Engaging in a Racket is called Racketeering

Ouch. Thought I had managed a remarkable performance through the Stag weekend out West, even waking up in time to catch Villa's destruction of the Blues and walk up a Banff mountain on Sunday. But was destroyed by the Mmmmmmmmmmonday circuit upon the return to Halifax, no doubt the rest of the trip culminated in putting me down. A good fest, but my oh my. Strange waking up with a business card from a "Sexy Girl Proprietor" in your wallet and not having the first clue as to how it got there.

A few miscellaneous things this Tuesday:

(1) A penguin bumps into another penguin and says, "Oh, for a minute I thought you were wearing a tuxedo." "How do you know I'm not?" asks the other penguin. Once more, [Garrison Keillor's] unique brand of humor shines through. "I love the joke for the silence that comes after the punch line," he said. Me too.

(2) In May 2008, Michel Fournier will jump from a weather balloon from an altitude of 130,000 feet in North Battleford, Saskatchewan in an attempt to become the first human being to break the sound barrier. I just might go.

(3) On 25 November 1998, Les Stewart reached his goal of typing all numbers from one to one million - in words (not numbers) on his manual machine... Seven manual typewriters, 1000 ink ribbons, 19,890 pages, 16 years and seven months later, he finished with the lines "nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine. one million." Here's to dreams. Nicely done, Les.

(4) Again I woke up this morning with words, and by the time I arrived at a keyboard that had flown. I remember only the brief introduction to the collection of short stories that flickered across the brain:

What follows is mostly self-indulgent and I make no apologies for that. It is filled with enough unheroic and untaken actions that deserve far greater requests for forgiveness; I have learned over the years not to ask for even that. They say Yeats's writing was all the better for Maude's shunning of his advances, and Beckett said it all and beautiful when he had Krapp state hypnotically on tape: "Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance for happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now."

These are some stories about that fire.

(5) Last night I learned that you can make a fairly impressive t-shirt out of a five dollar bill. And I have googled and will perfect the napkin-to-rose gambit for future opportunities.

(6) More people should know about Nina Simone.

(7) The sun sets on another day, and I find myself wondering about another jaunt to the banks of the Thames and Seine thanks to old Zoom and its five airplanes and $99 each-way fares. In two weeks at that, September 18th to 24th. What's another thousand dollars, anyway? Time will show.