The Hammock Papers: miscellaneous balderdash

Showing posts with label miscellaneous balderdash. Show all posts

04 January 2020

19 July 2019

Marxism.

Essential dance steps to learn from the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers …

23 December 2017

23 September 2016

Remember.

Remember, it's the same color as the tricycle ...

Thanks, Casey.

02 March 2016

Finding.

You don't need to be an engineer to be an inventor ...

08 January 2016

19 November 2015

Eisenstaedt, Children Watching St. George Slay the Dragon at the Puppet Theater in the Tuileries, Paris, 1963

Two hundred years ago elementary level education included Greek & Latin. Today we have to put “DO NOT EAT” on silica gel packs that come in shoe boxes.

04 May 2015

21 April 2015

11 February 2015

Different.

And now for something completely different ...

23 January 2015

17 January 2015

16 January 2015

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.

Jack London

05 January 2015

Time.

Everywhere is within walking distance, if you have the time.

Steven Wright

15 November 2014

Marxism.

The greatest ten minutes in the history of cinema ...

20 October 2014

Interesting.

“It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing,” he attests. Some would call swearing unnecessary, and Fry recontextualizes their argument like so: “It’s not necessary to have colored socks. It’s not necessary for this cushion to be here. But is anyone going to write in and say, ‘I was shocked to see that cushion there! It really wasn’t necessary’? No. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting.”

CONNECT

23 June 2014

Not.

19 January 2014

Goodbye.

Say goodbye to a man addicted to the spotlight and its perks (enumerated by then-agent Scott Boras in A-Rod's first go at free agency, in 2000)-- a private office at Shea Stadium, his own marketing staff, his own merchandise tent at spring training, a luxury box, the use of a private jet, and billboards galore—perks that former Mets GM Steve Phillips rightly said would lead to a roster of “24-plus-1.”

CONNECT

28 September 2013

Infomercial.

Learning baseball for me was ugly and terribly awkward.

An infomercial for Hunter's Hitters Youth Baseball Camp ...

This public service is brought to you by the good nature and well wishes of Drew Harrison Firchau.

28 August 2013

Irrelevant.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."