Believe it or not, Ohio had a vibrant avant garde music scene in the mid 70s, with Devo being the best-known band of the Ohio scene. Seriously, in 1973-4, Ohio was more of a hotbed of rock-and/or-roll innovation than any other place on the globe. Another celebrated Ohio band was Cleveland's Pere Ubu, a band which had its origin in short-lived band Rocket from the Tombs, a band which also gave rise to The Dead Boys.
While I have long been a Pere Ubu fan, and I dig a couple of The Dead Boys' songs, I had never heard anything by Rocket from the Tombs (not to be confused with the band Rocket from the Crypt, which took its name from RftT). Recently, I found some Youtube videos of live recordings by Rocket from the Tombs (who broke up before releasing an album). The sound reminds me of a lo-fi Black Sabbath, playing avant-weird music and fronted by a warbling art-school student).
"Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" was an early single by Pere Ubu, a chilling, jagged-edged soundscape inspired by accounts of The Doolittle Raid, a one-way bombing mission meant to bolster American morale and jar the Japanese out of a sense of military supremacy:
Dark flak spiders bursting in the sky,
reaching twisted claws on every side.
No place to run.
No place to hide.
No turning back on a suicide ride.
The version by Pere Ubu is enough to elicit goosebumps:
The original by Rocket from the Crypt is sparer, and even less conventional than the Pere Ubu single:
"Sonic Reducer" by The Dead Boys is a fairly straightforward punk song, all adrenaline and attitude, and has passed into the punk "canon" (covered even by St. Joseph):
While the original by Rocket from the Tombs clocks in at about twice the length, it clearly foreshadows The Dead Boys' version, sounding like a "Stooges" outtake:
I suppose it was inevitable that Rocket from the Tombs would break up, what with two such disparate musical styles (exemplified by David Thomas and Cheetah Chrome) characterizing the band's output.
I'd been meaning to hunt down music by Rocket from the Tombs ever since reading Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, but the recordings were as rare as hens' teeth. I'd make a snide comment about how the internet makes everything easy to find, but I'm too happy to have found these recordings to play at being a hipster d-bag.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
The Passing of the Best: RIP Jack Vance
Via zrm, I have learned that a day I have long dreaded has finally arrived- my absolute favorite author, Jack Vance, died on May 26 at the age of ninety six. A perusal of older blog posts will reveal my love of Jack's work. He was a larger than life figure, a merchant seaman who traveled the globe, wrote for the pulps, and built his own house. A world traveler, but more importantly, a world builder. Jack had a knack for sketching exotic societies in a succinct fashion- he could create several more interesting cultures in a novella than the typical "paper doorstop" author could create in a multi-novel series. The best way to memorialize Jack is to read his work. I have excerpted several of my favorite passages from his novels in previous blog posts, but I feel obligated to re-post one of his hilarious trademark dialogues from The Killing Machine:
...The air of Ard Court smelled richly indeed, with a heavy sweet-sour organic reek that distended the nostrils. Gersen grimaced and went to the shop from which the odors seemed to emanate. Taking a deep breath and bowing his head, he entered. To right and left were wooden tubs, containing pastes, liquids, and submerged solids; overhead hung rows of withered blue-green objects the size of a man's fist. At the rear, behind a counter stacked with limp pink sausages stood a clown-faced youth of twenty, wearing a patterned black and brown smock, a black velvet headkerchief. He leaned upon the counter without spirit or vitality, and without expression watched Gersen sidle past the tubs.
"You're a Sandusker?" asked Gersen.
"What else?" This was spoken in a tone Gersen could not identify, a complex mood of many discords: sad pride, whimsical malice, insolent humility. The youth asked, "You wish to eat?"
Gersen shook his head. "I am not of your religion."
"Ha ho!" said the youth. "You know Sandusk then?"
"Only at second-hand."
The youth smiled. "You must not believe that old foolish story, that we Sanduskers are religious fanatics who eat vile food rather than flagellate ourselves. It is quite incorrect. Come now. Are you a fair man?"
Gersen considered. "Not unusually so."
The youth went to one of the tubs, dipped up a wad of glistening black-crusted maroon paste. "Taste! Judge for yourself! Use your mouth rather than your nose!"
Gersen gave a fatalistic shrug, tasted. The inside of his mouth seemed first to tingle, then expand. His tongue coiled back in his throat.
"Well?" asked the youth.
"If anything," said Gersen at last, "it tastes worse than it smells."
The youth sighed. "Such is the general consensus."
Here is one of Jack Vance's most gloriously "purple" descriptive passages from Jack's first collection, The Dying Earth, written while he was serving with the Merchant Marine in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War:
"This is the Museum," said Guyal in rapt tone. "Here there is no danger ... He who dwells in beauty of this sort may never be other than beneficient ..." He flung wide the door.
The light came from an unknown source, from the air itself, as if leaking from the discrete atoms; every breath was luminous, the room floated full of invigorating glow. A great rug pelted the floor, a monster tabard woven of gold, brown, bronze, two tones of green, fuscous red and smalt blue. Beautiful works of human fashioning ranked the walls. In glorious array hung panels of rich woods, carved, chased, enameled; scenes of olden times painted on woven fiber; formulas of color, designed to convey emotion rather than reality. To one side hung plats of wood laid on with slabs of soapstone, malachite and jade in rectangular patterns, richly varied and subtle, with miniature flecks of cinnabar, rhodocrosite and coral for warmth. Beside was a section given to disks of luminous green, flickering and flourescent with varying blue films and moving dots of scarlet and black. Here were representations of three hundred marvelous flowers, blooms of a forgotten age, no longer extant on waning Earth; there were as many star-burst patterns, rigidly conventionalized in form, but each of subtle distinction. All these and a multitude of other creations, selected from the best of human fervor.
The door thudded softly behind them; staring, every inch of skin a-tingle, the two from Earth's final time moved forward through the hall.
"Somewhere near must be the Curator," whispered Guyal. "There is a sense of careful tending and great effort here in the gallery."
"Look."
Opposite were two doors, laden with the sense of much use. Guyal strode quickly across the room but was unable to discern the means for opening the door, for it bore no latch, key, handle, knob or bar. He rapped with his knuckles and waited; no sound returned.
Shierl tugged at his arm. "These are private regions. It is best not to venture too rudely."
Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man's brightest dreamings they walked, until the concentration of so much fire and spirit and creativity put them into awe. "What great minds lie in the dust," said Guyal in a low voice "What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvelous creatures are lost past the remotest memory ... Nevermore will there be the like; now, in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery."
Here is the opening to The Miracle Workers, a novella which ranks among Jack's best:
The war party from Faide Keep moved eastward across the downs: a column of a hundred armored knights, five hundred foot soldiers, a train of wagons. In the lead rode Lord Faide, a tall man in his early maturity, spare and catlike, with a sallow dyspeptic face. He sat in the ancestral car of the Faides, a boat-shaped vehicle floating two feet above the moss, and carried, in addition to his sword and dagger, his ancestral side weapons.
An hour before sunset, a pair of scouts came racing back to the column, their club-headed horses loping like dogs. Lord Faide braked the motion of his car. Behind him, the Faide kinsmen, the lesser knights, and the leather-capped foot soldiers halted; to the rear the baggage train and the high-wheeled wagons of the jinxmen creaked to a stop.
This is perhaps Jack's funniest passage, from the unfortunately titled Servants of the Wankh:
That fellow yonder I believe to be an assassin, from the style of his garments."
The man at this moment approached their table. "You are Adam Reith?"
"Yes."
"I regret to say that the Security Assassination Company has accepted a contract made out in your name: the Death of the Twelve Touches. I will now administer the first inoculation. Will you be so good as to bare your arm? I will merely prick you with this splint."
Reith backed away. "I'll do nothing of the sort."
"Depart!" Zarfo Detwiler told the assassin. "This man is worth ten thousand sequins to me alive; dead, nothing."
The assassin ignored Zarfo. To Reith he said, "Please do not make an undignified display. The process then becomes protracted and painful for us all. So then-"
Zarfo roared: "Stand away; have I not warned you?" He snatched up a chair and struck the assassin to the ground. Zarfo was not yet satisfied. He picked up the splint, jabbed it into the back of the man's thigh, through the rust-ocher corduroy of his trousers. "Halt!" wailed the assassin. "That is Inoculation Number One!"
Zarfo seized a handful of splints from the splayed-open wallet. "And here," he roared, "are numbers Two to Twelve!" And with a foot on the man's neck he thrust the handful into the twitching buttocks. "There you are, you knave! Do you want the next episode, Numbers Thirteen to Twenty-four?"
"No, no, let me be; I am a dead man now!"
"If not, you're a cheat as well as an assassin!"
Here's the first part of an interview with Mr Vance from 1976:
And here is the man himself, playing the ukulele and kazoo (his schtick):
Thanks, Jack... thanks for everything.
...The air of Ard Court smelled richly indeed, with a heavy sweet-sour organic reek that distended the nostrils. Gersen grimaced and went to the shop from which the odors seemed to emanate. Taking a deep breath and bowing his head, he entered. To right and left were wooden tubs, containing pastes, liquids, and submerged solids; overhead hung rows of withered blue-green objects the size of a man's fist. At the rear, behind a counter stacked with limp pink sausages stood a clown-faced youth of twenty, wearing a patterned black and brown smock, a black velvet headkerchief. He leaned upon the counter without spirit or vitality, and without expression watched Gersen sidle past the tubs.
"You're a Sandusker?" asked Gersen.
"What else?" This was spoken in a tone Gersen could not identify, a complex mood of many discords: sad pride, whimsical malice, insolent humility. The youth asked, "You wish to eat?"
Gersen shook his head. "I am not of your religion."
"Ha ho!" said the youth. "You know Sandusk then?"
"Only at second-hand."
The youth smiled. "You must not believe that old foolish story, that we Sanduskers are religious fanatics who eat vile food rather than flagellate ourselves. It is quite incorrect. Come now. Are you a fair man?"
Gersen considered. "Not unusually so."
The youth went to one of the tubs, dipped up a wad of glistening black-crusted maroon paste. "Taste! Judge for yourself! Use your mouth rather than your nose!"
Gersen gave a fatalistic shrug, tasted. The inside of his mouth seemed first to tingle, then expand. His tongue coiled back in his throat.
"Well?" asked the youth.
"If anything," said Gersen at last, "it tastes worse than it smells."
The youth sighed. "Such is the general consensus."
Here is one of Jack Vance's most gloriously "purple" descriptive passages from Jack's first collection, The Dying Earth, written while he was serving with the Merchant Marine in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War:
"This is the Museum," said Guyal in rapt tone. "Here there is no danger ... He who dwells in beauty of this sort may never be other than beneficient ..." He flung wide the door.
The light came from an unknown source, from the air itself, as if leaking from the discrete atoms; every breath was luminous, the room floated full of invigorating glow. A great rug pelted the floor, a monster tabard woven of gold, brown, bronze, two tones of green, fuscous red and smalt blue. Beautiful works of human fashioning ranked the walls. In glorious array hung panels of rich woods, carved, chased, enameled; scenes of olden times painted on woven fiber; formulas of color, designed to convey emotion rather than reality. To one side hung plats of wood laid on with slabs of soapstone, malachite and jade in rectangular patterns, richly varied and subtle, with miniature flecks of cinnabar, rhodocrosite and coral for warmth. Beside was a section given to disks of luminous green, flickering and flourescent with varying blue films and moving dots of scarlet and black. Here were representations of three hundred marvelous flowers, blooms of a forgotten age, no longer extant on waning Earth; there were as many star-burst patterns, rigidly conventionalized in form, but each of subtle distinction. All these and a multitude of other creations, selected from the best of human fervor.
The door thudded softly behind them; staring, every inch of skin a-tingle, the two from Earth's final time moved forward through the hall.
"Somewhere near must be the Curator," whispered Guyal. "There is a sense of careful tending and great effort here in the gallery."
"Look."
Opposite were two doors, laden with the sense of much use. Guyal strode quickly across the room but was unable to discern the means for opening the door, for it bore no latch, key, handle, knob or bar. He rapped with his knuckles and waited; no sound returned.
Shierl tugged at his arm. "These are private regions. It is best not to venture too rudely."
Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man's brightest dreamings they walked, until the concentration of so much fire and spirit and creativity put them into awe. "What great minds lie in the dust," said Guyal in a low voice "What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvelous creatures are lost past the remotest memory ... Nevermore will there be the like; now, in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery."
Here is the opening to The Miracle Workers, a novella which ranks among Jack's best:
The war party from Faide Keep moved eastward across the downs: a column of a hundred armored knights, five hundred foot soldiers, a train of wagons. In the lead rode Lord Faide, a tall man in his early maturity, spare and catlike, with a sallow dyspeptic face. He sat in the ancestral car of the Faides, a boat-shaped vehicle floating two feet above the moss, and carried, in addition to his sword and dagger, his ancestral side weapons.
An hour before sunset, a pair of scouts came racing back to the column, their club-headed horses loping like dogs. Lord Faide braked the motion of his car. Behind him, the Faide kinsmen, the lesser knights, and the leather-capped foot soldiers halted; to the rear the baggage train and the high-wheeled wagons of the jinxmen creaked to a stop.
This is perhaps Jack's funniest passage, from the unfortunately titled Servants of the Wankh:
That fellow yonder I believe to be an assassin, from the style of his garments."
The man at this moment approached their table. "You are Adam Reith?"
"Yes."
"I regret to say that the Security Assassination Company has accepted a contract made out in your name: the Death of the Twelve Touches. I will now administer the first inoculation. Will you be so good as to bare your arm? I will merely prick you with this splint."
Reith backed away. "I'll do nothing of the sort."
"Depart!" Zarfo Detwiler told the assassin. "This man is worth ten thousand sequins to me alive; dead, nothing."
The assassin ignored Zarfo. To Reith he said, "Please do not make an undignified display. The process then becomes protracted and painful for us all. So then-"
Zarfo roared: "Stand away; have I not warned you?" He snatched up a chair and struck the assassin to the ground. Zarfo was not yet satisfied. He picked up the splint, jabbed it into the back of the man's thigh, through the rust-ocher corduroy of his trousers. "Halt!" wailed the assassin. "That is Inoculation Number One!"
Zarfo seized a handful of splints from the splayed-open wallet. "And here," he roared, "are numbers Two to Twelve!" And with a foot on the man's neck he thrust the handful into the twitching buttocks. "There you are, you knave! Do you want the next episode, Numbers Thirteen to Twenty-four?"
"No, no, let me be; I am a dead man now!"
"If not, you're a cheat as well as an assassin!"
Here's the first part of an interview with Mr Vance from 1976:
And here is the man himself, playing the ukulele and kazoo (his schtick):
Thanks, Jack... thanks for everything.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Alinsky! Alinsky! Alinsky!
The inspiration for today's post comes straight from the House of Substance. Monsieur McGravitas is riffing on a sad post by "Townhall" doofus John Hawkins:
10 Musicians Who Should Be Blacklisted By Conservatives
Predictably, the list itself largely consists of people who haven't recorded anything of note in the last decade- as Mr McGravitas puts it: We here omit the various crimes of the artists named - saying things - in order to simply list them and let you, the reader, decide how the state of popular music would be rocked if conservatives gave up on:
Psy
Sheryl Crow
The Dixie Chicks
Bruce Springsteen
Moby
Madonna
Bette Midler
Barbra Streisand
Tom-Morello-from-Rage-Against-The-Machine-after-Paul-Ryan-said-he-was-a-fan-of-their-band
Kanye West
Yeah, it's just sad and out-of-touch, like all conservative attacks on last decade's pop culture. For me, though, the most interesting feature of the original piece is the invocation of combination bête noire and inspiration Saul Alinsky: "Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." -- Saul Alinsky
I'd never heard of Saul Alinsky before the right-wingers elevated him to the status of combination Public Enemy Number One and Sensei. Most of the liberals I know are inspired by FDR, Woody Guthrie, and RFK, and are unfamiliar with Alinsky. To my Northeastern Establishment ears, "Saul Alinsky" is merely a poorly-attempted dogwhistle signifying "Jewy Jew Jew", a successor to "Upper West Side NPR Liberal" which is easier to gloss over ("we're not anti-Semitic, we just hate this one guy"). Googling "Saul Alinsky", the majority of the results lead to right-wing websites. In the first page of results, we even have a post by dopey John Hawkins (not gonna link, check it out for yourselves): 12 Ways To Use Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals Against Liberals. In the post, Hawkins writes:
Saul Alinsky was a brilliant man. Evil, but brilliant. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, everyone on the Left from the President on down is playing by his rules in the political arena.
EVERYONE on the left is playing by the rules of this evil man... therefore conservatives have to emulate this evil man. Got it? Hated enemy and inspirational tactician, Saul Alinsky serves as a combination Emmanuel Goldstein and Sun Tzu.
It's no wonder that conservatives are so unhinged- the cognitive dissonance necessary to simultaneously demonize and lionize a figure of no great significance would be enough to disorder the most brilliant mind, and righties like Hawkins are far from brilliance.
10 Musicians Who Should Be Blacklisted By Conservatives
Predictably, the list itself largely consists of people who haven't recorded anything of note in the last decade- as Mr McGravitas puts it: We here omit the various crimes of the artists named - saying things - in order to simply list them and let you, the reader, decide how the state of popular music would be rocked if conservatives gave up on:
Psy
Sheryl Crow
The Dixie Chicks
Bruce Springsteen
Moby
Madonna
Bette Midler
Barbra Streisand
Tom-Morello-from-Rage-Against-The-Machine-after-Paul-Ryan-said-he-was-a-fan-of-their-band
Kanye West
Yeah, it's just sad and out-of-touch, like all conservative attacks on last decade's pop culture. For me, though, the most interesting feature of the original piece is the invocation of combination bête noire and inspiration Saul Alinsky: "Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." -- Saul Alinsky
I'd never heard of Saul Alinsky before the right-wingers elevated him to the status of combination Public Enemy Number One and Sensei. Most of the liberals I know are inspired by FDR, Woody Guthrie, and RFK, and are unfamiliar with Alinsky. To my Northeastern Establishment ears, "Saul Alinsky" is merely a poorly-attempted dogwhistle signifying "Jewy Jew Jew", a successor to "Upper West Side NPR Liberal" which is easier to gloss over ("we're not anti-Semitic, we just hate this one guy"). Googling "Saul Alinsky", the majority of the results lead to right-wing websites. In the first page of results, we even have a post by dopey John Hawkins (not gonna link, check it out for yourselves): 12 Ways To Use Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals Against Liberals. In the post, Hawkins writes:
Saul Alinsky was a brilliant man. Evil, but brilliant. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, everyone on the Left from the President on down is playing by his rules in the political arena.
EVERYONE on the left is playing by the rules of this evil man... therefore conservatives have to emulate this evil man. Got it? Hated enemy and inspirational tactician, Saul Alinsky serves as a combination Emmanuel Goldstein and Sun Tzu.
It's no wonder that conservatives are so unhinged- the cognitive dissonance necessary to simultaneously demonize and lionize a figure of no great significance would be enough to disorder the most brilliant mind, and righties like Hawkins are far from brilliance.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Memorial Day Weekend
Ten years after the "Iraq War" began, more than ten since we invaded Afghanistan... and it's Memorial Day weekend. I fervently hope that the country can wind down from "perpetual war" status soon, so we can stop throwing young men and women into the meat grinder. As I did last year, I will "outsource" my Memorial Day post to Eric Bogle, who wrote one of the most poignant critiques of war, and the cultures that produce endless war:
Now young Willie McBride I can't help but wonder why
Do all those who lie here know why they died
And did they believe when they answered the cause
Did they really believe that this war would end wars
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying was all done in vain
For young Willie McBride it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Now young Willie McBride I can't help but wonder why
Do all those who lie here know why they died
And did they believe when they answered the cause
Did they really believe that this war would end wars
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying was all done in vain
For young Willie McBride it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
L-O-N-G Night
On the workfront, the organization I work for has rented out our property to **REDACTED**, so that they can **REDACTED** a **REDACTED**. Our customers have been on-site for about three weeks, and will remain until mid-June. Last night was their longest workday- they estimated that they would be on-site until 5AM or thereabouts. I drove (I didn't want to leave the main building locked, because they are using it as their "staging" area, plus it's raining like hell yet again) by the section of the property where they are working at 7AM to check on their progress and they seem to be wrapping up. The general rule of thumb is "take the time they tell you they'll be here until and add two hours".
On a typical night, I range all over the property, making sure the premises are in order and prowling around with mah preshus kittehs, but I'm pretty much stuck on "doorman" duty while the work crew is on the premises. I can't even concentrate on doing the prep work for a decent blog post- such is the price of vigilance (plus, I have to confess that I find the project manager on duty attractive enough to be distractive- petite and brainy-looking, with glasses and a ponytail, no makeup, no frills, C-U-T-E).
I believe this is the only stretch when they will be working so late (they usually clear out by 1AM) but I seemed to have gotten through their intrusion on my late-night routine with a minimum of fuss.
On a typical night, I range all over the property, making sure the premises are in order and prowling around with mah preshus kittehs, but I'm pretty much stuck on "doorman" duty while the work crew is on the premises. I can't even concentrate on doing the prep work for a decent blog post- such is the price of vigilance (plus, I have to confess that I find the project manager on duty attractive enough to be distractive- petite and brainy-looking, with glasses and a ponytail, no makeup, no frills, C-U-T-E).
I believe this is the only stretch when they will be working so late (they usually clear out by 1AM) but I seemed to have gotten through their intrusion on my late-night routine with a minimum of fuss.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Urban Boy Diggin' Country...
Country music, like all other genres, is subject to Sturgeon's Law, but when you run into one of those songs which falls into the good 10%, you're in for a treat. The new single by country (or is it alt-country?) artist Caitlin Rose is fantastic. All I can say is, "What a voice!" I imagine you'll be just as smitten as I was when you hear this melancholy but sweet number:
I hope this becomes a big breakout single, but the Balkanization (WTF, Google spellcheck?) of radio may keep it off the "rawk" or "pawp" stations. Sturgeon's Law obviously applies to radio here in the 'States.
I hope this becomes a big breakout single, but the Balkanization (WTF, Google spellcheck?) of radio may keep it off the "rawk" or "pawp" stations. Sturgeon's Law obviously applies to radio here in the 'States.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
High Water Mark
I always joke that my job is cushy, except when it's not. Today was firmly in the "not" column. I drove to work in a downpour- driving on the local roads was like riding in a log flume, my car was throwing up quite a spray. When I got to work, the basement was flooded as badly as it was during Hurricane Irene. My first order of business was getting a pump in working order to reduce the water level outside the basement doors (I don't know if the "day shift" even knows the pump is still there, but I almost never forget anything). Thankfully, I had picked up a pair of "water shoes" in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of at least one kayaking trip this summer. I joked to the Director of Operations, who was on site to assess the situation, that I usually packed for work as if I were on a camping trip but that today, luckily, I had packed as if for a boating trip. Once again, I found myself calf-deep in dirty water, making sure the drains were clear and assessing the pump operation. I also hastily dug a drainage trench in a slope behind to building to re-route a rivulet that was pouring off the roof into the basement. I'll have to point this problem out to the head of grounds and maintenance (my boss), and talk about a more permanent solution to the drainage problem. Currently, there is a team from a cleaning contractor using wet vacs and industrial dryers to "unswamp" the basement.
As if the flood and the subsequent unpleasantness weren't enough, one of my beloved on-site mulberry trees is beginning to be uprooted, and is currently blocking the footpath to our employee parking lot. Tragically, it's impinging on some of the overhead wires, so it'll have to come down. It wouldn't hurt so bad if the tree wasn't chock-full of green fruits which would have been utterly delicious in a month or so.
While I was puttering around trying to mitigate the flooding, I found a little friend who was swimming in water above its head- I grabbed it and let it loose in a nice patch of pachysandra:
Hey, buddy, you're a terrestrial amphibian, you'd be happier on dryish land... for that matter, so would I.
As if the flood and the subsequent unpleasantness weren't enough, one of my beloved on-site mulberry trees is beginning to be uprooted, and is currently blocking the footpath to our employee parking lot. Tragically, it's impinging on some of the overhead wires, so it'll have to come down. It wouldn't hurt so bad if the tree wasn't chock-full of green fruits which would have been utterly delicious in a month or so.
While I was puttering around trying to mitigate the flooding, I found a little friend who was swimming in water above its head- I grabbed it and let it loose in a nice patch of pachysandra:
Hey, buddy, you're a terrestrial amphibian, you'd be happier on dryish land... for that matter, so would I.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
