close cover before striking

Phillumeny.

Now wouldn't you just know the hobby of collecting matchbooks would be known as Phillumeny!

The match "folder" was patented on this day in 1892. I only have about a half-dozen, but I still find some designs from the past fascinating...






Of course, there are the pinups.

Similarly, there are these matchbox covers from around the Wide Wide World that I think are just great.

Faulkner on his birthday

She washed and mended his clothes and cooked him a shoe box of vittles. And that night me and Pete laid in the bed and listened to her packing his grip and crying, until after a while Pete got up in his nightshirt and went back there, and I could hear them talking, until at last maw said, "You got to go and so I want you to go. But I don't understand it, and I won't never, and so don't expect me to." And Pete come back and got into the bed again and laid again still and hard as iron on his back, and then he said, and he wasn't talking to me, he wasn't talking to nobody: "I got to go. I just got to."

Two Soldiers (1942)
~William Faulkner, 1897-1962

lost: one harmonium

Wells on his birthday

No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

~ H. G. Wells
The War of the Worlds (1898)

shiver me timbers!

Or shiver me peg leg, it be talk like a pirate day, matey!

Ye be findin' that some sprogs be losing the way of the plank aye...

dry as dust

No rain this September. The TV weatherman's voice incredulously rises like his wife forgot to put cookies in his lunch box as he laments those thin numbers in the red. The grass is brown with green freckles. There is moisture though in the reddened eyes of the lawn clipping blower man I nod to passing along the sidewalk in the morning. Each night at my front door a spider with a PhD in Engineering weaves long web strands from the door handle high into the trees and back. I break through and swat it away, but the web is there again with small gutted insects dangling when I return at the end of the day. I tear it all down, but I'm guessing the weaver just rolls its 8 eyes and starts over chuckling.
They say it's suppose to rain.

goodbye, Mary

static

A few seconds after 6 tonight my favorite radio station went to dead air. Another small market victim of the woeful economy. Sounds silly, but Pidge, Libby, and Scott were something of a joyous extended family, even in the close stuffy quarters of a long trip with me driving and them all squeezed close to one another. Libby's jovial laugh at dawn to Pigeon's witty remarks, and Scott's ever cheerful, enthusiastic, smiling voice on the drive home. All much more meaningful than the oldies they played. Truly a welcome bunch on an imaginary Carefree Highway bumper to bumper to bumper.
And now they've all vanished into thin air like they were never there or something I made up.

Hitchcock

Young and Innocent(1937)
starring Nova Pilbeam.

Kennedy

Been thinking a while now about how to comment on his passing. It would be much too easy, of course, to take shots at any flawed man, especially one at the opposite political spectrum of my own.

So, I'll just contribute a new stanza instead to that old song, Abraham, Martin, and John, about other imperfect fallen idols....

Anybody here see that old lion Teddy?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
Thought I saw him accompany a Pride
With Abraham, Martin and John.

just the stamps, ma'am

The USPS got it right for the most part. I would've added the classic The Andy Griffith Show, a hallmark show espousing Honor, Love, and Family. And for being just a plain funny show! that hasn't left the tube since it premiered in 1960.
So grab a big steaming bowl of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and plop down in front of the old black and white.

edit: the show deserving of a stamp, by golly..

I'm through with love

the dead guy

the dead guy...this Fall, Wednesdays at 8PM.

Episode 1:

Fade in.

Interviewer: Tell me, Doctor, where was he found?

Dr. Margaret Beakersnifter:[voice similar to Marlin Perkins] On a plateau, on a cliff, a hollow cave-like opening high up in the mountains.

Interviewer: He seems well-preserved, as preserves goes ..don't you think?

Dr. Beakersnifter: Yes. [pushes glasses back up nose] I think I know why.

Interviewer: Tell me, please, Doctor.

Dr. Beakersnifter: Of course. You see. The ice and snow gathered at that particular plateau and was constant, unlike other areas of the mountain where ice and snow thalled and there was a runoff. Simply, where this fella was found it was frozen...for centuries.

Interviewer: How did the fella die?

Dr. Beakersnifter: I can only guess. Perhaps. Food poisoning. Maybe. Bad batch of Stew? [long pause, moves in closer, peers through magnifying glass] But interestingly...

Interviewer: The agony!

Dr. Beakersnifter: Interestingly...

Interviewer: Yes?

Dr. Beakersnifter: There was no penis.

Interviewer: Excuse me?

Dr. Beakersnifter: I couldn't find his penis.

Interviewer: It must've been...

Dr. Beakersnifter:[shaking head, frustrated] I couldn't find his penis.

[break away to first commercial..Dinty Moore Beef Stew!]