WhimsyLand

Walsenburg Update:  The Rio Cucharas Motel turned out to be pretty decent (if creepy).  They did have everything promised in the web-listing:  double outdoor tennis court, indoor pool, restaurant.  The tennis court surface was a beautiful adobe and these amazingly lovely giant sunflowers were growing through the net.  The indoor pool and restaurant have been closed since the Ford administration.  The room was spacious, however, and cost only $53 which included state, city and local hotel tax.  Ally, John, Junie and I imbibed various libations and played a game in which one had to identify famous quotes.  If you got one right, you received a marble representing one of the 9 planets (Pluto was reinstated for the game), which we would lay out on the carpet as our own personal solar system.  I thought the Earth marbles were particularly nice, blue with cloudy swirls of white.  Neither the marbles nor the interplanetary distances were, thankfully, to scale.  Alys's Restaurant (no, you can't get anything you want) was packed and for good reason:  Alys is apparently closing up shop and was outdoing herself with an outstanding menu, decent wine list, and unavoidable dessert tray. 

Junie is leaving for Eau Claire again tomorrow morning and I'm starting to get the blues already.  We knocked off three or four Cox & Rathvon cryptic puzzles on this trip, perhaps a new record.  Movies watched included Hot Fuzz (no Shaun of the Dead), Babel (not bad, Cate is eerily beautiful as usual), Wild Hogs (ugh), The Darwin Awards (amusing), and Avenue Montaigne (a diverting mini-Amelie). 

Sandra's recent poem post, Another Failed Poem about the Greeks,  cracked me up: His sword dripped blood, His helmet gleamed. / He dragged a Gorgon's head behind him. // As first dates go, this was problematic".

We're the champions of military budgets and toy imports.

Crag continues posting Six Word Stories.  This exercise is presumably motivated by the famous story attributed to Ernest Hemingway:   "For sale:  baby shoes, never worn."

I've read countless articles now about The Departure of Turdblossom.  I think the funniest quote is from Wonkette:  "While before there were a bunch of hacks, an idiot and sociopath working at the White House, now there are just the hacks and the idiot."  I still think he looks like that Nazi psychopath, only doughier.

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"I have declared that poetry had exhausted the possibilities envisaged in the vision of the utterable that engendered it, and become a stage for postures of poetic utterance, contests of skill in exhibiting vision of oneself, and oneself, as theme of the uniquely all-utterable." – Laura Riding Jackson, 1928.  More at John's place.  And sadly, he's right.  Bernstein does look a bit like Cheney.

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Emily notes the Slate article on The Craft Vote.  Honestly, I don't understand Those People.  I run into them at Michael's when I'm buying picture frames and they're always sorting through various colors of decoupage goop.  Or buying $140 worth of foil appliqués for their scrapbooks.  Or purchasing new heart-shaped dies for their punchy-machine-thingies.  I have no idea what they ultimately do with the crafts they make.  They kinda scare me.

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"Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it."  From The Black Swan, not this one (which goes for about $5k), that one.