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Soon to be unemployed

Leftovers & links & reviews without spoilers

ᐅ I'll be unemployed soon, which will bring big disadvantages and problems. On the bright side, I'll enjoy having wide-open mornings with nothing to do but eat breakfast and write. There are five, count 'em, five articles percolating in my head, and I have a whole weekend to get 'em written — and perhaps much longer! Is this Iowa? No, it's Heaven.

ᐅ Call me a rebel, call me a monster, but I’ve mostly stopped using forks for any food where a spoon will work. General Tso's chicken? Spoon me. My world-famous microwaved vegetables with beef bits? Spoon me. Mac and cheese? Chili? Mashed potatoes? Spoon, spoon, spoon. Forks are for salads, and breakfasts at the diner, and not much else.

ᐅ I'm trying to find some well-written but under-read blogs to add to the blogroll on the side, but jeez — where are they? Can't find many blogs that are aren't selling something, or offering self-help or financial or fashion advice I probably need but don't want. Where are the blogs that remind me of zines, where someone's pounding out words they're truly passionate about? If you know of some blogs like that, please share.

This click is a smile, but it saddens me, too. I met Ben Masel a few times and admired him, and it's belated bad news that he died ten years ago

ᐅ Do you know the name Marjoe Gortner? I remember him as a B-movie actor in the 1970s, but to my mom & dad, he was a superstar child evangelist. Yes, those two words, child and evangelist, together. Gortner's parents were traveling preachers, who made their son wear a suit and deliver sermons, beginning at the age of four. It's a horror, but the happy ending is that when he grew old enough to fight back, he did a documentary that revealed the sordid and seedy behind the scenes world of Christianity. Obviously, I love the guy.

ᐅ The concept makes me want to barf, but I've lived in the South so it doesn’t surprise me: Some old-time plantations, built and worked by slaves, have become tourist attractions and wedding destinations, where the reality of slavery is brushed aside and barely mentioned. “Would you get married at Auschwitz, and take portraits by the crematorium because the flowers in the field there are so beautiful?”

ᐅ This is a startling perspective I'd never considered even briefly, and I disagree, of course. Sigh. But it's argued well and perhaps deserves to be heard before being dismissed as simply wrong: Wesley Crusher is good, actually

ᐅ Here's a present-day Jonah who was eaten by a whale

ᐅ Here's a kangaroo playing with a dog. Why? Because it's cute, dang it.

Clocks are weird. "We discipline our lives by the time on the clock. Our working lives and wages are determined by it, and often our “free time” is rigidly managed by it too. Broadly speaking, even our bodily functions are regulated by the clock: We usually eat our meals at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are hungry, go to sleep at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are tired and attribute more significance to the arresting tones of a clock alarm than the apparent rising of the sun at the center of our solar system. The fact that there is a strange shame in eating lunch before noon is a testament to the ways in which we have internalized the logic of the clock."

ᐅ And we'll close with five mystery Links, just for fun:
           

 6/12/2021

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5 comments:

  1. MYSTERY LINKS! I haven't seen those since your site 20 years ago. good clicks...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Captain HampocketsJune 14, 2021 at 11:36 AM

      I thought I was the only one who remembered Unknown News...

      Delete
    2. Wesley is not good, never was. Wil Wheaton is cool though.

      Delete

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