Non Sequitur
Stream of subconsciousness
Yawning with Yann
An intimate look at three troop greeters as they confront the universal losses that come with aging and rediscover their reason for living.
Happy Veterans. No politics or bullshit. Peace.
You Are What You Doodle doodly doo
I was sitting with a friend over a cup of joe, doodling over a brown napkin that had already become privy to my Vaseline lip imprints.
Said friend asks, “What’re you writing?”
Me:…….(shows lame flowers haphazardly drawn)
Friend: “Oh, I thought you were writing something deep.”
Ouch.
When our minds drift into space, our pen tips bleed into seemingly nonsensical shapes, figures and squiggly lines. But could squiggly lines be more than just squiggly lines? Here’s the good ole’ Atlantic’s compilation of squiggly lines—not just any squigglies mind you, but Presidential squigglies generated during White House meetings (reassuring, I know).
There is one by John F. Kennedy during the Vietnam War, where he scribes rigid boxes around the word “Vietnam.” The Atlantic writes, “Where Hoover’s doodles are abstract and geometric and Eisenhower’s concrete and pictorial, Kennedy’s are heavily textual—reflecting his verbal, cerebral nature.”
Maybe JFK is worried about Vietnam just a tad, or wants some sense of control by drawing figurative boxes around the situation at hand. Not to say doodles are Rorschach blots for our psyches or that every insignificant inch and corner of that Intro to Ancient Pots n’ Pans notebook is brimming with meaning. In fact here is my final verdict on the meaning of my ghetto napkin flowers: it mostly reflects the fact that it’s like, the only thing I can ever draw save for the androgynous stick figures and demented phallus. Still, doodling seems to fill some sort of mental void, and is a more socially acceptable way of spacing out without staring awkwardly into space in the middle of a vibrant cafe.
Oh and just as an aside: John Keats doodled flowers in his school notebooks too, thank you very much.
We do doodly do What we must muddly must Muddly do muddly do Until we bust bodily bust.
“and tango makes three,” a children’s book about two male penguins who adopted and hatched a penguin egg, topped the American Library Association’s list of most controversial books in America, joining the ranks of Huck Finn, the Golden Compass, and Perks of Being a Wallflower.
> complete list from the Economist
Well, shit
James Fallows from The Atlantic commented about getting the newspaper in his Newark hotel. The situation is at once hilarious and kinda serious. Not to be a broken record about the decline of newspapers and blah blah blah, but this backs it up.
Paynefully Rotten
Looks like the revolving door is spinning with ever so much momentum:
Stephen Payne, a lobbyist with ties to the Oval Office is offering to arrange meetings with Bush & company in exchange for comely largess to Bush’s private library, according to an investigation by the Sunday Times, a British paper.
” Stephen Payne, who claims to have raised more than $1m for the president’s Republican party in recent years, said he would arrange meetings with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and other senior officials in return for a payment of $250,000 (£126,000) towards the library in Texas.”
According to the report, Payne has made an offer to “an exiled former central Asian president” to meet with the likes of Rice, Negroponte, Cheney etc. in exchange for “between $600,000 and $750,000,”
Payne told the undercover Times reporter,
“The main thing is that he [the Asian politician] comes, and he’s well received, that he meets with high-level people … and we send positive statements made back from the administration about ‘This guy wasn’t such a bad guy, many people have done worse’.”
Aside from the point, who is this Asian dude!?
Props to the Poles
Poland’s #1 premium Vodka. “Notice the lack of La Di Da,” says the caption on a billboard ad for the product on a California Freeway.
Here are a few things that I’ve passed off as commonplace in China but rediscovered here in the U.S.
EAST, WEST, AT THE GERMANS’ BEHEST
I used to stare at the above logo on the corner of our washing machine in our dingy apartment home in China, circa. 1997. Haier, founded in Qingdao, China, is the third largest seller of household appliances in the world, and has a niche in the U.S, as I’ve found some Haier refrigerators at Home Depot.
In the 80’s, when China was opening up to foreign markets, the German Liebherr Group entered into an agreement with the company and refrigerators were sold under the name Qingdao-Liebherr. Coincidentally, the Haier logo is a picture of two small children, one of darker skin tone and jet black hair and the other of paler complexion and blonde hair.
Believe it or now, the well-known Tsingtao beer was initially a German-British brewery tailored to German and other Westerners in China in the early 1900’s. Tsingtao is an alternative spelling of Qingdao (above).
Beer is not exactly China’s mainstay, but with a little help from the Germans, I guess Tsingtao’s continuing presence on U.S. store shelves makes a tad more sense.
BUNNY BALLYHOO
This was one of my favorite candies in China. I was surprised to find these in the Chicago Chinatown a few months ago, and to my surprise and delight, a college friend said it was in fact a bit of a hype in elementary school back in Seattle, Washington.
