First published Sept 15, 2006
“We write, in part, the words we need to read.“
…. Rebecca McClanahan, Write Your Heart Out
My words are my children,
nurtured from conception to maturity,
from thought to page.
They are what (all) I have to leave behind,
to let someone know I was here.
The mark I leave.
One proof of my life’s worth.
They talk back to me, make me laugh.
They explain me, comfort me, as I grow old.
Submitted by SK as a comment
Spring has almost sprung in my corner of the Midwest. The dance is always two steps forward, one step back. Then spring actually does arrive, stays briefly and suddenly leaps forward into full summer.
With these longer days of spring and the sun warming the earth there comes the urge to clear and clean, dig and plant. My indomitable English mother was always bottom-up in flower beds and vegetable patches from the minute the clock jumped forward while we children were tasked with picking up sticks and collecting branches that litter the lawn after winter storms.
I never quite remember exactly how my garden was the year before. The first day out in the spring is therefore all about pottering around trying to remember what worked well and what was left undone, taking mental notes and preparing for more important decisions to come later on when frost is no longer a threat. Gardens teach us great patience. You can spend all winter making the best of plans only to have them thwarted because of weather or pests or blight or other unforseens.
The great thing about gardens is that you are never lonely. You are always in the company of bees, earth worms, beetles and birds, all of whom have something to tell you about the state of the things if you are quiet enough to listen.
The birds arriving from their winter places are always a joy. Skeins of geese honk overhead – it’s a stirring, ancient sound that we on the ground have heard for eons. Usually the first song birds to arrive in my part of the world are the redwings. They stand on the tip of reeds at the edge of the marsh and sing their happy blackbird tunes.
One of the few Apps I have on my phone and use often is the Merlin Bird app. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the app permits you to record bird songs and then identifies for you, with names and photos, all the birds it hears. One late spring morning I set my phone on a table outside. The app identified 23 different birds in an 10 minute recording. I was astonished because I hadn’t heard nearly that many. The result that morning on the app encouraged me to listen more carefully, beyond the songs of bluejays, cardinals, chickadees etc that one becomes accustomed to hearing as daily background noise in the garden.
The University of Texas, last May, published an interesting article on the subject of birdsong and the human voice. They conducted, as part of a study, high-resolution anatomical scans of syrinxes from hummingbirds and ostriches — the world’s smallest and largest bird species — and the discovered that the syrinx of birds and larynx, the vocal organ of reptiles and mammals, including humans, share the same developmental programming.
The genetic connection between the vocal organs, said one of the professors involved in the study, is a new example of “deep homology,” a term that describes how different tissues or organs can share a common genetic link. In short, birdsong and the human voice share the same genetic blueprint. Here is a link to the article:
www dot jsg dot utexas dot edu/news/2024/05/birdsong-and-human-voice-built-from-same-genetic-blueprint/
Looking for more information about this, I came upon a site about bird and animal music and the name of a Canadian composer and “zoomusicologist”, Emily Doolittle (what a perfect surname), who creates music from bird song. She has a website (emilydoolittle dot com) where you can listen to examples of her music, some of which I have included below.
The music is unusual, evocative and quite beautiful. Seems at times similar to the dream like music of Claude Debussy. It struck me as something perhaps the music lovers on this site might enjoy and something Gérard might have considered for one of his “Something Wonderful” posts.
How dull would life be without birds!
youtube dot com/watch?v=-E1Kg4J41-c
youtube dot com/watch?v=KF7IlH03UwE
(not mine)
First posted: July 17, 2008
I think about you
almost never
these days.
much less than
once in a while.
funny that, don’t
you think, all
those tears
washed my eyes
and let me see,
there is, after all,
life after left over.
Sometimes, this is how I feel when I have a post idea.
I actually just trashed one that on hindsight, felt it added nothing and subtracted much. I’ll leave some of my developing … hatred? … of “things” to myself.
It’s hard sometimes to keep from spewing out in public. Don’t we all get enough of that most of our waking hours everywhere we look?
Not that I’m all in for rainbows and unicorns …
This is much better:
Was poking around the Dashboard; thought I’d share site stats for the past 30 days.
Averaging between 40 and 60 visitors per day, depending on the time period selected. Not sure what the difference is between “Views” and “Visitors”. I suspect the peak there in the middle is from when Neo shut AD down and referenced people to this site.
I remember the first earth day: a warm sunny day in April 1970 giving us an excuse to cut class and enjoy the day.
Like my time hearing George McGovern give a speech in person, the lasting effect was the opposite of that intended. “Earth Day” was a cover for something; I still don’t exactly know what but I have my suspicions.
Giving a bit of myself away, I spent time as a professional in a closely-related field … and many of the so-called “problems” were manufactured to provide an excuse for mandated “solutions”.
Earth Day. Bah, humbug!
It was crazy then, but nice crazy … not “they’re coming to take me away” crazy like it is now.
A sample of some obscure – and some maybe not obscure – tunes from my strange and off-the-wall collection.
Today’s selections: Jon Astley “Jane’s Getting Serious” 1987 and Superfine Dandelion – “Janie’s Tomb” 1967
They just seem to go together …
Jon Astley is a British record producer and recording engineer. The list of groups he worked with is extensive: The Who, Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones, etc. He recorded two albums as songwriter/singer in the late ’80s. “Jane’s Getting Serious” is the most prominent of these.
Superfine Dandelion was a 1967 garage rock band out of Phoenix. They recorded one no-hit album and broke up in 1968. One of their members – Rick Anderson – became the founding bassist for the Tubes.
(written in 2003 by kim – Splendid Isolation @ www kimdutoit dot com)
Submitted by ghostsniper as a comment
A re-printed article
Prequel: from “After The Pussification” – an explanation by Kim Du Toit of the web site “Splendid Isolation”
For those who’ve been living on another planet for the past two decades, I once wrote a screed called The Pussification Of The Western Male, which took about an hour to write and was a stream-of-consciousness rant against the demeaning of men in Western society. The piece garnered an immediate and voluminous online response (thank you, Insty), caused my host’s (website and email) servers to crash and necessitated finding a new host because they kicked me off.
Follows is the forbidden text. The article is long enough that the post is an excerpt with a rarely used “Read More”
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)
There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.