June Day

June 1.  Turn the page.  And you wonder.  How far can irreverence take you?  You try hard.  Sure you do. You struggle with irreverence and not only irreverence but irrelevance. And then you wonder what that could look like if it doesn’t work out.  I mean in the long term.  And subconsciously, way down, you’re worried. Very worried.  Because you haven’t figured this out.

I can’t believe that Daniel Bruhl and Joshua McGuire are not the same person.  Let’s take a look.

Daniel Bruhl photo courtesy Elena Ringo
Daniel Bruhl

 

 

Joshua McGuire
Joshua McGuire

How many people know about this?  This could be important.  What if I’ve stumbled into something here?  Is Daniel Bruhl impersonating Joshua McGuire, or is Joshua McGuire impersonating Daniel Bruhl?  And if so, why?  Why either way?  What is the motive?

This is what happens when you start watching too many movies.  You fall into labyrinths of actors you’ve never heard of and how they actually have well established careers you didn’t know about.  And you wonder, again, for such a supposedly smart guy, why you didn’t know about Daniel Bruhl and Joshua McGuire and not only didn’t know about them but didn’t know about the Bruhl/McGuire look-a-like controversy.  It’s all over the tabs.  I think it was on ET.

6:00 pm.  So you struggle and wrassle with some very important issues.  And then you start tearing apart your mother-in-law’s carpet cleaner to see if it’ll work for the job that needs doing here.  It’s totally relevant.  And it looks like just about everything is set for this massive undertaking.  It’s a Bissell.

 

actor photogs copyright the photographers

 

Strange Concatenation of Events

You can be in the wrong for years and not know it.  You can be kind of proudful that you have information others might not have and it’s always interesting when that information, unbeknownst to you, is entirely wrong.  It’s erroneous.  And you’ve been wrong.  Hopefully you don’t go into a pout or snit but take the news well because you’re a public figure and have a certain standard to uphold.  A standard you invented yourself.

DSCN9946I’ve spent a month thinking about this.  Two weeks.  Actually, a few days.  I’m not making a big thing out of this but when you get something wrong it’s best to fess up and it also gives you, that is me, the motivation to come over to this here blog thingy to see what’s going on, which, and I’m not going to water this down any here, has let an entire month pass, and the merriest month of May, no less, without a single entry, or “post”, or whatever’s supposed to be going on here.

I know.  Big question mark.  Again.  Let’s take a short break and see what’s out there and maybe coming our way.

DSCN9950It’s all right.  It’s just that guy taking pictures of the sky again.  Why does he do that?

Musical Interlude

Take a word like “concatenation”.  For years you pronounced it and spelled it, on those admittedly rare times when you might have written it down, as in never, “concantenation”.  Raise it up for the Concantenation, hiya.  We free.

Then, I was stumbling around, bumbling and burbling and bliffling for something to get on with and then States said something.  It was something about something, or it might have been something about something else.

But it caused me to say:  “A strange concantenation of events”.  And she said she’d never heard of the word before.  And I felt strong because I’m so learned.  I knew about “concantenation”.  What I didn’t know then I know now and that’s always so humbling, isn’t it?  Feel so good.

I couldn’t remember where I’d first come across the word and the phrase.  And for years, although I had the phrase right, I was spelling and pronouncing “concatenation” with that extra “n” in there before the “t”.  It’s “concatenation”, Mike.  Not that other thing.

Concatenation: The action of concatenating, or the condition or relation of being concatenated. 1. Union by chaining or linking together; concatenated condition. b. an instance of chaining or linking together. 2. Union in a series or chain, of which the things united form as it were links. 3. A concatenated series or system, an interdependent or unbroken sequence, a ‘chain’.  That’s from the good book. OED.  God bless.

DSCN9935

Chain of events.  Then I managed to re-discover where I came across this word and phrase, and was reminded that the original discovery itself was the product of a strange concatenation of events.

It was a series of events that caused me, years ago, and I’m still a bit bewildered by this, and it’s kind of shocking, so be careful, to be reading Edward Gibbon.  Not the guy who runs the dry cleaners over on 8th, but the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” guy.  And for reasons unknown the word and phrase stuck through the decades.

And now, today, at last, through a further strange concatenation of events, I’m sharing with the world all that’s gone on about this.  And you can see how it could go on.  And on.  Because just about everything is the result of a strange concatenation of events.  Today is the result of every day that has come before.  I’m sure of it.

Belisarius or somebody was getting his kilt dry cleaned and by a strange you know what something went amiss.  I think that was it, but I could be wrong.

 

High Altitude Cirrus

IMAG1043Did you ever do that? Get 10 out of 10 on a clouds quiz in geography class then get docked a mark because the teacher thought you talked to the kid in the next row while the quiz was going on?  It happened to me.

The kid next to me knew nothing about clouds.  I knew everything about them because I’d listened to every word the teacher had said last period, and took notes.  This was back when I was still a good student.

And here I was, with this kid beside me, Brodie or something his name was, he didn’t even have pants on, nudging me kind of surreptitiously in the upper thigh with the index finger of his right hand.  Psst…

It’s grade five.  Brodie’s in short pants.

“Very good, Mr Strech,” the teacher said, announcing the results of the quiz.  She didn’t know my real name.  Neither did I.  “A perfect 10 out of 10. But you opened your mouth and spoke to the student on your left and that costs you 1 demerit.  9 out of 10 is your final score.”

It was Brodie who spoke to me.  I didn’t say a word.  Just looked at him.  So instead of getting the top mark in class I tied with Janie with 9 out of 10.  And the one she got wrong was “cirrus”.  I wonder what happened to Brodie.  And Janie.  Selkirk Elementary.  A good school and still is.

I was reminded of this life lesson last evening during that stunning display of all those streaky clouds way up there as things were heading on for dusk.

IMAG1047Things have gotten way more complicated since I was in grade five.  There’s about twelve thousand names for permutations of “cirrus” clouds these days just as there is with every other type of cloud formation but in those days it was simple.  Cumulo.  Cumulonimbus.  Nimbus.  Stratus.  Cumulostratus.  Cirrus etc.

10 out of 10.  The apogee, the apotheosis of my grade school career.  And a mark docked for talking during the quiz.  What a spectacle.  I took it like a boy.

SunsetApril2015Go ahead if you’d care to share some moment of clarity from your grade school days.  It’s Grade School Moments of Clarity all week here at samoyeddogs.