For my art date to the Gugg with L-M; I mistakenly decided that Th was a pay-what-you-will so I joined up. Now I can spend my life at my least favorite architectural contraption.
Don’t get me wrong, that ramp is perfect for art gazing. Check out Rashid Johnson’s artscapes which include potted plants (note they are there because they need nurturing).
My animus towards the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright extends to this potted plant of a building but also to the man I met reading Loving Frank.
“She said no,” he said as he walked into the bar. His friends gave out a communal sigh of deflation. “She said never,” he said.
“She doesn’t know what she’s missing,” John said. “She said never,” he repeated.
John patted his back with the thunderous confidence of a real pal. “She doesn’t know what she’s missing.”
He looked sheepish. He said, “She does. She knows what she’s missing.” He had allowed a sob to escape.
“She doesn’t want me,” he said with a mix of pain and surprise.
John said, “The waitress likes you. She’ll say yes.” The friends settled into weekday chit-chat and more beer.
A few weeks passed like this, with John urging him to move on, and he calling upon her rejection. The bar was quieter. Again, he said, “She said never.“
A girl, if girls can be in their late 30s, walked over to the table. John nodded to the friends to step away. The girl sat without asking.
He found himself laughing. They ordered burgers and a salad to share. “She has great teeth,” he said to himself. “I mean, I like her smile.”
“Where do you live,” the girl asked, “I’ll come make you supper Friday night.”
He demurred. “Are you sure?” The girl nodded. “I’m a good plain cook. I’ll make fish on Friday. Fish and rice.”
Sheila stopped him on the street. “You’ve recovered. Quickly,” she said.
“You said never,” he said. Sheila said, “Never is a long time. I meant not now, not then.”
“You recovered quickly,” Sheila said again. “Never,” he said.
Sheila reached over to adjust an errant curl on his forehead. He said, “You said no.” Sheila kissed his cheek lightly, familiarly as she turned to walk away.
Sing it to the tune of .. yeah you guessed it.
When you tell people you plan a visit to the Museum of the City of New York, they usually have a positive response.
My friend M said something to the effect of , “I love that place.” You get the drift.
I loved the Manny Vega exhibit. That especially, but there was a lot to like in every gallery.
So, a chance to enjoy tea [and crumpets?] with a curator just seemed like a perfect lunchtime activity.
One such event passed us by on the 2nd (with Sarah Henry), and The Curator’s Cup: Afternoon Tea with Sarah Seidman is on Oct 22nd, aka this Tuesday.
I am intending on attending the November 19th. I look forward to The Curator’s Cup: Afternoon Tea with Lilly Tuttle.
The skull’s lower jaw has particularly confounded scientists because it combines features of Homo sapiens and another ancient human relative — the mysterious Denisovans. And like Denisovans, HLD 6 did not seem to have a true chin.
CNN Science Wonder Theory newsletter
The find has sparked questions about a pivotal point in the evolutionary history of early human relatives, or hominins, that began in the late Middle Pleistocene.
The human timeline has gotten so very much more complicated. As archaeologists uncover new finds, we are introduced to remote ancestors we never knew.
In my elementary school days, I had reason to believe that the evolution was simpler. I wasn’t paying much attention, of course, but history seemed within my grasp.
As I went on in my education, there seemed to be fewer links in the human chain than are being discovered.
There was always a mysterious “missing link” that I assumed scientists understood.
It’s not a complaint, but boy, is it puzzling. Who were great²⁰⁰⁰ grandma and grandpa? Wiil we ever really know them?
Greeks must have meandered into French kitchens in the last half century. Almost every little bakery seems to feature a small burek alongside the croissants.
Veganism, if it is an ism, seems to be going mainstream. My evidence? Tacos with vegan pastor. Likewise, there’s Impossible gone mainstream in the Starbucks breakfast sandwich.
1971 draws a blank for the moment.
In 1967, I had a roommate who matriculated. She was finished with her studies a year ahead of me.
It’s a little game, silly, really, that I like to try. The universe hands me a date and I connect it to a memory.
The idea is not just to stay sharp but also to keep the timeline of my personal history fresh.
The latter has a way of slipping as time passes. It comes in handy, keeping a grip on who I am.
Sunset is a lovely time of day. My mother called it magic time. I sit by our windows and understand what she meant.
Would a flush toilet be considered a modern amenity? A 2400-year-old toilet was excavated in China recently. There is evidence of even earlier such luxuries dating back 4000 years in India.
One woosh and sewage is swooshed away.
The use of tools to gather or hunt may seem like the accomplishment of an advanced society. That makes it all the more interesting that otters use tools to, for instance, crack mollusks.
It’s the diversity of the animal and for that matter the floral and vegetal, kingdom that has me agape. I am wonderstruck by all that the oceans and lands have to offer. Adaptive evolution is a genuinely hard concept.
I may never grasp the full history of earth’s flora and fauna but its tidbits are awe-inspiring.
That history keeps evolving. Just grab snippets from Nat Geo to see new facts about humanity and our cohorts as they emerge. For me, that’s why not being able to sort it all out is a kind of progress.
I wanted to steer clear of the second February groundhog day screeds.
Only to find out that Fred had died before making his predictions. Who was Fred? He was to Canada what Phil is to Punxsutawney** (PA). I had to say something on Fred’s behalf.
**Punxsutawney is perhaps one of the reasons I wanted to abstain from this year’s reporting. It exhausts me to spell it out or write it.
Fred was a well-loved Quebecois billed as “Fred la marmotte.”
Phil made his prediction for a prolonged winter today. Ever the contrarian, our friend from Staten Island, Chuck says it’ll be an early spring.
We will never know what Fred would have said.
It’s astounding to think that a person’s life often spans nearly a century. Even more so when I realize mine has already covered three-quarters of one.
In some ways, the experience of all those years has been futuristic.
As an aside in the midst of this ramble, I wonder if the cave dwellers in our distant past didn’t have that same intimation. When fire was discovered or the wheel, didn’t they feel they were encountering the future?
In my lifetime so far, it’s the digital information that I appreciate as new and fresh. Computers have evolved to help orchestrate my life from the smallest of screens.
AI, like Hal in the Star Trek film, is a real thing. My experience of it has a robot scheduled to assist with my upcoming mammogram (for an add-on fee of $59.) Many other examples of artificial intelligence abound. One, of the many I am only vaguely aware of, is the rather alarming driverless or self-driving car.
At the beginning of my time on earth, there were no such gadgets or doodads. They would soon become a reality but not an everyday presence. When they crept further into our consciousness, computing devices loomed large but seemed vaguely improbable.
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy contended with one behemoth of a machine and a budding romance in Desk Set.
In 1957, there was room for some skepticism about just how useful such mechanical interventions would be. Not so anymore.
We carry a whole lot of computing power in our pockets now. Who woulda thunk? I mean back in the 1940s?
Ethical considerations about how much data we share and how much of our identities we give up or over to the machine are somewhere lost in the shuffle of convenience and notoriety. Look at all I am sharing here with strangers.
Without the devices we use to post these thoughts there would be no online forii.
The public square would be a sheep meadow in the middle of town. Those of us so inclined would argue our propositions from soap boxes. Others so inclined would be entertained by the spectacle.
There would be no data breach just a lot of shouting.
All The Best