A Most Unpleasant Owl

As you know, I tell you every time I read a book with an owl in it. Why? I guess because I've been doing it for more than 10 years and there is no way to stop. Now, the moment I picked up a book by Salvador Dali, I felt a 98% certainty it would have an owl in it. But little could I have known it would be an owl of such a thoroughly unpleasant mien. This owl was a vision of Dali's, I guess we could say. It appeared on people's heads. It was, if I recall correctly, a kind of hallucinated figurine, and on the owl's own head was... how I can say this? Some poop. Poop adorned the head of the owl. Poop of a particular... no, I shan't continue. What am I, the author of Till Eulenspiegel? Ha ha, you guys know what I'm talking about.

Invisible Obelisk

I don't "blog" anymore, but by no means did I want you to think that McNeil has stopped looking for obelisks. He sent me the above photo (seemingly from a television show called UFO) and requested a glowing orb to put on his desk. He also told me to "note the obelisk." Friends, I looked all over and didn't see the obelisk! I communicated my alarm to McNeil! I concluded - too hastily - that the thing resembling a crystal ball was the "glowing orb," not the white circle, which, as I examined it, looked so flat and artificial that I decided McNeil has placed it there through computer wizardry, in order to mark the obelisk in question. I furthermore concluded, on the basis of zero evidence, that McNeil had meant to draw a red circle (or suchlike) around the obelisk but had, instead, made an opaque white circle by mistake. Confronted with my theory, McNeil was appalled. The flat white circle was indeed the object of McNeil's admiration, a supposed "glowing orb" original to the work as televised. The obelisk, he said, was on the left front corner of the desk (from the POV of someone sitting behind it). Then I saw it! And if you look, you can see it too. Maybe you have already seen it with your fresh young eyes that are not yet old and weak like mine. In conclusion, I mentioned to McNeil that the white dot looked like something that may have been placed there by censors to cover a large hole in the seat of the man's pants. Yes, McNeil replied facetiously, that would explain the slide whistle sound effect when the man turned around. And now you know why I don't "blog" anymore.

Corn Bath Danger

Megan and I are reading the autobiography of Salvador Dali, in which a young Dali decides to take a bath in a bushel of raw corn. We talked about that a lot, and I was put in mind of the film WITNESS, which features death by corn. I think it's corn. Anyway, someone is suffocated in a silo. Megan and I discussed the dangers of grain storage, which are serious and numerous. Megan dug around (as she does) and eventually sent me this article ("click" here), which I admired for the way it really gets across the temptation of a good corn bath before plunging into the terrifying downside, and also for the name of one of its interviewees, Bodie Blissett, who was buried up to his neck in corn.

Famously Complicated Feelings

From that Olga Tokarczuk book: "There are dogs on leads, monkeys in chains, much-loved parrots in silver-plated cages." Now, when you have that many monkeys and that many dogs, it seems inevitable that one of the monkeys will ride one of the dogs. Does Tokarczuk make such an interaction explicit? I regret to say she does not. Or perhaps "regret" is the wrong word, given the "blog's" famously complicated feelings about monkeys riding dogs.