Back to the garden

I hate being photographed - my head is always on one side, and my face looks kind of like a stroke victim's for some reason. I can't turn on a cheesy "cheese" smile like some people can.

But this was different. Bill got inspired. We made one of our pilgrimages to Burnaby Centennial Rose Garden, a place we stumbled on during one of our walks last year.

The place greeets you with waves of scent, intoxicating. You just have to stick your nose in all the blooms. I know nothing about roses, but they all smell different, some sweet, almost cloying, some spicy, others heavy and honey-like. A bee would drown happily here. The ladybug on the lip of the petal was content to sun itself.

I told you I can't do a good smile. I thought I WAS smiling for most of these, but this is how they came out. But the delicate mauve flowers enchanted me. Roses seem to come in all shades, including the deepest purple.

And fuschia. Every shade of pink and red (and none of the red shots turned out, but they have that long-white-cardboard-box-with-the-ferns smell, almost peppery - an anniversary smell).

These were dark burgundy, and as complex as peonies. 

Is this called a trellis, or a bower? It's much-o full o' flower. They drape heavily over the trellis and nod in the sun, drenching the air with sweetness.

I am happy in these roses, as I am happy in so many things.

There had to be a long shot - or not - but here it is.

I remember a line from Bradbury:

"I think the sun is a flower

That blooms for just one hour."

How does it feel?

This unremarkable-looking display is actually a cultural artifact of inestimable worth.

It's the first draft of Bob Dylan's classic, Like a Rolling Stone, which many have called the best rock song ever written.

Or recorded.

Or sung.

Recently these four humble pages, gleaned from I-know-not-where, sold at auction for $2 million. I don't know if Bob saw any of the proceeds. He may have been off somewhere forging paintings or making time with his new girl friend.

This is my all-too-inadequate attempt to blow up the pages. It's still impossible to read the text, but you can plainly see the little sketches he did in the margins, and the origin of the paper is a humble hotel room in Washington, D. C. Sometimes he write on an upside-down page, not that he would have noticed.

Here they are still more magnified, showing us that genius never moves in straight lines.

OK then, we all know His Bobness is a genius, and his quirky lifestyle is the proof. The fact he has lived this long is by far his greatest achievement.

But like most geniuses (geni-i?), his work has sometimes been wildly uneven. He's the Marlon Brando of rock, brilliant when he's brilliant, and sometimes plain stupid. The Christmas album is a case in point. 

But you never know quite what to expect from him. He has the courage or the foolhardiness to plunge in and try things he's really no good at. Last time it was welding gates out of old bicycle parts, claiming he was a welder when he grew up in Minnesota.

So all of a sudden he grew up in Minnesota instead of Outer Mongolia or wherever, raised by tigers. Now suddenly he's a man of the soil, a blue-collar sort, an everyday working man wielding a blowtorch. My ass he does that, but he doesn't want to run out of spontaneous twists and turns.

OK, the gates were actually pretty good, but who actually made them?

Who ate my Post Toasties?

Just a bunch more funny signs

I used to think this as a child, but not in those words.

Kind of crude, but the shoes are really pretty, so. . . 

Ewwwwwwww.

So is that a leprechaun standing there? They do say "shite", after all.

Personally I prefer the "soured vegetables" (these are vegetables that started out with high ideals, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, over the years, over the decades, their idealism was squeezed out of them by a pitiless world) and "the water fries the potato" (a nice trick). And what about "deep-fried bean-curd with odor"? Appeal to you?

I like the honesty here.

Have you ever seen a SMART bean sprout?

Mixed messages here. Does this mean it's GOOD to pee in the pool? or what??

Yes!

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Cute but dumb

Jesus, what a coincidence!

Quite a few posts ago, I did a photo essay on the religious art phenomenon I call "Laughing Jesus". These are mostly tacky paintings or depictions of Jesus either laughing or looking jocular. About the only one I liked was this blow-dried look by Greg Olsen, an artist who specializes in painting Jesus in contemporary settings (i. e. sitting next to a kid with a backpack - runaway?).

Then I was waiting for a bus outside a classical record store, and saw. . . this.

I honestly wonder if this could be a coincidence.

Does Greg Olsen paint "from life", or "from CD covers"? There's no law against it, it's not really forgery, it's just using an album cover as a model for your picture.

I guess.

But I still think it's weird.

Softness in his eyes, iron in his thighs

OLYM-PI-AAAAAAAAAAAA!

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Bean Boozled Challenge: It's Grandpa's Turn!

Nature's mistakes: oops, I did it again

 

Be aware that I don't choose these things. In my never-ending thirst for knowledge, they come to me, attracted, no doubt, by a mixture of curiosity and disbelief.

This thing, this, I don't know, this whatever-it-is, like a shrimp shell with fur, or a hamster trick-or-treating in a lobster suit,  it scares me to think that these things are scampering around, apparently cute except for the four-inch talons that could probably rip your throat out if you looked at it wrong. It was hard for me to believe it was real, so I had to dig around for more images, sort of like turning over rocks in your back yard to see what slimy things you can find.

This looks like a sea monkey, only bigger. It looks like a sea monkey might look if it actually stayed alive and grew into something, rather than dying in the first week and turning to stinky brown scum on top of the water. Bleahhhhhh.

The larval form. Just not possible, whatever it is. Then I found one that moved. . .

These must actually exist, then, or else animatronics has been taken to a level far beyond what I imagined. This primitive, struggling, fur-clogged thing, this thing that looks like it should have died out millions of years ago with the trilobite (in fact it even looks like a trilobite) is an animal so primitive, so small-brained, so stupid, that when you lift it off the ground it keeps working its feet because it thinks it's still walking.

OK, so having proven it exists and isn't just some taxidermic nightmare, I had to Wiki it (my main source of knowledge because I am incredibly lazy), and found the following:

Pink fairy armadillo

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Pink fairy armadillo[1]
Conservation status
Data Deficient (IUCN 3.1)[2]
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Cingulata
Family:	Dasypodidae
Subfamily:	Euphractinae
Genus:	Chlamyphorus Harlan, 1825
Species:	C. truncatus
Binomial name
Chlamyphorus truncatus Harlan, 1825
Pink fairy armadillo range

The pink fairy armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) or pichiciego is the smallest species of armadillo (mammals of the family Dasypodidae, mostly known for having a bony armor shell). It is found in central Argentina, where it inhabits dry grasslands and sandy plains with thorn bushes and cacti.

The pink fairy armadillo is approximately 90–115 mm (3.5-4.5 inches) long, excluding the tail, and is pale rose or pink in color. It has the ability to bury itself completely in a matter of seconds if frightened.
It is a nocturnal animal. It burrows small holes near ant colonies in dry soil, and feeds mainly on ants and ant larvae near its burrow. Occasionally, it feeds on worms, snails, insects and larvae, or various plant and root material.

The pink fairy armadillo spends much of its time under the ground, as it is a "sand swimmer" similar to the golden mole or the marsupial mole.^{[citation needed]} It uses large front claws to agitate the sand, allowing it to almost swim through the ground in a manner reminiscent of swimming through water. It is torpedo-shaped, and has a shielded head and back.

It took me a long time to figure this one out. This isn't a pink fairy armadillo, or any sort of armadillo.  AT ALL. This is some sort of Peruvian jello mold. Take a look at those feet - they're made out of cantaloupe spears. Carmen Miranda could wear this thing on her head! Such internet hoaxes should be outlawed, as they only choke my evenings with dross.

Worse horrors awaited me. Salamanders. Giant salamanders. Giant salamanders that thrashed violently in people's arms. Salamanders that attacked. This one looks like a mammoth Chee-toh or a pizza gone terribly wrong. Except it seems to be made out of some sort of vinyl.

These things are so primitive they haven't changed in a few gazillion years, and were already sliming around (why??) when the dinosaurs roamed. One does wonder, at times, how all this stuff happens, all the different species, some of which are so damned odd, if it's really all due to natural selection or some kind of sorcery.

A giant salamander on the dinner table.

There's even a corporation looking after these guys.

When I was a kid, I always wanted a newt, a toad, whatever I could catch that crawled or slithered. I would have loved to collect a salamander, but I never saw one, just read about them. Now I realize I was saved by the grace of God, by a divine Providence that snatched me out of the path of the Behemoth. What would these things eat? Why do they exist at all? What is evolution all about, and why is ANY of it here, when we started off as nothing?

If the salamander knows, he's not telling us.

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