We're changing our ways, taking different roads

The 80s were my formative years, but whenever I hear this song, it only brings to mind Donnie Darko.

PS - A primer on how Joy Division and New Order got their names.

Die Freude

Joy:

Like the time I dreamt about a loon family,
just some common loons—not metaphors
in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming
near each other so it was clear they were a set,
preferring each other’s company in the cold
still lake with its depth of reflected pines.
The curve of their black heads and sleek
necks, black and white stripes then checks
on their folded wings, floating so low
atop their reflections they almost seem
inside them. Their wails like wolves, their
calls like an echo without origin, their
calls like an echo of lake, or what makes lake
lake. How nice to think the male and female
loons cannot be told apart by their plumage
and that they build a nest and sit on eggs
together. One of their calls is called “tremolo.”

Miller Oberman.

PS - I miss sitting on the porch of my camp on Bald Hill Pond in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, listening to our local pair of nesting loons.  Sometimes I bust out ole Robert J Lurstema's Voices Of The Loon just to feel something.

Truth Is a Matter of the Imagination

Ursula K. Le Guin, October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness https://t.co/EBbRzpDTr3

— La femme merveilleuse invisible (@larwoolf) October 21, 2026

A fuller quotation:

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...

It's been a minute since I've read Left Hand, so maybe that should be my next book date.  Anyway, I absolutely adore Le Guin, and her writing has had a profound impact on my worldview since I was a wee lad (shoutout to my old buddy, Doug C, for introducing us in 4th grade).  Every re-read is an adventure that uncovers something new for me, and reinforces the old.

Selah.

Well, every day my confusion grows

Evergreen.

A Logical Operator

And:

Withstand pandemonium
and scandalous
nightstands
commanding candlelight

         and
         quicksand

and zinfandel
clandestine landmines
candy handfuls
and contraband

         and
         handmade

commandments
and merchandise
secondhand husbands
philandering

         and
         landless

and vandal
bandwagons slandered
and branded
handwritten reprimands

         and
         meander

on an island
landscaped with chandeliers
abandon handcuffs
standstills

         and
         backhands

notwithstanding
thousands of oleanders
and dandelions
handpicked

         and
         sandalwood

and mandrake
and random demands
the bystander
wanders
         in
         wonderland.

Nicole Sealey.

Bet you thought we stopped, you already know, kept, going

Melatonin doesn't really help me sleep, sadly.

Songs That Voices Never Share

[I never wish to sing again as I used to . . .]:

     I never wish to sing again as I used to, when two new eyes could
always stain the sea, of tangent worlds, indolent as callows, and the clock
went backward for a skip, to rise, to set.
      Some will twine grass to fit in a thimble, some will carve bread to
mend a craggy wall, some in the slantest midnight cry for sleep. When
the pitch-owl swallows the moon, what welt will show it? Sighing helps
nothing, raspberries raw and green, in the form of a heart
      imperfectly divided. A wave grows sharper close to the shore. Some
own words like strips of scape and summon. It is possible to suffer even
in the sun. And race the steep noon to its highest, hoary gate. Stares
drop under the sky; silence of a windslap; and a scar drifts out of air to
stand whistling:
      She who listens poorly will always be calling. She who sounds silence
drowns with the dumb.
      She who cuts her hands off must drink with her tongue.

Karen Volkman.

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

As people rush to cede their cognition to a technology that is literally setting our world on fire, I note that Fahrenheit 451 was published on this date in 1953:

"You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."

"She was simple-minded."

"She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her."

"That's water under the bridge."

"No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire'll last me the rest of my life. God! I've been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I'm crazy with trying."

And speaking of burning books, I recently completed my quasi-regular re-read (and multiple re-watches) of The Name of the Rose, which is of a piece:

“It seemed to me, as I read this page, that I had read some of these words before, and some phrases that are almost the same, which I have seen elsewhere, return to my mind. It seems to me, indeed, that this page speaks of something there has been talk about during these past days. . . . But I cannot recall what. I must think it over. Perhaps I’ll have to read other books.” 

“Why? To know what one book says you must read others?” 

“At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem. In reading Albert, couldn’t I learn what Thomas might have said? Or in reading Thomas, know what Averroës said?” 

“True,” I said, amazed. Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

In conclusion: goose-stepping morons should try reading books instead of burning them. 

Selah.

PS - The woman in the first pic is Bee Duffell, who appears in both Fahrenheit 451 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I have been known to mix her up with Zelda Rubinstein.

You say you wanna come down

You bet I played this back-to-back with NIN's cover when it arrived at the radio station.

Call me Ishmael

“The ribs and terrors in the whale”:

The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
And left me deepening down to doom.
I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints—
No more the whale did me confine.
With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightening shone
The face of my Deliverer God.
My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.

Herman Melville.

Trump Could Win the Entomological Foundation Peace Prize

Trump: "My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table. Great progress is being made, and that includes current hostage negotiations! Signing that document at this time will do that, and I can sign it later, or any time that I want! Perhaps more importantly, Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way. Lastly, Zelenskyy is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States. Farmers, ranchers, and businesses of all kinds are suffering greatly from this, but Russia is, nevertheless, sending, at a low price, millions of barrels of diesel to the World. Zelenskyy doesn’t care, and frankly, with all of the money that Europe is famously giving him, and that Crooked Joe Biden gave him in the past, he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did. He could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now. His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead. I WANT THIS WAR END! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 18, 2026

Unsurprising coming from Putin's puppet.  But man, if he really wanted to be seen as a Man of Peace, he should end this conflict, which scientists have compared to World War I trench warfare:

A 2006 UC San Diego announcement counted five Argentine ant supercolonies in southern California. The giant coastal one borders three of the four smaller ones, including a colony centered on Lake Hodges, north of San Diego near Escondido. Those colonies are genetically distinct and, crucially, they don't recognize each other as kin.

Ants tell friend from foe mostly by smell, sniffing chemical cues on each other's bodies with their antennae. Within a supercolony those cues are so uniform that a stranger from 500 miles away smells like home. At the boundary between two supercolonies, the cues don't match, and the result is a fight to the death... 

The team found sharp, well-defined borders at 16 contact zones between three pairs of supercolonies. They visited nine of those zones every week for six months in 2004 and saw consistent, intense fighting. Thomas collected the dead along small stretches of the border and scaled up. Her estimate: border clashes around the Lake Hodges colony killed at least 15 million workers in six months.  

The front wasn't hard to find. Holway told the San Diego Union-Tribune that you could spot the piles of dead ants from the car. The paper described the battle line winding through Escondido neighborhoods west of Interstate 15 and along the western edge of Lake Hodges. Despite the carnage, the boundary barely moved.

Crazy shit.  And still not so crazy as the fact we have a dude with an ant-sized brain grinding our Republic into the fucking dirt.

Selah.

PS - Hat tip to The Verified Post.

PPS - Suddenly reminded of A Republic of Insects and Grass by Jonathan Schell.  Read his book The Fate of the Earth, which includes that essay, for my class on nuclear war freshman year (1987, yikes).  Perhaps we won't nuke ourselves, but rather cook ourselves instead; either way I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Baby, babe, let's get together

Ericka and I used to sing this a lot.  Anyway, we need to bring back bands with a lively wind section.

All Those Moments Will Be Lost in Time

The Old Weep Gently:

These old trees
Sigh in every leaf,
Look down their trunks
As if back down the years.
Old knots stay
Where limbs were torn away—
Little fist-rubbed faces
Of gargoyle grief;
While shadows
Slip down the trunks
Like tears.

Yvor Winters. 

And My Heart Goes Pitter Pat

GABBY WILLIAMS TODAY: 26 PTS - 4 REB - 2 AST - 33 MIN PLAYED GOLDEN STATE TAKES GAME 1 🚨 https://t.co/zwOox3YdJC

— Women’s Hoops Network (@WomensHoops_USA) October 17, 2026

My goodness, what a game.  My watch got a workout telling me how stressed I was.

I do very much like Atlanta, and as I've said elsewhere, I won't cry if they end up taking the chip.  But man, I want the Valks to win so bad.

In conclusion: Gabrielle Lisa Williams is a goddess.

PS - Let's see what my Guards can do tonight.

Update: Guards didn't do much.  2-2 is still better than I expected, so let's see what they can do in Game 5.

Update update: Didn't do much again. As Gandalf said, "There never was much hope. Just a fool's hope."  But hey, they've done great in elimination games this post-season, so...in a world where the Browns beat the Ravens to take first place in the division (4-2!), why the hell not hope?