signifying.1

Happy Birthday!

Freedom of the Blog, Truth, Justice,

and all that stuff...

--photo courtesy of LeMa

The Splenda Molecule.1

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.

Go on now go walk out the door

just turn around now

'cause you're not welcome anymore

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story.

weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye

you think I'd crumble

you think I'd lay down and die

Oh no, not I

I will survive

as long as I know how to love

I know I will stay alive

I've got all my life to live

I've got all my love to give

and I'll survive

I will survive

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

--thank you to Anonymous for this splendid moment.

Blue Cats

The Dilettante knows a Blue Cat named Hattie. We have never seen another Blue Cat, but yesterday we accidentally came across a postage stamp with, yes, a Blue Cat!

This stamp was issued by a group of islands known as The Faroes, somewhere between Iceland and Scotland.

It is a magic land with a lost Viking language. Perhaps it is also the land of Blue Cats?

The Splenda Molecule

"Moochers are people who, when they are to blame, say it's the other fellow's fault for bringing it up."

--Ishmael Reed

Baby, don't you drive that car!

In 1926, a Bugatti roared through an Italian hillside town taking one of the 1500 treacherous bends in the 67 mile Targa Florio race course in Sicily. The driver was Eliska Junkova, the first woman to ever compete in the race. "The Czech racing queen of the Jazz Age," known in the West as Elizabeth Junek, went on to compete and win in races against some of the best male race drivers of the Twentieth Century.

The screech-the-oval races, currently known as NASCAR, started as an offical entity and icon of the American South in 1948. "The King" of what began as local stock car racing, Richard Petty said in 1976 regarding contender Janet Guthrie, "She's no lady. If she was she'd be at home. There's a lot of differences in being a lady and being a woman."

Thirty years later, with NASCAR courting women's, er, ladies' dollars at the gate to worship their valiant male champions, Petty says he still hasn't changed his mind about women in racing.

But then, perhaps he never met Eliska Junkova.

This catty commentary was suggested as material worthy of consideration by Her Royal Dowager Highness of The Clan Fiend (left) -- First cat to compete in the Antique Car Races.

Go Figure / Whatever

for lack of another name..."The Egg."

a collage by the dilettante.

original -- 8.5 x 15"

Style: geo-political fashion chick

Paola Antonelli, a curator of design at New York's Museum of Modern Art, opines that "Good Design makes you think."

Miuccia Prada, Ph.D. in political science, and present mistress of one of Italy's oldest fashion houses, recently said, "When you go out, you have to know how you feel at that precise moment. You really have to feel comfortable and at ease in what you're doing, who you're seeing, in what you are." Laura Bush, wife of President George, expressed a desire to free the women of Afghanistan from conditions most vividly represented by the garments they are forced to wear. Fashionistas of "the free world" are shamelessly borrowing the style of impoverished nations. If "good design makes you think," what are we thinking of.

--art and comment by Phd.

signify

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

--jack kerouac, from "On the Road"

signifying

The postwar era was a time where the dominant culture was desperate for a reassuring planned order; but there was a strong intellectual undercurrent calling for spontaneity, an end to psychological repression; a romantic desire for a more chaotic, Dionysian existence.

The beats were a manifestation of this undercurrent...

"This is the jazzy story of a hip, saxophone playing cat who heads to the big city to seek fame and fortune. Once there, he finds that the top dogs own the cool clubs, and that sometimes you have to work at the Doggie Diner to make ends meet.

But he also learns how important it is to ''do what you love to do and do it well!' "

--Hip Cat, by Johnathan London

Read more here on how the dominant culture transmuted the threat of a subversive counterculture into an amusing symbol of the signifier... Rant

Suttee of the Cats

On every occasion of a fire in Egypt the strangest prodigy occurs with the cats. The inhabitants allow the fire to rage as it pleases, while they stand about at intervals and watch these animals which, slipping by the men or else leaping over them, rush headlong into the flames. When this happens, the Egyptians are in deep affliction. If a cat dies in a private house by a natural death, all the inmates of the house shave their eyebrows.... The cats on their decease are taken to the city of Bubatis, where they are embalmed, after which they are buried in certain sacred repositories.


--Herodotus



Well, do you suppose, Herodotus notwithstanding, that such an intelligent animal would do this?

[original art by the dilettante]

identity illusions

Note.

An evening at the theatre. It occurred to me that there is something weird about someone wanting to be someone else. And even more so about someone sitting down for a couple of hours to look at someone they don't know; pretending to be someone else, talking to someone who is also pretending to be someone else. A dialogue, furthermore, invented

by somebody who imagined they were pretending to be each of these in turn.

--alan fletcher

Note.

The kind of profound,
bred-in-the-bone superficiality that can become, when superbly mounted, a
certain kind of meaningfulness.

--author unknown

Note:

Most people feel that their present situation keeps them from doing or being all they can. The feel they're on their way somewhere, to some higher league whre they really belong.

--terry miller, playwright

Note:

The
world will end with the whimper of a Boomer under the cosmetic surgeon's
knife.

--phD.

FULL MOONS

...ask any emergency room nurse; buttons were sold as fund raisers to alert the public to "be careful out there" during the Full Moon.