I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

Reblog if before a piano competition your rival asked to borrow your sheet music to refine a few details, and you let him, and then he went on to win first place.  And after your performance, your piano teacher rather brutally told you she thought you wouldn't even place in the competition, but you were so happy that it was all over that her prediction didn't sting (plus, you didn't feel that you did so poorly—you played a little fast, to be sure, due to nerves, but you got through it without a hitch).  And when they brought the trophy out, the presenter initially handed it to you, as if you were indeed the champion, even though you didn't actually place at all.  Reblog if so.

This image reminds of a great song recorded poorly by two fantastic singers.  The extraordinarly touching song "Don't You Forget About Me" was written for but rejected by Billy Idol, and Simple Minds got pressured into recording it, quite against their will.  Years later, Idol finally recorded his own version, and it fails just as badly.  Though we adore both Billy Idol and Simple Minds' Jim Kerr, neither vocalist did the song justice because, apparently, neither could relate to the sentiment.  The song is about the devastation of being made invisible on the street, by a former friend or lover who walks past without deigning a glance.  Perhaps the two singers, being unforgettable themselves, simply can't relate to the feeling of being forgotten, obliterated.  The lyrics mention how "rain keeps falling," and (news flash to Jim and Billy) it's not welcome news for the crops—it's an expression of gloom, depression, despair.  Both Kerr's and Idol's vocal performances improve a bit by the end of the song (each performance seems to be a single take; nobody dedicated much time to these recordings), but it's too little, too late.  Plus, Idol (bless him) gives us his bedroom voice, as if there never was that breakup that the whole song is about, saying "Will you call my name" as if he wants some positive feedback during lovemaking.  It's a hilarious interpretation of the song, and very Billy Idol to be sure, but woefully clueless.  We love you both, Jim and Billy!  Why did you both hate this great song so much?

"Yesterday he was you pal.  What about today?"  From The Film Daily, 1932.

Sure, we complain that Hollywood is out of ideas with each new remake, but it was no different a full century ago.  From Wid's Daily, 1920.

"Social distancing" a century ago -- "empty arms."  From Wid's Daily, 1920.

• acknowledges itself beaten.
• gives in totally.
• makes an apology.
• scratches without a good reason.
• feels ashamed of itself.
• forgives an injury.
• eats a cat.
• thinks it belongs to anybody.
• has nothing to do.
• has tender mercies.
• forgets being scruffed by its mother.
• can be over-indulged.
• leaves a home it has chosen.
• outgrows a love for play.
• tells a secret.

See How to Be Your Own Cat.

The point at which an influx of light meets a book is the true spirit of a library, according to Louis I. Kahn.

• good talk.
• being done.
• Hallowe’en.
• to answer not a word.
• an all-over bath with cool, not cold, water.
• an old-fashioned anise-seed tea.
• to go away from here.
• to be literary.
• just going to sleep.
• to begin again.
• not having to go to school.
• to do nothing.
• unencumbered, untrapped, unchained.
• that it will happen again tomorrow.
• that which must remain unwritten.

[Tidbits gathered through the course of our research.  See the remarkable collection, entitled Bullet Lists.]

Those fun moments when pretzel knots impersonate Aztec glyphs.  Pretzel knot diagrams from "Hyperbolic Pretzel Knots" by Jeffrey Meier.

"Functionally a library … spiritually a sanctuary." —Louis I. Kahn

"Dope, booze, stuff, swill and hate -- and you will have it all right!"  From The Doctors, A Satire in Four Seizures by Elbert Hubbard, 1909.

Here are the marvelous first two pages of an appreciation of our 21st cousin, Emily Dickinson, from The Procession of Masks by Herbert Gorman, 1923.  Gorman suggests that Emily's poems themselves are recluses, that they are unpremeditated footnotes to Emily's solitary life, that they are strange jewels set upon the unobtrusive thread of her days, and that they possess an inborn natural magic that no practice can make possible, since they are "flashes struck into existence by by the contact of an extraordinary mind with life."

It may be statistically true that one isn't the target audience for anything one encounters, but Statistics is pseudoscience (the bad kind; the good ones are the ones ostracized for audaciously resisting the sacred dogmas of Big Science), plus it's a highly alienating philosophy.  A more interesting approach to life would be to consider oneself the target audience for everything and evaluate from there.  The image is from You Are Not The Target Audience by William Gillis (undated).

"A book is tremendously important.  Nobody ever paid for the price of a book, they pay only for the printing.  But a book is actually an offering and must be regarded as such.  If you give honor to the man who writes it, there is something in that which further induces the expressive powers of writing."

—Louis I. Kahn, "I Love Beginnings" lecture, 1972

A true skeptic is skeptical even of the rock-solid.  Note that the author of this book opted for anonymity, for Big Science bullies were as bad in 1877 as they are today.  From Skepticism in Geology by Verifier, 1877.

"What's got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter."