Janet Greene singing her 60s folk song “Poor Left Winger”.
I’m just a poor left-winger
Befuddled, bewildered, forlorn
Duped by a bearded singer
Peddling his Communist corn
In the Café Expresso…
Janet Greene singing her 60s folk song “Poor Left Winger”.
I’m just a poor left-winger
Befuddled, bewildered, forlorn
Duped by a bearded singer
Peddling his Communist corn
In the Café Expresso…
I bought my brother some gift-wrap for Christmas. I took it to the Gift Wrap department and told them to wrap it, but in a different print so he would know when to stop unwrapping.
—Steven Wright
Saturnalia /sat-ər-NAIL-yə/. noun. The festival of Saturn, the ancient Greek god of agriculture. First celebrated in 497 BC. As part of Saturnalia, slaves were treated to a banquet and allowed to make fun of their masters, the toga was replaced by colorful clothes, and slave and masters alike donned conical felt hats. A time of peace, Saturnalia was also marked by temporary cessation of military activities and closing of the courts. Many customs of Saturnalia influence modern-day Christmas and New Year’s activities including the exchange of gifts, decorating with holly branches, and displaying evergreen wreathes. The customary greeting during Saturnalia is “io, Saturnalia!” where “io” is pronounced like “yo.” Try it!
► ADBC: A Rock Opera … a 70s rock opera pastiche telling the story of the nativity (“a new telling, ‘told in rock’, of the birth of Christ, this time from the point of view of the Innkeeper”) with music by Matt Berry and lyrics by Berry and Richard Ayoade. You know this has to be something to see me through my aversion to musicals and my resentment of Christmas.
► “Bohemian Rhapsody” on FLOPPOTRON is truly amazing. And, in the spirit of the seasonal trifecta, how about a capella group ► Six13 performing “Bohemian Chanukah” ※ Previously: ► Marbles, Magnets, and Music and ► Wintergatan – Marble Machine
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
—Philip K. Dick
—from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?