Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Interior of a Cloister,” Louis Jacques Mandé-Daguerre, 19th Century

Oil on canvas.

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“In darkest night …”

Oh! I saw my first fireflies of the year last night. 🙂 ❤ South of the city. They’ve been my favorite harbinger of summer since I was just about 18 and they would silently glitter en masse around Lake of the Woods in Orange County, VA. They were like a broad blanket of blinking emerald stars that caressed the darkened treeline.

Fireflies are the Green Lantern Corps of the insect universe, people. Respect them.



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“Pine Forest,” Ivan Shishkin, 1866

Oil on canvas.

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I call this omelette “The Fantastic Four.”

Because it’s fantastic, and because it’s got four cheeses: Swiss, muenster, mozzarella and mild cheddar.  (Diet be damned.)  Yet it’s still not as cheesy as the 2005 movie with Ioan Gruffudd.  (Sorry.)

Is it good?  It is worthy of the Baxter Building dining room.  The only thing missing here is a cameo by Stan Lee in your goddam kitchen.

BY the way, I am indeed employing the British spelling of “omelette” here, because the American “omelet” will always look wrong to me.  And if it’s one thing that I know, it’s omelettes.



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Illustration by Arthur Rackham for “Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination,” 1935

George G. Harrap & Co, Ltd, London.

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Throwback Thursday: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981)!

This is it, folks.  This is the greatest movie of all time.  It’s better than “Blade Runner” (1982), better than John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), better than “Aliens” (1986).  And those movies were all … perfect.  (Man the 1980’s really were a golden age for pop culture, weren’t they?)

I was eight years old when I saw this in the theater, and I thereafter was a bit of an Indiana Jones cultist.  It wasn’t just the action figures and board games and comic book and posters and role-playing games.  I actually resolved to become an archeologist (or a paleontologist), and I thought the best way that I could prepare for that as a third grader was to gain experience “in the field.”

So I would lead my friends on “digs” or “expeditions” in the forests around my neighborhood.  We would often arbitrarily pick a spot in the middle of nowhere and then just dig there, with a shovels we borrowed from my family’s garage.  We were hoping to find … anything of interest, I guess :buried treasure, dinosaur bones, Indian arrowheads, whatever.  (We never did.  About the only thing we “discovered” was that tree roots are a real bitch when you’re trying to dig a hole.)  I even kept maps and journals of our “adventures.”  These are the kinds of things that boys do before they discover girls.

I tried to look the part, too.  I had a brown cowboy hat that I hoped could pass for a fedora, an (empty) binocular case and a prop bullwhip snagged from a Levi’s jeans display at the local mall.  My older brother called me “Idaho Bones” because I essentially was a cheap, skinny knockoff of the character I wanted to emulate.  I hated it at the time, but as an adult, I kinda can’t dispute his assessment.

Oh, well.  We all had fun.  Every other boy in the neighborhood who spotted that bullwhip wanted to try it, so there’s that.

To this day, “Raiders” is still my favorite movie ever.

By the way, I am linking below to the Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers Youtube channel.



“Baba and Billy,” John Duncan, 1920

Tempera on canvas.

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ATTIC OF THE CLONES.

Be nice to nerds. This is a totally real thing I said last night to a college friend:

“Well, I am not identifying any more action figures from your attic, MISSY.”



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“Every Beginning is Difficult,” Robert Schiff

Picture postcard.

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The Porky Nolan.

Remember that amazing sandwich recipe I shared the other day?   The one with melted mozzarella and spaghetti sauce over mild Italian sausage?

It works just fine with a pork chop too.



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