The Royal Wedding.
Refinement, ritual, respect, dignity, grace, ceremony, order, artfulness.
No North American rubes, rudeness, coarseness, hate, violence, abuse, political agendas.
A reminder of some of the best of disappearing Western civilization via Brit culture.
Heard from a reporter during Hawaii volcano coverage:
“We moved our people when the sulphur dioxide smell became palatable.”
Yum! Yum!
Two more lost words: palatable and palpable.
So many of these reporters throw out words they don’t even know, but imagine they know.
Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard them eck-cetera, showing off their ‘erudition”. Nothing like broadcasting one’s ignorance.
No question, the language is in peril because of uneducated caucasian speakers in the media. Imagine the number of viewers who will adopt the above error in their own language use. (“I heard it on CNN so it must be right!”)
Construction site with big hills of dirt.
Couple pulls car over by the side of the road.
Get out with shovel and garbage bag and walk to the hills.
Free dirt! Help yourself!
I have long maintained that if it’s not bolted down, people will take it/whatever.
There also seems to be a lawlessness amongst ordinary folk these daze. The rules don’t apply to them. Zero conscience. Wait till the pot law comes into effect!
Trimming my ears periodically at 68. The many things we don’t have to do when younger.
This morning, doing same, I was suddenly mentally back to spring, 1998 in Winnipeg General Hospital–where both my Dad and I once worked–trimming his ears as he lay in bed reading the newspaper and dying of cancer. I gave him, too, a hand-exercise-ball to help ‘keep his grip’.
I helped him to the bathroom, which he was terribly embarrassed about, saying he never wanted me to “see him like this”. I told him it was ok, that he had taken care of me in much the same way from birth to age 3. Payback. It all evens out.
I had come when I could–near spring break when I could get some extra time off. It turned out to be fortuitous timing.
He had badly wanted to go home, but one of his hospital co-worker-friends of old had come in and convinced him otherwise; that he would be more likely be going to a terminal care facility. That news took the spirit right out of him after a valiant 7-month struggle.
When my mother and I left him afterward to go for lunch, she started having dread premonitions and we cut our lunch short and headed back to the hospital. One of the workers met and intercepted us when we entered the ward. He had died suddenly and quickly while we were gone: all this transpiring in an hour or less. They had tried a resuscitation, but it was too late. He went quickly, they said.
My mother was overwhelmed by how peaceful he looked in the bed when we were inside his room. For myself, I thought of how all our plans and efforts had turned to naught. He was at peace now. No pain; no suffering. He was at rest. I was glad for that and immediately turned to taking care of and looking out for my mother in the unreal weeks that followed.
The disgruntled female customer in a Langley Tim’s who dropped her pants, then defecated on the floor, and who next threw her crap at a Tim’s employee behind the counter shows that Screwball Central has really taken over and that anything gross and degrading can and shall happen these daze.
It was T.S. Eliot who said that civilization would end with people killing others in the streets–something which now goes on regularly with hit-and-runs and ISIL attacks in North America. I would concur with Eliot and cartoonist Walt Kelly; we have met the enemy and s/he is us; the barbarians have arrived all over again and gross, primitive barbarism and public murders are commonplace. No one and no situation is safe or sacred.
Especially with Trump and Trudeau, too, I think we are also witnessing the needless damage and deaths done by non-caring egotists in power. There are no longer any political authorities who inspire and elevate the populace and the human spirit. In their place, only a dumbing-down and catering to non-stop greed and selfish whims. The prevailing spirit, instead, seems to be “Fuck you all; this is all about Me and my agenda godamnit.”
I can still remember reading his first collection of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) in 1971 (as the most modern American writer in a 20th century American lit course) and really enjoying his funny Las Vegas essay which captured the sights, sounds, and madness of the strip casinos. Later, I would enjoy his illustrated The Right Stuff book on Chuck Yaeger and the early astronauts.
Don Iveson and city council for systematically, physically destroying Edmonton and laying it to waste while wasting billions of taxpayer money on frivolous, useless projects.
Margot Kidder, 69.
She will never be forgotten because of one good role in the first Superman movie.
A chance, too, to remember the late Christopher Reeve who died too young after being paralyzed from a fall from his horse. Remembering him as Superman and kissing Michael Caine in Deathtrap!
