Whatsthatsmell?

...and this bird you cannot change...

You might be a redneck if...

You sing the part about Neil Young in "Sweet Home Alabama" at the top of your lungs

Happy and Prosperous New Year to all

Go here for some New Year's Day black-eyed peas recipes.

Lost in the Cosmos...

I recently finished reading Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy.  Although I finished it about a week ago, its effects are still lingering with me.

Don't be fooled by the title, it is not a self-help book in the traditional sense.

It's a book filled with philosophical assertions and conundrums and discourses on semiotics, followed up with short mini-quizzes, which culminate in a question as to which sort of world would one want to live in (after several hypotheticals).  And I suppose it is within these short Q & As that one "discovers" oneself, or is forced to confront the fundamental inconsistencies within one's belief system. 

Unlike with comparable works which I have read - by the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, for instance - one is left a bit more hopeful and less agnostic than from the point whence one begins.

He also hits upon a few issues that have been in the forefront of my navel-gazing of late:

Whew! Glad that's over...

Just finished my final assignments for this quarter's course in Risk Management.  Looks like I'll chalk up another A.

Entrepreneurial Finance next quarter, just five more quarters to go and I will have my Bachelors....It's so close now, I can taste it.

To the Traffic Warden at Gatwick in the Drop Off Area...

who told me that my allowing my daughter, who had just thrown up in the car, catch her breath, was the same as waiting which is "prohibited", and who then went to nonchalantly get his colleagues when he saw the level of contempt I held for him in my subsequent gaze...

F*** OFF

you petty little bureaucratic f***wit jobsworth c***-sucking cowardly a***hole...There was space for about fifty cars to drop off all around me; no one was being held up, you t***.

No wonder people are forbidden from carrying weapons in this country; they'd have to add a new source of mortality to the mortality statistics - "Killed whilst being a jobsworth c***"

By the Way - Happy Thanksgiving, all...

I am grateful for America, and for being an American, and a Brit, and for the bounty that I have been given.

And for the first time in a long time, I am really missing Thanksgiving Day, which I haven't celebrated in well over 10 years, I think.

Someone was shooting off...

fireworks last night...

That is soooo two weeks ago.

And I am suffering from yet another virus/infection...Woke up with a sore ear, throat, and head, spent most of the day in bed, again.   This is getting old.

This Week's Word

Turducken

I have been going around the house mortifying the wife and the mother-in-law with the concept as a possible Christmas dinner.

Philistines.

So Much for Constructive "Cave" Time

Booked today off work to give myself a bit of "cave" time to slow down a bit, maybe go for a walk, etc.

I now have the sore ear and throat from hell, and shall be repairing to the bedroom to curl up with a volume of Homer.  (I'm about 2/3s of the way through The Iliad.)