blodgin

the blogger is back ________________________________________________________________

It seems like ages since the blogger worked...

posted by wrangler steve at Thursday, September 28, 2006 >1 comments

the king of them all ________________________________________________________________

...is Chris Lydon the master interviewer...see Open Source...man I am so excited to know Chris Lydon has a new platform...see his previous archive at

posted by wrangler steve at Monday, September 25, 2006 >0 comments

like a rolling satirist ________________________________________________________________

(see rollingstone.com)

On this day, though, as Vonnegut sips coffee and his tiny white dog, Flour, yaps in the background, there is no wry amusement or social satire in his repertoire. There is only burning dissent about the way modern technology and global capitalism are usurping the last gasps of goodness from honest laborers' lives. And deep sadness that everyday humans are butchering their most civilized impulses. But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. "Oh, yes," he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?" "Lung cancer?" I offer.

"No. No. Because I'm eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'"....

(I first learned of Vonnegut in 1969 from the cool paperback cover on my even cooler English professor's desk (Mr Reed with his sleek ever smoking cigarette and beautiful pencil stripe shirts) MOTHER NIGHT... still my favorite is the BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS and its unique anatomical sketches... I hope Vonnegut makes it another ten years at least...

posted by wrangler steve at Sunday, September 24, 2006 >0 comments

You Tube, I Beeb ________________________________________________________________

I find interesting work done here in the area of short film but unlike youtube BBC Film actually has content worthy of one's finite resource of time..

posted by wrangler steve at Thursday, September 21, 2006 >0 comments

why dont you find somebody to love... ________________________________________________________________

I am within three pounds of my target weight...if I slip below that number I need to gain..wow what a concept...Today to get those three out of the picture I added a running and walking component to my daily workout...I follow the "body for life" plan and believe me brother it has changed my life one thousand and one per cent...if you need info on that write chasgun at hotmail dot com..

(I am having trouble with blogger's image loader...ugh...when will technology be perfect...) The music is heaven at wync2 and the day is glorious...because I am in love and not out...and i feel in love with the entire world but I do not trust the world and in fact I do my very best to avoid it as much as possible...

Perhaps the recent death of J. W. and others has clued me in...or was it that sentence in the racy book I am reading which said you cant save anybody but yourself... but last night my friend Jimmy reached across the great divide and gave me a big hug...so maybe my cynicism is a bit too extreme...mainly I want to see my wife and daughter and I want to be paid tomorrow and buy a brand new brilliant book by a girl whose name i cannot remember but it rhymes with pessl and has the word physics in the title...

why dont you find somebody to love today...

posted by wrangler steve at Wednesday, September 20, 2006 >0 comments

crimson and white ________________________________________________________________

...if you are like my mom then there is nothing more horrible to contemplate in this life than the very idea of pornography however there is nothing more wonderful than a "racy" novel. When I was younger I thought she was talking about african american or native american literature...actually now that I have the advantage of fifty years or so I read THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE (Michel Faber) myself... only out of historical curiosity of course! (19th century industrialist "Bill"and the heroine of the novel, Sugar a want-to-be novelist...)-I believe I shall purchase however a true work of literature which is John Le Carre's new novel release today or tomorrow...

posted by wrangler steve at Tuesday, September 19, 2006 >0 comments

doth precede us... ________________________________________________________________

...it is said our reputation precedes us but I never really knew how true such a statement is until I had lunch with three lovely ladies...daughter and rosily pregnant Nancee, my adopted daughter I tell her Wendy, and my beautiful wife Linda...as we enjoyed our submarine sandwich...and mine tasted rather like it indeed had voyaged beneath the surface of the briny deep itself...my daughter said "dad do you know those people?" but my neck hurts (i think from allergy sinus glands etc but my wife thinks its because i hold my neck too strictly when doing pushups) so I dont know who she was talking about..."they said do you know that man...yes she said its my dad...oh we like him he's that nice man from the pharmacy...we know nothing about medicines or insurance and he really helps us".... see... our reputation doth precede us...

posted by wrangler steve at Monday, September 18, 2006 >1 comments

the conquest of cezanne ________________________________________________________________

I shall quote from the guardian online--

there's no better way of understanding Cézanne than by looking at Le Lac d'Annecy in London's Courtauld Gallery.

The view is framed by a tree whose broad trunk rises on the left, and whose branches cut across the upper part of the picture in two dark waving thrusts towards the bottom. The lake divides the canvas in half and its far shore appears as a straight line, which perfectly bisects the main body of the trunk. So the painting is structured like a "T" on its side, while across the crystalline lake floats a chateau whose tower is a dense cylinder.

Nowhere in Cézanne's art do you more immediately see what he meant when he said the artist must "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone". Cézanne shades the cylinder to denote its chunky volume, placing it over a roof of regular triangles. Along the shore is a smaller house captured in three planes of colour: red roof; bright side wall; shadowed end wall. From this description of symmetries and volumes, it might seem Cézanne was a cold, clinical painter who turned the visible world into a diagram. Nothing could be less like the experience of looking at Le Lac d'Annecy.

Blue, green and black diagonals cleave a sky that shatters into pink and blue diamonds. The slope of the hill is parallel to the overhanging branches, so the three repeated downward blasts become almost oppressive. The splintered mountains and sky torn through by these driving stormy bolts are energised shards of emotional information - hot and cold pulses. Cézanne has changed a benign view he feared might be "picturesque" into an almost apocalyptic spectacle. Yet he has absolutely nothing in common with the Romantic painters for whom this would come naturally. He doesn't fool himself that a real storm is brewing. He knows the storm is in him.

The Lac d'Annecy is, in its very violence, a triumph of order. Cézanne unleashes wild forces above the lake in order to tame them. The forces are his own - and so is the resolution. The drama of this painting is the emotional drama of the painter sitting there at his easel, thinking terrible things, overcoming his terror and anger, finding in the landscape a multi-faceted mirror of his inner struggle.

ilove art...i wish crystal bridges were right here, right now...

posted by wrangler steve at Saturday, September 16, 2006 >1 comments

ha, ha.... ________________________________________________________________

posted by wrangler steve at Thursday, September 14, 2006 >0 comments

picture,picture ________________________________________________________________

I love the visualization of difficult scientific concepts...oh I forgot one is supposed to only discuss vapid and foolish things in the culture of today which is not all that different from the one Juvenal wrote about...you are aware of the Sixteen Satires? Oh well, never mind lets talk about the swimsuit issue...

posted by wrangler steve at Wednesday, September 13, 2006 >0 comments

susan sontag's journal style... ________________________________________________________________

31 December

On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.

There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today (when I went up to 122 Bd. St-G to check for her mail) in H’s journal about me — that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us).. . .Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H. ever read this?

. . .

posted by wrangler steve at Tuesday, September 12, 2006 >0 comments

what works ________________________________________________________________

from the health section of the new york times we read:

Duration and intensity of physical activity are important factors in how much fat the body burns for energy, which, after all, is what you want to lose. The harder and longer you work out, the more fat you will shed.

When you diet without exercising, you lose both muscle and fat, which is counterproductive because muscle loss significantly lowers your basic metabolic rate, the number of calories your body uses at rest.

Type of Activity Matters

Weight-bearing activities that work against gravity — aerobic activities like walking, running, cross-country skiing, dancing, skating and stair-climbing — use proportionately more calories at a given level of effort than swimming, cycling or water aerobics.

The more muscle groups involved in your activities, the more calories you are likely to burn. That is why working out against gravity uses more calories than non-weight-bearing activities.

...more bike riding coming up today!

posted by wrangler steve at Tuesday, September 12, 2006 >0 comments

you did what you could ________________________________________________________________

thank you firemen and firewomen...www.rebeccablood.net

posted by wrangler steve at Monday, September 11, 2006 >0 comments

ted talk ________________________________________________________________

I have just listened online to the anthropologist Helen Fisher as she explains the three brain systems of humanity in regard to that awesome and wonderful thing we call love.

If you wish to understand the origins of casual sex (lust), romantic love, and life long attachment you must view Fisher's important talk or read her new book on this all important subject. Isn't that right? What is the future of love... see Helen's homepage

posted by wrangler steve at Friday, September 08, 2006 >0 comments

super day ________________________________________________________________

make it a super day, friends...write when you may chasgun at hotmail welcomes your word...

posted by wrangler steve at Wednesday, September 06, 2006 >0 comments

the word I am ________________________________________________________________

shi is the chinese definition of poetry and means I am the word. I find that quite different from the western view which we might translate as I make the word. What a difference these views are... (see ubu.com for chinese wall writing study)...

posted by wrangler steve at Saturday, September 02, 2006 >0 comments

ah, when summer must fade... ________________________________________________________________

Ah, when summer must fade...we lounge about...we sit in the yard in our sun worship attire...we read...we write...we think of friends...

posted by wrangler steve at Saturday, September 02, 2006 >0 comments

________________________________________________________________

Heroes -- In Theater trailer

friends i am about to become a fan of heroes...its got to be better than THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS. isnt that right?

posted by wrangler steve at Friday, September 01, 2006 >0 comments