Slow your scroll. Stop. Abide here for two minutes. Restore your soul. Promise.

“When you find that you can neither go backwards nor forward…when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were to busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.” ~Henry Miller from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Hummingbirds live exclusively in the Americas. The smallest can weigh less than two grams. The largest, the giant hummingbird found in Peru and Chile, tips the scales at around 20 grams. You could send something that weight in the U.S. mail with a single first-class stamp. World’s smallest birds is just one of several distinctions that hummingbird species claim. They’re the only birds that can hover in still air for 30 seconds or more. They’re the only birds with a “reverse gear”—that is, they can truly fly backward. And they’re the record holders for the fastest metabolic rate of any vertebrate on the planet.

“I’ll bet everyone in foreign service feels a whole lot safer today. And, the Persians didn’t bait him into a war.” — c w swanson

“My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

— Ulysses, Tennyson

I.

Her sinewed arms bend oars downstream,
Her belly taut against the swirling eddies
And the shifting shoals of sand and silt.

Soft plash of water against the hull,
As, on the lift of wind and loft of wave,
Her legs push and her breasts swell

To the slow rotating stroke on stroke
That guides her craft past rocks and reeds
Where bighorns graze and beavers slap the pool.

Her hair, rayed out, enfolds the sun.
Her downed thighs surge and shift
To the tempo of the current’s heart,

And her shoulders roll, her shoulders roll
The long blue oars through shafts of sun,
Through all these canyons carved from time.

II.

Unknowing, and yet knowing, I boarded her silver boat,
Armed with maps and memoirs, with the latest equipment;
With the whole weight of the world compressed into a sack…
And we cast off when the sun slid above the canyon’s rim.

All day we rolled past walls of slate, the hawk our only witness,
Past pages of the Book of Earth no living soul could hope to read.
I lay upon the cushioned deck, soothed by the lull and surge of rapids,
And watched her eyes become the stream, as time was silenced by her touch.

Her face, at first quite modern, changed; Diana, mistress of the moon,
Emerged to meet my gaze. The air grew still. A silken shawl
Seemed draped upon the river’s skin. The sun breathed in and paused.

It was then her voice, a whisper across a glacier, moved within my mind,
And in that place, removed from time, this timeless tale she told… [continue reading…]

Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

— BY GARY SNYDER

Don Surber: A leaderless party with no plan Then there is San Francisco. Just a few years ago, it was a nice if expensive place to live. Sure you had some problem areas, but all cities do. Democrats decided to turn it into a toilet. The city fathers stopped enforcing basic sanitation laws. People are pooping and shooting drugs in the streets with impunity. This is their vision of America, a land overrun by illegal aliens and homeless drug abusers. Which may explain why Democrats have no quality candidate for president. What person of any integrity wants to lead the party of poop? Even Hillary won’t run. This is why their leading candidate is Joe Biden, who finished fifth in Iowa in 2008 with less than 1% of the vote. I won’t say they are scraping the bottom of the barrel, but they are.

Man Implants Car Key in Hand to His Unlock Tesla with a Simple Wave

Tesla’s new electrolyte solvent patent is a step towards a 1 million-mile battery In September, a team of researchers led by Jeff Dahn at Dalhousie University published a research paper that claimed they had developed a lithium-ion battery capable of one million miles of driving, or 20 years of use in an energy-storage system

Lynn Yaeger, Vogue Editor says Melania Trumps wardrobe is tasteless, and out of fashion. Honestly, you couldn’t write the script. pic.twitter.com/bnB5x1o9VT

— Dr James Kent (@DrJamesKent3) December 26, 2019

Do you want manboobs with that? An impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper. Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill. [continue reading…]

One innocent person killed. One critical. One maniac put down with one shot.

And then the rest of the congregation’s guns (4? 6? 8?) come out.

[Alternates from the New York Post to the censored Youtube video above.]

Matthew had some strong ideas about prayer. It is in his book that we find the Lord’s Prayer, also known as “The Swiss Army Knife of Prayers.” This particular prayer, according to Matthew (who should know about such things), is the Alpha and the Omega of prayers. He stresses this when he writes in Matthew 6:9-6:13, “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven…

Of late, and for obvious reasons, I’ve become more likely to pray than to curse. Indeed my new program is to swap a prayer for a curse whenever I find I’ve slipped into the cursing mode.

In a world that is cursed putting more curses into it is never a good idea. We are full up at present. No shortage of curses that I can see. Still, slipping into the cursing mode is easy to do in today’s world. We’re encouraged to do it by the very nature of the secular society.

Add to that my thirty year stint in New York City where the standard reaction to almost any event is either a curse that involves the middle initial of the Savior (Just what does that “H.” stand for anyway?), or the invocation of unnamed males who have an affinity for crude sex only with females of the motherly persuasion, and, when it comes to my ability and propensity to curse, you are dealing with one crude mother…. [continue reading…]

It seems odd that some people (ostensibly on the right) have not yet figured out that Trump’s tweets are one of his tools. He communicates directly with the world with no filterperson in his office or the filtered brains in the media. With his tweets, he dispenses punishment and confusion to his enemies. He does this very efficiently but some folks are still blathering about in the  “Correct Presidential Behavior” hot tub having intellectual hot flashes.

The dependably sane James Lileks provides healing for those afflicted ones as well as a pointer to an ever growing list of Trump accomplishments.

But His Tweets  | by James Lileks at Ricochet  Via Twitter, a list of Trump accomplishments.

Let me channel the dead-enders: It’s not like he was doing the LBJ routine in the cloakroom, twisting arms. It’s not like he was calling in Congresspeople to request a bill increasing funding for AIDS and Historically Black colleges. He signed what was put before him. A Rubio administration would have done the same.

Yeah, but … first you have to have a Rubio administration.

Yes, but if we’d had a Rubio administration, we would have all those good things, without the loss of international standing and the rise of Bad Vibes among demographics conservatives need to court.

Yes. But. International-standing-wise, here is your sack of sand and a hammer; enjoy your workout. As for the unpopularity amongst the youth and suburban women who were once well-disposed to the GOP but now give socialism a fresh look because they don’t like Trump’s character — the Youth would have always peeled off to the Left because that’s what you do when the slack sails of inexperience fill with the gusts of egalitarian blather. As for the suburban women, that’s a different post.

Point is, the media is transfixed by who Trump is, but what matters is the end result of his occupancy of the office. By the metrics of the left — bills passed, money spent — he ought to be seen as a best-case GOP president. If they could conceive of such a thing.

Thread by @robbystarbuck: I get asked sometimes by people who are on the fence or who aren’t very politically active: “What has @realDonaldTrump done or fixed as Pres… Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck

I get asked sometimes by people who are on the fence or who aren’t very politically active:

“What has @realDonaldTrump done or fixed as President?”

It’s a good question deserving of an in depth answer, so here’s a thread listing some of what he’s done in 3 years. Read it all! [continue reading…]

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in

CH: “Nation still deeply divided day after vote…

Yeah, I love that trick. The nation’s always “divided” when Dems don’t get what they want.

I was forced to go to a Christmas party over the weekend and had to listen to some jackhole whine about how “divisive” Trump was and lament that we couldn’t “come together.”

I unloaded on that nickelfucker –

“You want to talk divisive? I hated that dog-eating Kenyan crackhead every moment of the eight years he infested the White House. But you know what I didn’t do, asshole? I didn’t riot in the streets. I didn’t scream “HE’S NOT MY PRESIDENT!” I didn’t gin up some phony, childish “Resistance.” I didn’t go into every damned restaurant and public space where Obama or any of his cabinet were and scream in their faces. And I sure as hell didn’t hijack the FBI to create a phony dossier to impeach him 49 hours after he was inaugurated!

YOUR filthy party did all of that and more, right from the moment the polls closed and you knew that drunk, morally leprous hag of yours wasn’t going to win. So you can take that fucking ‘divisive’ talk and your crocodile tears about unity and shove them up your ass until you shit blood for a week!”

Fortunately, I work at home, so I don’t have to run into that clown more than perhaps once a month. But got-DAMN, I am sick of Dems blaming Trump for their own diaper-soiling meltdowns.

Via (11) Clarice Feldman on Facebook but nobody’s sure who wrote it.

Shhhhh…Just Let the Democrats Schiff Themselves Impeachment is super popular…in Brooklyn, Washington and Santa Monica.

The savvy play is, of course, to run up the popular vote total in New York, D.C. and California because, of course, the popular vote picks the president. Just ask Her Highness Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit if you can catch her between hearty swigs of screw-top Trader Joe’s Chardonnay. But impeachment isn’t so popular in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In fact, it’s downright unpopular. And extendo-impeachment games are not gonna help.

See, the snooty UK smart set decided that the people were wrong when they voted for Brexit so it decided to obstruct the will of the people and, moreover, decided that the standard bearer for the ruling caste should be some wiggy commie weirdo. The normals poured out to vote and utterly humiliated their betters by electing, with a huge majority, the wacky outsider who promised to stand up to the liberal elite and do what the people demanded.

Yeah, but who cares what happens in Great Britain? It means nothing. After all, it’s not like Britain and America share some sort of special relationship.

Trump’s been doing that to the Dems lately. He’s been warning them they’re screwing up. He’s been telling them he’ll crush them in 2020. They won’t listen. They can’t listen. And so, they can’t get off the tracks before the Trump Train crushes them into pink pinko goo.

Raconteur Report: These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For Okay, let’s play that game. What’s the defensive capability of any police station you can name?

When I storm it with those same 40 guys, kill everyone there, steal everything I can use, and burn what I can’t, how many more police are you going to need to protect the station house, and every other one you have, 24/7/365? Who’s going to defend the police when I shoot them off duty getting a burger? Who’s going to defend their families when they get killed and kidnapped while Officer Friendly is out oppressing the peasants? (You think their women and children will be off limits if mine aren’t? Sh’yeah, you should live so long. The peasantry will make wind chimes out of those kids’ skulls, for sport, by Week Two. Bet money on it. Tape recordings of their families’ dying screams will be broadcast by PA at the police station daily. Videos of their torture that would make an Apache blush will go viral. So when you have zero cops at work by Week Three, who’s going to stop me from doing the same thing to their masters holding the leash?)

[continue reading…]

Turn around, a decade [plus one two] is gone. 70? 71? 72 73 74? It doesn’t feel so old. I’m told that it is but it doesn’t feel that old. At the same time, I confess I’m not exactly sure who this geezer is who shows up in the mirror every morning — or where he came from. The thing is he keeps writing notes like this and leaving them where I can’t help finding them:

In my extreme age —
In my age extreme —
Skin planed to glassine,
Bone buffed to crystal,
Light locked in the marrow,
And memory melded to images only…

Of my extreme age —
In my age extreme

In my extreme age —
In my age extreme —
Thoughts thinned to one
And dreams dimmed to soul;
To that one shred of thread
Which stitches the shroud

Of my extreme age —
In my age extreme.

In that age extreme,
That extreme edge of age,
There shall still
In such stillness
Ring in my ears
One echo of now;

Of my extreme age —
In my age extreme.

In our age extreme
Your echo shall glimmer
Ever on the river that streams
Through time’s silted canyons
Of my extreme age —
In my age extreme.

Of our extreme age —
In our age extreme.

— Vanderleun for Emma Jean.

After a series of dark and rain splattered days topped off by a drenching storm on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day dawned clear and golden from first light. He’d read her from the Bible as well as The Polar Express and How the Grinch Stole Christmas in her room at the rehabilitation hospital on the eastern city limits of Chico; out near where the firestorm of November flowed down from the ridge and tried to enter the town.

He came back on Christmas morning and found her doing much better than on the days before. Outside the bright day beckoned and so he put on her warm coat and scarf and took her out into the courtyard. There they sat in the unseasonably warm sunshine under a sky washed clean of ash and smoke and soot. They breathed in crisp air smelling like freshly laundered sheets hung on the line to dry. Even the breeze when it came and went and came back again was gentle, almost warm. They had coffee and remarked what a fine fine Christmas day it was.

Once again she regretted that she had “ruined Christmas.”

Once again he reminded her of the fact that in October one of her sons had a motorcycle accident and a concussion and yet survived and was feeling fairly good again.

Once again he reminded her that in November another of her three sons had had his house in Paradise burned to ashes along with the whole town.

Once again he pointed out that in December she, in the 104th year of her age, had fallen and sustained a concussion and yet here she was again on the mend.

“It’s Christmas Day and all three of us are still here and still standing. I don’t know about you, but I’d call that a very merry Christmas if ever there was one.”

She laughed and allowed how that had to be the case. Then they had some more coffee in the courtyard next to the ravines running down from Paradise where the burned zones still blotched the hillside with charred soil and scorched trees like vast pools of shadow with no source of light.

Later, as he drove west back into town, the sunset in front of him grew more and more intense until it held all the colors of a raging wildfire cast up from behind the coast range. He stopped by the side of the road and watched this singular sunset burning brighter and brighter until its colors became as incendiary as the Light of All the World, born this day, long ago, in Bethlehem.

[Christmas Day, 2018]

INTO my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content, 
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

— Housman