December 7, 2014

Face in the rock.

P1130509

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25 comments:

chickelit said...

I see a sideways porcine emotional support animal.

mccullough said...

The Seahawks look Super Bowl ready again.

pm317 said...

you see a dog face in everything now?

Louis said...

I would bring a cat to Hogwarts, rather than an owl. Both creatures will bite you but a cat is also a decent cuddler.

Ann Althouse said...

I saw a bear, but if you see the mouth in a different place, I agree that it looks like a dog.

pm317 said...

I do see the bear. But I was almost certain that you had said Dog face in the headline that I had to check twice before I made my previous comment.

Phil said...

All good Catholics will see both the Virgin Mary and the Face of Jesus

wildswan said...

This is a painting of a woman who put her lipstick on sideways and put a star above her left eye for a party which is being held in a strange blue light

I think there was a fake Lego woman scientist who looked the same way but this is the reality

traditionalguy said...

Great News on the College Football Playoff front. The TV folks got their Big Ten v. Alabama game like the good old days and TCU was thrown overboard to make room. But that means my family and Texan friends get to see the Horned Frogs New Years Eve right here in Big A. That costs thousands less than another trip to the Rose Bowl.

paminwi said...

The Columbia Law School is effing nuts!

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/12/columbia-university-law-school-allows-students-to-skip-finals-due-to-trauma-of-mike-brown-decision/

Freeman Hunt said...

Like one of those parched birds from The Dark Crystal.

Anonymous said...

I see a rock. Can't even see a face, dog or bear, when I try.

(Whither the wild imagination of childhood?)

Okay, now I see a mottled, dove gray rock with bits of growth that vaguely resemble germinating eye buds on a stoney, flat, dove-gray potato.

(More staring, now that I've been tipped off I'm looking for an animal profile.)

Okay, there it is. There's the bear.

(Seriously, that's a stretch ... reminds me of an online incident with a probable paranoid schizophrenic who thought a rat was an alien who worked for the NSA.)

David said...

It's December 7, The Day That Will Live In Infamy. Hardly anyone seems to have noticed, probably since it was 73 years ago.

Seventy three years before Pearl Harbor was 1868. Ulysses Grant was first elected President in that year.

Time is powerful.

David said...

In the photo, i see a possum with a bad toupee.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Anything I want?
1994 Youtube of Peter and Christopher Hitchens with Brian lamb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XvcxetSN-U&feature=youtu.be
Listen to the difference in accents.
The brothers are close in age and were raised together.
Peter Hitchens: York University.
Christopher Hitchens: Oxford.
Their accents are different.

Tom from Virginia said...

During my second year in law school, John Lennon was killed, Peter Sellers died of a heart attack, President Reagan was shot, and Pope John Paul II was shot. Even though Robert Scott was a member of the faculty, nobody asked us if we were too traumatized to take exams.

Quaestor said...

I see a teddy bear run over by a steam roller. (Isn't it funny that every roller we've ever seen in real life was diesel-powered, yet we universally use the term steam roller?)

Quaestor said...

Like one of those parched birds from The Dark Crystal.

I tried to image a skeksis from that rock, but it just wouldn't gel for me. Definitely a flattened teddy bear.

Paco Wové said...

It's the Elephant Man.

Hagar said...

Wally Kalbacken in the thread below wins.

Hagar said...

Wally Kalbacken in the thread below wins.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Nah, that's a bear. (Says Michelle, who has been looking at her own teddy bear more than once recently.)

JOB said...

Fieldstone

I worked summer down a valley’s farm-wide shoulders
With its recently acquired owner. We felt sunlight cut
Cloudy notches in a sky as white as fresh pine wood.
Morning’s hazy glare fed noon. We knew lunch was due.
Labor, though, works at a sort of hunger all its own,
Pushing us down-valley to mend fence lines further
Than we wanted to go, into the easy blend
Of weed-choked fields, through wilderness colonies
Of underbrush, briar-bush and winter’s dead wood.
It was a taking up of old ownership for labors undone.

From the unbending of philosophical nails
Laid out straight on an old barn plank and forgotten
By all but rust, to stoic mounds of firewood stockpiled
Against gnarly old posts, rough-hewn, grey, resunk
Like old pieces of stitchwork restored on a quilt –
It was the same story – coming down to mere survival,
To saving costs and maybe cheating just a bit
On that coming calendar-mark, old crow-footed death:
Like the title to a chunk of inherited land
Deeded in trapezoid plots of much-moving soil.

Among the farmland’s other detritus, a thorn tree –
And half-expecting it to be there, I spotted rock.
Maybe the token of a ghost’s cramped hands
Or the pioneer trademark of rain and glaciers,
It was a pencil-marked deposit, gaining interest
With age, weighting my own work with wonder,
A wonder which caught the farmer-owner’s eye, too,
But his silent back walled in his work. Too busy
For idling details, no story by survival, “Fieldstone, “
He said, lumping heavy facts into his tone.

Likewise, this spring-bubbled rupture from deep earth
Served facts in hard loafy loads to fictive rains.
Seasons softened their sky-facing edges like soap,
Making it the least angriest sort of stone.
Again: “Fieldstone, “ he shrugged beneath the faded
Overlap of sky, denims, and tractor’s engine-cowl.
“Just junky stuff, no good, not limestone, just fieldstone. “
He never named the farm’s previous owner,
But reserved his adherence to farm history
By divorcing supposed tales from labor’s loving pull.

The original tree line – now frozen in its last
Season – stood in vague form, bone-white stumps
Among perfect acts of persistence, saplings and weeds
Overrunning this too-yielding stand with grueling shade.
Each twirled barb-tine like a tiny finger clutching
Lost habits, the posts hung from rusted wire gallows,
Garroting fleshy trunks of trees grown into it.
But I got back to our suspended talk of stone
To speak up for that piled ruckus of silence.
“Fieldstone, “ he repeated, “take it up – toss it out. “

Taken up, but from where? The fields held fast
Until drawn wagons came asking for it, slowly,
In solid wages of sweat and knuckles chewed raw,
Some time ago, before shag-bark and pig-nut
Branched out into oak’s entitlements of sunlight,
Before the unearthed darkness of soil clung
To flanged limbs and gnarly-garnished trunks –
Ash, maple, elm, popple, all punked as charred bone,
Before the woods’ deepness where sunlight spilled
Into a drought, and the fairer wood went to earth.

Taken up, but why? “You can’t do too much with it
Except pile it up to think of what to do with it.
So you pile it. But c’mon, help me chain this trunk,
The taproot’s got a hold of something I can’t budge. “
So, taken up, a hopeful gesture for the future.
Tossed out, and when? “Pull! Oh well, jeez, I dunno, must be,
What? . . . .Pull! Say fifty, sixty years ago, at least.
Here when we came and it came sold with the rest
Of the place. Pull! Sold out with this old tractor, too. “
Tossed out, slowly then, slowly, past its shoring up.

The sun jack-knifed one notch higher the bark-peeled sky.
The tractor dragged sunlight to the stubborn taproot,
Holding earth’s hot core in its engine-surge, it chugged
Up the trunk for what it might have missed out on
In these old woods for the love of labors plied.
The farmer wanted brush cleared to better his view
Of the valley, and so moved on. But I stuck
By this pocked-out plane of stone and the walls
It made: “No story here… “ Except now, to retrieve
The slab, bowing to its altar even as I pulled.

Bad Lieutenant said...

Q, isn't steam used to heat the roller to an even temperature so as not to scorch or ignite the flammable asphalt and related compounds?

Bad Lieutenant said...

Oh, and Paul Klee was not available for comment.