(no subject)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant'è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai,
dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte.

Dude Ranch Nation

• Young angry guys in big powerful pickup trucks that are jacked way up and shod with knobby tires, everything meticulously clean, shiny differential even, with "Cowboy Up!" stickers, en route from shopping mall to shopping mall, riding the range that never was.
  
  
• Middle-aged pear-shaped dads in $50,000 luxury SUV's with military accessories, powerful engines, and smooth soft leather seats, able to ford swift rivers or charge up muddy embankments, rolling up to the valet parking at the movie theatre.
  
  
• Ecotourists decked out in perfect canvas hats, multipocketed shirts and shorts, wealth-preserving money belts, Gore-Tex boots over yak wool socks, and $1000 in tropical medicine gear and Sharper Image navigation instruments, tromping happily over the shrinking rainforest.
  
  
• Gun enthusiasts filling the magazines and working the bolts on their Special Operations Certified Combat Commando Stealth Rifles and Special Edition S.W.A.T. Concealed Carry High Power Pistols, sighting them coolly out the window and dreaming of singlehandedly defeating armies of terrorists who will never arrive.

If you have the gear you can be anything as long as you do nothing.

Real cowboys rode their asses raw, got killed and injured on the job a lot, were cruel to animals all day, drank themselves to death, smelled bad, were poor. Life is better in Dude Ranch Nation.

Another fine bbq of a 419 scammer

This one with a Senatorial twist.

Pigs... in...

SPAAAAAACE

Foolish quizzery

But hey, she's hot, so I'm not going to question it.

( with whom shall I sleep? )

I think I did this one a few years ago but I like Hell.

( welcome to my Hell )

The Still Center of a Turning World

As a child I spent a lot of time in art museums. My parents were culture vultures and we traveled a lot in Europe, including a year in Paris and some summers in Italy, France, and England. From the age of 7 to 14 I tagged along to every church, museum, archaeological site, castle, and concert in the First World.

Despite my strong desire to run in circles and eat sweets, I enjoyed high culture as a child. I could sit staring at a favorite artist's work for a long time, and even if I didn't like the stuff it was a fun game to learn all about it. For an agnostic I know way too much about Catholic saints to this day. There were downsides to this life (my mother would delay lunch way, way too long if the museum was good), but on the whole I was happy.

My favorites were Henri Rousseau's big, colorful, naive paintings; Monet, especially the biggest ones; Arp's shiny sculptures; Caravaggio's paintings; and, although we never visited any of those countries, almost anything from Asia.

I have a particular memory of sitting in front of a large bronze Buddha. The museum atmosphere was sterile and white, and the only sound was that of the hygrometer occasionally ticking in the corner. The gallery was mostly empty. I sat on a wooden bench slightly too high for me, so that my legs swung, and looked up at him. I think this must have been a Nepalese or Indian Buddha, because he had the half-twisted little wry smile I associate with Hindu art. His patina'd hand was held up in the Buddhist benediction sign. I wanted to be that statue, and for an hour or so I thought I almost was, under my own personal Bo tree, unmoved.

That experience is in the library now, and I can go there when I need it. I'll never be a Buddhist, but I can go back to that moment in a forgotten museum and sit on that bench next to Buddha and be still any time it's necessary.

It's good to live where I do.

Southern California this week is going to be a dangerous and painful furnace. Today it was 120° in Indio (desert town). The emergency services people have put out a dire bulletin advising people to be careful of the high temperatures and unusually high humidity, and not to leave old people, children, or animals in cars, and for chrissakes don't die of the heat.

Meanwhile, the report ends with this:

ONSHORE FLOW AND A MARINE LAYER INFLUENCE WILL KEEP TEMPERATURES
FAIRLY MILD ON THE COASTAL PLAIN...GENERALLY IN THE 70S AND
80S...EXCEPT 60S ON THE BEACHES.

Thank you, Dad, for buying a house in Paradise 40 years ago.

Where your mutual fund money is going (WSJ)

Short version: whores, private jets, and rented dwarves. P. Diddy is running your 401(k).

A Wall Street Affair: This Bachelor Party Gets Lots of Attention Probe Centers on Payments For Fidelity Star's Bash; Private Jet to South Beach

By SUSANNE CRAIG and JOHN HECHINGER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 18, 2005

Even by Wall Street's over-the-top standards, the March 2003 bachelor party for Thomas Bruderman, a onetime star trader for Fidelity Investments, was an event to remember.

The festivities began with a trip by private jet from Boston to a small airport outside New York City. There, the revelers picked up some Wall Street traders and at least two women who investigators suspect may have been paid for their attendance, say people familiar with the matter. The partygoers -- including the groom-to-be, who was getting ready to marry the daughter of former Tyco International Ltd. boss L. Dennis Kozlowski -- then continued to trendy South Beach in Miami. The fun included a stay at the ritzy Delano Hotel for some, a yacht cruise and entertainment by at least one dwarf hired for the occasion.

"Some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment," says the 4-foot-2 Danny Black, a part-owner in Shortdwarf.com, an outfit that rents dwarfs for parties starting at $149 an hour. Mr. Black says he spent part of the weekend on the yacht and worked as a waiter on the Friday night at a high-end Miami eatery alongside what he called "regular size" people. "A good time was had by all," he said, declining to provide further details.

( Now I say I say hold I say hold I say HOLD ON HERE. )