Month: March 2008

Not boring

The only thing that sucks more than being sick is being sick around my birthday. I seem to have what half of everyone I know seems to be suffering with. My wife’s been ill, too, and she took an illness-related fall on Tuesday that meant seven (count ’em, 7) hours in the ER; I went with her, and the event involved a number of brief flurries of action, followed by huge periods of waiting.

On the potential upside this week, one of my oldest friends, Karen, who I’ve known for 50 YEARS!, and whose birthday, not so incidentally, is March 9, sent me this Susan Miller astrology chart:

“It’s rare to have Uranus so close to the Sun and moon, and if you were born on March 7 or within five days of this date, [such as Gordon, whose birthday is today] this new moon will help you advance your hopes and wishes in a big way. This will not be a boring month, by anyone’s estimation!

A new moon will coincide with one’s birthday only very rarely – it could be decades until this happens again – so the coming 12 months should be VERY memorable, filled with fresh starts. If you were born on or near the new moon, March 7, you more than other Pisces will feel the full effects and benefits that are about to flow forward.

The best part of this is that the new moon will be in elegant angle to Jupiter, the Great Benefactor planet, now in your solar 1st house of your personality, identity, and all dreams and desires important to you. The 1st house is the engine that drives the whole chart!”

I suppose I should note that March 7 is MY birthday. While I’m not a big believer in astrology, I don’t dismiss it outright either. Anyway, I love that “the new moon will be in elegant angle to Jupiter”; I have no idea what that means, but it sounds purty.

ROG

ROG

Joe Stalin and Elvis Presley


March 5, 1953: Joseph (or Josef) Stalin died four days after what was considered to be a stroke, at the age of 74. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage… It has been suggested that Stalin was assassinated…In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and so predisposes the victim to hemorrhagic stroke (cerebral hemorrhage). Since it is flavorless, warfarin is a plausible weapon of murder. The facts surrounding Stalin’s death will probably never be known with certainty.
(For a long time, I used to wonder about the correlation between Stalin’s death and my birth, two days later.)


March 5, 1965: A milestone in Elvis’ personal life. While driving to Los Angeles to begin work on his latest film, the singer tells Larry Geller that he feels their recent religious studies haven’t produced a bonafide religious “experience.” Not long after, Elvis pulls over and runs into the middle of the desert when he sees a cloud formation that looks like Russian dictator Josef Stalin.
As he watches, it turns into a face Elvis interprets as that of Jesus Christ. As Geller recalls it in Peter Guralnick’s acclaimed book Careless Love:
“It’s God!” Elvis cried. “It’s God!” Tears streamed down his face as he hugged me tightly and said, “…I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You got me here. I’ll never forget, never, man. It really happened. I saw the face of Stalin and I thought to myself, Why Stalin? Is it a projection of something that’s inside of me? Is God trying to show me what he thinks of me? And then it happened! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it… Oh, God. Oh, God,” Elvis kept saying. Then he paused and added a peculiar aside. “Can you imagine what the fans would think if they saw me like this?”
“They’d only love you all the more,” Geller said.
“Yeah,” he said, “Well, I hope that’s true.”
Visibly shaken, he resumes the trip, although most of the Memphis Mafia are skeptical about the validity of this “sign.”

There’s probably something pithy to say, but I don’t know what.

***
You may have seen this, but Pete Seeger slammed Joe Stalin last year.

ROG

ROG

Stuff White People Like

A black colleague e-mailed me about a website called Stuff White People Like. I had heard of the two-month old blog before, but I hadn’t checked it out until this weekend.

I was curious how I would fare. Early on, I meshed with items 8, 12, 35, 36, 38, 43, 44, 46, 50, 55, and 57. But these last several posts:
* #78 Multilingual Children – well, optimally
* #77 Musical Comedy – I like Weird Al
* #76 Bottles of Water – afraid so
* #75 Threatening to Move to Canada – once in a great while
* #74 Oscar Parties – been there
* #73 Gentrification – not yet
* #72 Study Abroad – not yet
* #71 Being the only white person around – d/n/a
* #70 Difficult Breakups – oh, yeah
* #69 Mos Def – not so much
* #68 Michel Gondry – no
* #67 Standing Still at Concerts – depends
* #66 Divorce – yes
* #65 Co-Ed Sports – not recently, but there was that volleyball at the Y period in the early 1990s
* #64 Recycling – absolutely

My cultural identity is in shambles!

I jest, but there is this:
I was leading adult education for three weeks during Black History Month, a/k/a, February. The latter two weeks, this guy shows up and talks. A lot. About issues tangential at best to the topic at hand.
The last week, I’m wearing this African garb. As I rush from Adult Ed to the bathroom, then onto choir, this guy asks me if I were African-American. I figure he’s just yanking my chain and ignore him.
Then the new church letter comes out for March. Inside is a black-and-white picture of some of the participants of the first adult ed class I led, including someone who I didn’t immediately recognize as me. In my mind’s eye, I look the same as I always did, but the vitiligo has rendered me light enough so that someone who did not know me DIDN’T know that I was black. Most peculiar.
ROG

ROG

Graphic meme

From Tosy and/or Cosh from a couple months back; I did it, then promptly misplaced it.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

Shina is a Japanese model I had never heard of.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact. – Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

You then take the pic and add your band name and the album title to it, then post your pic. And so we get:

***
Johnny B. asked for art requests. So I suggested he draw Fred Hembeck. See the results.
***
Jaquandor asked for questions, and questions he got from me, profound and profane. He answers them here and here and here (1st question), with even more to come.

ROG

ROG

Lent

Somebody pointed out to me recently that all that Easter/spring parallel stuff is terribly Northern Hemispherist, and of course, he was right; Easter in the Southern Hemisphere is in the autumn. Anyway, my sister sent me an e-mail last month:

As it turns out, the story has appeared in a number of websites, such as here (edited) and here (complete).

Don’t always know if I’m an Easter person, but I’m definitely a Lenten person.

ROG

ROG
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