Aaron McGruder: Where Art Thou?

This world would be a better place if cartoonist Aaron McGruder would draw new BOONDOCKS comic strips.
I believe this November 25, 2004 strip is his only one to mention Barack Obama. At that time, Obama was best known for one and only one speech–at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

Alphabetical Music Surreally Explained

iThinks therefore iTunes in

Blowing in the wind
Blowing in the wind
Blue
Blue and Sentimental
Blue Angel
Blue-eyed Soul
Blue Gardenia
Blue Goose
Blue Guitar


Mr. Dylan's wind
Was covered by Judy Collins
And found true Blue
With Joni Mitchell.
Then zigzagged thru Basie and zippered squirrels

Zagzigging thru Wilco & Lee Morgan
And yielding to the Duke
Buffeted by a Blue Guitar.

Nothing Will Not Change. Thank you!

I recently posted this photo on Truml.com, a social network from Poland. Within one day, this comment was posted:

śmierć traw pośród kamieni... niczego w nich nie zmieni...

Translated into English, it means

Death of grass among rocks. Nothing in them will not change.

The grass is always dreamier on the other side. Therefore, I must present a bouquet of Gratitude to my Polish friend, ApisTaur, and also to rls.

W.C. Dumpty

In 1933, Paramount Studios produced a live action ALICE IN WONDERLAND
wherein Mr. H. Dumpty explains the meaning of an unbirthday.

Charlotte Henry portrayed Alice exactly the way Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel
intended her to look. All other actors spent endless hours in the wardrobe department.



According to the Lewis Carroll School of Logic, this is the only feature film in Hollywood history to cast Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and W.C. Fields.

Somewhere in the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY, all of the actors appearing in this film are listed in alphabetical order.

Kissed & Cursed

To fully understand the arc of the Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald relationship, imagine living a lifestyle where people are willing and eager to kiss your ring.

But then time's evil twin makes it necessary for you to hock the ring in order to eat.

Save Me The Waltz (Part 3)

Depending on who you talk to, this book is out of print but that was not always the case.









The boy in the middle of this undated yearbook photograph is Allan Stewart Konigsberg. He was born three years after SAVE ME THE WALTZ was published. I am willing to bet the house that he read the book before changing his name to Woody Allen.



When I was the same age as the boys in this photo, I asked my father "Who is the Great Gatsby?" He told me that Gatsby was a second baseman for the Pittsburg Pirates.
Then I heard stand-up comic Woody Allen tell this joke:

Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Year's Eve party. It was April.

Woody was one year away from becoming a film-maker but the comedic seeds of MIDNIGHT IN PARIS were sprouting in this 1964 stand-up routine.


To quote this 1932 novel:

The sign above the woman's head said "Do Not Touch The Looking Glass" in French, English, Italian and Russian. Madame stood with her back to the huge mirror and gazed at the far corners of the room. There was no music as they began.

Wasn’t any art the expression of the inexpressible? And isn’t the inexpressible always the same, though variable–like the X in physics? It may represent anything at all but at the same time, it’s always actually X.

Blogger's Note
I would be remiss in my duties if I did not recommend three books about Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald: Matthew Bruccoli's SOME EPIC SORT OF GRANDEUR, Nancy Milford's ZELDA, and Budd Schulberg's THE DISENCHANTED.

You Can Sing Along...

Subtitle = IE Bennie

If it weren't for Bennie Benjamin, the Mischmasch* posts would never have existed.
He wrote this song.









*One hundred years before Charlie Dodgson named his puzzle magazine Mischmasch, Goethe entitled an essay "Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt." According to Wikipedia, this translates to "hotchpotch of fallacy and violence."

Mischmasch and Me (Part 2)

The MIDNIGHT IN PARIS hyperlink will provide links 
to any names not highlighted below. 

The truncated scribbled notes to the left were written while watching Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. None of the notes are worth a hill of beans other than the fact that when time-travelling Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) tells the Ernest Hemingway character that "All of modern American literature comes from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn," he was in truth paraphrasing the real-life
Ernest Hemingway!

Personally, the most important characters from the Parisian "Roaring Twenties" scenes are Scott And Zelda Fitzgerald. Because of my obsession with them, I was determined to hate Midnight in Paris. That Scott & Zelda had to play a secondary role to Hemingway is a puke-inducing fact vis-a-vis another fact that Scott Fitzgerald coigned the term "Roaring Twenties." But divine intervention over a cup of Peets coffee injected a respect for cinema reality
and I now kowtow to...  

FIFTY YEARS AND COUNTING OF WOODY ALLEN's GENIUS!

 

If Woody had allowed the F. Scott Fitzgerald character to have shown his true Roaring Twenties personality, Tom Hiddleston–an actor with a perfect FSF face–
would have chewed up all the scenery.

Professional boxing has an expression: "Pound-for-pound, the best boxer is..."

If only the Academy Awards had a parallel expression: "Second-for-second, the best actor is..." For his seventy-two seconds on screen, a special Oscar should have been given to Adrien Brody for his portrayal of Salvador Dali.

I hereby hurl one thousand and one bouquets of praise to cast & crew of Midnight in Paris,
especially you: Alison Pill. 

Your Zelda would have made Alabama Beggs proud!


Can you find Alabama Beggs 
in this collage?














How about now?





Ooops. My Bad: Alabama Beggs 
is Zelda Fitzgerald through 
the Looking Glass.






That is, the ballerina featured
on the book cover below is
"Alabama Beggs."






Technically, SAVE ME THE WALTZ is a work of fiction. Historically, it is much closer to the non-fiction story of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. The only major nod to fiction is that the latter–named David Knight in the book–is a famous painter rather than writer.



The next Mark Twain reference appears here.

Mischmasch & Me (Part 1)

This sentence should align with the "collage" of paper scraps and album liner notes.

All is blogpost fodder, and then some.

A quick click on that photo should enlarge it with enough clarity so that everything is legibly readable.


Clockwise from the top:
Liner notes from a BEST OF NINA SIMONE compact disc...Hand-written directions containing the word LaTex...A folded typewritten sheet referencing "Mr. Christ with some ostrich feathers"...Magic Marker scribble related to Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris.

The un-clockwised blue note is a direct quote from a George Harrison-penned song. For the Former Beatle–and his endless quest to be curiouser and curiouser about spirituality and life in general–I will boldly quote verbatim: Everyone has a choice: When to and when not to raise their voice.

The folded typewritten page is a work in progress dedicated to Robby Ravenwood.
LaTex is a link to the universal language necessary for serious math research.
If all goes well, it will enable me to publish a paper begun in 1992, long before I did
the Fibonacci Quadruple thingy.

Unlike everything else in the bottom collage the Midnight in Paris notes has an extremely important connection to the collage above it. (The picture of the pipe in the first row has a reasonably important connection to the collage below it.)

The twelfth track of the Nina Simone album is entitled DON'T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD: a Sixties Rock&Roll song most often associated with The Animals. It was a follow-up hit to the British band's gold-standard folk rock cover of HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN.


The Nina Simone CD was purchased less than an hour before this post began. I paid $2 at a garage sale because the garage sailors loaned me their ears into which I poured some of my treasured Nina Simone anecdotes.

I already had every song in my iTunes file but what truly inspired the purchase was that all-important paren-
thetical statement below the title


DON'T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD.
I already knew the song was written for Nina but I did not know it was composed by Bennie Benjamin. Bennie has been enshrined in the Songwriter's Hall of Fame.
But if you link to the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame, you will find a shrine for Benny Benjamin.

Surrealist Rene Magritte's THIS IS NOT A PIPE is featured in the top row of the top collage and also on the home page of this blog. Posthumously, Mr. Magritte said

Tomatos may be tomatoes but Bennie Benjamin is not Benny Benjamin.

I was already to tell you otherwise but the y Benjamin was the fabled drummer of Motown Records and a drummer is Father Time's alter ego. Everytime I ever danced to the Temptations, Supremes, Four Tops...I was foot-stomping in time to Benny Benjamin!

Before mischmasching my way to Part 2 of this post, I must comment on the little guy in the middle of the third photograph posted above. That is Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals.

According to MisInformation Anonymous, John Lennon was thinking of him when he sang about the Eggman in I am the Walrus. Why?
Eric Burdon was partial to eating raw eggs poured over the cleavaged skin of his paramours.

But it was fellow Lewis Carroll alum, Robby–with a y, not an "ie"–Ravenwood who re-enlightened me as to who the Original Eggman is.
That would be Humpty Dumpty.....with two y's.
Such is human perversity.

Please note: I said that Robby re-enlightened me. I had been taught so many things–probably including the blockquoted Magritte–at the Lewis Carroll School of Logic. But my five-star inability to remember all of them inspired the following verse whose title is long forgotten.

If forgetting were an art
I'd be Van Gogh
Then forget where my ear was
And cut off my toe.

To be continued...Please note: The Animals recorded House of the Rising Sun on May 18,1964, a/k/a my fifteenth birthday. But Mr. Dylan & Ms. Simone both recorded pure folk versions of the same song in 1962.

Shoe

If I could do another impression of Nikki Hill from Jefferson High School:

In a world with only one law, I would limit the world to include only aspiring stand-up comics. The law would be that everyday, they would be required to read Shoe.

F-Minus

This is a brilliant comic strip.
May I suggest reading as many as possible or stopping when you have emptied your laugh bucket.

Vis-a-Vis

The next time you hear about how many people have lost their jobs and their homes...The next time we hear that we are in a depression unlike anything since the DEPRESSION OF 1932, please consider the following information clipped from artdailynews. org.

The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale at Christie’s London on 20 June 2012 realised £92,583,550 / $145,541,341/ € 114,618,435, selling 80% by lot and 84% by value. The auction had a pre-sale estimate of £74.5 million to £108.7 million. The top price was paid for Femme assise, 1949, by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) which sold for £8,553,250/ $13,445,709/ €10,588,924

While all the alleged authorities were wagging their tongues about the economic woes that had befallen the United States and the rest of the world in the year we shall call 2010, an auction record was broken by the approximate numbers:
The most money ever paid for an American comic book had been $350,000 until 2010.
At that time, $1,100,000 was paid for a DC Comic Book featuring a Superhero we shall call x. But the following month, that record was broken when a DC comic book featuring Superhero y sold for $1,100,005.59
My numbers might be slightly off but the ratio of the first sale to the pre-existing record was essentially 3:1

I find this information comically undepressing and I love bubbled water!

But what was it that George Carlin said about Evian, a popular and expensive sparkling water:

Evian spellt backwards is NAIVE!

Outside my door

Moments ago, I stepped outside my door and snapped away. I will let the photographs speak for themselves. However, there are "companion photos" which have been posted down below in the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY.
I must express my gratitudies to "rls" for this idea. But please pray I whip his butt in Racquetball this weekend.
Happy viewing to all of you...

Happy Birthday, Sir Paul

This post was written yesterday–June 18, 2012–but posted today.
YESTERDAY was Paul McCartney's 70th birthday.
Paul has given enough to this world to make God jealous. However, he never could have done it without John, George & Ringo but you already knew that. McCartney has given enough to this world and continues to do so!
And once upon a time, they said "Paul is dead!"
His 70th birthday inspired Time.com to post an excerpt from an upcoming book entitled Paul McCartney: The Legend Rocks On. Coincidentally, this book was written by TIME MAGAZINE staffers.
I hereby excerpt the excerpt:

A photo with the story shows McCartney, soulful in dark shirt and light tie, -confidently strumming his guitar and singing into a mike while Lennon, seemingly a little less sure of his playing, stares down at his instrument, carefully fingering a chord. Two girls and a boy sit on a bench to the right, paying careful attention. The caption reads: “Three ‘cool cats’ listen to ‘The Quarrymen.’ ” The polite-looking, well-dressed young English people resemble anything but cool cats. The girl on the left, smiling at McCartney, is Cynthia Powell, who will later marry Lennon.

Two comments from this blogger.
1. The quote about John Lennon: "seemingly a little less assured of his playing."
Or is John simply yielding the stage to his bandmate?
Does this mean that whenever a musician is entirely focused on his instrument AND oblivious to the audience, there is a lack of self-assurance?
If John had lacked self-assurance, the girl in the picture identified as Cynthia Powell would never have become Cynthia Powell Lennon.
2. The TIME author criticizes the original caption of the photo–"Three 'cool cats' listen to 'The Quarrymen.'" The author refers to the captive audience as anything but cool cats.
By doing so, the author demonstrates a very high IQ. Unfortunately, that acronym has been put through the looking glass and stands for Ignorance Quotient.
The THREE COOL CATS is a reference to a song covered by the Silver Beatles/Quarrymen and originally recorded by the Coasters. George Harrison sang lead.
In their embryonic stage, the Beatles recorded three songs by the legendary Coasters–all written by Mike Lieber & Jerry Stoller. The other two were included on the Beatles' demo tape for Decca records: Searchin' and Youngblood.

The Coasters are most deservedly enshrined in the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame. Very important to the evolution of the Coasters was a Los Angeles school: Jefferson High. For reasons like that, I am proud to have taught there for twenty years but I have one and only one more thing to say.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PAUL McCARTNEY. I WISH YOU A CORNUCOPIA OF HAPPINESS!

Stonybrook @ the 2012 College World Series

After an unexpected Cinderella season, the Stonybrook University baseball team made it to the mecca of Omaha, Nebraska but so did UCLA and Florida State. Numbers below tell the rest of the story.


In the immortal words of Casey Stengel, "Wait 'til next year!"

Wearing black pompoms, WUSB personality/Professor Emeritus MORT MECKLOSKEY will lead the parade to welcome home the Seawolves from Omaha.
Be there or be...elsewhere.

Lewis Carroll & John Tenniel

Numerous examples of John Tenniel's illustrations are to follow. All of them appear in the edition of "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS And What Alice Found There" reproducing exactly what Lewis Carroll wrote in 1871. But the afterword excerpted below was written by Peter Glassman© in 1993.




This post is Part 1. Part 2 is here.

I Shot A Mailbox

    It is an antique mailbox on the Promenade
    in downtown Long Beach.





   I also photographed some ornate architectural detail,
   including a mustachioed gargoyle.





   In her natural color, I captured the Wedge Woman.
   I caught her standing in the crosshairs
   of my Kodak weapon.






   And outside a neighbor's door,
   stood these two upright people.

The Wallendas are Still Flying!

This is from today's ArtDaily newsletter.The caption is verbatim.


NIAGARA FALLS, NY.- Nik Wallenda walks a 1,800 feet-long tightrope over the brink of the Niagara Falls, as seen from Niagara Falls, Ont., on Friday, June 15, 2012. Wallenda battled brisk winds and thick mist Friday to make history, becoming the first person to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette.

My Little Red Lie

This story has been told repeatedly on the campus of the Lewis Carroll School of Logic.
I re-tell it here with a slight adjustment of fact.

In 1865, the initial publication of Alice in Wonderland was such a success throughout England, that the prevailing monarch approached the author with a special request. Queen Victoria asked Lewis Carroll to dedicate his next book to her.
"I will indeed dedicate the next thing I write to you, your Majesty," replied the author.
He did exactly that. However, Lewis Carroll was also known as Charles Lewis Dodgson, a professor at Oxford University. The next thing he wrote, after Alice in Wonderland was not a book but a Math research paper entitled Self-Generating Pythagorean Quadruples and N-Tuples.

I compromised the little red lie with a strike-through.The title of Professor Dodgson's Victorian-dedicated research paper was An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.
The author of the Pythagorean Quadruple paper was me.

YOU, the genuinely intelligent reader, might ask "Why are you telling me this?" (And your intelligence would be doubled if perchance you remembered a blogpost entitled Magreetings.)
I, the ersatz intelligent blogger, might will answer "Because I occasionally have a problem with Ego Control."

Years before the publication of my Pythagorean Quad formula, years before mathematicians the world over learned how it works, countless students at an obscenely under-achieving school learned how to apply the formula. The school, of course, was Jefferson High in South-Central Los Angeles. No student of mine understood the formula better than CARMEN CASAS. Her name has been unchanged to applaud the worthy.
Another name that will be unchanged is CRAIG PICELLA, a Math colleague of mine. He suggested my having Carmen demonstrate the Quad formula to Jefferson's Math & Science teachers.
There was no way those teachers could have known the formula because I invented it. I went out of my way to invite the Principal to the presentation.
Carmen did such a magnificent job of explaining the Quad formula, everyone in the room gave her a rousing ovation.
I did not drive home from school that day, I floated!

Outside My Door

This is the first thing I see when I walk out my door. The aquamarine of the fendered, chain-guarded bicycle (with basket) accentuates the landscape.

Here is another view:

The hat is trey cool. The bicycle belongs to a new neighbor whom I have yet to meet. The previous occupant was a friend of mine who permitted me to keep my bicycle on her porch.

This is my bike.

Not a pretty sight, I must agree but I also must explain why. My ten-speed Diamondback has been treated with a very expensive P.O.C. application called "theft-proofing."
Imagine if you were a bicycle thief. Would you steal this piece of crap with the torn seat and crooked handlebars?
Obviously NO is your answer.
Exactly my point. The crappy look eclipses the world-class derailleur and the quality gear-shifters.
P.O.C. stands for Piece of Crap!

This is Number 6

This is also my 100th published blogpost.

Moments ago, I googled a word and encountered exactly five websites but have one question:

What does the music of Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, the Fallen Stars, the Indigo Girls and Greg Brown have in common?

Just like calculus, musical genres and sub-genres have limits but the artists named above can be fitted into a category called "Americana."
But, you might say, "I just googled Americana and there are 'About 43,500,000 results.'"
However, I now present a new definition for Americana music:

Americana Music is country music with a Smartectomy.

And my middle name is "Copyright" but you can call me ©

Musilage

Abstract Algebra or...Algebra abstracted from life?



The author called it Black Magic.

The page is entitled Musilage
because the author is  Robert Musil.

Yogi Berra & His Alter Ego (Wording #2)

You have now entered a red ink-free zone, proceed with caution whatever gets you there.
These two photos appeared in a previous blogpost. What they have in common is that both Yogi Berra and Robert Musil have created sculptures of the most intimate lovers mentioned in this blog: Language & Logic. The quotes below are verbatim Musil and approximate Yogi.

ROBERT =
Life is living: you cannot describe it to someone who does not know it. It is friendship and enmity, enthusiasm and disenchantment, peristalsis and ideology. Thinking has, among other functions, to establish an intellectual order in life, and just as frequently, a single phenomenon will give rise to many new concepts. It is common knowledge that our poets have stopped wanting to think ever since they think they heard the philosophers say that thought is no longer supposed to be a matter of thinking, but rather of living. Life is to blame for everything.
YOGI ≈
I ate a bowl of yin&yang. An hour later, I was hungry again for the first time.

*************************************************************************************

We have now exited the red ink-free zone.
To go THROUGH THE OTHER LOOKING GLASS...is to look through Binoculars.

ROBERT =
When magnified, impulses are actualized, and when viewed through the looking glass, every woman becomes a psychologically spied Susannah in the bath of her dress.
YOGI ≈
Looking at a woman through binoculars is just like looking at a woman with a magnifying glass.

*************************************************************************************

ROBERT =
When the hero of this little story–and truly, he was one–rolled up his sleeves, two arms as thin as the sound of a toy clock came into view.
YOGI≈
The 97-pound weakling had 97 pounds of muscle.

ROBERT=
And following the vacillation in the selection of endearments that usually comes at the start of every love affair, she called him “My little squirrel.”
YOGI≈
Help! Somebody! Read this story to me or I'll have to read it myself.

Mr. Musil's delicious story is entitled THE GIANT AGOAG. "When the hero..." is the opening line!
Do not be deceived by the title: AGOAG is not a story about monsters. But it is a monster of a story.
Hey: didn't Yogi say just those words?



EVERYBODY AT THE LEWIS CARROLL SCHOOL OF LOGIC WORSHIPS YOGI & HIS ALTER EGO DOPPELGANGER.

Lewis Carroll Works in Long Beach

Subtitle: LC in LB



This garden topper has been mistaken for a popcorn container. The whereabouts of the book cover's original contents will be explained below.



Lewis Carroll works on a one-way street in Belmont Shore.



The author of "Alice in Wonderland" was no one-trick pony. In the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY, this listing of his vast body of literature appears in enlarged–and more readable form. Ditto for his bio.




A vertical–but incomplete–view of the unfolded book cover.



"Feeding the Mind" ????? From his "Original Games and Puzzles," I learned about the most magnificent six-digit number ever created: 142857
According to the King James Brown Bible, 14-28-57 is the bicycle lock combination of Mr. J. Christ.

You might be inclined to say "The book cover is interesting but where is the book?"
I might be inclined to reply "Thank you for opening up a can of words."

Originally, The Works of Lewis Carroll was a required text. It morphed into a family heirloom after travelling with me from Long Island to Florida to California (in 1981). Sometime after 1987, I shipped it to Virginia when my nieces and nephews were old enough to read the book. In 2006, I reclaimed the family heirloom and together–with all my life's possessions–we drove from Virginia to Long Beach, California. By then, multiple copies of Alice in Wonderland, and a handful of other LC books were either sold, traded or disappeared. At that point in my life, I got religion in the form of daily attendance at the Church of Jack Daniels Nightmare, a/k/a "Bye Bye Budweiser."
The church had no altar but the congregants strongly believed in sharing stories. After a meeting church service, I befriended a very charming and intelligent woman who charmed me into sharing my copy of The Works of Lewis Carroll. Due to the geometric wonder of her physical architecture, I trusted her when she promised to return the book.
I never saw the woman again.
I no longer go to that church in Marina Pacifica. Other people need it much more than me and the only books they should ever lend out need to involve a form of twelve-step choreography, spiritually speaking.
Had I not retained the book cover, I probably would not have written this post.

Sam O'Leaner (Apple #8)

"It was midnight in the Red Light district. The puppet guitarist is Sam O'leaner. The shadow on the wall is a peeled shard of the musician," said Professor McKinley Morganfield.
"I took these pictures over in Europe. My band was touring the continent with Bo Diddley and Elmore James."
Thirty music students scribbled in their notebooks. A bespectacled boy, seated in the back of the classroom, raised his hand.

"Does Bo have two or three D's in his name?"
"Three D's in his name. Diddley rhymes with 'Italy.' And Elmore James has three D's on his slide guitar when playing in Open D Tuning. His strings are tuned D-A-D-F#-A-D."
"It's the Dad Fad!" shouted the bespectacled boy from the back of the room.
"Not quite, Winston," said the Bloggerhythm & Blues professor, whose stage name was Muddy Waters.
"It would be, not 'Dad Fad' but 'Dad Fshad.' F-sharp for the fourth string!
When you are playing slide guitar, the difference between F# and F is the difference
between lightning and the lightning bug." Scribble scribble scribble.

Winston had a long nose and a loud mouth. He also had a mid-century student visa. Briefly, during the nineteen fifties, the Lewis Carroll School in Piscataway, New Jersey had a student exchange program with England. The program was funded entirely by the estate of a 19th Century "mathemagician" named Charles Lewis Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll.
To qualify for the mid-20th Century student visa, students had to be from working-class families. They also had to have "untapped genius potential."

"In the next photo, a sepia-toned Sam stands on top of a blockheaded mannequin. The mannequin is stuffed with falafel powder."
"If you were touring with a slide-guitarist, shouldn't you refer to these photographs as slides?"
"Winston, when are you returning to Liverpool?"



"There is one more 'slide' I need to show you but first I have to confess that if my alter ego's music was as bad as my photography, he'd still be driving a truck."
Nobody scribbled but everybody laughed. So I have been told.
"We were somewhere in Hamburg when we heard this puppet blues band. The Red Light district was all aglow. The mannequin was holding a book cover over its blockhead but Sam O'leaner–and his trusty shadow–just keep on playing guitar."



This 'slide' presentation pre-dates my time at the Lewis Carroll School but I recognized the book cover. Actually, it is a textbook cover. The contents were required reading for all School of Logic students: 600 pages of Mr. Carroll's literature. Only one-third of the book has to do with Alice's in Wonderland. Photograph of the contents are on exhibit in the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY.

About the exchange student named "Winston," it has been said that the only time he was ever seen wearing glasses in public was in Professor Morganfield's classes. The boy with the long nose and the loud mouth certainly learned the difference between a F and an F#. However, in 1958, "Winston the Ornery" insisted on using a harmonica to slide across the guitar strings, His grade in Morganfield's was C-
Winston was voted the "student most likely to mispronounce the words of McKinley Morganfield."
According to campus legend, "That Boy" would sit lotus style between the Walrus statue and the Humpty Dumpty statue, chanting Sam O'leaner and the peeled shard...sitting atop the falafel tower.
All artists "steal." Only the best artists steal with stealth. This is not criminal theft. It is theft through the looking glass and the best person to have on the other side of the mirror is a teacher.

Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo kachoob goo goo kachoob...

Professor Morganfield and another British exchange student were the only people to ever address Winston by his preferred name which was "John Lennon." But the professor preferred to think of him as That Boy.
The other Brit is said to be the Morganfield's all-time favorite student.



Wherever there are legends, misinformation is sure to follow but occasionally the record can be set straight.

"Goo goo kachoob" were the final words that Humpty Dumpty said before he fell off the wall and died.

But this is–verbatim–how Lewis Carroll ended Chapter 6 of THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS:

'I shouldn’t know you again if we DID meet,’ Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; 'you’re so exactly like other people.’
’The face is what one goes by, generally,’ Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
’That’s just what I complain of,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ’Your face is the same as everybody has–the two eyes, so–’ (marking their places in the air with this thumb) ’nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance–or the mouth at the top–that would be SOME help.’
’It wouldn’t look nice,’ Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes and said ’Wait till you’ve tried.’
Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but as he never opened his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said ’Good-bye!’ once more, and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn’t help saying to herself as she went, ’Of all the unsatisfactory–’ (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) ’of all the unsatisfactory people I EVER met–’ She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.

And Humpty Dumpty did not die. The author just reduced the character to his natural thousand-year-old nursery rhyme state.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

But there was no harm in trying...


Blogger's Note
"The other Brit" was Mick Jagger

(Apple #9) is  here.

StonyBrook University

More than forty years ago, their Math Department thought best to transfer me through the looking glass to the Lewis Carroll School of Logic. For doing so, I have exponential gratitude
but today, STONYBROOK UNIVERSITY IS GOING TO THE COLLEGE WORLD SERIES.



New York baseball has given the world Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Joe Dimaggio, Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter, the Miracle Mets, Yogi Berra, and more than thirty World Series champions. Given the magnificent history of its professional teams, it is only natural for New Yorkers to ask:
"Do we really have college baseball in this town?"

The answer today is emphatically YES!
I learned about it from ESPN Sportscenter this morning but the blockquote below–with acronyms unacronymed–is from the linked Newsday article:

Stonybrook University, which has gone 6-2 with two one-run losses in the regional and super regional rounds, is the first New York City-area team to reach the College World Series since St. John's in 1980 and the first team from the Northeast since 1986.

Go Seawolves!

The Original Eggman (Apple #7)

Alice was just a curious child but Humpty Dumpty was both Egg and Man. At the time Lewis Carroll wrote THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, John Lennon was minus seventy eight years old.

(Apple #8) is here.

Shadow Dancers

Clipped from imdb.com, this is a Plot Summary for Jammin' the Blues

This 1944 Warner Bros. short is a jam session with several outstanding African-American jazz musicians, including Lester Young. Darkly lit and with a mood that matches the music, the film was groundbreaking in its day and was a showcase for then lesser-known musicians and entertainers who would not otherwise have had exposure to a much larger audience...Prominent jazz musicians of the 1940's get together for a rare filming of a jam session. Marie Bryant has a vocal, and dancer Archie Savage does the jitterbug. It is notable that for several cast members, this is their only known appearance in a theatrical film.

The ten-minute film is available here and a five-minute excerpt is available there.


The trumpeter is Harry Edison. (This photograph is also on exhibit in the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY.)

The English language needs more superlatives for me to accurately describe Jammin' the Blues. But the plot summary was written by garykmcd and David Glagovsky. The band photo is from Jonathan Stout.