Jimmy Akins, a Catholic Evangelist, attends the world premiere of Jack T. Chick’s new film and meets the reclusive cartoonist. Of course, Catholics are the tools of Satan, in Chick’s worldview. It’s not hilarity that ensues, really, but I still found this fascinating. [via Monkeyfilter.]
Gathering Blooms
Max Hunter Folk Song Collection, at Southwest Missouri State University.
An old fave, forgotten due to sloppy bookmarking. Rediscovered when searching for versions of that great old folktune “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet,” penned by Marvin Blumgardner.
I suspect this of being a nom de guerre considering the song’s subject matter and central metaphor. The lyrics begin, “Death is an angel sent down from above, gathering blooms for the one that he loves*” and continue in that piously morbid vein for a tidy 2:54. The song has been recorded by several old hands (including the fantastic version by the Stanley Brothers that was my introduction to the tune).
Of course, “Blumgardner” could simply be a transcriptionist’s slip, considering that Marvin Baumgardner is also credited with the song, in more authoritative contexts.
*Actually, that’s how I recall the lyrics. In reality they run: “Death is an angel sent down from above; sent for the buds and the flowers we love.”
I heart bees
Wired News: I Love Bees Game a Surprise Hit. Anonymous ARG puppetmasters run three month game in support of Bungie/Microsoft game release Halo 2. Can Danelope catch up?
Dreams
I had a dream that I could see Mount Saint Helens from a public park here in Seattle. The mountain was steaming as it has been but also burping up rocks and ash, which you could see flying into the air and dropping down the sides of the mountain. Oddly, the mountain was visible through a break in a mountain range. More mountains appeared behind the volcano, in contrast to the volcano as it appears in real life.
The park itself was on a gentle slope, and seemed to be based on some of the pocket-sized parks built on scraps of land I’ve seen in cities like Boston and London. It was a traffic island type, an oddly shaped sliver of land defined by two converging streets. The surface of the park was contained and defined by a roughly built terrace of yellowish, flinty granite. On reflection the stonework appears to have been drawn from the now-shuttered ranger station at Mount Baker we visited this summer.
At the narrow tip of the park, the statue of George M. Cohan that resides in New York’s Times Square looked out over the shallow Seattle valley.