“Seagull,” by Eric Robert Nolan

Like an awkward emperor,
you sit alone atop
the rooftop of my urbane neighbors.

Squat and fat and white, you’re
a satisfied and unenlightened despot.
Edicts issue out
From your discordant “caw!”

What do those yuppies think of you?
Your mien makes
Their rich art-deco house
A commonplace kingdom.
Your ungainly gait makes
a prosaic palace of their home.

Cardinals arcing over
are airborne scarlet darts.

Pairs of swallows will sometimes
loop in symmetry.

You’ll have none of it. You’re
All utilitarian flight
And graceless landings.

If you were human
you’d be a pot-bellied plumber, perhaps
in a wife-beater t-shirt
holding a beer.

Other birds will swoop and dive.
Other birds will sing.
But your cawing only exhorts us,
“Hail to The King.”

© Eric Robert Nolan 2013

 

800px-Laridae_in_Beijing_Zoo

Photo credit: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=437394

“Each outcry of the hunted Hare/ A fibre from the Brain does tear.”

A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing
The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight
Does the Rising Sun affright.

— excerpt from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”

 

800px-The_rabbit_hunt-_all_but_caught_LCCN2001703791

 

Cover to “Entertainment Weekly Comic-Con Issue” July 2015

Pictured is Ryan Reynolds as “Deadpool.”

Deadpool-Entertainment-Weekly

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

—  from George Santayana’s “Tipperary,” in his Soliloquies in England, 1924

(This quote is often misattributed to Plato, most notably by General Douglas MacArthur in a 1962 address at West Point, according to the online sources I consulted.)

 

Santayana

A very short review of “The Meg” (2018)

“The Meg” (2018) is an easy movie in which to find flaws.  They’re many, they’re egregious, and they’re consistently front and center.  The biggest flaw for me is its truly terrible script; it’s like the screenwriters weren’t even trying here.   (At one point we see a character simply grunt a response to another during an exchange, as though the screenwriters were too disinterested to write a line of dialogue.)  The movie’s other weaknesses include the occasionally spotty CGI and some head-scratching science.

With all of that said, however, I still had fun with “The Meg.”  (The title refers to a prehistoric shark called megalodon, which our protagonists inadvertently release from a newly discovered deep-sea trench.)  I’d rate it a 6 out of 10 because it was a fun enough summertime monster movie.  It’s clunky stuff, but it’s passably enjoyable lowbrow entertainment for fans of creature features.

I like Jason Statham too.  (This is the first film I’ve seen him in since 2004’s “Cellular.”)  He certainly isn’t a bad actor, even if his lines in this film should have had him inwardly cringing.  He’s got presence and charisma.

I’m not sure I would actually recommend “The Meg,” but I didn’t hate it.

 

6266706_so

“High Noon,” Edward Hopper, 1949

High-Noon-Edward-Hopper-1949

Making up memes isn’t my strong point, but I still have fun with it.

What do you think?

 

39jaqn

“You have enemies? Good.”

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

— Winston Churchill

 

69113347_535349290538434_1252202147555049472_n

Cover to “Heroic Age: X-Men” #1, Jae Lee, 2010

Marvel Comics.

Heroic_Age_X-Men_Vol_1_1

PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY.

I am SO sorry.  I know these jokes are terrible even as I write them.  Somebody should take this computer away from me.

lossy-page1-800px-Hurricane_Dorian,_August_31,_2019_over_open_waters.tiff

Nurse Your Favorite Heresies in Whispers