it should be fall now but it's still hot like summer
happy (day after) labor day to my fellow americans! from those swell folks who brought you the weekend. :D i hope you had a nice long weekend in which you rested from your labors. i went to costco with my sister, by which i mean we went to the store but did not actually go in because it was CLOSED. wtf. on the one hand, retail is (
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A bear on a vespa sounds like the beginning of a daft joke - how surreal!
I never knew that about the ships being painted so colourfully, but it does make sense.
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it was so weird! definitely the beginning of a joke.
i was surprised to see the stripes but yeah, it makes sense. 17th century branding!
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"(the very long canoe could seat like twenty people but the wampanoag - the local tribe - would also make ones that seated forty. that is a very tall tree.)"
I don't know why, Cindy, but this struck me as the funniest takeaway in a long time, and I have been giggling like a schoolboy for a couple of days.
I was a Benedictine monk for four years. The first year you are called a novice, and you are assigned a novice master by the Abbot. He is supposed to bring you along in living the Rule, look after you, yada yada yada. There were seven of us, a minor miracle after the collapse of vocations after Vatican II in the 1960s. So we were handed over to the illustrious Father Aidan, whose only real interests were Notre Dame Football and sneaking out after night prayers to visit people (not a euphemism, he had been a parish priest in the area and his former flock was always delighted to have him to deluxe dinners). The seven of us were highly educated, young -- no one was over 25 -- and included at least one person who was later discovered to ( ... )
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So the novice master, Aidan, was a country boy to a degree that left this New Yorker cold. He was also politically to the right of Genghis Khan, so our first tussle came when he tried to make us register for voting. This was during Vietnam, and while I was a kind of milquetoast "lefty", Luke ACTUALLY HAD HIS OWN FBI FILE because of his activism and refusal to register for the draft. Aidan never found out that Luke actually renounced his citizenship and convinced the poll workers he was ineligible. However, he was not amused when Luke went to the car with the news that I had tried to register Communist. It was the early 70s. I was an idiot.
So the next weekend Aidan dragged us off to some Civil War battlefield to see the place where our valiant boys in gray struggled for states' rights (as if). This was very much pre-Disney World additions, so there was just a series of glass cases in a small building filled with, I swear to God, Ken dolls dressed up as soldiers, strewn over some kind of papier-mache landscape that looked like the ( ... )
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that was fascinating. what made you want to be a monk? also brother luke sounds like a real character and i'm impressed his family got back in touch with him even after sitting shiva. (not surprised they did that tho.)
i'll have to share a picture of the canoe. it's a big canoe!
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