Max the fish

This is Max. Max is a “Betta” but is commonly known as a Siamese fighting fish. I’ve had lots of unusual houseguests over the last 20-ish years but he is my first real fish. Unlike my usual guests, he is very pretty and eats very little. Alas, he is going home to Western Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Even though our conversations were pretty one-sided, I will miss him.

Limericks for David

“I’m chef of the kitchen; the grill’s not my job;
So manning a Weber is meant for a slob!”
But he fetched and he schlepped,
Which was fine but he kept
Heaping butter and parsley and scorn on the cob.

Sunbathing, a nudist while daiquiri sipping,
Had a deep thought, albeit not gripping.
He made a decision
About circumcision,
Without it, fellating is foreskinny dipping.

The hunger for games and things Mister Potter,
Means Kitness and Harry lead lambs to the slaughter
Entrapped, they are caught
Like Munch and Seurat
Small hope for the sun and none for the dotter.

Pole Dog

Huh! My nephew emailed this photo to me with this explanation: “Saw this in my neighborhood. Thought of you.” Obviously it’s time to reassess my relationship with my nephew. Either that or just plot retaliation; my first basic (but understandable) reaction. Whatever it will be, revenge is savored best when it is a sweet potato, perhaps covered with rue, then disguised with avuncular misdirection.

Rocket Thrower (Up)

I am totally devoted to public art in all its forms. Actually liking any particular objet d’art is not the point. The point is that any given work gets put out there for us, the public, to decide on our own. Personally I disliked (hated is too strong a word) Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” when it was splitting a plaza down in the financial district and I was glad when public outcry decreed it be removed. I understood the statement he was making (I think) but I still preferred clean and clear open space as opposed to a Berlin Wall of subtle meaning.

Usually I’m fine with almost anything, whether I personally like it doesn’t matter, it’s the effort I appreciate. However (isn’t there always a however?) a sculpture left over from the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, instead of being removed, is now being restored. This sculpture, in my opinion an atrocity of the first rank is, according to The New York Times critic David W. Dunlap, “a gargantuan…tchotchke of homoerotic kitsch.” He goes on to say, “Perhaps the Municipal Art Society would have been more successful raising money to melt down [Donald DeLue’s bronze, 43-foot-tall] “Rocket Thrower” than to conserve it."

When it was erected for the Fair it was blasted by both the press and the public. But I guess it was an artistic embarrassment easier to ignore than maintain until it started to deteriorate badly over the last 25 years. The restoration is costing $115,000. Maybe it could be melted down (at a fraction of that cost?) and kept in place, the resultant pile of molten bronze left as a warning to future generations about mindless and misguided municipal decisions.

Hunger Games

I just finished reading The Hunger Games trilogy and I totally understand its popularity. It is horrible and horrific and totally absorbing. I was told that I would love it. Wrong. But it sure did test my gag reflexes which might be a good thing. Just because one surprising and repellant atrocity after another is visited upon the intrepid heroine, and keeps the reader turning the pages, doesn’t make it good. The only points in the book’s favor: it’s a very quick read and surprisingly typo free.

Lucky Ducky

So what do you do with your left-over cans of house paint? I tend to paint other things not usually connected with houses. This ducky represents practically every color of the palette that makes up both the prime coating and the final result, inside and out, of the building, and the apartment therein, in which I reside.

I also channel Jackson Pollock and other easily emulated artists of note. No, I’m not a forger…I’m an emulator and I never try to pass anything off as someone else’s art. I just really hate to wastefully let paint dry up in the can. Or the basement.

Jorge el Solitario 1912 - 2012

I have two travel destinations left on my bucket list. Australia/New Zealand and the Galapagos Islands. I’ve planned both trips several times but I’ve always been deterred by two things; lack of time and/or lack of money. The Galapagos seemed to be the most logical, and still is but now, alas, the last living sub-species of a tortoise named Lonesome George has died so I’ll not be able to visit his heart-shaped pool in the dusty pen where he slept and kept his peace from 1972 until last week. He was around 100 years old and I guess he just got tired of waiting for me.

The big question I have is why the hell he was named Lonesome George. My research reveals he was named after George Gobel, an American comedian of that era who used Lonesome George as a persona in his act. But why would the Ecuadorians (who own the Galapagos) go along with that? I’m not sure I even want to know.

My Martian Chronicle

When Ray Bradbury started publishing his books I was definitely part of the age and gender group that lived to eat up his every word. I was crazed for Sci-Fi when most vulnerable to it. The biggest city from home was Fresno, Calif.; 45 miles north of town and San Francisco might as well have been Mars. In my little town the local library only allowed you to take out four books at a time so I got around that by reading my four books and also the four books my mother would check out. It didn’t matter how adult they were or how badly written or stupid, I read them all. I remember being mesmerized by Bradbury’s books and it was the beginning of realizing that there was more to the written word than had been theretofore foisted upon my fertile imagination.

Having lately been burned by rereading the most popular books of both Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five) and J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), motivated to do so by their passing, I picked up a copy of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles with trepidation. I was right to worry because it’s pretty much pulp in a way but still, in certain chapters, powerful enough to bring tears to one’s eyes because Bradbury was capable of seeing what was possible scientifically but still able to describe a red-neck sensibility that makes the reader cringe. What could I have possibly have felt as a ten-to-12 year-old? Of course the allure of space travel but also the recognizable image(s) of the grown-ups in my own family. No wonder I’m such a far-left liberal as an adult.