There has been a flood of comic books into our house recently [exacerbated by middle son’s wisdom-teeth-ectomy, which led to a parental wallet-ectomy] something [the flood and the wallet-ectomy, not the teeth extraction] that has occurred every now and then throughout my decades I slowly realised as the current wave engulfed our wee abode, and while I am not much of a fan of superhero movie heroes, like Superman, I have read every Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County I could find.
And when I start to think back, my childhood was filled with comics too, from Peanuts to the Fantastic Four … Mad Magazine and the books it led to like Spy vs Spy, which Mikey always took out of the cottage library, because it had no words his dim parents failed to notice. Tales from the Crypt, which has left me fearing the Sargasso Sea to this day. Pogo, which I never understood but read nonetheless. Doonesbury until Gary Trudeau lost his sense of humour.
But for some reason when the graphic novel came along, I didn’t try to understand the genre, and had been turned off the whole comic world by the endless Batman movies. [I alone seem to think they almost all stank – Batman without Robin is like weed without a match, and the inability of Hollywood to accommodate Robin strikes me as homophobia at its worst – imagine assuming that there was anything inappropriate about Bruce Wayne’s love for his Boy Wonder!]
I remember when Persepolis first came out being asked by our eldest’s Grade 5 teacher to read it and see if it was appropriate for the class as she had been sent an advance copy. I didn’t like the art work, and felt the autobiographical novel would be better understood by a more mature audience, and that was that. Mind closed.
Recently though I have come to appreciate the astonishing breadth of expression the graphic novel allows, a picture truly being worth a thousand words, and have been absorbed by this fabulous book
All of which is mere preamble to a video by graphic novel master and sub-culture guru, Alan Moore, whom I had never heard of but turns out to be the man, and according to Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge, is
[f]requently described as the best graphic novel writer in history, he has been called “one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years.”
Solve and coagula! Paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns! [Charlatans who are after your wallet, alchemists turning fear into gold, I might add.]
But the world is rudderless, and that’s a good thing, because no one should be at the helm.
Except maybe me.
I have often likened the earth to a body and it’s modern society inhabitants to cancer cells. So in your analogy, let’s say modern society is rudderless, not the world. World/earth being interchangeable in my book.
I marvel at this- how do 4 life stages and 4 generations of Monarchs complete this marvelous migration.
http://www.monarch-butterfly.com/life-span.html
And how do Regal Fritillary caterpillars find their host plant after the eggs have been strewn willy-nilly?
http://www.xerces.org/regal-fritillary/
I think we need more “poo” and to reawaken the ability to divine, I repeat- divine- our current and future status by smelling of the past.
http://woodsandprairie.blogspot.com/2014/03/prairie-and-veldt-what-tallgrass.html
And now for some egregious (e·gre·gious
iˈgrējəs/
adjective
adjective: egregious
1.
outstandingly bad; shocking.
“egregious abuses of copyright”
synonyms: shocking, appalling, terrible, awful, horrendous, frightful, atrocious, abominable, abhorrent, outrageous; More
monstrous, heinous, dire, unspeakable, shameful, unforgivable, intolerable, dreadful;
formalgrievous
“an egregious error of judgment”
antonyms: marvelous
2.
archaic
remarkably good.)
(pick one)- self promotion. Sorry, no Regals, still working on that.
adult on Asclepias tuberosa
One of my sisters-in-law likes to hatch monarchs and grows milkweed in her backyard to capture eggs! These pictures are of a successful release at the cottage:
…
….
As a purist, I find the use of unnaturally tamed subjects to be exploitative. 🙂
And requiring a longer lens.
You should see what I do to my hummingbirds!
Adam Hamilton has an article on 321gold.com today, explaining why this string of all time highs in the stock market are not really all time highs at all, when you adjust them for inflation. From a technical standpoint, this turns a new bull market into an ongoing bear market. An important distinction. And it all seems to make sense, as long as the reader does not think too hard.
I have two problems with his analysis:
1) He is conveniently forgetting dividends. Stocks pay dividends. If he had bothered to use a “total return” chart for stocks, he would have had a totally different answer. His whole thesis would have been debunked, trashed, turned on it’s head.
2) He never gives us an answer to “So, what would have been better at protecting our purchasing power?”. I expected to see “Gold” in the final paragraph, given his history, and the fact that the article was published at a place like 321gold, but…no. Apparently stocks suck, but he has no other idea what might have served us better. Well, thanks for nuthin’.
For some illuminating ACTUAL FACTS regarding stocks (with dividends) and gold since 1972, I present the following blog post. It’s as plain as day. Even in the heady days of the tail end of the 2001-2011 gold bubble, it was never able to catch up to the long term return of stocks. Never did, and I’ll wager never will. Nowadays it’s not even close.
Worried about Weimar? Angry that Criminal Central Planners are foisting crushing debt and inflation on you and your grandchildren? Then by all means, protect yourself! Buy Stocks!
And for those who hate that sort of information, I’ll do them a favor and present their rebuttal for them.
(I won’t overdo this, I promise, but I just couldn’t resist)
Popcorn is looking killer.
Dangit. Resize…
The blog post with the chart included a reference to a post from Noah, of Noahpinion blog. I hadn’t read it because I thought it was one I’d already seen. But No! It’s a rebuttal to a rebuttal to the original “Austrian Brain Worm” post, which set off quite the firestorm across the web.
Let me put it this way: This Noah fellow has no fear of Austrian Internet Trolls whatsoever. Here’s a taste:
“First, Robert takes pains to point out that the image I included in my original blog post was not a picture of an Enterprise crewmember who had been subverted by Khan’s “brain worms” (actually “Ceti eels”), but rather of a minor character in an unrelated episode of the original Star Trek series. This is correct, of course. Searching for an image to use in my post, I found the pictures of the actual Ceti eels too visually unappealing, while the pictures of the subverted Enterprise crewmen did not look particularly out of the ordinary (much as a devotee of Austrianism may appear, when encountered in a bar or on a trading floor, to be a normal human being in full possession of his faculties). “
No more Santelli. I asked nicely. Too many anti-Austrian rants are making me grumpy and seem somewhat off topic.
Got it. Was just about to pivot back to gardening.
The apples are looking good.
Seems like most years I get either a good apple crop and a poor popcorn crop, or the reverse. Seldom both good at the same time. I haven’t researched as to why that might be. Just my casual observation.