A salute to Golden Gardens - Excelsior!

Orcas ("killer whales") off Golden Gardens in February, 2009 (they
don't usually come this close to Seattle proper) - click to enlarge


a typical scene -- looking over toward Bainbridge Island - click to enlarge


Sunset (a great time to visit), just before the bonfires are lit. The sun becomes an
orange or red ball and fills the sky with pink, yellow, and orange as it slips below
the Olympic Mountains behind Bainbridge Island - click to enlarge


An amazing polyglot mix of people gather every day at Golden Gardens. Golden Gardens is a beach in north Seattle (Ballard) on Puget Sound's Shilshole Bay. It is within walking distance of my house, down a trail and maybe 150 stairs. Its 87 acres contain multitudes, and a lot of Ballard history. It became a key Seattle park early on, since it was at the very end of the streetcar line.

You'll find volleyball players, Christians gathering to pray and sing around the campfire, families cooking over open fires or charcoal, drum circles, solo guitar players, skaters, joggers, bikers, kite fliers, scuba divers, wind surfers, Buddhist gatherings, Wiccan meetings, kayakers, canoeists, and mostly just people walking and sitting on the beach.

The beach ranges from sandy to rocky and littered with shells and driftwood. One section of the beach at the north was restored to what they believe was its original pristine state...a small dune area, freshwater pond, and wetlands were recovered a few years ago.

At low tide you find anemones, sea urchins, limpets, oyster drills, starfish, crabs, clams, sand dollars, oysters, and all sorts of other tide pool critters.

At the very north (the restored part) of the beach are reeds, sea grass, alder trees, salal and Oregon grape, and other native flora, which create some very private areas to hang around in. These areas are rumored to contain, at times, people performing the act of procreation (or just straight recreation without the pro- if you're on the other team).

The sunsets are stunning, as the orange sun falls below the Olympic Mountains after sending rays dancing along the sound.

My mom used to come here and swim in high school on the last day of school. A lot of kids, the polar bear club, and the occasional grown-up still swim here. The temperature of Puget sound ranges from about 45 degrees to around 52 in the summer. It is brutally cold, although there are some hot spots around the sound--shallow areas where the temperature is more hospitable. Golden Gardens is not a hot spot. When you jump in you are instantly numb. But you see people swimming anytime you visit there from May to September. I can't do it. . .mid-calf is about as far as I go.

In the last few years, the park has increased security, and cleaned up the beach. There are now 12 steel fire pits where the city allows park visitors to build fires. This is a big improvement from the days when you could build fires anywhere--which left the beach littered with charred logs and ash.

This is about as good as it gets...you bring in a surreptitious bottle of wine, sit on the beach and watch a sailboat regatta and later, the sun as it drifts downward, and finally slips down into the other half of the world.
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11 Stupid Questions From Yahoo Answers That Have Changed My Life from 11points.com

11points.com (or, Sam Greenspan, who also runs the SmashPanda.com site) comes up with some fascinating lists. Sometimes his commentary can be a little snarky...but, he does come up with some pretty fine lists. One from January, 11 Stupid Questions From Yahoo Answers That Have Changed My Life, is pretty fascinating, and spooky, and creepy. But good.

Some of his recent posts include:

11 Ways Ice Cube and I Differ On Assessing What Constitutes a Good Day
11 Questions With Jennifer Widerstrom, Phoenix from American Gladiators
11 Totally Different, and Mostly Crazy, Systems for Calculating Your Age
11 Weakest Official State Items
11 Businesses Selling Two Hilariously Unconnected Items
11 State Laws About Marrying Your Cousins, From Strictest to Loosest
11 Most Profound Quotes in Simpsons History
11 Old School Nintendo Tricks Permanently Burned Into Our Brains
11 Women the Kama Sutra Says You Shouldn't Have Sex With
11 Predictions That Back to the Future Part II Got Wrong
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digital art: the new family

click to enlarge

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Happy Mother's Day - John Lennon sings "Mother" live at MSG (with lyrics)

Mother by John Lennon

Mother, you had me but I never had you,
I wanted you but you didn't want me,
So I got to tell you,
Goodbye, goodbye.
Farther, you left me but I never left you,
I needed you but you didn't need me,
So I got to tell you,
Goodbye, goodbye.
Children, don't do what I have done,
I couldn't walk and I tried to run,
So I got to tell you,
Goodbye, goodbye.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home.
Mama don't go,
Daddy come home...
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Happy Mother's Day - Frank Zappa & The Mother of Invention's "Mother People".

We are the other people
We are the other people
You're the other people too
Found a way to get to you...
Do you think that I'm crazy?
Out of my mind?
Do you think that I creep in the night
And sleep in a phone booth?
Lemme take a minute & tell you my plan
Lemme take a minute & tell who I am
If it doesn't show
Think you better know
I'm another person
Do you think that my pants are too tight
Do you think that I'm creepy?
Lemme take a minute & tell you my plan
Lemme take a minute & tell who I am
If it doesn't show
Think you better know
I'm another person (the verse that really
Goes here has been censored out &
Recorded backwards in a special section
At the end of side one...)
We are the other people
We are the other people
You're the other people too
Found a way to get to you
We are the other people
We are the other people
You're the other people too
Found a way to get to you
Do you think that I love you...
Stupid & blind?
Do you think that I dream through the
Night
Of holding you near me?

Lemme take a minute & tell you my plan
Lemme take a minute & tell who I am
If it doesn't show
Think you better know
I'm another person
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Photo of Stazzi James Cannon: meet the parents

click to enlarge - photographer unknown for the moment

A photo of my brand new grand-nephew Stazzi James Cannon, along with his parents (my niece) Paloma and Von. I don't know who actually took the photo--Grandpaw Dwight? It came in an email...
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Father Cutie a/k/a Padre Oprah caught with his pants [not quite] down

Cover of the tabloid TVNOTAS - click to enlarge - [First photos of a priest - Holy God - caught red handed - photo of mistress]

Tabloid photographs of a popular television priest engaged in a clinch on a Florida beach have been published by a Spanish language tabloid, TVNOTAS, and have now--of course--appeared all over the internet. The Padre has literally millions of reader, followers, parishioners, and listeners.



Rev. Alberto Cutié a/k/a Padre Oprah has published books, and hosted radio and television shows ("Padre Alberto") about relationships. He had a recent best-seller, “Real Life, Real Love.” As it turns out, the Father wasn't just talking out of his a**. Perhaps he was just working on his next book? He may have been just performing research with the brunette on the beach.
Photo from the tabloid TVNOTAS - click to enlarge

The tabloid photos show the handsome 40-year-old priest in swim trunks, cuddling with, and smooching on, a dark-haired woman on a Florida beach. The very same day, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami removed him from his post as pastor of a Miami Beach church (he is on leave). As you probably know, the Catholic church has required priests to be celibate since around the 11th century. Interestingly, he got the boot one day after the revelations came out. Earlier celibacy violators in the RC Church were often shuttled between parishes (and have bankrupted--and even closed--more than one Diocese and parish). Many of the molesting priests are still active in the church--but their crime was molesting 14 year old boys, not cuddling up with a consenting female adult.
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The Band's final song: Dont Do It - the encore at their final performance

As their final song, after a very long concert with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Neils Young and Diamond, Emmy Lou Harris, The Staples, Muddy Waters, and many more, The Band played their great cover of Marvin Gaye's Don't Do it, albeit in a shortened version. They'd been on stage for many hours. Rick Danko and Richard Manuel both died tragically years later. And the rest of them are still plugging along, but no one ever came close to the transcendent heights The Band achieved. The movie this clip is from, Scorsese's Last Waltz engendered a lot of hostility from the Band members (except Robbie Robertson). Rick Danko told a reporter that they usually turned Robertson's mike way down--because he couldn't sing. . .something easily verified by a listen to his solo recordings.

Dylan Thomas's Late Poem "Prologue"

This is one of my favorite poems. Dylan Thomas wrote the Prologue with an elaborate rhyme scheme that no really picked up on--to his great disappointment. The hundred line poem rhymes the first and last lines, the second with the next to last line, all the way up to the very middle of the poem--bridging the stanzas--where there is a couplet (Sheep white hollow farms/To Wales in my arms). You fade into his rhyme scheme in the middle, where, for about 12 lines or so, the rhymes chime. . .and then it fades back away, back to where line 2 rhymes with line 99, etc.

Rhyme scheme notwithstanding, it is a gorgeous, dense and lyrical poem, with an amazingly propulsive rhythm. The poem is very much in the spirit of his great late poems like Fern Hill, In Country Sleep, etc.

Prologue

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spining man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms


To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooning the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a toungued puffball)
But animals thick as theives
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Hulloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now.

-- Dylan Thomas
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Sarah Palin's new heater: NRA gives the Governor a custom assault rifle

--click to enlarge--
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Elvis Costello video: High Fidelity from one of the great albums "Get Happy," produced by Nick Lowe

Knowing Elvis's personality, and knowing how cranky he was back then (remember the Ray Charles Incident?), it's amazing they got Elvis to do so many videos, and seriously dance and emote...here is Get Happy's High Fidelity. . .


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