Chef Boyardee reciting the works of Sarte while dancing nude on Mao's desk.
Normally I'd ask for Dave M on this score, but this has all the hallmarks of oblivias trying to set me up for a fall. Too bad for her that I have the inside tract on just who it was that drank all the coffee before Juan Valdez was set to take the stage (it was her).
You know how flat-earthers and creationists like to mention that we haven't worked out how life on Earth began? Well, here's some amazing news. Scientists have discovered that RNA can form spontaneously on volcanic glass. And there was plenty of volcanic glass around some 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. This could go a long way in answering the question of how life appeared on Earth.
Oh, for sure. Yale's love for all things bland and corporate predates my and my husband's arrivals of some decades ago. Benno was president when I was a student. My husband knew Bart very well. He was probably the last good one.
The villagers' attitude towards me began to change. I had been touched by something of the divinity that inhered in the stones the villagers had named "blue tigers", but I was also known to have profaned the summit. At any moment of the night, at any moment of the day, the gods might punish me. The villagers dared not attack me or condemn what I had done, but I noticed that everyone was now dangerously servile. I never again laid eyes on the child who had played with the stones. I feared poison, or a knife in the back. One morning before dawn I slipped out of the village. I sensed that its entire population had been keeping an eye on me, and that my escape would be a relief to them. Since that first morning, no one had ever asked to see the stones.
I returned to Lahore, the handful of discs in my pocket. The familiar environment of my books did not bring the relief I sought. That abominable village, and the jungle, and the jungle's thorny slope rising to the plateau, and on the plateau the little crevices, and within the crevices, the stones - all that, I felt, continued to exist on the planet. My dreams confused and multiplied those dissimilar things. The village was the stones, the jungle was the swamp, the swamp was the jungle.
I shunned the company of my friends. I feared that I would yield to the temptation of showing them that dreadful miracle that undermined humanity's science.
I performed several experiments. I made a cross-shaped incision in one of the discs, put that disc with the others, and shuffled them around; within one or two conversions, I had lost it, though the number of discs had increased. I performed an analogous test with a disc from which I filed a semicircular notch. That disc also disappeared. I punched a hole in the centre of one disc with an awl and tried the test again. That disc disappeared forever. The next day the disc with the cross cut in it reappeared from its journey into the void. What mysterious sort of space was this, which in obedience to inscrutable laws or some inhuman will absorbed the stones and then in time threw an occasional one back again?
The same yearning for order that had created mathematics in the first place made me seek some order in that aberration of mathematics, the insensate stones that propagate themselves. I attempted to find a law within their unpredictable variations. I devoted days and nights alike to establishing statistics on the changes. From that stage of my investigations I still have several notebooks, vainly filled with ciphers. My procedure was this: I would count the stones by eye and write down the figure. Then I would divide them into two handfuls that I would scatter separately on the table. I would count the two totals, note them down, and repeat the operation. This search for order, for a secret design within the rotations, led nowhere. The largest number of stones I counted was 419; the smallest, three. There was a moment when I hoped, or feared, that they would disappear altogether. It took little experimenting to show that one of the discs, isolated from the others, could not multiply or disappear.
Naturally, the four mathematical operations - adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing - were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty discs, divided, might become nine; those nine in turn divided might yield 300. I do not know how much they weighed. I did not have recourse to a scale, but I am sure that their weight was constant, and light. Their colour was always that same blue.
These operations helped save me from madness. As I manipulated the stones that destroyed the science of mathematics, more than once I thought of those Greek stones that were the first ciphers and that had been passed down to so many languages as the word "calculus". Mathematics I told myself, had its origin, and now has its end, in stones. If Pythagoras had worked with these ...
After about a month I realised that there was no way out of the chaos. There lay the unruly discs, there lay the constant temptation to touch them, to feel that tickling sensation once more, to scatter them, to watch them increase or decrease, and to note whether they came out odd or even. I came to fear that they would contaminate other things - particularly the fingers that insisted upon handling them.
For several days I imposed upon myself the private obligation to think continually about the stones, because I knew that forgetting them was possible only for a moment, and that rediscovering my torment would be unbearable.
I did not sleep the night of 10 February. After a walk that led me far into the dawn, I passed through the gates of the mosque of Wazil Khan. It was the hour at which light has not yet revealed the colours of things. There was not a soul in the courtyard. Not knowing why, I plunged my hands into the water of the fountain of ablutions. Inside the mosque, it occurred to me that God and Allah are two names for a single, inconceivable Being, and I prayed aloud that I be freed from my burden. Unmoving, I awaited some reply.
I heard no steps, but a voice, quite close, spoke to me:
"I am here."
A beggar was standing beside me. In the soft light I could make out his turban, his sightless eyes, his sallow skin, his grey beard. He was not very tall.
He put out a hand to me, and said, still softly:
"Alms, oh Protector of the Poor ... "
I put my hands in my pocket,
"I have not a single coin," I replied.
"You have many," was the beggar's answer.
The stones were in my right pocket. I took out one and dropped it into his cupped palm. There was not the slightest sound.
"You must give me all of them," he said. "He who gives not all has given nothing."
I understood, and I said:
" I want you to know that my alms may be a curse."
"Perhaps that gift is the only gift I am permitted to receive. I have sinned."
I dropped all the stones into the concave hand. They fell as though into the bottom of the sea without the slightest whisper.
Then the man spoke again:
"I do not yet know what your gift to me is, but mine to you is an awesome one. You may keep your days and nights, and keep wisdom, habits, the world."
I did not hear the blind beggar's steps, or see him disappear into the dawn.
A little humblebrag: Needed to see my endo today for quarterly follow-up. A1C (primary long term glucose indicator) was 5.9% (normies are around 5.7 and lower). Eating my low carb diet continues to pay off. And my lipid panel also came in: total cholesterol 128 without meds. LDL and triglycerides near the low end of 'normal'. If only my knees worked, I might actually be healthy.
In the book series "The Dresden Files", Jim Butcher has multiple kinds of vampires. Three races are common in the books.
Black vampires are basically the classic Bram Stoker type. Feed on blood, can convert humans, can't go out in sunlight. Evil, batlike.
Red vampires are similar, but use magic, and wear skin suits to appear more humanoid. The suits keep them in the shade so they can go out in daylight. They feed on blood, and you can kill them by cutting the blood sac in their abdomens.
White vampires feed off human emotions (mostly sex). But they are like Colin Robinson. Very humanoid otherwise.
He mentions green vampires which are rare - mostly in South America. They feed on human breath and can drain you from a hundred meters away.
The Wiki says there are 7 more types but they make no appearance in the books.
Steve Berlin, saxophonist and keyboardist in Los Lobos, is 71 years old today. Here's the band live on 2 Meter Sessions in 1996 performing "Kiko And The Lavender Moon":
all right everyone. let's all lustily boo this one
but keep your shirts on and your pants off:
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/09/trump-posts-photo-of-new-helipad-the-dumocrats-made-the-white-house-a-dump-now-it-is-a-palace/
It was never supposed to be a palace.
I'm of the much derived "boomer" class. Gotta be my fault as I've fought longer and harder than most you young assholes are capable.
Grow the fuck up .
Hehe longer and harder...hehe young assholes.
"The name is Mitch. Moscow Mitch . . ."
Just looking over tonight's line-up...
...let's see...
Chef Boyardee reciting the works of Sarte while dancing nude on Mao's desk.
Normally I'd ask for Dave M on this score, but this has all the hallmarks of oblivias trying to set me up for a fall. Too bad for her that I have the inside tract on just who it was that drank all the coffee before Juan Valdez was set to take the stage (it was her).
<El Exigente has entered the chat>
Remember Strom Thurmond at the end?
Asked for no reason in particular.
At least he's not an OB-GYN anymore. The horror of having that creature giving intimate medical exams is too much to bear thinking of.
Cliff Huxtable in his on gyn office basement vibes.
That the kids were never allowed to interrupt while he was working….
All your [ MAGA ] base belong to us . . . You have no chance to survive make your time.
•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•---•
"MAGA is ending. In conservative circles, the debate over what comes next is heating up." –https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/24/opinion/trump-maga-future-republican-party/
Hmmm..."The Nationalist Socialist Party" seems appropriate.
Based on recent past history, something *even worse* than MAGA.
Do they say why?
Hopefully a bloody civil war
You know how flat-earthers and creationists like to mention that we haven't worked out how life on Earth began? Well, here's some amazing news. Scientists have discovered that RNA can form spontaneously on volcanic glass. And there was plenty of volcanic glass around some 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. This could go a long way in answering the question of how life appeared on Earth.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35588195/
i really prefer an explanation that involves a time paradox.
See what Obama was doing at the time . . .
That's like 4 years old.
Just a handful of amino acids and a wee bit of electricity
And Bob's your uncle
Or, rather, several grandfathers back . . .
"RNA?! Now the liberal scientists are saying vaccines started life on Earth, not Jesus".
Jesus started BINGO . . .
I like the idea that asteroids and comets brought somethings to the table as well....
I uh... hate this fucking timeline. It's bad enough that shit sucks, but what really hurts is how stupid it is, also...
Word. That is what galls me the most, I think. And the racism. But I think they are related.
A school banned all clubs rather than allow a gay-straight alliance. Students sued & won.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/09/a-school-banned-all-clubs-rather-than-allow-a-gay-straight-alliance-students-sued-won/
Such Bad Faith.....always on the Right....
The love the First Amendment until the courts remind them that it doesn't protect just them.
"We're sorry we got caught."
Sometimes my beloved employer gets on my nerves.
https://news.yale.edu/2026/09/13/power-conversation-new-david-brooks-podcast-considers-how-find-purpose-and-meaning-life
Perhaps you find meaning in dumping your spouse for a younger colleague.
Maurie McInnis is very...blah.
Yale’s love for Brooks predates her arrival.
Oh, for sure. Yale's love for all things bland and corporate predates my and my husband's arrivals of some decades ago. Benno was president when I was a student. My husband knew Bart very well. He was probably the last good one.
Coleridge's Dream - Jorge Luis Borgas
(this is not serialized, this is the whole piece, it is from his collection of non-fictions)
The lyric fragment "Kubla Khan" (fifty-odd rhymed and irregular lines of
exquisite prosody) was dreamed by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
on a summer day in 1797. Coleridge writes that he had retired to a
farm near Exmoor; an indisposition obliged him to take a sedative; sleep
overcame him a few moments after reading a passage in Purchas that describes
the construction of a palace by Kublai Khan, the emperor whose
fame in the West was the work of Marco Polo. In Coleridge's dream, the text
he had coincidentally read sprouted and grew; the sleeping man intuited a
series of visual images and, simply, the words that expressed them. After a
few hours he awoke, certain that he had composed, or received, a poem of
some three hundred lines. He remembered them with particular clarity and
was able to transcribe the fragment that is now part of his work. An unexpected
visitor interrupted him, and it was later impossible for him to recall
the rest. "To his no small surprise and mortification," Coleridge wrote, "that
though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general
purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered
lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface
of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after
restoration of the latter!" Swinburne felt that what he had been able to recover
was the supreme example of music in the English language, and that
the person capable of analyzing it would be able-the metaphor is Keats'to
unravel a rainbow. Translations or summaries of poems whose principal
virtue is music are useless and may be harmful; it is best simply to bear in
mind, for now, that Coleridge was given a page of undisputed splendor in a
dream.
The case, although extraordinary, is not unique. In his psychological
study, The World of Dreams, Havelock Ellis has compared it with that of the
violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini, who dreamed that the Devil (his
slave) was playing a marvelous sonata on the violin; when he awoke,
the dreamer deduced, from his imperfect memory, the "Trillo del Diavolo."
Another classic example of unconscious cerebration is that of Robert
Louis Stevenson, to whom-as he himself described it in his "Chapter on
Dreams" -one dream gave the plot of Olalla and another, in 1884, the plot
of Jekyll and Hyde. Tartini, waking, wanted to imitate the music he had heard
in a dream; Stevenson received outlines of stories-forms in general-in his.
Closer to Coleridge's verbal inspiration is the one attributed by the Venerable
Bede to Caedmon (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum IV, 24). The
case occurred at the end of the seventh century in the missionary and warring
England of the Saxon kingdoms. Caedmon was an uneducated shepherd
and was no longer young; one night he slipped away from some
festivity because he knew that the harp would be passed to him and he didn't
know how to sing. He fell asleep in a stable, among the horses, and in a
dream someone called him by his name and ordered him to sing. Caedmon
replied that he did not know how, but the voice said, "Sing about the origin
of created things." Then Caedmon recited verses he had never heard. He did
not forget them when he awoke, and was able to repeat them to the monks
at the nearby monastery of Hild. Although he couldn't read, the monks explained
passages of sacred history to him and he,
as it were, chewing the cud, converted the same into most harmonious
verse; and sweetly repeating the same made his masters in their turn his
hearers. He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all
the history of Genesis: and made many verses on the departure of the
children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering into the land of
promise, with many other histories from holy writ; the incarnation,
passion, resurrection of our Lord, and his ascension into heaven; the
coming of the Holy Ghost, and the preaching of the apostles; also the
terror of future judgment, the horror of the pains of hell, and the delights
of heaven; besides many more about the Divine benefits and
judgments . . .
He was the first sacred poet of the English nation. "None could ever compare
with him," Bede wrote, "for he did not learn the art of poetry from
men, but from God." Years later, he foretold the hour of his death and
awaited it in sleep. Let us hope that he met his angel again.
At first glance, Coleridge's dream may seem less astonishing than that
of his precursor. "Kubla Khan" is a remarkable composition, and the nine-
line hymn dreamed by Caedmon barely displays any virtues beyond its
oneiric origin; but Coleridge was already a poet while Caedmon's vocation
was revealed to him. There is, however, a later event, which turns the marvel
of the dream that engendered "Kubla Khan" into something nearly unfathomable.
If it is true, the story of Coleridge's dream began many centuries
before Coleridge and has not yet ended.
The poet's dream occurred in 1797 (some say 1798), and he published
his account of the dream in 1816 as a gloss or justification of the unfinished
poem. Twenty years later, in Paris, the first Western version of one of those
universal histories that are so abundant in Persian literature appeared in
fragmentary form: the Compendium of Histories by Rashid al-Din, which
dates from the fourteenth century. One line reads as follows: "East of
Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in
a dream and retained in his memory." The one who wrote this was a vizier
of Ghazan Mahmud, a descendant of Kublai.
A Mongolian emperor, in the thirteenth century, dreams a palace and
builds it according to his vision; in the eighteenth century, an English poet,
who could not have known that this construction was derived from a
dream, dreams a poem about the palace. Compared with this symmetry of
souls of sleeping men who span continents and centuries, the levitations,
resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or
nothing at all.
How is it to be explained? Those who automatically reject the supernatural
(I try always to belong to this group) will claim that the story of the
two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions
or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds. Others will argue that the
poet somehow knew that the Emperor had dreamed the palace, and then
claimed he had dreamed the poem in order to create a splendid fiction that
would palliate or justify the truncated and rhapsodic quality of the verses.'
This seems reasonable, but it forces us to arbitrarily postulate a text unknown
to Sinologists in which Coleridge was able to read, before 1816,
about Kublai's dream.' More appealing are the hypotheses that transcend
reason: for example, that after the palace was destroyed, the soul of the Em-
peror penetrated Coleridge's soul in order that the poet could rebuild it in
words, which are more lasting than metal and marble.
The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred
five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the
palace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of
time involved reveals a superhuman executor. To speculate on the intentions
of that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless,
but it is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal. In
1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all
that was left of Kublai Khan's palace; of the poem, we know that barely fifty
lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams
and works has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the
palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other's dream,
was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on
a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not
suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or
of music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one
will be the key.
After writing this, I glimpsed or thought I glimpsed another explanation.
Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object
(to use Whitehead's term), is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation
was the palace; its second, the poem. Whoever compares them will
see that they are essentially the same.
BLUE TIGERS - Jorge Luis Borges
(serialized, part 5, final part)
The villagers' attitude towards me began to change. I had been touched by something of the divinity that inhered in the stones the villagers had named "blue tigers", but I was also known to have profaned the summit. At any moment of the night, at any moment of the day, the gods might punish me. The villagers dared not attack me or condemn what I had done, but I noticed that everyone was now dangerously servile. I never again laid eyes on the child who had played with the stones. I feared poison, or a knife in the back. One morning before dawn I slipped out of the village. I sensed that its entire population had been keeping an eye on me, and that my escape would be a relief to them. Since that first morning, no one had ever asked to see the stones.
I returned to Lahore, the handful of discs in my pocket. The familiar environment of my books did not bring the relief I sought. That abominable village, and the jungle, and the jungle's thorny slope rising to the plateau, and on the plateau the little crevices, and within the crevices, the stones - all that, I felt, continued to exist on the planet. My dreams confused and multiplied those dissimilar things. The village was the stones, the jungle was the swamp, the swamp was the jungle.
I shunned the company of my friends. I feared that I would yield to the temptation of showing them that dreadful miracle that undermined humanity's science.
I performed several experiments. I made a cross-shaped incision in one of the discs, put that disc with the others, and shuffled them around; within one or two conversions, I had lost it, though the number of discs had increased. I performed an analogous test with a disc from which I filed a semicircular notch. That disc also disappeared. I punched a hole in the centre of one disc with an awl and tried the test again. That disc disappeared forever. The next day the disc with the cross cut in it reappeared from its journey into the void. What mysterious sort of space was this, which in obedience to inscrutable laws or some inhuman will absorbed the stones and then in time threw an occasional one back again?
The same yearning for order that had created mathematics in the first place made me seek some order in that aberration of mathematics, the insensate stones that propagate themselves. I attempted to find a law within their unpredictable variations. I devoted days and nights alike to establishing statistics on the changes. From that stage of my investigations I still have several notebooks, vainly filled with ciphers. My procedure was this: I would count the stones by eye and write down the figure. Then I would divide them into two handfuls that I would scatter separately on the table. I would count the two totals, note them down, and repeat the operation. This search for order, for a secret design within the rotations, led nowhere. The largest number of stones I counted was 419; the smallest, three. There was a moment when I hoped, or feared, that they would disappear altogether. It took little experimenting to show that one of the discs, isolated from the others, could not multiply or disappear.
Naturally, the four mathematical operations - adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing - were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty discs, divided, might become nine; those nine in turn divided might yield 300. I do not know how much they weighed. I did not have recourse to a scale, but I am sure that their weight was constant, and light. Their colour was always that same blue.
These operations helped save me from madness. As I manipulated the stones that destroyed the science of mathematics, more than once I thought of those Greek stones that were the first ciphers and that had been passed down to so many languages as the word "calculus". Mathematics I told myself, had its origin, and now has its end, in stones. If Pythagoras had worked with these ...
After about a month I realised that there was no way out of the chaos. There lay the unruly discs, there lay the constant temptation to touch them, to feel that tickling sensation once more, to scatter them, to watch them increase or decrease, and to note whether they came out odd or even. I came to fear that they would contaminate other things - particularly the fingers that insisted upon handling them.
For several days I imposed upon myself the private obligation to think continually about the stones, because I knew that forgetting them was possible only for a moment, and that rediscovering my torment would be unbearable.
I did not sleep the night of 10 February. After a walk that led me far into the dawn, I passed through the gates of the mosque of Wazil Khan. It was the hour at which light has not yet revealed the colours of things. There was not a soul in the courtyard. Not knowing why, I plunged my hands into the water of the fountain of ablutions. Inside the mosque, it occurred to me that God and Allah are two names for a single, inconceivable Being, and I prayed aloud that I be freed from my burden. Unmoving, I awaited some reply.
I heard no steps, but a voice, quite close, spoke to me:
"I am here."
A beggar was standing beside me. In the soft light I could make out his turban, his sightless eyes, his sallow skin, his grey beard. He was not very tall.
He put out a hand to me, and said, still softly:
"Alms, oh Protector of the Poor ... "
I put my hands in my pocket,
"I have not a single coin," I replied.
"You have many," was the beggar's answer.
The stones were in my right pocket. I took out one and dropped it into his cupped palm. There was not the slightest sound.
"You must give me all of them," he said. "He who gives not all has given nothing."
I understood, and I said:
" I want you to know that my alms may be a curse."
"Perhaps that gift is the only gift I am permitted to receive. I have sinned."
I dropped all the stones into the concave hand. They fell as though into the bottom of the sea without the slightest whisper.
Then the man spoke again:
"I do not yet know what your gift to me is, but mine to you is an awesome one. You may keep your days and nights, and keep wisdom, habits, the world."
I did not hear the blind beggar's steps, or see him disappear into the dawn.
I came to fear that they would contaminate other things - particularly the fingers that insisted upon handling them.
LOL
A little humblebrag: Needed to see my endo today for quarterly follow-up. A1C (primary long term glucose indicator) was 5.9% (normies are around 5.7 and lower). Eating my low carb diet continues to pay off. And my lipid panel also came in: total cholesterol 128 without meds. LDL and triglycerides near the low end of 'normal'. If only my knees worked, I might actually be healthy.
So you guys know that sometimes my movie night selections seem to reflect current events, this month we are doing vampire movies
Bela Lugosi is dead but apparently Mitch is not.
Some vampires can go out into sunlight.
How does Mitch feel about garlic?
In the book series "The Dresden Files", Jim Butcher has multiple kinds of vampires. Three races are common in the books.
Black vampires are basically the classic Bram Stoker type. Feed on blood, can convert humans, can't go out in sunlight. Evil, batlike.
Red vampires are similar, but use magic, and wear skin suits to appear more humanoid. The suits keep them in the shade so they can go out in daylight. They feed on blood, and you can kill them by cutting the blood sac in their abdomens.
White vampires feed off human emotions (mostly sex). But they are like Colin Robinson. Very humanoid otherwise.
He mentions green vampires which are rare - mostly in South America. They feed on human breath and can drain you from a hundred meters away.
The Wiki says there are 7 more types but they make no appearance in the books.
Just because Mitch showed up in the senate chambers doesn’t mean he was exposed to sunlight.
See also Thurmond, Strom.
How does Mitch feel about garlic?
I say we test that question out in the interest of empiricism. You know, just to be sure.
Bela Lugosi's dead
No, no, he's outside looking in
He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Bela Lugosi, Bela Lugosi
(apologies to The Moody Blues)
I think Mitch is more of a lich than a vampire.
Steve Berlin, saxophonist and keyboardist in Los Lobos, is 71 years old today. Here's the band live on 2 Meter Sessions in 1996 performing "Kiko And The Lavender Moon":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUQyd9fo5k4
And here's the band in 1987 playing "Will The Wolf Survive":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOmjUnGZg5Q
Saw them live once, Leo Kottke solo opening. Good show, Kottke was amazing.