Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/01/09

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, June 1, 2009

Monday Sundries

Random thoughts while waiting for the clothes to dry.

The Republicans are all aloft about the Obamas' trip to New York for a dinner and a show. Why couldn't they have bought a show ranch and pretended to clear brush like regular people?
It occurred to me that it has not been so long ago, certainly within my lifetime, that Barack and Michelle Obama would have been barred from even entering that restaurant.
I have never knowingly voted for a Republican (although some of the Democrats I was forced to vote for back in Mississippi and Texas might as well have been), but dear lord, I'm beginning to feel sorry for them. How an a party led by Larry, Curly and Moe -- I mean, Newt, Rush and Karl ever get its act together?
We have kittens -- although we call them the Usual Suspects -- and they have taken charge. Simon is the more inquisitive one, and because of his demonstrated interest in people food, he's the one we suspect of having eaten the crusts off of an unattended peanut butter sandwich yesterday and of having nibbled the pointy ends off of some yams that were out on the kitchen counter. But it may have been Nicky, who tries to conceal his mischief behind the mask of an aggressive affection, a motor-rumbling, face-nudging eagerness to be petted whenever the mood takes him. Maggie calls him a "cuddle slut."