makes you want to take an ape home to play with

in the land of make believe

Today I met up with some childhood icons and a bit of American television history. I like to think I do this frequently, but today was different.

Mr. McFeely even had me say "speedy delivery" in Italian for our picture and told me of his visit to KUED some years ago. What a neighbor that man is!

denti di giudizio

in memory of my very first post, i repeat that fall is a nice time of year. this year i won't be enjoying the change of seasons three times over, but i'm finding plenty of pleasant things to do instead. i think it all began with a Labor Day visiting Niagara Falls, where i believed (falsely) that people had aching desires to enjoy nature's majesty and power

while in reality it's seems more connected desires for wax museums and haunted houses.

Annamaria and i held off until just recently for our halloween experience, which was masterfully brought to us in the form of Diamanda Galás gurgling razors and low-note piano keys for over an hour.

in efforts to balance our diet of this year's fall experience we took a little jaunt out to Hartwood Acres to tour the mansion there. i thought that was pretty worthwhile as well, and have a photograph to prove it.

the next addition to the parade of autumn delights would be nothing else but a wonder movie and concert by Califone. they played a cacophonous soundtrack to their kind of scary, kind of kooky, kind of silly film and topped everything of with a very enjoyable group of songs. i was so satisfied that i bought the new cd and a t-shirt!

one of the next adventures will be thanksgiving in phoenix. the last time we had thanksgiving there we had great napkin holders.

So every time I go down near Moab I try to stop by the T-Shirt Shop and pick out a design to remind me of the olden days when Grandma would buy a shirt for all us grandkids.

biking adventures with Gus pt II

kind of like sasquatch

So a dream came true for me on Wednesday when I was up mountian biking with my friend Gus in American Fork Canyon. We ran across one of these guys

about this color too. I've wanted to find a rubber boa for about the past 16 years or so, so I was pretty pleased when Gus managed to spot one on the trail without running it over. You can find some more info and more pictures of the boa featured above here.

making the river answer

Plastic in the water

As I've been reading Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us I've stopped several times to sit and wonder just what it is we think we're doing to the planet - most of what we're doing doesn't seem to be keeping within any kind of previously existing ecological balance. I stopped to question our behavior once again when I read about exfoliants.

"Can you believe it?" Richard Thompson demands of no one in particular, loud enough that faces bent over microscopes rise to look at him. "They're selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by sea creatures."

Weisman certainly plays on the theatricality of this experience, but I have to say that the issue might merit some dramatic emphasis. For the past year and a half I've been using and enjoying a particular body wash. Today I checked the ingredients and found near the top of the list "polyethylene." I don't know where that plastic is going now that I'm in the eastern United States, but I have to believe that when I was in Southeast Asia I was contributing to the island of plastic floating around in the North Pacific Gyre.



The question for me becomes "what do we now do with all this plastic that we have and how do we live without it?"

SEND BOOKS TO KIDS IN INDIA (please)

This morning my friend Taty in Sicily asked me if I wanted to help collect books to send to a children's school in India where a friend of hers is trying to assemble a library. I'm in the humanities and consequentially am really into books, so I emailed Fr. Sibi to get some more information about what he's after. This was his response

"I would like books on subjects like science, geography, history, stories, events, encyclopedias etc. Books that is meant for children and their mental growth."

If you can think of a book you read as a child or young adult that stimulated your mental growth, or a book that would have stimulated it, I think you should do what you can to get a copy to the school. Here are a couple of options

1. Find a copy of the book(s) you want to send, write a little message on the inside cover, go to the post office and send it. Just be aware that sending heavy things to India might be pricey so

2. I recommend buying your book(s) through an online bookstore that will ship it(them) for free. The best ones that I've seen so far are Rediff Books and flipcart. The prices are in rupee but you can check the dollar amount here, just select "Indian Ruppe" and you can figure out the rest. As for the message on the inside cover, you could simply email it either to me or directly to Sibi.

I'm waiting to here back from Sibi about where exactly we'll need to send the books.

My hope is that we can add at least 100 books to their library. Help me keep track of what gets sent (also so Sibi knows what to wait for in the mail) by sending me an email or even commenting here on the blog. Thanks for reading.

San Severo - la Madonna del soccorso

This is the annual run of the bulls for San Severo but instead of bulls they line the streets with strings of very mean firecrackers and occasional bits of what must be TNT (they even managed to make a small wall collapse this year) at the approximate hight of a human head. The hight is important when you add the fact that townsfolk are supposed to run en masse in front of the explosions in effort to not get burned or maimed. The fuochi, literally meaning "fires," are the main attraction of the celebrations and this fact has not settled well with the local bishop, who would like the attention to be refocused on the namesake of the events, that is the Virgin Mary. But when this fine gentleman began insisting a couple years ago that the city do away with the explosives the citizens responded with the an iron fist. For several days the bishop couldn't leave his house without getting beat up. So the explosives stayed and the bishop stayed quiet.



The fuochi featured in these videos were some of the first to be set off and consequently they were also some of the tamest. Nevertheless they still managed to shake us to our core and make our ears bleed slightly.

dance-o-tronic

this is basically what we did for an hour while they cleaned a body off of the highway.



then we did this for the rest of the day:

reading Anna Maria Ortese

I didn't understand much of what I read in the short story La casa del bosco, but I did enjoy this sentence:

Si è parlato anche, con una certa compiacenza, dell'Apocalisse, e i Cavalieri del Cielo spesso hanno animato le notti dei più infelici che spiavvano dietro i vetri di New York, o Londra o Lisbona; ma il mio idraulico, non si è mai veduto.

I'll even give you a late-night translation:

There was also talk, with a certain satisfaction, of the Apocalypse, and the Horsemen of Heaven often stirred the nights of the most unhappy who would peer from behind the windows of New York, or London, or Lisbon; but my plumber was never to be seen.

The rest of the short story wasn't much clearer.

the where

About a month of my stay was spent in the region of Apulia, which goes from the spur to the heel of the boot. Our base camp was the city of Altamura (famous for bread and Ciccillo, the prehistoric man) in the province of Bari. By depriving Raffaella of her car for days on end we managed to visit some hit cities in every province, a few of the favorites being Otranto, Gallipoli, Torre a mare, Ostuni, Alberobello, Trani and San Severo with its unique festival for the Madonna del soccorso.

Destinations outside of Apulia included Matera and the Sorrento Peninsula, famous for the Amalfi Coast. And a trip to Italy wouldn't be complete for me without a trip up north to see old friends. We even made it out to Spain for a few days. And that was about it.

that's it for italy

reading Flann O'Brien

Hatchjaw's theory in this regard is more acceptable. He tends to the view that the water was boiled and converted, probably through the water-box, into tiny jets of steam which were projected through an upper window into the night in an endeavour to wash the black 'volcanic' stains from the 'skins' or 'air-bladders' of the atmosphere and thus dissipate the hated and 'insanitary' night. However far-fetched this theory may appear, unexpected colour is lent to it by a previous court case when the physicist was fined forty shillings. On this occasion, some two years before the construction of the water-box, de Selby was charged with playing a fire hose out of one of the upper windows of his house at night, an operation which resulted in several passers-by being drenched to the skin. On another occasion he had to face the curious charge of hoarding water, the police testifying that every vessel in his house, from the bath down to a set of three ornamental egg-cups, was brimming with the liquid. Again a trumped-up charge of attempted suicide was preferred merely because the savant had accidentally half-drowned himself in a quest for some vital statistic of celestial aquatics.

It is clear from contemporary newspapers that his inquiries into water were accompanied by persecutions and legal pin-pricks unparalleled since the days of Galileo. It may be some consolation to the minions responsible to know that their brutish and barbaric machinations succeeded in denying posterity a clear record of the import of these experiments and perhaps a primer of esoteric water science that would banish much of our wordly pain and unhappiness. Virtually all that remains of de Selby's work in this regard is his house where his countless taps are still as he left them, though a newer generation of more delicate mind has the water turned off at the main.

I'm reading "Herzog on Herzog"

While waiting for my flight I just kind of opened up the book and noticed this toward the back:

The Minnesota Declaration

Truth and fact in documentary cinema

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

by Werner Herzog

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. he resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. 'For me,' he says, 'there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.' Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows on ly stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: 'You can't legislate stupidity.'

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walder Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 30, 1999)

a glance behind

One year ago I had just received 30,000 baht for teaching four overcrowded classrooms and two less-crowded ones, and was nearly on my way out to visit other wonders of Thailand. At that time I think the only thing I was afraid of was my neighbor and fellow teacher, Mike, the one who looked like a week and a half old cadaver despite his being only a few years older than myself and who was constantly having fairly intense arguments with his own self. There was no doubt in my mind that he could try to kill me one night and send me to heaven. And just to be honest, I was also a little afraid of Greg even though all he ever did was talk incessantly about loving the apostle Paul, earthquakes, pot, and his search for love online, the latter being the result of his unsatisfaction with his pregnant girlfriend, whom he left just as teaching finished up. So that was the sum of my fears a year ago - two strange men I interacted with as little as possible and will hopefully never see again. The fact that I didn't have tons of money and very limited language skills didn't seem to bother me considering the fact that I had extensive plans to get rid of the money and put my self in situations of even greater linguistic diversity. I had the Unknown right where I wanted him. Sometimes he won sometimes I won, and it all turned out nice enough.

This year I'm off again. Tomorrow I head out to Italy for a month to be with someone that I don't want to be without, and the adventures seem ever more challenging and intriguing. This time around I have to like pretty much everyone I meet. While meeting people is easy, liking them all and wanting to spent time with them often creates some challenges. The language barriers that were ever present last year will no longer be around, and the lack of people to rely on in time of need will no longer be a factor this trip, but still the presence of the Unknown comes seeping into my dry skin like an unwanted but, oh, so effective lotion. I imagine that, much like last year, sometimes I'll win and sometimes he'll win - either way, it should be interesting.

airborne

The other night I had a dream that I could fly. I've not had one of those for a long time. It always starts with me jumping up into the air and not falling and so I keep kicking until I think I've froggied up high enough. My first flying dreams were all the same and involved being at my grandma's house in the backyard by the swings, but this one was different.

And while I'm here, I might as well add this link to an article explaining how I've joined a cult.

Here are a couple of highlights from a New York Times article.

“He shivered and I leaned over and said, ‘Come here, baby, are you cold?’ and he exploded,” Ms. Bowers says. “He started biting and screaming at me, biting any place he could touch. It was a nightmare. We tipped over furniture, I would have killed him if I could. But he was so strong. I tried to choke him to make him stop. We fought for I don’t know how long. I was trying to hold him so he couldn’t bite me. I took one of my big fabric books and held it on his throat.”

“All of a sudden I feel a severe pain on the right side of my mouth and then I felt something dripping down my face,” Ms. Harrison says. “And there was all this blood, and I look over at Mikey and here he had my tooth in his hand, roots and all. He had pulled my tooth out with one finger.”

One day we made a special day
for a very special person.

in the flesh

For all you cynics of transubstantiation, proof lies in Lanciano, Italy.
What does your heart tell you?

new year's resolution

For those of you living out in Utah County, or might be passing through, you should go enjoy some tacos at the Pastorero. Like most restaurants that have tried making a claim in Brigham's Landing, it will likely have to close in a couple of years, so the moral is that you should get your tacos now before it's gone.