First Looks category archive

My local rag has an interesting article about how restaurants, lodgings, and service stations are selected to appear on those “services at the next exit” signs along interstate highways.

The weather.

I’m under it.

Juanita Jean explains the true moral of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Gina Barreca offers some guidelines at The Hartford Courant. Here’s a sample:

The second category is “Don’t Ever Say,” as in don’t ever say, “I can’t even imagine having another serving of that rich food — I’m stuffed!” as seconds are being passed.

(snip)

Don’t ever say, “I’m sure he only did that because he likes you. Lighten up.”

Don’t ever say, “Lighten up.”

More at the link.

The Portland Press-Herald’s Greg Kesich muses on the recent torrent of news (not “allegations,” news) of sexual misconduct by powerful persons, almost all of them men. A snippet (emphasis added):

What has changed is not that men are getting in trouble for doing things that used to be OK. It’s that stars are not getting out of trouble for doing things that everyone has always known were wrong.

I commend the entire piece to your attention.

Warning: Language and scorn and lots of them.

Off to drink liberally.

When fellowship is needed, join us . . . .

When: Thursday, December 14, 6 p.

Where:
Croc’s 19 Street Bistro
620 19th Street (Map)

More here.

Warning: Language.

The GOP, always willing to extend a helping hand . . . .

While most Americans are openly disgusted by pedophiles, the bighearted people over at the GOP seek to help them find decent, well-paying jobs where they can shape national policy. You only need to look at the amazing work the GOP is doing with pedophile Roy Moore in the special U.S. Senate election in Alabama to know that this organization is looking out for the people society tries to put in the margins.

Via Atrios.

If you want know why, call my dentist at 1-800-555-PULL.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I stumbled over a new-to-me old time radio website and added it to the sidebar, over there, on the right.

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California man recreates Sherlock Holmes’s sitting room with period items.

You can hear him discuss the process with the Baker Street Babes.

Off to drink liberally.

Things to do.

Neil Gaiman:

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

Off to drink liberally.