Blog to be renamed: Things I Read on Wikipedia

In 1863 William Banting, an obese English undertaker and coffin maker, published "Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public" in which he described a diet for weight control giving up bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes.  His booklet was widely read, so much so that some people used the term "Banting" for the activity usually called "dieting."

Prelinger and Macauley and now this:

"Will it make a beautiful ruin?" That was the question Basil Spence asked about the nuclear power station he was designing in Trawsfynydd, Wales. This was back in the 1960s, but it was forward looking. Spence, an architect (he designed the famous Coventry Cathedral in England), was aware of one simple fact: Nuclear power plants are functional for a relatively short period of time before they are put out of commission and replaced by newer, safer designs and technology. The abandoned plant is filled with radioactivity that makes it unusable for anything for a long time. A cathedral is designed with the idea that it should stand, and function, for a very long time — perhaps beyond time. A nuclear power plant is designed with the knowledge that it must become a ruin, and rather quickly. It is born to die, and then to sit as a corpse, a testimony to the strange and unsettling function it once had. -The Power of Ruins

green in judgement/cold in blood

What with all my journals, notebooks, books, and dictionaries in a storage locker in Texas, it was with great delight that I stumbled onto an old, forgotten writing blog online.  My voice speaks from distant years!  With no editing:

A hard breeze comes off the lake, fooling my hair into imagining that it is not in a ponytail, until up is down and more is down than up. Tension plays with my back, tightening the muscles under the skin of my upper arm which has gone lavender and yellow. Bruising has brought a new spring to my body; new colors showing every day until presumably the floral riot will fade away.
I have crushed my water bottle between two rocks where it is anchoring my book bag to prevent me from knocking it off. I am still silent for the passers by, three boys in sports jerseys which hang low, exposing their beautiful brown young shoulders and backs. They are not talking, just walking, and we are all silent as they pass me by. It is then that I am sure that I am leaving.


or


i say those stars are beautiful and i mean you are beautiful.
i say the trees! the trees! all i mean is you.

Effie's A Box of Sun

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Copyright: Joseph Pintauro and Norman Laliberté, 1970 - Harper & Row Publishers

Tom Ford's daydream:

Wisdom from Mike Tyson:

"Respect is better than love."  Words from the mouths of babes, no?

Eccentric Collection

I met this fellow yesterday who looks like a member of the cramps and is a professional rollerblader.  Companies pay to sponsor him even though he participates in no competitions.  When I asked him if it was his full time job, he was bashful and told me that he'd love to be in a band, but it won't pay the bills.  The mind reels!  The universe is HUGE and crammed with things I've never imagined!

Sublime Note upon Further Conversation

And really, Lobachevsky is required reading.

Like Edith Wharton read aloud.

Oscillating electric fan set on medium:

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at asolar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it hadrusted shut.

He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.

She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

“Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”

The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.

Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.

They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.”

Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.

The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.

The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.

Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light.

The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.

I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.

She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.

You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.

The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.

The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

High School Creative Writing

Richard Feynman on Fashion

"Do not keep saying... 'But how can it be like that?'... Nobody knows how it can be like that."

Laibach

Dang, both hilarious and great.

Trajectory

On the Thaw

When on the lake yesterday, we went under a bridge where the ice was clear but for fault lines showing depth. Bubbles rose frozen white, tender voids, and underneath particulates drifted.

And years past, the thaw then on the shores of a greater lake, unfrozen and waves crashing fiercely. Iceburgs became lucid, full of holes and a greater clarity, and they exploded on the rocks at our feet with the sound of chimes.

Plasticine Crow

It's surprising that I didn't add this in earlier. Here it is to be found again:

Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!

"In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things that we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we "officially" desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the happiness of dreaming about things that we do not really want... like the proverbial woman who snaps back at the man making macho advances to her: "Shut up, or you'll have to do what you're boasting about!"

Niki de Saint Phalle

Married at eighteen, mother at twenty-one, and terror of the art world.

Favorite dream of mine.

I dreamt I was a young, fierce orphan girl, flat chested and wiry. My best friend and my intended was a fellow orphan. He would hold me to him when he laughed, great lungs booming around me. We tormented our ancient city.

Playing one day on the sandy edges of the town, we found a book with a map and an corroded navigation tool made of bronze. We set out to find the treasure it described, although we could not read or use the tool. We just knew that was the proper response.

We went deep into the deserts. The deserts were shaded every hue, and as the sand moved dunes took on new colors. We were awed by the beauty, and although we were about to die of thirst, our eyes praised the world. Holding dirty hands, browned and naked skinny, wonder eyes.

We collapsed. Desert gypsy's found us and a large woman who had lost a daughter took me from him. They left him.

I was convalescent, planning murder, covered in beautiful colored blankets. Wakeful in a tent, with lights shining on the fabric, I saw his shadow creeping along the edge. His knife came up and cut open the tent cloth and he stepped in.

Overjoyed escape into the desert.

Hedgehog in the Fog

A La Belle Poule

I was unable to find the hairstyles that represent the solar system or commemorate the first vaccine, but the internet assures me that they did exist.