This Is Not The Rockettes

This inanimate alter ego of the fabled dancers from Radio City Music Hall is formally known as the Tubular Aluminum Rockettes.
But you can call them...
THE TUBETTES

Two Singers //Two Generations

In the nineteen fifties, Frankie Avalon made beach blanket movies with Annette Funicello. He was very good-looking and clean-cut. Frankie reeked unlimited innocence and boy-next-door charm. The kids loved him. Every mother would have been proud to have her daughter bring home a boy like him. The media of the nineteen fifties made Frankie Avalon a perfect fit for the decade. He was profitably successful, as were his producers.

Flash forward fifty years: in the 00’s, Snoop Dogg is a different type of performer. His forte is gangster rap. Snoop’s persona exudes danger and menace but the current media made him a perfect fit for a decade that featured 9/11. The kids love him but if a daughter brought home a boy like Snoop Dogg, a mother might be tempted to commit suicide, unless–of course–the boy was willing to sign away half his wealth.




Danger is the reciprocal of innocence but both are eminently capable of selling product.

RECIPROCULTURE happens when two seemingly unrelated cultural entities
have an uncommon denominator.

Rockingham County, Virginia

Rockingham County
is distinguished
by two things:

churches & slaughterhouses


If I were a turkey,
that sign would
translate to

Auschwitz
0.1 mile

From Anger to Art

G. FatMat recently played in a Master Racquetball tournament, a/k/a, the Geezer Tournament. Some of the players were older than seventy but were talented enough that they could have worn blindfolds and still beaten most twenty-five year olds. I was not one of those players. The only facet of the game in which G. FatMat excelled was anger. I smashed my racket but salvaged the remains.

An enlargement of the framed and mounted photo can be viewed by scrolling down from here. Just cross the great divide and enter the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY.

Jean Paul Sartre's TROUBLED SLEEP

TROUBLED SLEEP is set in 1940,
after France was invaded
by Germany.

French soldiers were commanded
to "fire as they see fit."

Then their commanding officers
disappeared.

They had counted on this war to make men of them, to give them their rights as heads of families and as war veterans. It was to have been a solemn initiation, a means of freeing them from the shackles of the other, the Great War, the World War, which had stifled their youth with memories of splendor. This war of theirs was to have been greater and still more world-wide. By firing on the Heinies they were to have accomplished that ritual massacre of fathers which marks the entry of each new generation into life. But as things turned out, they fired on nobody, they indulged in massacre, the whole thing had gone wrong. They had remained minors and their fathers were still leading the procession, very much alive, hated, envied, adored, and feared. While the sons, twenty thousand warriors, remained bog down in a rancorous childhoood.

If you–or anyone you know–are a serious fan of modern French & German literature,
please click here.
In my youth, I had a Profounder-than-thou attitude until I attempted to read Sartre's
"Being and Nothingness." I might as well have been reading Sanskrit.

But I have to credit Mr. Sartre for the best definition ever of the word freedom.

Freedom is the ability to say the word NO.

...................... 37 Bullets (±x) ......................

Presently, x = 12


The more you write, the more you need a weedwhacker

When the creative process is ten percent excellent and ninety percent excrement, 

all you have to do is tip the scale

A run-on sentence is the literary equivalent of a drum roll

If they gave Mona Lisa a makeover, she could look 

a whole lot younger but what’s the point?

If you never look back, you won't fall on your past

We all need something to believe in even if it’s just disbelief

Anyone who only believes in the absolute truth is better off being an atheist

Everybody needs their moment in the sun but we can 

just as well sparkle under a silver moon

Castles made of sand are not subject to housing codes

A trauma a day keeps your sanity away

If you take too many shortcuts, you will never survive the long haul

 Why do we need two hands to put on one glove?

Statistics reveal as much as they conceal

Just because a man wears a three-piece suit does not mean he has a four-star brain

Just because a book is "non-fiction" does not mean everything in it is true

Freedom of Speech is dangerous if you do not know when not to speak

To forget and to lie both reside in the same zip code

Every politician is honest; some of them are honest for as long as five minutes

If trust was measurable by cleavage, the divorce rate would plummet

An elephant never forgets because he has nothing to remember

Complete undivided attention died the day texting was born...

Paranoia is vanity through the  looking glass

If there were no injustice, you could never have a sense of justice

There would be no repetition if things were not done a first time

Carnal knowledge is often learned in the backseat of a car

There  is always an easier way than the hardest solution

Bad impulses out-wrestle good intentions

Never try to sell fire insurance to a fish

Caution: my middle name has legally been changed to "Copyright"

The way we mistreat Mother Nature, we might all become orphans

Honesty is not something that you should have to manufacture

When you have something important to say 

don’t let words get in the way

The devil can sell you aluminum siding 

when all you really wanted was a cup of coffee

Agnosticism is ignorance with a doctoral degree

Atheism is lacking in imagination but my alma mater 

has more  than a surplus of the latter

Organized religion was invented because people need

an organized sense of hypocrisy

For the Talented Tenth nothing is more revolting

than universal equality.

***

Blogger's Notes

"Agnosticism is..." was inspired by
Zelda Fitzgerald's SAVE ME THE WALTZ.

This post has been copyrighted by
the Lewis Carroll School of Logic.

For legal usage of any of these "bullets"

please contact this website.

The Original Godmother

 God was the first man to learn of the Superior Force.
 Consider the rose: His most aesthetic creation.

 More delicate then the sweetest dream
 and redder than rubies.

 Softer than an April rain, it sends
 the olfactory sense into celestial orbit.

 Poets pound their brain just to describe the rose.

 God invents it. He is excited.

 He proudly runs home to Godette
 finally convinced that this creation business
 is a worthwhile occupation.

“It needs thorns,” She declares.
“But Godette, thorns are dangerous
 and this rose is so beautiful,”  He  protests.

“Yes, my dear, and anything that beautiful needs its own protection.”



 Blogger's Note
 Pythagoras was the second man to learn of the Superior Force.

The Godmother of Geometry

500 years 

Before Christ,

Pythagoras became

The second man

To discover

THE SUPERIOR FORCE







On that ecstatic day when Pythagoras discovered his theorem,
he and the Pythagoreans went chanting through the hills of ancient Greece:

c (squared) = b (squared) + a (squared)

Mrs. Pythagoras was standing in the doorway when he got home, shaking her head.

"You've got it backwards. Go from the smallest to the largest:

a (squared) + b (squared) = c (squared)

"It's alphabetically correct and has a nicer flow to it."
 *****************               *****************

That day was approximately twenty-five hundred years ago
and revisionist history can legitimately refer
to Pythagoras as "The Second Man."

They refer to the Superior Force not  as "Mrs. Pythagoras"
but as a woman named Theophiline.

Rocky Point, New York

I love swimming more than I could ever love myself. If ever I enumerated all the memories associated with the body of water pictured here, I would find a number north of infinity.
What you are looking at is Friendship Beach on the north shore of Long Island. Swimming there was not an exercise, it was my birthright.


I learned to swim before I was old enough to walk but I shot the shoreline above when I was old enough to collect a pension. Somewhere in between those two ages, I moved to California with a degree in Mirthematics from the Lewis Carroll School of Logic. I became a swogger which Mr. Carroll once defined as a mixture of swimming, walking and jogging. Collectively, the mileage equalled the round-trip distance from Long Island to Burbank.

Mirthematics is a mixture of pie-charting, yin-yanging, photo-schlepping, memory-baiting and the unhyphenated essence of mathematics.





Today, my exercise of choice is racquetball. I am a two-time D-league champion.
However, winning a D-league title is like winning the Special Olympics but not qualifying for a handicap parking space.

Therefore, I ride my bicycle.





Blogger's Notes
In a Sad All Over Glad All Over moment, The shoreline photo takes an encore.

"Mirthematics" is the copyrighted property of the Lewis Carroll School of Logic.

The F.O.G. un-Acronymed & the ECM

Due to a malfunction of my ego control mechanism (ECM),
I have posted this somewhat blurry photo.

If you were to google Godfather of Math (without quotation marks)
you could then link to any of three million websites.
Included amongst them are sites referencing Euclid,
Herman Cain, Marlon Brando, Jaime Escalante,
Frances Ford Coppola, Pythagoras, & James Brown.

However, the first website listed is all about yours truly,
featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Friend Of Google
(previously referred to as FOGgy).

The reporter was veteran journalist Tom Gorman
and the photographer was Don Bartletti.

Tom relocated to Las Vegas and Don won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize
for photographing people in Central America.


That this blogsite gets top billing over Marlon Brando & James Brown
–not once but twice–has just sounded an ECM alert.

Excuse me while I give my ego a well-deserved slapdown.
@#$%$^&*(****)*&^%$#@ @#$%$^&*(****)*&^%$#@

The school, at which Paul Oliverio gave the first copyrighted
MATH THEATER perfomance, was in Fallbrook
in San Diego County.

In 1986, Fallbrook was the home of the American Nazi Party.

Speaking of slapdowns, wouldn't it be nice if Fallbrook became
the cemetery of the American Nazi Party?

The second copyrighted MATH THEATER performance
–with an audience review–inspired campus chaos
when four camera crews simultaneously arrived
at a high school in South-Central Los Angeles.

FOGgy had struck again.

RAYMOND PETERSSEN (1949-2012)

Rest in Peace, Ray Peterssen.

He circumnavigated the calendar almost sixty two times.
The last time I saw him was the day he completed his 61st orbit of the calendar.

I organized an early AM surprise birthday party at a San Diego Starbucks.

At least twenty people–including virtually all the baristas–sang the birthday song
and Ray was in fine fettle, made finer by a chocolate croissant
begifted from the Starbucks manager.

It was my privilege to know Ray for more than fifty years.

Our bi-coastal friendship began in 1961 at St. Luke's Elementary School.
Along with three other students, Ray was the first teenager
I knew personally who could actually play Rock&Roll music.

He would continue to do so for the rest of his life.
His primary instrument was the guitar–electric, acoustic, and other-worldly.
The instrument I played was the phonograph but I sure knew how to dance.

On June 1, 1967, Ray was the first person in Flushing to purchase
multiple copies of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Flushing is where the New York Mets have been playing baseball since 1964.
The infield of Shea Stadium was converted to a staging area in August, 1965
when the Beatles performed there. More than 55,000 people were there
and Ray was one of them. He paid $6.50 for his ticket.

Unfortunately, I was not at the stadium that night but the two of us
attended a ballgame there on May 18, 2001. It was my 52nd birthday
and I had a reciprocal Andy Warhol moment: my name was flashed
on the stadium scoreboard for 1/15 of a second.

In 1970, Raymond Peterssen & Paul Oliverio had lysergically-induced
"burger moments" at the Hampton Bays Diner.

In 2003, we had drug-free jogs alongside the Cross-Island Parkway,
where we discovered the ultra-hip music of Marvin Pontiac.
*******************************************

Meanwhile, on the other coast, in the current millennium, we ironed out our mid-life crises
during lengthy walks in Burbank and La Jolla, where we did some fine dining with Lori,
Ray's wife. She got very excited because Pauly Shore was seated at the next table.

The dubiously-hip Pauly seemed obligated to let everyone in the waterfront restaurant
know that he was there.

There are as many as fifty songs in my iTunes file which Raymond Peterssen either performed/ composed/ produced, including albums by Robin Lee Rey
and Ray's award-winning production of a Seattle band, Woodrush.

Four out of five Lucinda Williams' fans love Robin Lee Rey.

Another Raymond Peterssen post is here.

Lori Peterssen is the retired President of this Godfather's fan club.
Their son, Jessie, was also at his father's bedside yesterday morning
when Ray passed away.

Happy Birthday, NINA SIMONE

Today, February 21, would have been Nina's 79th birthday.
Many yesterdays ago I was her Slash Man. That is, in 1982, I was Nina's roadie/go-fer/public defender/shoeshine boy. I would also have been her swimming partner if only my then-girlfriend conveyed a 6AM message rather than smash the telephone.
Instead of listing Nina's immeasurable contributions to modern culture, I will guarantee listening pleasure at this link and compound that pleasure by recommending another.

To quote the King James Brown Bible: PLEASE, PLEASE PLEASE, goto the wonderful world of JazzOnTheTube.com for a magnificent menu of Nina Simone's music.
A future blogpost will explain the concept of PLAN 9 MUSIC. It is a dot-connecting method wherein the "dots" are actually songs that might not otherwise be connected.
For example, Nina Simone and John Lennon are rarely mentioned in the same sentence unless you are on Mt. Olympus. After listening to Ms. Simone's Aint Got No, check out a two-minute version of John Lennon's God. The connection is purely in the self-love theme of the lyrics but both songs will enable your brain to get on the good foot.


Correction: Today, February 21, 2012, is Nina Simone's 79th birthday.
The last nine of which have been spent in posthumous bliss. Today, her favorite birthday gift is a new guitarist named Raymond Peterssen, to whom this blog is dedicated.


If I haven't exhausted your lust for linkage and you really want to read about Nina Simone, I cautiously recommend a story about an utterly legendary woman. I say "cautiously" because the editor was asleep on the day of publication. I will oblige anyone who demands that I shake the old man from his continuing slumber.

The story is based upon this impossible-to-find* Nina Simone album. The actual autographs referred to in "Tattered Terrycloth Jazz Legend" have been immortalized in the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY. They can be found very close to the southernmost point of this blog site.




*If you, or anyone you know, can locate this album in disc format, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know.

The Onion

Though I prefer Firefox to Safari, I am proud of my Irish compatriots, MacBookie and iPaddy II. Upon arriving in cyberspace on the MacBook, my home page is a vegetable.  For the internetgalactic journey, I need nutritional fortitude in the form of Vitamin H, as in Humor.

Therefore, I need ONION.COM and herein present horizontal bullets from their website:

Love and forgiveness of Christ to come in exciting new gel form...Jar of change on dresser sadly factoring into a number of financial decisions...Local ape thanks God it’s Friday...Select Starbucks coffeehouses conduct queuing experiment. They will have asshole lines exclusively for people too busy texting to know when they are next...Court rules Meryl Streep unable to be tried by jury as she has no peers...Afghanistan war memorial planners asked to adjust length once again...NASCAR driver's parents pay for congratulatory message on side of son’s car.

Where else can you read about an .05k Run to raise funds for diabetes or a house fire 

that destroyed a package of Oreo cookies?

She is in The House (For Brenda)

Welcome to heaven, Whitney–
Said God.

Dazed and confused
All she could say was:
Where’s my bathrobe?

Ordinarily–Said God–
People arrive here in a casket.
But we were so anxious to get
Such a beautiful singer up here.
Do you recognize your
Pearl-inlaid bathtub?


Nonsense–Said Whitney–
You only wanted to see me naked!

Trey Cool–Said God–
We love smart women up here, Ms. Houston.

Godette (also known as "Mrs. God") applauded.

Then
So did everyone else.

Cheers of Joy
resounded throughout heaven.

Blog Dedication

This blog is dedicated to Ray Peterssen
It was created hours before learning that
He had passed away in his sleep
On the morning of February 19, 2012

Creationists Find Fatal Flaw In Evolution

The Creationists prove something indisputable:

Evolution did exclude intelligence.

Proof of its non-existence is...Us!

Dovetailing Evolution & Creationism

 ←
   The first thing
   the creator
   created












It can be said that humans rose up from the slime
but we did not evolve from single-cell creatures.
Evolution began with the gargoyle.
The purpose of the gargoyle
was to protect us from evil.
But evil had yet to be created.
The gargoyle got very lonely.
It was given a makeover...
and then there was GOD.

God created the world in six days...and then he refinanced...He was praised
by a Global Evolution Bank officer for his work with mountains, sky and sea.

“What we can do for you is a package amoeba deal.”

God was told that in time there would be fish in his waters, birds in his sky,
animals in the mountains, then–give or take a millennium–
there would be MAN!

“Man. What is that?”
“Oh, you’ll find out.”
“Whatever.”

As evolution evolved, GOD had an ever-increasing amount of free time,
most of which was spent reading books. GOD was partial to comic books,
especially ones that had a lot of this thing called "Violence."
And then He created the Bible.


Blogger's Note
The photograph is from the Schnitzer Museum of Art on the Eugene campus
of the University of Oregon.

Godfather of Math

This blog would not exist were it not for
the Los Angeles Times.

In particular, the name of this blog
is derived from a 1987 article written
about me by a reporter named
Tom Gorman.

As a result of that article,
I was hired as a Math Teacher.

Nine years later, the Times
was in my classroom, again.

The reporter was  Elaine Woo.

My gratitude to Mr. Gorman,
Ms. Woo and the Los Angeles Times
is beyond measure.   


Gratitude must also be extended to Gyselle,  the K-towners,
Rip Spencer, "rls,"  Mrs. CarPeo,  Jay Pegg, and Et Al.

Apologies must be made to Pascal, Pythagoras, Euclid,
and all the true Godfathers of Mathematics,
including Leopold Kronecker who once said

God made the numbers, all else is the work of man.

On the pages that follow, Logic—the breathing apparatus
for all things mathematical—will often appear wearing
high heel sneakers.

This is not a blog for people interested in rigorous scientific theses

And "This Is Not A Pipe" is how
you say those words in English.

It is an image of a pipe but
the phrase This is not will
appear many times
throughout this blog.

Thank you, Rene Magritte.

On this blog but there will be a mischmasch of data–words & pictures–mostly directed at that thing called your mind, by way of the jocular vein. 

As if I were alternately known as the "Godfather of Mirthematics."

Occasionally, I will pay tribute to people who eminently deserve such compensation. In this potpourri of posts, subject matter and chronology will take leaps and bounds. But there will also be sequential posts, for example, "Apple 1" through "Apple 9."

If you are a very visual type of person, please scroll down to the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY and feel free to let me know what your eyes think.

A 19th century Brit named Charles Lewis Dodgson amused his siblings with a handmade puzzle book entitled "Mischmasch." The future Oxford University Math professor influenced me more than any teacher who ever got chalk on his clothes.  

Professor Dodgson was also known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. 

Except for the King James Bible, no book in the English language is quoted more often 

than Alice in Wonderland.

Identical to the one in New York's Central Park, this statue of Dodgson/Carroll is situated
in the exact geographical middle of my alma mater.

I have a graduate degree from the Lewis Carroll School of Logic
where students are compelled to get "curiouser and curiouser."

All LCSoL Graduate students learn that curiosity is the opposite of anxiety. 

Both involve what is unknown. The former is intrigued by it 

but the latter is terrified by the unknown. 

At the Lewis Carroll School, everybody knows that "Music is the mathematics of the Gods." 

The Post-Humous Chairman of the Music Department is McKinley Morganfield. 

His primary field of interest is "Bloggerhythm & Blues," 

with an emphasis on Chicago Blues.

Professor Morganfield is also known as Muddy Waters.

                                                                                                   

If logic were a lady, I'd dress her in high-heel sneakers. 

But, in such attire, she would never be welcome on a racquetball court. 

However, she will still have a vigorous work-out by exercising her free will. 

There is only one demand I would put on this lady: upon entering a Jacuzzi, 

she must massage her feet.

All of the photographs posted in the 2-DIE-4 Gallery were taken by me, 

unless linked otherwise.

Rene Magritte is the Post-Humous Chairman of the Art Department 

at the Lewis Carroll School. 

I have permission to alter the spelling of his name and wish

MaGREETINGS TO ALL WHO ENTER THIS BLOG.

Mr. Carroll once said "Anything that is illogical, as opposed to logical, 

hastens the creation of comedy but there are other ways to be funny."

If you like this blog, tell a friend. If you do not like this blog, tell a lie.

Mark Twain once said "Truth is such a valuable commodity that we economize the use of it."

Marcel DuTramp once said "If it weren't for the lie, the truth would have no place to hide."

DuTramp is pronounced Doo-TRUMP. 

He is not to be confused with his uncle, Marcel Duchamp. 

But neither is a stranger to the creative process.

Blogger's Notes

The quote from Pythagoras at the very top of this page is stated verbatim
in the Disney Classic, Donald in Mathemagic Land.

In the Los Angeles Times, front page obituaries of Norman Mailer, Elizabeth Taylor, 

Michael Jackson and J.D. Salinger were written by Elaine Woo. 

But I was alive and well when she wrote about me.

The previous paragraph is an example of a "deferential equation."
That is, I pretentiously deferred to equate myself with
Michael Jackson and J.D. Salinger.

The next Mark Twain reference is here.