Leave Greta Garbo ALONE! & be a movie star on your own!

You may wonder what I'm listening to on this cool evening. I can't get enough of the Anne Murray album "Together" (1975). Luckily for the blogosphere, she performed the song "Everything Old is New Again" on the muppet show, so you can watch it right now:

I also stumbled upon a few tracks from this Peter Frampton & the Bee Gees - Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Fixing a hole? Getting better? Yes.

	Bee Gees & Peter Frampton - Fixing A Hole
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

	Bee Gees & Peter Frampton - Getting Better
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Oh! I know why I've heard "Everything Old is New Again". It's in my favorite creepy Bob Fosse movie, All that Jazz:

Earf People Day

In the early days of this weblog, I wrote about Nonviolent Nondriving, my tiny personal movement to not drive a car. Since cars kill more than wars, nondriving is inherently nonviolent. (More people die in Israel from car accidents than from violence. In the US, we kill around forty thousand people a year in car accidents, compared to around two thousand firearm deaths.) ANYWAY, not to mention pollution. Happy Earf Day Earf People & Lizard People! New York to California! 

We just noticed that Brains Aha!, our Sports & Leisure correspondent, has been covertly blogging also at a website called carfreeusa.blogspot.com, which is about many things, but principally about a carfree USA. A few days ago he posted this link to my facebooks wall:

People have been pushing to turn Berkeley's pedestrian-busy Telegraph Avenue into something akin to Cornmarket Street in Oxford, England - buses & lorries okay, there's no reason to have a personal car on it. Parts of Berkeley, like most of Oxford, is just too damned complicated to drive around in anyway, not to mention parking. Also not to mention pollution, & societies & communities ripped apart by car roads.

Also for Earth Day, I recommend this Huffington Post post, a list of statistics about livestock's impact on the environment. Remember it takes six pounds of grain to make one pound of meat, & eleven times as much fossil fuel.

So today I inaugurate itwaslost.org's Department of Nonviolent Nondriving, as part of our larger Imaginary American anti-Lizard People initiative spearheading.

A Celebration of Fake Love: Photos from the Fake Marriage Ceremony

On April Fifth, the Mimosas Witnesses hosted a Fake Wedding in the Berkeley Hills. The Bride & Groom had never met. The guests roles (MILF-of-the-Groom, Drunkle) were selected semi-randomly from a Sorting Sombrero. The photos from my camera have just returned, the first batch from the ceremony:

Today with my whole heart
I pledge to thee
My love & faith
For all of eternity
And even longer after that
I'll fill your life
Up to past the brim of my hat
And be your little wife
I'll be your special friend, in cloudy climes,
Thru troubles & strife,
Good times & stupid sucky times
Thru this life & most of afterlife [...]

-From the Bridal Vows

You are the Eve to my Adam,
You are the ying to my yang,
You are the yoni to my lingam,
You are the Lady Macbeth to my Mister Macbeth,
You are the Lewinsky Scandal to my Kenneth Starr,
Without you, I am like half of a lemon after it has been sliced in half,
And the other half thrown away into the compost,
To return again unto the earth & fertilize the summer crops.

-From the Groomal Vows

Every night in my dreams,
I see you, I feel you,
That is how I know you go on.

Far across the distance,
And spaces between us,
You have come to show you go on.

Near, far, wherever you are,
I believe that the heart does go on,
Once more you open the door,
And you're here in my heart,
And my heart will go on and on.

-From the "hymn" we sang

The text for these Fake Nuptials is here.
The Invitation.
Photos from the Sunny Reception - & I'll post more photos from the reception tomorrow, & all the crowd shots & photos shoots anon.

I got totally fucked up by a kid today.

He threw a piece of tree at me, at my head.
See the blood?
It took him a long time to hit me.
First he was throwing pieces of dirt,
then bark,
then pieces of tree.
His only direct hit was to my left temple.
What was I doing?
Lying in the grass,
eating fish tacos.

Epistle to the Non-Bloggers of the UnBlogosphere

Six weeks ago, we tried to start a duel with smarmy GQ writer Adam Sachs, who declared a pitiful "War on Brunch" - which in many ways was a hate crime towards our religion, the Mimosas Witnesses. Our feud with him was aborted due to his failure to realize we exist. I suspect it's partially because his weblog, The Vacationist, he is too embarrassed to call a blog, & awkwardly refers to it as a "Non-Blog", even tho it looks & smells like a duck. This morning, we gee-dissed our once-&-future nemesis & all the unbloggers of the world:

12:50 PM Olaf: i see

of the food write loser

came to nothing

me: Hm?

Oh, that guy was a wank.

Olaf: true

me: He probably didn't even read the comment on his Non-Blog.

Olaf: he had

me: UnBlog

Olaf: to

cause the comments were blocked

12:51 PM me: It's like someone who writes a book but never liked the trendy word book so he called it an UnBook.

Olaf: until he read them

and mine got through

he just chose inaction

ha ha

yeah I dont write novels cause the novel is dead

me: It's sort of a NonBook, because I've never been a book writer.

Olaf: i write long stories

yeah,, i mean

me: Exactly.

Olaf: book writers are like, "hey, look at me i write BOOKS"

12:52 PM NOT ME

i am never like that

me: No one is.

I do like to use the word Weblog, too, as a creaky nod to the word's origin,.

7 minutes

12:59 PM Olaf: WE-Blog

like Wee-Blog

like Wee-Sing

1:00 PM me: Wee-Blog Silly Songs

Wee-Blog American Songs

Olaf: Wee-Blog traditional songs of the Applachain Region

appla-chain

applechain

hm.

1:01 PM i need to lay in the grass

Here's the comment Mr Olaf Mary had posted on Sach's NotABlog, as a fragmented memory of a duel interrupted:

Dearest Adam,

I invite you to a debate, rap battle, poetry contest, drawing contest, and to brunch. Each contest will pit your childish, self-pitying, foolish, and lousy idea of "why brunch blows" against the even reason of good juice, mediocre champagne and wonderful company. How old are you? Why do you insist on "non-blogging"? It seems abundantly clear that you are extremely uncomfortable with yourself and I would like to help you. Please accept my invitation. We can use your blog and this one - www.itwaslost.org - as the stage for our debate, rap battle, poetry contest and drawing contest (please feel free to suggest any other form of contest).

thank you,
Olaf Mary

UPDATE: After this post, we continued our conversation about GQ:

me: Meanwhile, all these magazines are slowly going out of business

Olaf: there are suddenly many large flies

inside

true

me: And their writers are slowly morphing into bloggers.

Olaf: magazines are extremely wasteful

me: Yeah, the glossy isn't recyclable.

Olaf: yes!

1:21 PM and they are ugly

me: I love magazines, but they're on the wrong side of history.

Olaf: and full of advertisements

me: There's something especially funny about a Gentleman's Quarterly in its 21st century incarnation

A hold over from a golden era of Men's Interest magazines, which people would read in leather chairs in wood-paneled rooms.

1:22 PM Olaf: yes

me: But then, they had to change the name to an acronym because it seemed too old-fashion.

Now it's, like, what is it?

A men's magazine for people who wear cologne?

Olaf: i read Lisa Cralles dad's back issues of GQ and Playboy in his leather chair n his wood paneled room

me: Cool

Olaf: and then i drank his expensive whiskey and shot his shotgun

and bathed in his bathtub

1:23 PM I was a man

me: I plan on doing all of those things today!

Olaf: well done!

me: At least, the bath part.

Olaf: have you seen cralle around?

bath

maybe i will also take bath

1:24 PM me: Berkeley feels like muggy florida today

Letter to Barack Obama: "stop smoking NOW"

Man, I loved these letters to Barack Obama that the New York Times posted today, with his responses. There was an article about the White House mailman, who sorts thru the thousands of incoming mail to give ten a day to the President. "We pick messages that are compelling," he said, "things people say that, when you read it, you get a chill." Here's a moving one telling the Father-in-Chief to stop smoking (click on it to read it large):
I wish they'd post more of them, & not just the touching ones. Writing to the President is an interesting art form, I assume attracts a lot of eccentrics. It's like Pascal's Wager: I guess the tiny chance it would be read outweighs the likeliness of its insignificance.

Remember the This American Life radio episode that had all the kids reading their letters to Obama? The whole episode is here, & there's a bunch of mp3s of the kids there also. I think it was part of a Dave Eggers project, & there's a book with many of them published at 826 Valencia. Here's Sheenie:

Purple Flags? The Sequel

It seems like only thirteen months ago that I wrote a post about Purple Flags. I did declare that it was a mystery why the color purple - a strong color, the color of royalty, a good Christian color - is represented on NOT ONE OF THE WORLD's national flags. I presented pictures of several of the curious flags, some regional ones, some defunct ones, which contained some purple, still a surprisingly tiny number - & I asked for help finding more. I still declare this a bizarre mystery, unsolved, why one of the major colors is almost unused in national iconography. Is it because nationalism & modern country flags grew up while royalty was losing its footing? Is it because purple is a more expensive dye, inherently un-populist - altho I suspect that explanation would have lost its logic by the 19th Century when flags were on the rise. In America, where, as pick-up truck bumpers inform us, these colors don't run, otherwise we'd have plenty of purple or light-purple flags.

Because the original Purple Flags essay became one of the most clicked-on posts at itwaslost.org, & it is not like us to deprive the loyal readers what they want, HERE ARE MORE PURPLE FLAGS - some of which were mentioned but not shown in the last post or suggested by readers' comments.

Mr Brains Aha!, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, sent us the city's current flag:
Is the color related to the Fleur de Lise? Looks a bit bluish.

Here's Tokyo's Flag:
In the comments for the last post, Pele wrote "It's like an anime arse a-winkin' at me. Hard to think of any offensive cause with a purple flag, so I'm FER it!" Here here.

Do you remember the Iberian peninsula's Kingdom of León, which existed independently from 910 to 1301? (I've never seen a purple lion in Europe.) This is the "classic example" of porpora, or Purpure, the original rare tincture. You would think these high middle ages, with the height of heraldry, would be the origin of all the purple flags to follow, such as this Castile flag:

In that original post, I linked to The “purple” flag of Chuvashia at a "flags of the world" website. Here's that flag:
I notice now on that website, there's quite some debate there about what exactly purple is. António Martins writes:

[...]Then I decided to make an experiment. I grabed a handful of objects clearly red and other of purple ones, and then asked Russians and Chuvashs «What is this color?»…

The red ones, ranging from a Marlboro cigarrette pack to a Swiss Army knife, were imediately classified as "krasnyĭ". After some insistence, the swiss army knife could be called "temno-krasnyĭ". And then I’d ask: «Could it be "purpurnyĭ"?» and most would hesitate and concede a yes.

The purple ones, after some hesitation, were said to be "fioletovyĭ" or "malinovyĭ". Most people would confess that the differences between those words are not very definite, only maybe in the head of graphical artists. And then I’d ask: «But could any of these [the purple ones] be "purpurnyĭ"?» And every interviewed person, even already color confused, would imediately say: «No, not at all! Definitely not "purpurnyĭ"!».

The final question was «Apart from yellow, what’s the colour of your flag?». Not a single person replyed spontaneasly with "purpurnyĭ"! Everybody would say "krasnyĭ", rarely "temno-krasnyĭ" (or theyr chuvash equivalents), and when I asked «Is it "purpurnyĭ"?» they would hesitatingly reply «Yes, but… that’s not an often word…», and even one chuvash speaker was surprised to learn that the very word "purpur" exists in chuvash…

Careful direct observation of a large number of flags hoisted in public places and goverment buildings metal plates in Ĉeboksary | Чебоксары / Ŝupaŝkar | Шупашкар, Novoĉeboksarsk | Новочебоксарск, Alatyr | Алатыр and Kanaŝ | Канаш shown that the color used matches almost precisely with the shade of (dark) red in the handle of a so called Swiss Army knife (original Victorinox brand).

Not just in Chuvashia! You can see just from the flags pictured here, what purplish varieties, & how a couple stretch the definition. I remember from my Shakespeare days, that the bard often describes the color of blood as "purple".

The red rose and the white are on his face,
The fatal colours of our striving houses:
The one his purple blood right well resembles;
The other his pale cheeks, methinks, presenteth.
-Henry VI Part III, [II.v.97-100]

Unless I'm misreading that, King Henry seems to be comparing the purple color of blood with the red rose of Lancaster. At the end of Henry the Sixth Part III (spoiler alert!), Richard of Goucester describes the king's bleeding to death ("the aspiring blood of Lancaster / Sink in the ground") as purple tears [V.vi.61-64]. There in my Norton edition there's a side note defining purple as "blood-red". Thank you Stephen Greenblatt for your helpful annotations! I'm not sure any of this has furthered our understanding of the purple flag mystery, except to confuse the definitions a bit. There's plenty on the wikipedias about the history of purple.

The tiny purple flags at the top of the post are from the Gulf Shores of Alabama website: the purple flag, from their five flag warning system for jelly fish & rip tides, means "dangerous marine life present". That could explain the dearth of purple flags, it was frustrating that every time you tried to show patriotism, everyone would run for dry land.

Purple Flag wavers of the world, help us find more!

PURPLE FLAGS? PART THREE: NUMBER CRUNCHING

Mix Tape was lost! Vol. 14

PHIL COLLINS FINALLY SPEAKS TO HIS IDEAS, PURSUIT OF HUMOR!

WE DID THE WHOLE THING!

I'M A LION!

JAMES BROWN, HEY HEY HEY!

KOREA'S GOT SOUL!

KNOW YOUR HARPISTS!