I Think

Like the space shuttles - Too complicated to work right.

Report them to the postmaster.

I finally got my stuff.

Good! Worry and anxiety are the pits!

Them sumbitches made me sweat, but after four days of idiocy it came through.

I found a snake of about three inches long, swimming in the pool yesterday. I dipped it out and carried it in a coffee can to the far side of the retainer pond. Hopefully it will make new friends and have a good home out there. I used to find one or two snapping turtle babies on the property each year, but it has been five or six years since the last time. I have a group of sparrows that always hang close as I dip out the June bugs that float in the skimmers. I lay them out on the deck to be eaten.

It has created a stir that Batman will appear in the next Superman film, but that's not so innovative. They were in at least one comic book together in the 1970s.

I saw a trailer for Michael J Fox's upcoming comedy TV series. His character will play on Fox's real medical condition. I plan to at least check it out.

That sounds like another in a long series of long-winded ads for the medical profession and its ancillary tentacles. Your Life In Their Hands sort of thing. Which does seem to be the case. Dying with your boots on is the very last thing the medical profession require of us.

It's one of my favourite subjects and I could easily expand this post a considerable distance if it wasn't that it would try the patience of readers of this thread and that is not my style.

I have a number of birds visit my back garden. And white butterflies laying eggs on my cabbages. Robins, pigeons, blackbirds, magpies, a blue tit once, sparrows, ducks even. I use the plural because I don't know if they are the same ones all the time. Except for the blue tit of course. And sea gulls fly over all the time. Big jets too. Leaving a trail of Lord knows what in their wake. I wonder what those tribes that haven't been reached yet make of the speedbirds. They can't possibly think there are 400 folks arse-down in them in serried ranks. The messengers of the Gods maybe. Which they might be said to be looking at it in a certain way. Pilot=God, Business Class=Saints and Angels, and the faithful bringing up the rear to keep prices down for Business Class.

There's streaks of bird **** on anything perchable. There's nothing like watching a flock of seagulls to see what well-adapted eating-and-shitting machines look like. Are the evolutionists really sure we have a degree of kinship with the beasts?

But the sun has come out after a cloudy morning and we have to make the most of it so I'm off for a bask.

You have blue tits?

The Michael J Fox thing is played for comedy. The preview looked pretty funny.

Innovative is not a word that should be mixed up with such arrant nonsense as Batman and Superman, Ed.

You're a grandfather or even a great grandfather for Christ's sakes, not a doughy headed teenager.

It's "ed" JT.

From comic books to James Joyce to Goethe is not that great a stretch.

That's an excuse, Ed, not an explanation.

What do you want from me? I am easily entertained.

For English comics maybe. Since Henry Fielding wonder working in fiction has been the territory of the incapable.

No sooner is a miracle worked the possibility of all miracles looms and in that situation any story becomes ridiculous.

With the suspension of reality, "with a bound Jack was free" is always there for the author's convenience and anytime he doesn't take advantage of it he is caught padding out his bullshit.

Something is allowed to be highly unlikely mind you. Such as the faint whiff of fresh air was when the remnants of the cast of King Solomon's Mines were trapped under a mountain with so little hope that Quatermain had made his last confession in a most pitiful and highly amusing prayer.

So long as the thing could happen it is legitimate.

Superman is just an extension of building god myths in an age where it is difficult to believe in divinities.

But his virtue is totally at odds with Darwin's version of reality. He defines good guys and bad guys and is sold out to populist sentiment. It's like being in Sunday School.

Some people yearn for Sunday school in disguise. Evolution is not a straight line from point A to whatever point turns up, as you ought to know.

It might be from the point of view of the Selfish Gene.

Species survival depends on luck and enlightened self interest. I don't see that much of either.

When my daughter was lured to Colorado to help the company she worked for to expand in and around Denver, I noticed that some long time employees got fired now and again, with no warning. And yet she was given incentives and heaped with honors. She opened new restaurants for them and at times managed multiple restaurants. But a few years ago I could tell they were now taking her for granted. Yesterday, with no advance warning, she was fired. It coincides with the fact they are well established there now and can at last function with lesser paid employees. Maybe she will get a chance to come home to Texas. The one silver lining I can see.