Anyway, I'm headed out to bring a local toy buddy- I bought my first 'collection' of Captain Action stuff from this guy, Sheldon, almost twenty years ago...hmmm,maybe it was more than twenty years ago, I don't know, it's close on that long anyhoo... Anyway, he sold it and made his house payment and has been giving me a hard time about it ever since. And his wife blamed me for the infectious nature of toy collecting that started him on along sentimental road of his own, buying and selling all manner of pop culture collectibles in the years since. She's now his ex, sad to say, I hope it had little or nothing to do with toys although I know exactly how distracting- and divisive -that diversion can be - check out the right side of the little 'retail' display space I keep at The Hilltop Emporium in beautiful downtown Wrightsville, Pa. Abandoned by my former co-worker, Don, who got me in the door in the first place, it needs some super duper plastic goods to fill it up. It's cheap to rent and fun to show up every so often and see what has and hasn't sold and shuffle things around in the display case. Maybe Sheldon will have fun at it too.

It'll be fun for all this afternoon, I'm sure. More to come!

 

By the way...

If you're paying attention you know Yahoo! has reconfigured their Photo Album utility and I've reconfigured some of my archives too, adding mostly old timey photos of ancestors but a few vintage family pics as well. I'm a little slow figuring out just how to organize everything so while the first page of each album may be roughly chronological ensuing pages may not follow a strict pattern. At any rate, it's fun for me looking at these folks- and myself, of course -some of them I remember, some I never met.

sixbidfix

So, I've been two nights- or was it three? -without sleep this week and it is catching up with me in a big way. I'm Boggling worse than usual- excuses, excuses! -and thinking about sleep almost all day and thinking about nuzzling my big cushy pillow the rest of the time! My hands seem a little unsteady so that it's hard to draw and paint a straight line and when I do I just can't seem to get enough light on the subject. I did manage an afternoon nap one day but that didn't really dent the, whattta ya call it?, 'sleep debt', that's right.

So I've taken a little break from the current gee whiz project- which seems to be developing nicely in the hands of some obviously talented people if the single pre-animation sample I've seen is any indication! -in favor of the rubber shop which, for the most part, I neglected for a week or so. Did a little bit of organizing here at the desk, exciting. Which means I shuffled the stacks of paper and small boxes of stuff in various states of completion and plastic bins filled with various and sundry material- fabric and leather, buttons and beads, ribbon and buckles -so that it's less likely to crumble and kill or maim someone in its path. A few of those swell framed posters- how pleased I was just a few short months ago at having them properly framed and hung -now grace the corners of the corner of the room that now houses the sum total of my homespun enterprise with the exception of those few molding devices, a little messier than most, which still reside at what I taken to calling my 'remote studio'. Which is simply a glossy reference to Mom's garage.

Which, with winter fast approaching- it's the middle of September already?!? -has mi madre scurrying about, repositioning and shuffling- much like I've been doing here at my desk but with ever so slightly more elbow room... -stacking and racking the assorted yard sale finds and exercise equipment she's accumulated over the fair months to make room for her shiny late model vee-hickle so as not to expose it overmuch to the winter's harsher winds and precipitation. I can take a clue- in some cases, others I have to be hit over the head but usually only once -thus the effort to re-organize here and relocate those leftover devices and accoutrements despite the lack of real space and/or place for them.

It's either that or show up each week to find my doodads and gew-gaws handled and dandled from place to place, suffering the resultant deleterious effects of dust and precarious placement among the madding crowd jostling for space, as it were. Who wants that? It's created more than a few anxious moments already with one dog and three cats and seemingly every flying, leaping, creeping, crawling insect in southern York county given free rein about the place. They seem to be drawn by the pleasing smell of ammonia, just one component of the 'plastick' material used to fabricate the majority my wee widdle doll goods.

And it's just as well, after all, because those same dreadful conditions would make for no fun driving back and forth across the county as the days and weeks progress into the dead of winter. It bad enough doing it in good conditions with all the nuts that are licensed to drive between here and there, forget the added peril of snow and ice on the roads.

And the 'new' little car of our own is doing quite well. It was a low down, dirty, dog-eared shame to junk the last one- the Saturn was a great little car, handled like nothing I've ever driven, not that I'm an expert, and was quite zippy until the last major engine snafu -but it was either that or keep spending more than the car was worth to keep it on the road. So, one short trip to the nearest scrap yard and we were a hundred clams to the good and down one car needing several hundred clams worth of work. Besides, the little woman had to have a station wagon, good for pulling over and loading up the things other people throw out, bringing them home and deciding there was a good reason somebody else threw them out in the first place... but it's almost like a hobby with her so there you are. Sometimes it works out although I wouldn't hazard a guess at the percentages of useful vs. 'our trash goes Monday'.

Well, I need a nap before the pizza shows up. With momma gone for a coffe with her momma- they've spent some strange days re-connecting after a mutual estrangement of quite some time, mental illness can do that -the boy and I are on our own and leftovers can wait for tomorrow or the next day even. So it's Pizza Hut delivery and maybe some vintage cartoons or a bad afternoon movie, we'll see.

 

 

Juggling

Photos over at the Yahoo! Archives. Since the powers-that-be have seen fit to re-vamp the configuration of the albums and so forth(I'm not crazy about it so far...) I've decided to add some photos and shuffle things around a bit too.

I'll try and configure the photos so they fit together chronologically in some fashion- of it'll let me -and so if things seem a little askew for the nonce, headings and album descriptions out of whack, now you know why.

Received a note from the creative force behind the aforementioned seafaring feline(as well as several other 'top secret' projects in which he has graciously allowed me to have a hand!), seems at least one of his other co-contributor has the same dim view as my own, expressed in recent email, of the oft-repeated, overused, beaten like a dead horse, tired out, worn out, trite, hackneyed, rusty, misapplied, sarcastic, sardonic catchphrase, 'It's all good.'

Quote: "Totally unsolicited. (I never use the term) But just like you, he said, "As much as I hate the term..."It's all good".  Haha!"

To which I replied: "Well, they say 'great minds think alike'. There's your proof."

And to which I add the following:

"Points to ponder: If this true is of 'great minds', that they all 'think alike', then it must be true of 'mediocre minds' as well.

And of 'miniscule minds'.

So, logically then, all minds 'think alike'.

If that is true, why can't we all agree that sayings like 'It's all good! are, in fact, no good?!?"

Just something to think about. But not for long. Here's another nugget: They say 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Well, especially in light of the foregoing, would you imagine that 'The road to genius is paved with moments of madness'?

Or that perhaps 'The road to enlightenment is paved with used matchbooks'? Or with 'dead C batteries'? See?

See, I'm just rambling now. What is the source of that truism about the proverbial 'road to hell...'? I confess, I do not know. John Donne? Shakespeare? Alfred E. Neuman? Perhaps they also considered these other 'roads not taken' in their enlightened moments.

I'll tell you this much: I worked with a fellow not long ago who you would have guessed had the patent on that egregious phraseology-

 which, hopefully, will soon pass from the common vernacular into the bedarkened land of 'What Was' where forgotten characters of popular culture- Milli Vanilli and The Noid, for example -pass along the dirty sidewalks of even dirtier cities, giving each other dirty looks and muttering a cursory greeting of, 'Where's the beef?!?' and 'Fugeddaboutit!' then walk home to their dirty, rundown tenement flats and cry themselves to sleep each night moaning the lyrics to Flashdance(What A Feeling). Ewww, creepy...

because he used with every breath, like an addict! He enjoyed hearing himself say it so very much, I guess, he would interject it as the last word, the summation, the subject, verb and predicate, the crowning thought to every sentence.

Now, here's a thought... Maybe it was a great social experiment he was conducting all on his own, gauging the reaction to endless and meaningless repetition of the phrase to whomever he would meet. A social experiment the results and ramifications of which he alone is privy to... Maybe he actually did invent the phrase and now is doing his utmost to ensure it's survival in the everyday vocabulary of the population of the entire planet!

Frightening...