I loved the line, “Rare is the bus that can keep on board both Sadiq Khan and John McDonnell, and take them to totally different destinations.“
Maybe because so much of the green issue is our fault.
Maybe because so much of the green issue is typified by the thinking described in my insulation story.
Maybe because the article just made harsh sense.
It stated:
The next few decades will not be about inventing entirely new things but substituting for what we already have. Installing heat pumps and ripping out boilers, using renewables rather than fossil fuels, relying on battery power over the internal combustion engine: moving to a lower-carbon future is not going to be a great, dramatic transformation – it will be slow and chronic, and frankly more expensive to societies reared on cheap food, cheap energy and the idea that the rest of the bill for both those things will be picked up by someone else, perhaps yet to be born.
Will it happen?
It depends on leaders and leadership I guess.
I for one can’t wait for the candidate who says at a debate, my plan is, frankly, more expensive to societies reared on cheap food, cheap energy.
falls the rain each day each night under the rain the sore the gold are as one
Adapted from the poem Still Falls the Rain by Edith Stilwell (1887-1964) in the section:
Still falls the Rain At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us — On Dives and on Lazarus: Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one
I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto Me and rest; Lay down, thou weary one, lay down, Thy head upon My breast.’ I came to Jesus as I was, So weary, worn, and sad; I found in Him a resting-place, And He has made me glad.
I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold, I freely give The living water; thirsty one, Stoop down and drink and live.’ I came to Jesus, and I drank Of that life-giving stream. My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, And now I live in Him.
I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘I am this dark world’s Light. Look unto Me; thy morn shall rise And all thy day be bright.’ I looked to Jesus, and I found In Him my Star, my Sun; And in that Light of Life I’ll walk Till traveling days are done.
It all started here.
Luke 16:19-31 New International Version The Rich Man and Lazarus
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’ But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’ He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’
He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’
I looked to Jesus, and I found In Him my Star, my Sun;
Matt Calkins joined The Seattle Times in August 2015 as a sports columnist after three years at the San Diego Union Tribune.
Never afraid to take a stand or go off the beaten path, Matt enjoys writing about the human condition every bit as much as walk-offs or buzzer-beaters.
His mom reads the comments so take it easy on him.
view from the narrow window was dreary lonely inexpressibly
From Chapter 1, Page 1 of The Crime atBlack Dudley by Margery Allingham (1904-1966) (published by William Heinemann Ltd, London, 1929).
How you start writing a novel when in your first line, you admit the view was dreary and inexpressibly lonely is beyond my poor power to add or detract.
I have to admire any author who describes a scene with the word ‘inexpressibly’ and then goes on to describe it.
I love and enjoy the writing of the 1930s.
That those writers thought, wrote and inexpressibly expressed themselves like this, leaves me grasping for the now non existent thesaurus.
I came across the writing of Margery Allingham in a search for something to read.
What you say?
Nothing to read?
Let me explain.
Something happened to writing or maybe editing or something over the years.
The influence of TV.
The rise of the word processor.
I miss the lack of narrative.
Watch TV and the narrative is visual but all over the place.
A segment opens with a plane landing or a car driving down a road and words appear on the screen like ‘London’ or ‘Monday 3AM’ or the ever popular ‘3 Days Later. (the first three years of Sponge Bob are the best)’
Without these ‘establishing’ shots, the viewer has NO CLUE as to where they are.
It seems this has become the style in modern American fiction.
Thinking of Tom Clancy here of course but without his section headings, you would never know where you were.
You go from section heading to section heading, sometimes paragraphs at a time are broken up.
I also blame the word processor for some of this as it is so easy to save any short burst of prose and then hammer it by shear force of will somewhere, anywhere, into the narrative and then add the section heading to help the reader understand why this ugly plank is sticking up in the floor.
Read Gone with the Wind (Very Very politically incorrect but for this argument) and NOT ONCE is the setting set by anything but the narrative.
If you know the history of the WRITING of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell dumped two suitcases of manila envelopes filled with stories and an editor, a very capable editor, transformed Ms. Mitchell’s pages into one long story.
If you get a chance, watch the little watched movie, GENIUS.
Its a great period piece about the author, Thomas Wolfe and his editor, Max Perkins and how the book, Look Homeward Angel was created.
ANYWAY, I guess what I am saying is, they don’t write ’em like this anymore.
And I know there are those who will say, THANK GOODNESS.
For me.
I do like reading writing as much for HOW it is written as for what is written.
I have three or four devices FILLED with the latest fiction.
For me, I can click on a book, read or start reading the first pages and say outloud, ‘NOPE.’
And that’s that for that one.
Sometimes I will have hope and push on through the first pages.
But folks, I know when reading becomes a salmon swimming upstream.
Sometimes no problem.
Sometimes the current the other way is swift.
Sometimes there is dam (what did the salmon say when it hit a concrete wall? DAMN!)
AND SOMETIMES THE RIVER IS BLOCKED BY NIAGRA FALLS.
My point is that I feel I give these authors a fair chance, but I can tell, fairly quickly, when its a no go.
A Canadian website where books, whose CANADIAN copyright has expired, have been scanned and put online for download for FREE!
Got to love those Canadians.
Browsing through this website, I came across the writing of Margery Allingham and the Albert Campion Mystery series.
Ms. Allingham starts the first book with :
The view from the narrow window was dreary and inexpressibly lonely.
Miles of neglected park-land stretched in an unbroken plain to the horizon and the sea beyond. On all sides it was the same.
The grey-green stretches were hayed once a year, perhaps, but otherwise uncropped save by the herd of heavy-shouldered black cattle who wandered about them, their huge forms immense and grotesque in the fast-thickening twilight.
In the centre of this desolation, standing in a thousand acres of its own land, was the mansion, Black Dudley; a great grey building, bare and ugly as a fortress. No creepers hid its nakedness, and the long narrow windows were dark-curtained and uninviting.
The man in the old-fashioned bedroom turned away from the window and went on with his dressing.
‘Gloomy old place,’ he remarked to his reflection in the mirror. ‘Thank God it’s not mine.’
For me, reading this is like watching a skilled piano player.
Fingers on keys, almost effortlessly calling notes out of the piano.
Fingers on keys almost effortlessly calling words out of typewriter.
our history’s parts only way can be lost is we choose to lose them
I am not sure when I became aware of the actor Stanley Tucci.
Much like Ward Bond and Thomas Mitchell, Mr. Tucci seems to have been in everything and nothing at the same time.
He is always there.
I am not sure when it was but I do recall looking him up to find out who he was, and I think this was back in the days of if you wanted to look up a movie you grabbed a paper back (possibly the thickest regularly sold paper book in the store) copy of ‘Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide’, a copy of which was always laying around the TV in my house, and you looked up the movie and hoped you could figure out who was who from the short cast listing.
My Dad was a minor movie buff and he loved that book.
“4 stars for that?”, he would yell or “COME ON MIKE, it’s FOUR STARs with Clark Gable!”
He also loved to read the description of the 1962 remake of State Fair with Pat Boone, pause then yell, “BOMB.”
He would laugh and laugh.
It is amazing that back in the days of over the air three channel TV’s to remember how often movies were on TV.
TV shows cost money to make.
Movies were already made.
Television was flooded with movies.
The movies of the 40’s and 50’s.
The black and white era.
Every station had a block where an old movie could be run.
Bill Kennedy at the Movies from Detroit.
WGN’s Movie Night from Chicago.
My Dad also liked to listen to the CUBS on WGN radio from Chicago.
If there was a good movie on the night before, Lou Boudreau and Vince Lloyd would talk about it during the basbell game.
There wasn’t much else to watch and everybody watched the same thing.
Wait you say, if this is before cable TV, how did we watch WGN in Grand Rapids where we lived?
You caught me.
This didn’t happen in Grand Rapids.
We were one of those lucky family’s that had a summer place in Grand Haven, Michigan.
We lived right on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The first thing my Dad would do each spring was hook up a TV antenna high enough to pull in the stations from Chicago.
I watched the late movies from WGN all summer long.
If you watched old movies and you wanted more information the only source you had was that Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.
And at some point, I looked up Stanley Tucci.
I remember doing this as I can see the book in my hands and hear myself saying ‘Stanly Tuckee – touchi – ha whaaa??’.
If I look Mr. Tucci up in the Wikipedia and read through his list of movies or his ‘Filmography’ nothing really pops out at me until you get to The Big Night in 1996.
If you haven’t seen, it is worth the effort to pirate to watch and enjoy and hear about the dish called timpano.
Since the Big Night, Mr. Tucci, for me, entered into that ‘Ward Bond, Thomas Mitchell’ phase I mentioned and now he seems to be in everything and everywhere.
And Mr. Tucci has published a book.
Actually he has a couple of books to his credit but a new one has just come out.
When I worked in a bookstore nothing, well, almost nothing, made me more angry that anytime a celebrity would bank on their name and publish anything but a bio.
Bill and HILARY Clinton have now published novels.
Sports figures who I would figure could not construct a basic English sentence to save their lives have published novels.
OH COME ON.
Quite a few celebrities can get around this by publishing cookbooks but again, oh come on.
Is that something the world needs?
After 20 years of working for a book seller, library and publisher let me tell you about cookbooks.
Any cookbook with ONE, that’s right, ONE good recipe in it is a good cookbook.
99% of the cookbooks in the world are BAD cookbooks.
Now Mr. Tucci has published Taste, My Life Through Food.
This way its a bio and a cookbook.
And it is a delight.
Mr. Tucci can turn a sentence or at least he can with his editors help.
But the book has a secret ingredient.
Readers all know that part of the mystery of reading is how did the author intend to have this read.
What sounds, what phrasing, what and where are the pauses.
For the most part, each reader makes up their own mind.
For example, take Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I have never been able to listen to any audio version of the Lord of the Rings because of the way Gollum is re-created.
One, the voice is nothing like what I imagined and I won’t waste my time.
Or, two, the voice is spot on and that is just tooooooooo creepy to be listened to..
And you never know when that Gollum will show up.
Plow your way through the book, “The Long Season: The Classic Inside Account of a Baseball Year” which is known for being one of the first, inside the locker room – tell it like it is – baseball books written back in 1959 and all of sudden the author-player tells how he went through a phase driving everyone nuts in the St. Louis Cardinals locker room by talking like Gollum.
“Has he got handses?”
“Can he hits baseballses?”
I pass over those film adaptations of Lord of the Rings except to say I really wish the filmmaker had taken the time to read the books as I am not sure what the movies were based on.
Another example is Charlotte’s Web.
If you like this book please try, just for a gift for yourself (let me know if you need it emailed to you) to find the audio version.
The audio version read by EB White.
There is a lot of magic and poetry in the sound of White’s voice and to hear his phrasing and pronunciation is the purest form of this book you can imagine.
Keep in mind that when the manuscript for Charlotte’s Web arrived at the publisher it needed NO editing of any kind.
So back to Mr. Tucci.
It must be because of his recent show on CNN that this works.
I watched that show with my wife and when I read his book, I can hear Mr. Tucci.
I can catch his phrashing and such.
Mr. Tucci also has one of those voices that is both distinct and yet doesn’t stand out except to say it is uncommonly common.
My reading of Taste: My Life Through Food is like listening to the audio version because I hear it in my head as I read.
Goofy I know but there it is.
I doubt I will try many of the recipes in the book at this time.
But I will read them.
I also will read about Mr. Tucci’s adventures growing up in America.
We are about the same age and I also can remember WANTING if not getting and eating a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich.
Also at this time I am spending a lot time thinking about food and families and culture and culture expressed through food and familys.
The Gullah Culture wants to presever its culture though food,
The SouthernFoodwaysAlliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Mr. Tucci sums this up in an E PLURIBUS UNUM on food when he writes:
Losing a beloved family heirloom is a very real personal loss;
they’re things that cannot ever be replaced or re-created.
But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes.
Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time.
Yet unlike a lost physical heirloom, recipes are a part of our history that can be re-created over and over again.
The only way they can be lost is if we choose to lose them.”
I want to eat it all.
My Mom’s Thanksgiving Stuffing Recipe … how it reads…This is what the recipe says ….
