Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone. There is room for optimism:

Thanksgiving

Dateline: Somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Sorry for the dearth of posts. Crabs are collecting and will be appropriately displayed. I hope everyone in the Olde Land (from that part from which the Pilgrims sailed) and the Newe has a peaceful weekend.

Random pics

Harper's Ferry - 1978

Friday Crab Blogging

Dribbles and Drabbles

In spite of my attempts at posting

purity

accuracy, it appears that several questions were raised about the previous set of select crabs.

Commentator 1:

In the second frame ... I presume that "Hunter" is the name of the artist, not a description of the crab (nor a reference to the 1960 case of the Brookloined bridge)?

This comment raises a significant ontological dilemma. That is, does it refer to the Hunter Series:

Hunter is a police drama television series starring Fred Dryer as Sgt. Rick Hunter and Stepfanie Kramer as Sgt. Dee Dee McCall, which ran on NBC....

Or the Hunter Series. I presume the latter:

The Brookloined Bridge: The Fox steals the Brooklyn Bridge and tries to peddle it to unsuspecting people on the street. As the Hunter searches for the missing bridge, Officer Flim Flannigan runs into the Fox on the street and chases him around the city. The policemen corner the Fox at the edge of the river and he's forced to use the bridge to escape. On the other side of the bridge, the Fox collides with the Hunter, who gets all the credit for returning the Bridge and capturing the Fox.

Assuming the latter, one does recognize a certain similarity between the loins on the mentioned bridge:

And those of a certain Ms. Brooke's loins:

(Dr. C becomes fatigued at trying to force a round peg through a square hole.)

Commentator 2:

Pssst ... Dr. C, that's not a crab sent from a curmudgeon. That IS a curmudgeon. It's the nostrilo-pede himself wearing a crab costume. Note the multiple legs under the mask's "chin", the lack of hair, the shortage of FEET on the crab outfit(and we know where the others went (Hint: see "notes".))

I must assume that Commentator 2 felt miffed because of the superiority of the nostrillo-pede to her costumes from here:

or maybe

or could it be?

Friday Crab Blogging

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This entry was sent in from across the seas from our able correspondent and fellow curmudgeon (at least I assume one who is a Growler is a curmudgeon, but I could be mistaken). (correction: mage provided by Judith Acland of View Camera.) It was taken at Lyme (Regis), famous for, among other things, conger cuddling* (excuse me, coddling). Of course Lyme is also a town in southern Connecticut, USA, where, in 1975, there was a rash of rashes which we now know were caused by a spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi. Here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland we are at the epicenter of Lyme Disease incidence. It is a nasty problem.

*[Conger coddling is a traditional event in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, in which a dead conger eel is thrown at members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).]

I think that this is a species of "super crab" compared to the shark on the lower right.

I thought I would include this one, even without a crab, because I think that the key at the bottom of the picture indicates these are candies. And, I am quite found of the chocolate represented by Hersey kisses.
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Friday Crab Blogging

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Davis renders an abstract impressionist crab.

A while back we discussed how to tell male and female crabs apart. It has to do with their apron being either the Capitol or the Washington Monument. The males are, as Michalea has indicated, "Jimmys," and the females are "Sooks." (though the word "sook" apparently means "baby" in Southwest England.). Another way to distinguish females is that they, like their more human counterparts, paint their nails.

Note the red fingernails. Makes me think of Lady Macbeth.

Boys, of course, have blue fingers.

I wasn't wearing a yellow shirt but it is still a good likeness.

Gazelle sighting

Though standing in the shadow of that hawk-eyed Topshamite when sighting such things as he did (here, here and here), I did stumble upon a nursing gazelle in my one of my favorite authors, Trollope. There, on page 448 of the Oxford World Classics edition of The American Senator, we have Mounser Green (of the foreign office) commenting on the demise of "The Paragon" (John Morton of the Foreign Service and Squire of Bragton):

'.... If Paraguay gets the better of the Patagonese all Brazil will be in a ferment, and you know how that kind of thing spreads among half-caste Spaniards and Portuguese. Nobody can interfere but the British Minister. When I suggested Morton I knew I had the right man if he'd only take it.'

'And now he has gone and died!' said Hoffman.

'And now he has gone and died,' continued Mounser Green. '"I never nursed a dear gazelle," and all the rest of it. Poor Paragon! I fear he was a little cut about Miss Trefoil.'
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(Ms. Trefoil, we should add, was the femme fatale of the story who ended up going off to Patagonia with Mounser Green in a typically Trollopian ending.)
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The editor of the book (John Halperin) has an extensive comment in the footnotes:

'I never nursed a dear gazelle': quoted from 'The Fire Worshippers' section of the famous poem by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), Lalla Rookh (1817), i, 279-86.

Oh! ever thus, from childhood's hour
I've seen my foundest hopes decay;
I never lov'd a tree or flow'r
But 'twas the first to fade away.
I never nurs'd a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well
And love me, it was sure to die.

The mawkish, self-pitying tone of the poem was often parodied in the the nineteenth century, which knew Lalla Rookh well - e.g., Dick Swiveller in Dicken's The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1): 'I never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well, it was sure to marry a market-gardener.'
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(Note how it is nurs'd in the poem but not in Trollope or Dickens. I suppose this was to simulate the Irish dialect though, to be fair, it is said that the English spoken in Dublin is the purest English of all. Then again, by the upper crust, not the Jackeens. )
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On further wandering (looking up Lalla Rookh), I found this comment by Katalin Hegedus in 2007:

I found this poem (i.e. Lalla Rookh) by chance. Reading George Eliot's Middlemarch the author refers to this poem as Rosamond Vincy's favourite (sic).

(Can't they spell?? First its colour and paediatrics and now its favourite!)

Anyway, this gives me THREE gazelles. Top(sham) that if you can.
In a little while, I'll be a vertible Hemingway.

More about the book, The American Senator, in a bit.

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(Friday) Crab Blogging

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Looks a little like a B-52 lumbering over the ocean. BTW, that thingy on the bottom half of the crab is his skirt. The way you tell males and females apart is that the skirt on a female's look like the United States Capitol (soon to be taken over by the unmentionables) and the male's look like the Washington Monument. (The Lincoln Memorial is spared).

Notice how the artist is able to have the crab look at her fate. Trompe l'oeil.

(Friday) Crab Blogging

Compositionally, this is probably the best ever with the rainbow fish taking first prize.

What do sharks eat with peanut butter? Jellycrabs!

Annie likes square crabs. Honest, she told me this was a crab.

Hirsute legs reminiscent of a pre-shave Arnold Schwarzenegger. (please note that while Google Spellcheck flagged Jellycrabs and Spellcheck, it let Arnold Schwarzenegger by. Oh, my.)

Oh, the joys of a new box of crayons (notice how some of the other pics above sort of veered away from technicolor.)

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(Friday) Crab Blogging

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Do not, under any circumstances, assume that this is not the way to spell "Crab"




Brought to you unedited except for tracing the outline.

Another Gathering

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I just watched Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" on YouTube. The whole thing. There are many interesting aspects apart from the amazing cinematography. This is 1934 and none of the soldiers have guns. I did not know that the German Army was limited at that time to 100,000 soldiers. Military exercises for Hitler are horses and relatively antique armored cars.

Aesthetics aside, what is truly amazing about this film is how insidiously evil it is. But, of course, we look at this in hindsight. However, caveat civis.

The philosophy behind it, the invocation of "God" and "Germany" in the same phrase, makes me very afraid of Glenn Beck. I thought he was a clown. Many thought Hitler was a clown.

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin

I just don't understand these people. Either they are absolutely looney, which certainly has crossed my mind, or they are the most cynically craven politbots around.

Restore Honor? Who destroyed it in the first place? They have jumped off from a set of assumptions about America that are totally unwarranted.

I'm reading "The Jokers" by Albert Cossery. I was thinking of becoming a Cynic. (not to be confused with the garage band, the Cynics) But, I just realized that true "Cynics" are the opposite of what they have been portrayed.

(Friday) Crab Blogging

I think that this is my all time favorite.


Note the worry lines. Crabs should worry.

Not a bad representation, though I don't wear my pants around my knees. On the other hand, I think I've been left out in the cold.

The Saga of the Mighty Wurlitzer

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I used to think, erroneously as it turns out, that political change happens insidiously. In a way, this is true. It happens person by person. But where I was in error is that the cause of this change is subtle. It is not. It is battered into people day after day until, one day, that person wakes up and actually believes something that the day before they did not. In spite of Goodwin, and with no mention of Mr. H., this must have been what happened to the German people in the 1930's and, ironically, the Israeli people in the last 60 years. If you have it beaten into your head, over and over again, that some people (Jews, Palestinians) or some person (Obama) are not what you thought them to be (ordinary people), eventually, to retain your sanity (not hold two opposing thoughts at one time), you will be led to believe the awful awful.

The American people have had hammered into their heads day after day that Obama is not "one of us," that he was born "elsewhere," that he is in some way "evil." So that now:

Poll: Growing number incorrectly call Obama Muslim

Why Muslim? Well, of course, to tie him in a salacious way with the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero (I am old enough to think of Ground Zero as the site of the first Atomic Bomb Test in New Mexico.)

(I have a picture that I took of this but I copped this one from the Internet)

This is going to have disastrous results on the American polity. The reasons for it are very simple. No better example is Sarah Palin abandoning her position of Governor of Alaska for the lucrative role of player of the Wurlitzer.

The suffering of Jews in Europe in the 1930's-'40's is well know. The dehumanization of Palestinians is ongoing. The killing of Afghan and Pakistani civilians (and consequent dehumanization) has led directly to the poor response to the Pakistani flood.

Propaganda is a powerful tool.

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Friday Crab Blogging

Composition, Composition. It can be everything.



I am not sure why the fish is on the sand.