7-Strings Sunrise & Sunset
Category: Art
Dentist Sun Rise & Shine
Dentist’s office sun rises shines
Imprisoned by shadows stripes
Thinking grinding gnashing teeth
Some impressions made
Brain numbed by Novocaine
Lips lost face sags
“Open wider” whirring drill
Splashes suction smoking still
One imagines gaping holes
Picking drilling air-blasts woe
Fitting carbon paper bite
Drilling fitting bite again
Glued fitted bite down hold
No brushing eating or floss don’t chew
For three weeks until we call
To anoint the crown give proper reign
Don’t let that temp one fall
World Opposite
We talk
My world opposite yours
Your today is my tomorrow
My today is your yesterday
Through your voice I see the future
Through my voice you glimpse the past
When I see the light, you stand in darkness
When darkness engulfs me, your light shines
My summer is your winter
When you spring, I fall
Your world opposite mine
We talk
A Question An Answer
Eleanor at You Lil Dickens posted Ask Yourself with the question “Why is Poetry important to you?” I answered:
Poetry expresses many things we cannot layout as plain thoughts, words or deeds. Poetry allows us to mask reality in mysterious verse, soften hard realities, drive home points that need to be made. We can expose our deepest secrets, friendly or foul, in abstruse rhymes and mysterious lines left to the reader to unfold, and decode. Poetry is an avenue to express our feelings about life and death, love and rejection, freedom and oppression, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, sexuality and abstinence, belief and unbelief, good and evil. Through poetry we can express all the symptoms, right and wrong, of being human.
Chuck, The Reluctant Poet, asked me to post it here.
Flaming Host
Flaming host of hosts
Cup of spirits crucified
Apparition hangs
All Day And All Night Through
I am super excited about this collaboration between Resa at Graffiti Lux Art & More and ArtGowns, and me. Resa mentioned that the construction project to replace the 130 year old sewer lines that run under the street in front of where she lives in the old area of Toronto, Canada goes on “all day and all the night through!” I told her that would make a good parody. Resa wrote the parody lyrics to go to All Day And All Of The Night by The Kinks. I go the music and recorded the first round with my vocals. I sent the music to Resa and asked her to try singing her parody. When she sent me the audio file of her vocals, I was like “Wow!” she sounded super good. I mixed her vocals in with the music, Resa sent me video clips and photos of the construction from her window, and I put the parody music video together. Laurie was reviewing the video and she thought there needed to be more desperation in the chorus, and asked if I could add construction sounds to the chorus. I pulled the scraping sounds off a backhoe video and added snippets of the scrapping and clanking to the chorus and solo. That was enough to give a better sense of desperation to the parody.
When Resa first told me about the construction I really felt sorry for her. When we lived in Madrid, Spain, the city constructed a new Metro stop about 100 feet from the apartment building we lived in. The construction noise went on 24/7 for a year. It was horrible. However, we were not in lock down, and so it was easy for us to simply go to parks, museums, and bars to get away from the noise. Toronto is still locked down with stay at home orders, so Resa cannot simply say the heck with it, go out and get away from it all. She can go on walks, but she is very limited in her activity under the lock down orders.
ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT THROUGH
By Resa McConaghy
Oh they have got loud work to do in the day time
Evac, jack hammers and backhoes too, all the night through
There is no time nowhere to hide losing my mind too
It’s cruel they pound and crash then roar all of the time
All day and all night through
All day and all night through
All day and all night through
I believe this crazy work will always be there
Oh yeah all day and night time through – PTSD
There is no time nowhere to hide losing my mind
Evac, jack hammers and backhoes too, not a good time
All day and all night through
All day and all night through
Oh go away
I just know that they will be here forever
Oh yeah all day and night time through, fixing the sewer
There is no time nowhere to hide losing my mind
Oh they have got loud work to do in the day time
All day and all night through
All day and all night through
All day and all night through
MAD about Lovely Missile’s Garden
No comment… #9 by Anakreon Kanavakis.
Lovely Missile’s Garden
Inspired by No Comment… #9 by Anakreon Kanavakis above. Lyrics by Timothy Price. Music by The Beatles.
The above sketch by Anakreon Kanavakis brought back memories of growing up during the Cold War when Mr. Kanavakis drew this sketch. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was all the rage for waging a Cold War. MAD is the theory of deterrence based on the idea that if enemies have equal abilities to annihilate each other, the equilibrium will deter said enemies from launching nuclear strikes against one or the other. The proliferation of bombs and missiles was a constant source of fear and concern during the Cold War which Mr. Kanavakis illustrates so well in his sketch.
Keep in mind that Athens, Greece, where Mr. Kanavakis worked for newspapers, is much closer to Russia than the United State. I will dare to guess that the fear of annihilation from the Soviet Union was more poignant in Greece than in the USA at that time, yet doomsday seemed to be always at hand everywhere.
When I saw Marina’s post with No Comment… #9 on her anmar blog, first thing this morning, I commented with the first few lines that came to mind. Soon after that I wrote the rest of the lyrics and turned the initial inspiration into a complete parody called Lovely Missile’s Garden (lyrics at the end of the post) to the music of Octopuses Garden by The Beatles. When inspiration strikes, I take action before the inspiration slips away. After writing the lyrics, I found an instrumental version of Octopuses Garden. Between various chores, I recorded the parody and sent it off to Marina for her approval and permission to use No Comment… #9.
I took this photo yesterday. It seems fitting for today’s theme.
On April 9, 1999, after President Clinton dropped bombs on the Serbs without informing Russia, Russian President Bois Yeltsin threatened to nuke Europe. We lived in Madrid, Spain at that time and saw Yeltsin on the news making his threats. It made me think of Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you!” statement in 1956 (I was not born yet). We were worried about the whole affair, but all our Spanish friends were “Meh!” Some of our friends had done their military duty with Russian troops and said that most everything the Russians had was broken down and didn’t work. They didn’t think the Russian’s bombs were capable of exploding.
Lovely Missile’s Garden
Inspiration: Anakreon Kanavakis
Parody Lyrics: Timothy Price
Music: The Beatles
I like to be, watering bombs you see
In a lovely missile’s garden in the shade
I know I’d win, because I’ve been
Watering missile’s garden in the shade
I have no friends who want to be
Watering my missile’s garden with me
I like to be, watering bombs you see
In a lovely missile’s garden in the shade
It would be warm (Oh so warm), from the storm (From the storm)
A little blast-a-way and big shock wave (Boom! Boom!)
No resting our heads (Our heads), we’d all be dead (Oh no!)
A missile garden will make our grave (So sad!)
We would not sing or dance around
Annihilation would be profound
I like to be, watering bombs you see
In a lovely missile’s garden in the shade
Without a doubt (No doubt!) we’d be blown about (All about!)
Echoes fall beneath the blasting waves (So many waves!)
There’s no more Joy (Killed Joy), no girls or boys (No girls or boys?)
Knowing there’s nothing left but empty space (So much space).
No happiness for you and me
No one left to tell us what to do
I like to be, watering bombs you see
In a lovely missile’s garden in the shade
I like to be, watering bombs you see
In a lovely missile’s garden in the shade
Travel Photo Challenge Day 6 “GOAL!” 8 Days in Paris
The neighbor’s cow was itching to get into the spirit of football…
Day 6 of the Travel Photo Challenge takes us to Paris, France in 2018. We were in Paris for 8 days in July 2018. Laurie gave a paper at the 2018 Internation Conference on Construction Grammar. Laurie and I were both going to present papers at the 2020 Internation Conference on Construction Grammar in Antwerp, Belgium last August, but it was postponed to August 2021 because of COVID.
We did a lot of exploring, including meeting up with a fellow blogger, Anne, who hasn’t posted in a couple of years, and she gave us a long walking tour of the 10th and 19th Arrondissements. We arrived in Paris the day France played and won the World Cup by defeating Croatia 4-2. The Parisians were celebrating in the streets.
We stayed in a hotel inside the roof of a hospital that was rebuilt in 1380 and then remodeled in 1801 to remove the church-like façade. The hospital is catercorner to Notre Dame. The hospital is a labyrinth and it was very difficult to find the hotel when we first arrived. After 8:00 pm security had to ring us in through a side door, and we often had a heavily armed military unit follow us into the passage. One day when the military unit was making its rounds through the hospital, one of the men broke guard, stopped me, and asked me about my cameras and lenses. He was into photography and we chatted for a few minutes then we rejoined the unit.
There are 79 photos broken up into the World Cup celebration, Fashion Wheels, Where we stayed, On the town, Château of Vincennes, and Notre Dame. We were there the year before Notre Dame burned. We got up in the bell towers on our last day in Paris. We are very fortunate to have been able to go to Paris in 2018 and stayed so near Notre Dame.
Moon through the clouds. December 27, 2020.
Jupiter, a few of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn on the lower right. December 27, 2020.
The photographer of the day is Inge David at https://ingedavid.wordpress.com/portfolio-2/. I don’t know where Inge lives, but it’s somewhere in northern Europe. She is an excellent photographer and loves cars, architecture, and nature.
GOAL! France won the World Cup in 2018.
…She painted herself like a Frenchman.
People were sitting in the streets all over the neighborhood we were in watching the game.
Fashion Wheels
This family, each on their own wheels were adorable, and the young woman on the right was very fashionable.
Where we stayed.
We had a small, comfortable, modern room with our own bathroom and air-conditioning. Not bad for a 640-year-old building.
We were in the last room in the third wing on the right.
On the town
Graveyard cats
Château of Vincennes
We walked five miles east to Château of Vincennes, which is outside of Paris proper. You can learn more about it in my post A Long Walk into the Past at https://photos.tandlphotos.com/blog/2018/7/a-long-walk-into-the-past
Notre Dame
The Deal
Downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
MacMemories From 1984
I’ve been cleaning out shelves in my office area and I came across the media packets that came with the first Macintosh we got in 1984 followed by the first Macintosh Plus we got in 1986. The Macintosh had 128K of RAM and one 3.5 inch diskette drive, no hard drive. The process for using it was 1) you booted the computer with the System diskette. 2) You ejected the system diskette and inserted the Program diskette and opened the program, such as MacPaint. 3) You MacPainted to create your graphics. 4) You selected Save to save your graphic file, which ejected the Program diskette. 5) You inserted a diskette to save your file. 6) If the diskette wasn’t formatted, then you would have to click on Yes to format the diskette, and 7) save your file.
I’m trying to remember if when you quit the Program and Shut Down the Macintosh if it asked you to put the Program diskette and then the System diskette back in before it shut down, or if it simply ejected whichever diskette was in the drive before it shut down. I think there was a lot of ejecting and inserting the different diskettes before it shutdown.
We got an external disk drive with the first Macintosh Plus, which meant we could have a program diskette in the computer and a file diskette in the external drive. Our next Macintosh plus had two disk drives. We got external hard drives for the Macintosh Pluses before the SEs and SE/30s came out with internal hard drives. When we got one Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Laserwrtier in 1986, the pair cost over $10,000 — around $3K for the Macintosh Plus and $7K for Laserwriter. That’s around $23,700 ($7.1K and $16.6K respectively) in 2020 dollars. Macintosh computers always came with the system software and at least a sample of programs.
Those were the really expensive, bad old days of computing. The first IBM PC we got, with similar specs (it had two 5.25″ floppy drives) was around $3K in 1981 (~$8,600 today) plus you had to buy whichever DOS you wanted to use, plus buy the programs, the drivers, etc. Nowadays you can easily pay $7,000 or $24,000 or more for a new Macintosh Pro. However, you get a lot of CPUs, RAM, and disk space for the money and a lot of powerful programs included in the price. But most computers today cost a fraction of what they did in the bad old days of computing.
Off Center & Not Even 