Don't blame guns, blame the owners.
What a poor winner, picking on McCain for being born in the Canal Zone. Remember, "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours and we're going to keep it."
Nothing ambiguous about those bumper stickers. Both declare with 100% certainty: "I AM A GODDAMN IDIOT AND PROUD OF IT."
3 gets it more exactly right than exactly. Precision exactly. Japanese exactly.
My fave ambiguous bumpersticker pairing (that I may have mentioned before) is: FREE TIBET with END THEOCRACY. I mean, not ipso fact in contradiction, but . . .
Or "I have a right to tell others to shut up, or else."
FREE TIBET with END THEOCRACY. I mean, not ipso fact in contradiction, but . . .
To give a small amount of credit where sorta kinda due, the Daily Llama seems to have either accepted this recently, or recognised that he looks like a twat for not accepting it. I wouldn't like to guess which.
I keep seeing these SOCIALISM ISN'T COOL bumper stickers around town, and I sorta love 'em because the driver's inevitably doing something contradictory (as in the photo, where he's parked in a free-parking spot).
I once saw a bumper sticker reading, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I did and it worked great.
|| NMM to Marie-France Pisier, star of Les cousins dangereux Cousin, cousine. |>
Thanks to some good advice, I don't even know who that is.
12: That might be more difficult than usual.
Not an ambiguous bumper sticker, but the other day I saw: WAG MORE, BARK LESS
At first I was charmed, then I frowned in puzzlement, then I became slightly annoyed: Hey, waitaminute, are you saying, in effect, "Don't worry, be happy" or "Be nice, don't argue" or "Nobody likes outspoken people" or "I like it when you agree" or what?
My political mood these days may be affecting my reading.
Her?
Oh, waitaminute, clicked on the link. Her.
Amazing piece about privatised mail here. Free market capitalism: a great idea until you run out of other people's time and effort.
She also was Colette in a couple Antoine Doinel movies, and appeared in and wrote the screenplay for Celine et Julie vont en bateau, which is magnificent and strange. I'm somewhat curious about the horrible sounding TV miniseries she did in America.
I mean:
I watched the postwoman sorting mail in her kitchen, dividing it up into piles on the steel counter on either side of the sink, carefully dried after the evening's washing-up. It seemed to be mainly Ikea catalogues, the cover showing an exquisitely lit arrangement of blond, cheerful furniture. The Ikea ideal did not include any obvious area for the sorting of mail.
And I thought I had reason to get a bit cross on having to use my own computer and software for company business from time to time.
20. Yeah I read that in the dead trees. I'd be interested to hear Martin Wisse's take on it. Not positive, I'd guess.
Bumper sticker spotted just now (right next to one of those "Socialism isn't cool" ones): "AARP: Association Against Retired Persons!"
Huh?
My favorite seen recently: "If it ain't King James, it ain't Bible." There's also a car in my lot with both a "This car will be empty in the event of the Rapture" and a "Harvard Law School" sticker. Just saying.
||
BDL linked yesterday to "Questions from A Worker Who Reads" by Brecht, and, this morning, I am a sucker for that sort of leftism.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War.
Who Else won it?
|>
24:"This car will be empty in the event of the Rapture"
Good upskirt potential during the Rapture.
Id like to see a sticker explaining people with giant vehicles explaining why they complain about gas prices
I've seen "In the event of Rapture can I have your car?"
25:
The Revolution
Donald Hall
In the Great Hall where Lady Ann by firelight after dining alone
nodded and dreamed that her cousin Rathwell turned into a unicorn,
and woke shuddering, and was helped to her chambers, undressed,
and looked after, and in the morning arose to read Mrs. Hemans,
sitting prettily on a garden bench, with no sound disturbing
her whorled ear but the wind and the wind's apples falling,
the servants
tended fires, answered bells, plucked grouse, rolled sward, fetched
eggs, clipped hedge, mended linen, baked scones, and served tea.
While Lady Ann grew pale playing the piano, and lay late in bed aging,
she regretted Rathwell who ran off to Ceylon with his indescribable
desires, and vanished--leaving her to the servants who poached, larked,
drank up the cellar, emigrated without notice, copulated, conceived,
and begot us.
25, 29, sort of:
An Irish Airman foresees his Death
W.B. Yeats
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
I'm fond of the bumper sticker my mother has: "I am a Quaker. In case of emergency, be quiet".
re: 24
Heh, I've been looking at the hand-marked-up copy that eventually became the KJ Bible [at work]. Very interesting. Also quite good for dispelling the mythology around it.
32: Somebody left it in the break room or you are looking at images.
33: So you're looking at, what?, true forms?
33: I think where ttaM works is where they take the pictures of books like that. He might be in the room with the real thing.
Yeah, I think ttaM gets to look at the real thing. Nothing quite shakes you up and quiets you like that, I think.
Nothing quite shakes you up and quiets you like that, I think.
NERD!!!
I kid, I kid. Sorry. I couldn't resist. In seriousness, I found myself surprised by my own sense of ... being shaken up and quieted, I suppose ... by some of the books at the Huntington Library, when I visited a number of years ago. Original Hobbes, man. Gutenberg.
Nothing nerdy about that at all. Handling very old material is quite sobering.
(It's just that I would have thought you more of a 'starry sky above me and moral law within me' person, rather than any mere human artifacts, I suppose.)
Handling very old material is quite sobering.
Then maybe that creep in the rain coat was just trying to make sure those women were ok to drive.
41: Oh. I suppose I'm a bit of that, but artifacts are their own thing, and fairly sacred. I don't have occasion to handle actual incunabula, but even something from the 18th or 17th century tends to have me slowing down, pausing, considering. I actually wind up being without words about it. Beauty here in your own hands.
Also quite good for dispelling the mythology around it.
Alan Bennett has an essay in Writing Home about the Book of Common Prayer. It goes back and forth about the devotion people have (as with the KJV) to the particular language and turns of phrase in of it, and ends by saying something like this is all very well (and very English), but bear in mind that "Cranmer did not die for English prose".
As for bumper stickers, I saw one a while ago that went "In Fairy Tales the FROG turned into a PRINCE but SCIENTISTS call it EVOLUTION".
40, 43: Goodness. I'd totally forgotten for a moment what business you worked in. Now I feel extra silly. Bedtime.
Once I was allowed in the vault (!) at an antiquarian bookstore some of whose wares my mom was selling on consignment (the store consigned them to her) at a store she was managing/buying for in Las Vegas (which no longer exists—in fact, neither does the antiquarian bookstore in question). I remember a fabulously expensive set of the Harry Potter novels, and a one of Freud's books, inscribed by Freud to a patient of his.
I don't recall anything particularly old, but there must have many such things. The Freud thing was enough for me.
42 is one of my favorite things ever.
46: The Harry Potter didn't do for you?
(insert smiley face here)
47: It's kind of "Benny Hill," but still works.
27: Oh, actually, an old acquaintance of mine just did that routine on Facebook this very night. He loves his motor home, you see, and Obama is over-regulating the oil industry and not allowing more drilling, thereby bringing gas prices to $4/gal.
20. Yeah I read that in the dead trees. I'd be interested to hear Martin Wisse's take on it. Not positive, I'd guess.
God, no. Used to work as a part-time mailman myself, when I was a student. when working some six hours every Saturday meant having enough money to and pay the rent and support a growing comics habit. Great work and you'd be workign alongside fulltimers who had been doing it for twenty-thirty years or longer.
That was when being a post employee was a well paying job for life which was open to anyone who could work hard and who didn't mind the sometimes ungodly hours. You could actually raise a family on the wages the post office paid and very importantly, you could do so without having to go to college for four years.
So of course this situation had to be destroyed in the name of market liberalisation, where the right to shove junkmail through your letterbox cheaper is more important than the need for people to earn a living wage. Never mind that the quality of mail delivery has dropped badly in the past few years, never mind that anything important still has to be send by either the proper mail, never mind that none of these new companies actually can make a profit, we can send our junkmail a cent cheaper and havign this "competition" means we can justify screwing over our workers.
Like TNT's plans last year to actually cut wages by fifteen percent in order to "survive".
re: 32 - 43'ish
In this case it was images, as it was photographed I think a year or so back. I was getting the images together for someone senior to use.* But yeah, I see a lot of amazing things in the flesh. The list is long. I remember being quite impressed when someone casually handed me a Magna Carta. Ditto various others - illuminated manuscripts by the dozen, etc. In terms of working with images, the oldest extant copy of P/ lato really impressed me. Also, the autograph copy of M/ aimondes. It still sort of gobsmacks me that there _is_ an autograph copy of the M1shn3h T /orah. It reminds me of the Fast Show sketch:
"And then we found the Bible, in the attic. The original. Which was nice."
* not strictly my job, but when there's a rush I'm the person with the metaphorical keys to the image archive ...
I just glanced at Marie France Pisier's Wiki page. Talk about a full on paid up member of France's elite (gauche caviar with deep right wing connections branch). Daughter of one of the top officials in French Indochina from the late thirties to the late forties (continuously from the late Third Republic through Vichy, Japanese occupation and then the Fourth Republic) and Action Francaise activist, her brother is one of France's top mathematicians, her sister is a top political scientist and first wife of Bernard Kouchner and current wife of celebrity academic Olivier Duhamel, himself a son of a top right wing politician and brother of a senior media exec. Marie France Pisier herself was the girlfriend of Daniel Cohn Bendit in the late sixties, including during May 1968, the former wife of Georges Kiejman (France's top lawyer to the rich and famous) then married to a grandson of Jean Luc Lagardere and senior exec at the Lagardere groupe, one of the three family run right wing companies that completely dominate French media ownership, all of which have their origins in either defense (Lagardere-Matra and Dassault) or public works (Bouyges). For extra fun Matra was founded as a armaments company in 1941 (sic).
No need for six degrees here, she was one or two degrees of separation from most of France's political, business, and academic elite.
Wheee!! The gauche caviar bit seems to restricted to knocking off Danny C-B in the excitement of the moment 40 years ago. Otherwise, nasty, nasty.
I remember being quite impressed when someone casually handed me a Magna Carta.
I'd be impressed. The only copy I've seen (Salisbury) was surrounded by so many environment controlling gizmos I kind off assumed it would fall apart if anybody actually handled it in a normal room.
51. When I was a lad, there was a tradition of getting temporary work at the PO in the run up to Christmas, delivering cards, so that the permanent guys could concentrate on their normal stuff. You'd do three or four rounds (shorter than a standard walk) per day, 6 days a week plus the last Sunday before the holiday. Good money, good times. These days there's no extra deliveries even in the last week, and the full timers have to schlep it all themselves. Fucking capitalism even steals Christmas.
"As for bumper stickers, I saw one a while ago that went "In Fairy Tales the FROG turned into a PRINCE but SCIENTISTS call it EVOLUTION". "
i'm not sure if my appreciaqtion of that is 'ironic' or not but thats a big fukc yea\h!
re: 55
I can't speak for everything, but much of the very old stuff is surprisingly robust in my experience. I remember working on a fairly famous 9th century Irish illuminated manuscript [I was hand correcting a load of digital proofs for pre-press by comparing them to the original], and asking one of the curators if I needed to wear gloves:
"No, these things are so tough that if they get dirty they can be washed."
Very much not the case for everything, of course, some things are handled with extreme care if they are handled at all, and I'm sure that's not actual current preservation practice. He was just illustrating how robust vellum can be.
re: 55
That said, the M.C. was in a cardboard box when given to me, and handled _very_ carefully when it was removed.
The gauche caviar bit seems to restricted to knocking off Danny C-B in the excitement of the moment 40 years ago
That and her own fashionable radicalism of the time plus a leading role in the abortion legalization campaign. And Kiejman was a Socialist, albeit with little in the way of ideology but a close associate of Mitterrand's while both her sister and Kouchner were radical lefties at the time of their marriage. You've got to wonder what her parents thought of her first dating Dany the Red and then marrying Kiejman. For a thirties style French upper class radical right winger having their daughter in relationships with two stereotypical Jewish boogie men would be straight out of their worst nightmares. (Charismatic young leader of the Revolution and the brilliant older socialist and social climbing wealthy wheeling and dealing lawyer child of poor Polish Jewish immigrants.) And the younger daughter married Kouchner.
He was just illustrating how robust vellum can be.
Not too surprising that sheepskin would be sturdier than paper.
re: 61
Yeah, with indelible inks.
62: Has anybody tried shaving the sheep, writing with a tattoo gun, and then tanning the hide?
I don't want to read Moby Hick's novel, though.
In a few minutes, the sidebar comments will be replaced and 64 won't make any sense.
Because I wasn't proposing a novel on a sheep. Just the Bible.
re: 63
IIRC, vellum isn't tanned. It's also often not sheep.
It'll be our secret, Moby. Everyone else will just think I'm some basement dwelling loon, but you'll know.
Has anybody tried shaving the sheep, writing with a tattoo gun, and then tanning the hide?
If you had been forced to stand in a scriptuary all day in all seasons for years on end, copying stuff in insular majuscule with a goose feather, I'm sure the idea would have occurred to you. Also s/sheep/abbott/; and many other ideas.
67: My process works on a wide variety of animals and for many methods of hide processing.
gauche caviar with deep right wing connections branch
The right wing doesn't have droit caviar?
Oh, I'm being totally clueless. I thought "gauche" was just being used in its everyday English sense there.
71. French socialists have this problem with their canapes always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
72: If you think "gauche" has an everyday English sense, you can't really be that clueless.
I think it's quite clear that essear was being sinister.
Has anybody tried shaving the sheep, writing with a tattoo gun, and then tanning the hide?
I don't know if tattoos would survive the skinning and tanning process. They're quite deep down in the tissue.
That's an emperical question. I seem to recall seeing preserved human skin with clear tattoos, but I can't think where and am reluctant to google it from work.
77: there's a Saki (or it might be Roald Dahl) story on a similar subject. But I don't know if it would work in real life as opposed to just making a good story.
72: If you think "gauche" has an everyday English sense, you can't really be that clueless.
He was confusing it with "gouache".
From now one, I'll remember who to ask when I have these types of questions.
80: both, actually, now I can be bothered to check.
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/501/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_%28short_story%29
But I was thinking of the Roald Dahl one.
