Drawing: The lost ones - Pt. 1

click drawing to enlarge

"I cheat on my income tax. I sometimes steal commissions rightfully belonging to other salesmen. I step out on my wife whenever I make a sales trip to Toledo. I don't really like my 2nd daughter. I can't wait to collect my inheritance."
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Another warning sign from Yellowstone National Park

Other warning signs I saw about Bison/Buffalos go into even more detail about their unpredictability. I wrote a poem about the Bison on my recent trip:

http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2006/07/poem-red-flag.html


click poster to enlarge
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President Bush: "Stop doing this shit!"

As diplomats focus on possibly sending an international force to southern Lebanon, President Bush--who was unaware that his microphone was "hot"--revealed that his focus was to force Syria to stop the Hizbullah attacks on Israel.

President Bush was recorded telling Tony Blair that Syria should press Hizbullah to "stop doing this shit".



The entire story appears here.

Another source, Jeanine Aversa, AP Economics Writer, quotes The President as saying:

" 'See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over,' Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll."
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A warning on geysers

click to enlarge


This is part of a warning poster on why stepping on Geysers in Yellowstone National Park is not a great idea. Many people have been killed or maimed by geysers and hot water at the park.
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Hiking along Yellowstone's Grand Canyon

Click photo to enlarge

Del, Claire, Jack, and Keelin hiking near Artist Point, along the rim of Yellowstone's Grand Canyon, at about 8,700 feet above sea level.
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Old Faithful

As far as sights and images in Yellowstone, Old Faithful was cool, but a bit of a snoozer compared to the Canyon and the many animals we saw. The other geothermal features like the bubbling paint pots and the sapphire pools were pretty stunning, but again, did not compare to the seismic and geothermal wonders of Yellowstone's "Grand Canyon."













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Poem: The Moon's In Tune

A parchment full moon
In a pale fog aurora
Struggles to clear the mountaintop

The Sea of Tranquility
Flowers in the center
The moon's in tune

She leads the wolves in song
And turns the tide
Of earth's one great ocean

Down here we cured
Polio smallpox and Hitler
But we couldn't save the Dodo.

Yellowstone, July 12, 2006
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The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

I have never been so stunned by the beauty of a natural feature. This is not the Grand Canyon of Arizona, but a smaller, geothermal version (900 feet deep, and about half a mile across). It's free for the price of a hike.

The chemical and heat action of the geyser basin cause the rhyolite rock to become rotten (not in the sense of putrefaction, but the rock becomes easily brittle and erodible). Thermal activity still exists in the canyon in geysers and hot springs, as it does in Old Faithful, and the many springs, mudpots, hotspots, and streams in Yellowstone. In many places, sulfur fumes permeate the air.



The colors in the canyon are due to hydrothermal reactions. The rhyolite in the canyon contains various iron compounds. When the old geyser basin was active, chemical alterations took place in the iron. Exposure to the elements as well as the sometimes acidic gases that accompany the hot water cause these changes. The rocks are oxidizing; the fantastic symphony of color is because the canyon is rusting.
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President Bush Retreats

"Unable to placate the wailing child - despite all his skills of diplomacy - President Bush was forced to hand it back to its waiting mother. " Read the Associated Press story here.

When I think of it, the way he handled the baby and passed it back to the mother isn't all that different from his handling of the "war" on terrorism. He will one day hand Iraq back to itself in much the same manner.
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Poem: The Red Flag

A brown bison with dreadlock fur
Grazes alongside the sparkling river
In the Lamar Valley

His colossal head wreathed
In black flies and no-see-ums
He ambles across the meadow

At a pace to reach the other side
Hours from now
The warning signs remind me

Of his pent-up potential
Bison are a little bit crazy
And will charge for no reason

Erupting from zero to thirty
In a flash
While a homo sapien

Tops out at ten m.p.h.
He would close the gap
In a few seconds

But I am still tempted
To wave the red flag
Just to see

The lumbering beast
At full speed
Charging to impale me.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, July 11, 2006
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Henley's Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes, and Processes

This is one of my favorite books. It contains "ten thousand selected household, workshop, and scientific formulas, trade secrets, chemical recipes, processes, and money saving ideas." The edition I have was published in 1912. I discovered this book when I was staying at the Flying Karamov Brothers' bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Wash., while I was at the jazz festival there. It is an endlessly fascinating book, telling you how to make, well, just about everything there was to make in 1912.

The book tells you how to cook up just about everything. It none only tells you how to set up a lab, but walks you through creating some extremely complicated potions and concoctions. It has forty pages on adhesives alone. Aabsinthe, amalgams, antidotes for poison, beverages, celluloid, ceramics, cider, candy, cosmetics, tooth powders, dyes, essences, lemonade, mayonnaise, waterproofing, candles, varnishes, skin whitener (remember, this is still 1912), perfume, toothpastes, and embalming fluid! Blasting powder! Dynamite! Fertilizer, how to detect formaldehyde, copper, saccharine, and dozens of other substances in food, fumigants, glass, household formulas, ink, how to tan leather, how to make matches, how to make paint, dozens of recipes for photographic solutions, rat poison, rubber, soaps, alcoholic spirits, syrups, liquor. . .and about 9,950 other things!

You can usually find a copy on Amazon or EBay. I also see the book on survivalist sites, and maybe even our local nutjob book purveyor Loompanics stocks it. It was selling for $100 on some of the wacko sites.

I have been periodically dipping in and out of this book for twenty years. . .and always have fun.
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My ten favorite albums: Elvis Costello & The Attractions' Get Happy

[I'll get to the other ten albums sooner or later]

From My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, up to Trust, Elvis Costello was a songwriting and song performing machine. These five albums are, in my booklet, the best music to emerge in those years (77-81). And they had some pretty stiff competition from Talking Heads, The Clash, The Ramones, and many others. . .I mean at that point, even Motown was still a force. Elvis is the best composer to emerge from either side of the Atlantic.

In album four, Get Happy, Elvis achieved a masterpiece. Elvis's embrace of Stax/Motown is stunning. And it had twenty songs-- a miracle on vinyl. It is a shimmering, blazing tribute to soul. It may not be his greatest album (Imperial Bedroom or maybe Armed Forces takes that prize), but it is my favorite, and the favorite of a lot of long-time fans. On the re-mastered version that came out a couple of years ago, Elvis included an incredible 30 bonus tracks, ranging from demos to alternate versions. It is a tribute to Elvis that he almost always made the right choices--I have yet to hear an alternate version that was better than the released one.

As with previous albums, this one was recorded in an alcohol-fueled frenzy. The songs tumble out jackhammer style--some of them are less than two minutes long. Nick Lowe was once again the producer and somehow he pulled it off, despite his production methods, which Elvis once said consisted of

"a fader in one hand and a vodka bottle in the other."

These songs were frequently written and recorded in canon blasts, like the boast of "Possession" being written in five minutes after an afternoon infatuation with a cocktail waitress. The Attractions' mission was to pump out as much music as possible, as soon as possible.

Album five, Trust, was another excellent album. And then things got spottier. But ten great albums, or whatever it is. . .not many can match that. Maybe only one other band. And now, I'm thinking I've been a bit hasty. . .do I really like this album better than This Year's Model, Imperial Bedroom, or Armed Forces? Well, I do today.
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