Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility

Oh, so you say you CAN handle the kind of stuff McNeil and I talk about? All right. I'll give you the straight skinny, and then you'll be sorry. So McNeil sends an email: "Reading The Apocryphon of John and it's blowing my mind. BOOOOOM. In a way it makes the vicissitudes (!!look at my big word there!!) of the OT God a little easier to understand. I said a little. And I'm talking bout the Monad, y'all...which is what people really should be worshipping, I guess." All right! So it looks like McNeil is starting a cult and trying to get me to worship "The Monad." So I'm like, hey, I think I have that book around here somewhere. But I look all around and I can't find it. BUT THEN! I remember an anthology called THE GNOSTIC BIBLE, which is on a shelf behind glass, and I have to move my blood pressure machine to get to it, and I can barely be bothered to make the effort. Finally, I drag my old carcass over there and take it down and I'm like, hey! And I email McNeil: "one of the sections is called The Secret Book of John, which seems to correspond to the book you're talking about. For example, it mentions 'The One,' which a footnote explains is 'The Monad.' And so on. So let's get busy, Apocryphon style!" And there was some other stuff McNeil brought up about A.I., but let's not get into that right now. We have enough problems! Oh yeah, and McNeil had given me an assignment, which was to study "the passage about halfway through, maybe, where man is created. There is a long long list of people who worked on the project - and how they felt about it afterward." I still haven't done that. Sorry! So McNeil follows up with "There should be a place we meet and discuss the Apocryphon - a place like Omaha or Des Moines - and in a pergola near a nature preserve or something so it seems spiritual and also inexpensive. We could wear hats like they do in Masters of Atlantis." And I shoot back my own suggestion: Yankton, South Dakota! McNeil goes "At that pizza place you're obsessed with - but only if they can provide us with a SCIF." And I don't know what the hell a SCIF is and McNeil has to explain it to me. But about this pizza place... see, for my 60th birthday, I thought McNeil and I could meet at a pizza place I knew about through one tweet, back when twitter existed. The way I remember it now, this place had a pizza with crab, beef, and cheddar cheese on it, which was named (the pizza was) after Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Because you know how much they loved crab, beef, and cheddar cheese on a pizza! I even looked up local forms of entertainment and I think I found several casinos in the area. Alas, that plan came to nothing. A lot of things came to nothing that year. Some of you know what I'm talking about. Hey! Speaking of religion, I see that the announcement is up at Square Books: I'll be "in conversation" with Tom Franklin about his new novel DEVILWOOD in February! So I can finally tell you... remember when I said I was reading a manuscript with owl balls in it but it doesn't mean what you think it means? Well, that book with the owl balls in it is DEVILWOOD, as can finally be revealed. Owl balls!

The Short Version

You know, several days ago, McNeil and I had a pretty good thread going about James Franciscus, and in my heart I was like, "Oh, there's a rich vein of 'bloggable' material here." Then I was like, "Well, I better find a photo of James Franciscus, because no one knows who he is." Then I was like, "Gee, how am I going to explain what McNeil and I are talking about?" Then I realized that once I began explaining James Franciscus, I would have to explain a lot more things, and pretty soon I'd be explaining the universe. And then I got depressed. The short version is that McNeil got some information about a James Franciscus movie from one of his old books, but when he consulted the "internet" about it, he discovered that THERE IS NOT EVEN A SINGLE ALLUSION TO THIS MOVIE ANYWHERE ON THE "INTERNET." And then McNeil blamed Elon Musk for creating this new reality we live in, in which the James Franciscus movie McNeil wants to see has been erased from what we laughingly call "existence." We laughingly call it that! Laughingly! Anyway, the main thing is you know three things about me: I have a "daytime" book I read during the day. I have a "nighttime" book I read at night. And I have proven that every book has an owl in it. Therefore, it should come as no shock that yesterday during the day I found an owl in my daytime book and during the night I found an owl in my nighttime book. But let's dig deeper! Just like a burrowing owl! My daytime book is a Million Dollar Book Club selection by J. Hoberman, all about the avant-garde art scene in New York in the 1960s. In a footnote, I noticed a place called "The Night Owl Cafe." And I was like, "You can't hide from me in a footnote, owl!" So, at night, I'm reading... well, remember when I was reading that James Ellroy book while I took my blood pressure? And I chose it because it had a reliable-looking and charming spine? But I didn't really care for the words on the pages of the book itself? Anyway, I was in Square Books the other day and I bought the sequel (see also). So the narrator calls Richard Nixon a "foul owl on the prowl." A few pages later, someone calls our narrator a "night owl." And that reminded me of how James Ellroy seems to love the phrase "night owl." And who can blame him? I will conclude with the astonishing fact that in yesterday's reading, both my nighttime book and my daytime book namechecked the film THE CRY OF JAZZ (see also). All of which reminds me, Dr. Theresa says I'm supposed to take my blood pressure today.

Aquinas Mania!

I'm sure you've been keeping up with the adventures of Jerky the Li'l Jerk, that rascally rapscallion who has stolen America's heart by telling people to go to hell. In that case, there is no need to remind you of Jerky's recent encounter with Thomas Aquinas. In order to compose that little masterpiece, I first fetched my "concise translation" of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA. Well, friends, that "concise translation" was a little TOO "concise"! Ha ha, what a fix. So I had to crawl around on the "internet" in search of the mot juste, as I call it. Then I started thinking, "Jack," I started thinking, "why don't you have a COMPLETE edition of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA in several volumes like a normal person?" So I tracked down just such a set. I made it to page three of the first volume, you will be impressed to hear. And that's where I read about "the weakness of our intelligence, 'which is dazzled by the clearest objects of nature; as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun.'" As you can plainly see, due to my expert rendering of the punctuation, Aquinas is quoting from something there, which appears to be, based on his note, the METAPHYSICS of Aristotle. All right! That means that not only does the SUMMA THEOLOGICA have an owl in it, it borrows that owl from another work with an owl in it, a nesting phenomenon, if you will, which we have examined before, and I would include a "hyperlink" to prove it, but I'm starting to depress myself. And you! (Please "click" on this important correction.)

Of Donkeys and Robots

So I'm reading ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC and Gideon Bohak, the author, is telling of an "erotic spell" in which a charm is written on a piece of tin, to which he adds the parenthetical statement "it's a tin line between love and hate!" Let me explain. This is nothing like the Gideon Bohak I know. Well, there is a footnote in which he makes a fond, gently humorous allusion to his hometown. But the violent whimsy of "it's a tin line between love and hate!" is present nowhere else in this academic... some might say dry as burnt toast... work. Well! Gideon Bohak does favor a jaunty exclamation point in his parenthetical statements (as seen in the example already given), which might count as whimsy if you are a scholar of ancient esoterica. Before I continue exploring this thought, I want to say that I wonder what Gideon Bohak's editor thought of "it's a tin line between love and hate!" Did Gideon Bohak have to fight for it? I am developing an enhanced sense of respect for Gideon Bohak. Anyway, so, yes! In the very next paragraph we have an example of Bohak's penchant for parenthetical exclamation points. He has moved on to a spell which requires the magician (or is it the client?) to "take meat of a donkey in your mouth." I'm sorry I told you that. But I had to! Because Gideon Bohak presently adds the parenthetical statement that putting donkey meat in your mouth is "not very kosher!" Exclamation point his, I reemphasize. He goes on to examine cultural depictions of donkeys as "stupid, stubborn, and lazy," which reminded me, by way of contrast, of the other book I am reading right now, THE ILIAD, in which mules have been put forth more than once as some of the greatest animals you'd ever want to meet. They're always plowing fields faster than an ox, or pulling a big tree trunk down the side of a mountain. Those are the two things I can remember mules (in both cases, metaphorical mules) doing in THE ILIAD. Which brings me to another subject! Last night in bed, as I read THE ILIAD and Dr. Theresa worked a crossword puzzle, I suddenly shouted, "Hey! There are robots in this book!" Let's let that hang in the air for a while. Because I also want to say that I ran into Kelly Kornegay in Jackson, Mississippi, a couple of weeks ago, at the 50th anniversary party for Lemuria Books, which I didn't even tell you about, because why should you know every single thing that goes on in my life? Anyway, Kelly and I were talking about THE ILIAD, and she mentioned living in a new place where she can look out the window and see a donkey, and I got to tell her about the heroic mules of THE ILIAD. Pretty soon it got dark and Ace Atkins and I were standing in front of a stage watching 92-year-old bluesman Bobby Rush, of whom I took a photo with my very own phone and perhaps I will "post" it below. Also, there was a guy dressed as a cowboy who did some of the greatest dancing I've ever seen. He was up there all by himself dancing in his cowboy suit while opening acts played, and finally I thought, I should go dance with this guy! Let's get this party started! And Ace took a video of it, which I texted to Dr. Theresa (who had stayed home) so she could see my moves, and she immediately texted back "Have you been drinking?" And that's an interesting question but I bet you want to get back to the robots I read about in THE ILIAD last night. "They were made all of gold, but looked like living women." So you know I immediately thought of the DC comics characters the Metal Men, just as Homer intended. Furthermore, I checked Emily Wilson's endnote, and she calls them "robot women," so I'm not just coming to crazy conclusions. In fact, I think somebody installed A.I., because "They had a consciousness inside their hearts." And as I was lying there marveling about the golden robot women with consciousness in their hearts, I remembered thinking that I had noticed robots in the RAMAYANA as well. And I didn't just lie there and think about it for a change. I hauled my sorry carcass out of bed and went upstairs and found the RAMAYANA and refreshed my memory about these hydraulically powered automatons: "mechanical men, silently driven by falling water in some hidden way." And much like them, I am now running out of steam.

Crying Horses

Last night in THE ILIAD, these horses started crying. These were some upset horses, I tell you! "Hot tears flowed from their weeping eyelids to the earth." And such. I thought "Surely Emily Wilson will give us a footnote - or an endnote, to be precise! - about these weeping horses." But why did I want to be precise in the middle of that sentence? That's the real question. Precision is always a mistake. Anyway, I did check and she provides a note about how the horses' heads are bending so low in grief that their glorious manes get dirty dragging the ground, but nothing about their red hot tears of woe. Now, bear in mind, these are magic, immortal horses, so they have different standards than the common horse you rode to work today. I'm kind of slow with THE ILIAD because I get in bed at night and everyone immediately starts stabbing each other. In the book, I mean. I'm like, "Wow, these guys never stop stabbing. They love it!" And pretty soon I'd rather be asleep. Poor me! I'm as sad as a horse sometimes.

The Hoary Story

You know, whenever I think about the word "hoary," which I do several times a day, as we all do, I think of it in pejorative terms... in the sense, though they do not use the word "hoary," you will find in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, when its characters quote what is, ironically (?), a hoary chestnut: "That gag's got whiskers on it." This, to me, these whiskers, these regrettable whiskers, this, they, they bespeak hoariness. If I were in a middle school essay contest about "What Hoariness Means to Me," I would quote, "That gag's got whiskers on it." BUT! All right, I'm reading ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC by Gideon Bohak, and Professor Bohak has used "hoary" twice so far, at least twice that I've noticed, and both times, he seems to mean it in a nice way! So maybe I have "hoary" all wrong, like everything else. Okay, so the other thing is, I'm reading in ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC about a certain root that will kill you if you pluck it out of the ground, due to its magical powers, so what you do is, well, you trick an innocent dog into doing your deadly dirty work for you. I don't like that. I don't like it one bit! But as I was reading it, I thought, "Hey! I already know about this magic root!" And the footnote informed me that the anecdote was extracted from a book by Josephus I have already read. It just goes to show you the benefit of reading mostly ancient things for a long time: pretty soon, you will be reading the same stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over because you have sucked out all the juices of antiquity, leaving nothing but the bone-dry husk. So that's something. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize for a second time that I am not in the manosphere (I read somewhere that the manosphere loves to contemplate ancient times with ugly little smiles on their stupid faces).

It Bleeped

Reading Tacitus, I get to a part where this guy dreams there's gold buried under his field. So he runs up to Nero like Chicken Little and says "There's gold in my field!" You can see where this is going. There's no gold. And Nero... well, you know how Nero is. Anyway! So! The translator, A.J. Woodman, is crazy in love with footnotes. There's hardly a page without multiple footnotes at the bottom... or "foot." And are his footnotes dry? I don't know. Is the Sahara dry? I'm assuming the answer is yes, although I can easily imagine a big smart nerd who would tell me otherwise. Anyway, A.J. Woodman's footnotes are so dry they make the Sahara look like the grotto at the Playboy Mansion, as Dennis Miller would put it, causing us all to throw up. But in this singular case, A.J. Woodman's footnote is... whimsical? I don't know what it is. Here, I'll quote it: "'Dream guided treasure hunter to Roman coins' (headline in The Times [London], 11 December 1998)." So that footnote gives us nothing, really. That's not like A.J. Woodman! And really, the Roman coins found in 1998 could not be more different than the gold dreamed of by Caesellius Bassus, which was "not in the form of money but in a raw and ancient mass." (Also, unlike the Roman coins found in 1998, it didn't exist.) I guess A.J. Woodman just thought it was a fun story. It's still a mystery, if so, why he suddenly and very uncharacteristically wanted to be "fun." And certainly it would be going too far to postulate that he put forth the headline from the Times of London as a counternarrative... as if to say, "Hey, sometimes a dream CAN lead you to buried gold! Never give up, kids!" I couldn't find the article (I didn't try too hard), but I found the same story reported in the Irish Independent a full day before the Times of London picked it up. Here's a paragraph: "'In my dream I could see myself in the middle of the field pulling up a haul of coins,' Mr Roberts (46), a plumber, told a treasure trove inquest in Newport, south Wales, yesterday. 'When I had the same dream again a few nights later I took a few hours off and went to the field. I took just two paces and my metal detector bleeped.'" A treasure trove inquest! I didn't know about those. You know what this puts me in mind of? The other day, McNeil told me he had dreamed of salmon patties. And that was weird, because the day before - that is, the day leading to the night of McNeil's dream - I had been thinking about salmon patties! AND... later that night (the night AFTER McNeil's dream), Dr. Theresa - having been privy to neither my salmon patty thoughts nor McNeil's salmon patty dreams - suddenly announced, "I'd like to make salmon patties!"

I Really Shouldn't Do This

Hey! So, you know, I'm reading THE ILIAD last night, because I'm the biggest egghead going, and Helen says "my dog-face self." And I'm like, "Whoa!" I'm like, "What's going on here?" I'm like, "Be nice to yourself, Helen! What can I do to help?" Also, I vaguely recall reading something about Helen comparing herself to a dog... where could it have been? In Emily Wilson's introduction to her translation of THE ODYSSEY? So I get up this morning and take THE ODYSSEY off the shelf and open to the exact page I was thinking of! Because I'm some kind of miracle man, everyone says so. Anyway, last night, I flipped to THE ILIAD's endnotes to see what "dog-face" was all about. Appended to the explanation was an incidental remark about Athena's usual designation as "owl-eyed." We all knew about that, didn't we? (See also.) So I said to myself, I said, "Hey! Are you going to put THE ILIAD on your famous list of books you've read with owls in them? Which consists of every book you have ever read? Because every book has an owl in it? It's just a fact of science!" And then I was like, "Hey! But that's only an endnote! So far, in the actual part of this translation you've read, Athena's eyes have been 'bright' and 'flashing' but not owl-like. So what's the plan? You're going to put THE ILIAD on your list WITH AN ASTERISK?" Because I was like "That seems crazy! You know Athena is going to be owl-eyed sooner or later! You would be a fool to put an asterisk on THE ILIAD. Why, you'd look like the biggest jerk alive! Nobody puts an asterisk on THE ILIAD, as Patrick Swayze famously said in DIRTY DANCING." So I'm going to go ahead and... look. This could easily cost me my "blogging" license. But I'm going to go ahead and put THE ILIAD on the list, without an asterisk. I know I'm taking a risk here. This is like betting the house on a spin of the roulette wheel! Oh my God! I can't believe how tense I am all the time! I live on the edge! And the taste of fear is delicious.

Judgment of the Flying Head

I know what you're wondering... did THE LOST STEPS by Alejo Carpentier have an owl in it? Let's look at the facts! No need getting emotional about it! Toward the end of the book we have "the flying heads with wings for ears of the Tierra del Fuego." Now! Could this possibly be the chonchón mentioned in THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT? You bet your ass it could! And, as I am sure you will recall, the translator of the latter work referred to the chonchón in a note as an "owllike creature." This is where things become complicated. For you see, the translator of THE LOST STEPS does not mention the flying heads at all. No, he is one of those "What is translation, anyway?" type guys, and he spends his entire translator's note wondering what translation is anyway. He can't figure it out! You know, one of those guys. This being the case, we cannot claim in any sense that "the flying heads with wings for ears of Tierra del Fuego" are perceived as "owllike" by either author or translator of THE LOST STEPS. It is therefore the decision of this court that THE LOST STEPS by Alejo Carpentier does not have an owl in it.

Only Vaguely Related

Well! You remember how I used to think I could read only one book at a time, and then something happened to me and I started shoving several books into my brain at one time like a monster. "This will interest you," I go on to say with the same accuracy as John Goodman in INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS: I have just now decided to categorize two of my "main books" as my "daytime book" and my "nighttime book." Bearing that in mind, I think you will enjoy "clicking" on the following "hyperlink" about how my daytime book and nighttime book, so dissimilar, as a rule, in genre and style, both mentioned Gogol withiin a 24-hour period, followed by a different daytime/nighttime pairing, similarly mismatched, that both mentioned British composer John Dowland. What times those were! I am sure you are still recovering from the shock. Well, now I am on yet another pair of daytime/nighttime books... one is, according to the back cover, "the best-known book by Cuba's most important twentieth-century novelist" and the other is (according to ITS back cover) "the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry." So imagine my giddiness at closing my daytime book at a mention of the "Chanson de Roland" - imagine it! - and opening my nighttime book to a mention of the "Chanson de Roland"!!! The latter shouldn't have surprised me, given the subject matter of that volume (THE SINGER OF TALES by Albert B. Lord)... in fact, the "Chanson de Roland" is mentioned on the back cover... but I don't think they told me much, if anything, about the "Chanson de Roland" at the University of South Alabama. We did read "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," which I suspect is only vaguely related, if at all. I know no one has made it this far, but I add for my own records that I started THE SINGER OF TALES because, I believe, Emily Wilson recommended it in the footnotes to her translation of THE ODYSSEY. (See also.)

From the Golden Toilet

Speaking of... what? Well, I know what I mean. Going from Queen Elizabeth in my fuzzy little brain to Dr. John Dee, I was put in mind of the chronovisor, a gadget McNeil emailed me about recently, under the heading "Forget the Golden Toilet." Perhaps I should explain the subject line of McNeil's email. Have you not heard of the famous artwork that was fashioned in the beauteous form of a golden toilet? McNeil and I used to amuse ourselves thinking of clever ways to steal the golden toilet, but then someone stole it in real life and ruined our fun. Now, according to all the newspapers, the golden toilet is back - and better than ever, I assume. But why am I telling you this? After all, McNeil has commanded me to forget the golden toilet – review the title of his email for confirmation - and think about the chronovisor instead. I’ll provide a "hyperlink" (here) so you can begin your own stupid journey of discovery about the chronovisor, a device that allows you to see back in time! Supposedly. Well, the idea behind the chronovisor put me in mind of my own big idea for seeing back in time, which involves an impossibly powerful telescope and a faraway galaxy. The narrator of Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN (or is it his hero de Selby, much quoted in footnotes?) has a related (?) notion involving an infinite series of mirrors, if I recall correctly, which the structure of this sentence throws into doubt. McNeil declared that my idea would indeed allow us to see ourselves eating lunch in high school, what a dream come true. Anyway, as our email chain became longer and longer, I kept misreading McNeil’s subject header as "From the Golden Toilet," which I finally told him. I think he said I could put that on his tombstone, but I countered that it might work better as the title of an edition of our collected letters.

Endnote Maniac

I didn't expect an owl in Kafka's diaries. I just didn't think of him as a nature guy, if you know what I mean, because I don't know what I mean, but luckily no one cares, and neither do I. Anyhow! There she was, suddenly, a teacher Kafka meets, "owlish young fresh face, full of lively tense features." Then, to my shock, the book was over a couple of pages later, but I should have known, because translator Ross Benjamin never met a sentence he didn't want to augment with an endnote. Did every endnote, however, serve an illuminating purpose? I read a lot of them, and I have to say no. But I like his energy!

Various Birds

I picked up a book called THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT by José Donoso, and I was like, hmm, can this obscene bird of night be an owl, perchance? But then I read the epigraph, which is by Henry James's dad, and he is giving his sons some life advice, including "The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters." Thanks, Dad! (I recall while typing this that some kind of weird monster bird of the psyche attacked Henry James's father in a novel by Colm Tóibín and also, presumably, in real life.) So last night I was in bed reading THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT and I came across "the ugly chonchón of ill omen." So I was like, "Hey, sweetie, look on your phone and tell me what a chonchón is." Dr. Theresa, who was also lying there reading, picked up her phone and looked up the chonchón. She said - and here I paraphrase freely - "It's a head that flies around by flapping its big ears like wings," which was pretty dang close to how it had been described in the book. I mean, exactly, really. "A horrible head would fly through the air, trailing a long mane of wheat-colored hair... flapping huge sinewy ears that were like bat wings." I flipped to the TRANSLATOR'S NOTE at the end of the book, in which Megan McDowell refers to the chonchón as an "owllike creature," and, as you know, that's good enough for me. Though maybe I should put an asterisk on it for now. Which reminds me! I finished that Julian Barnes novel and I didn't see any owls in it, but there were some luminous geese... I should say, "Luminous Geese," as he afforded them the dignity of proper nouns. As a person who plopped luminous owls into his second book, I took special note of the Luminous Geese. (See also.)

Sitting in a Big Owl

Well, I ordered and received a book called THE SURVIVAL OF THE PAGAN GODS, of course. See, Kitty Mrosovsky often mentioned this guy Jean Seznec in her "Notes to the Translation" of THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTONY. I don't think it's the same book of his she was talking about, though. Or maybe it is. All I know is that the cover seemed to show a king and a queen sitting in a big owl. Like Pee Wee and Simone in their dinosaur! A big owl head, I should say, not like the big owl at that boy's camp for troubled billionaires. "Hmm!" I thought. "I wonder if this book has an owl in it!" Because I wasn't sure that thing was an owl. You got this queen and king in their owl head, and over here there's some devils poking a guy in the neck with a pitchfork, and down here I thought I saw a three-headed lion (with dragon scales?), but once I checked the fine print on the back cover and saw that the illustraion represented Pluto and Prosperina, it all came together, and I was like, I guess that three-headed thing is Cerberus. On either side of old Cerberus, you got a lady in a hennin playing a musical instrument. This one doesn't look too happy about it. This other one doesn't seem to mind. I believe she's gone and got herself a many-stringed instrument capable of all modes, such as Plato (not Pluto) so despised - I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a viola da gamba. Not to be confused with what we know as an everyday viola, PLEASE! Get real. But none of this rigorous analysis tells me if that's an owl they're sitting around in, or if there's an owl anywhere in the book. I thought I could cheat and check the index for Minerva. She always has an owl hanging around! What a nut! But I don't know, there are so many entries for Minerva, and I'm so tired.

Gasp!

Yesterday, I was sitting in my favorite chair, watching a movie called YOUNG BESS, which I had recorded off of TCM. It wasn't the most interesting movie ever made, and my eye wandered to the side table, where THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTONY was just lying there. I thought, and may have muttered half-aloud, "Well, this book has every kind of animal in it, including some that don't exist, but no owls! And here I am almost at the end of it." Indeed, friends, I was closer to the end than I knew: many of the remaining pages were taken up by "Notes to the Translation." (A wonderful translation by Kitty Mrosovsky, I should add!) There were but three scant pages of the text itself to go! Anyhow, with the movie still playing, I opened it up, and right there, on the third page from the end, there were owls! Owls! Reader, I actually gasped. I gasped at the owls. I don't think I gasp very often. But maybe I am going around gasping all the time without knowing it. This time, I noticed. Nor were they just any owls. They were "owls with snakes' tails." Now, that's something you don't see every day, brother.

Sex-Crazed AI

I guess you want to know how my project is going, the one where - ever since McNeil found a former outside "blog" "link" to a literary treasure that had been salaciously commandeered by sex-crazed AI robots (FOOTNOTE! I originally titled this "post" "What's Up With Zombies," going so far as to research whether or not "With" should be capitalized in a title, before changing it to "Sex-Crazed AI," which I felt would "generate" more "clicks") - I am slowly "clicking" on every previous "blog" "link" to make sure that insidious zombie "links" are replaced by a wholesome alternative. So far I've looked at between 250-300 "posts," I estimate, out of 6910, as of this one. So it's going to take a while. I have to say that I can't believe I've "posted" just 6910 times so far. It feels like 691,000. What a wasted life. But that's not your problem! Oh, as I go through these old "posts," I am also deleting any image, or dead spot where an image used to be, that was originally acquired by what I later learned (around 2008?) was the ignorant and problematic method of "stealing bandwidth." Very often, as a result, if you "click" on an old "post" (I know you won't! Partly because you don't exist), you will see former me excitedly advising you to check out a real groovy accompanying image that isn't there. You know what? Who cares?

The Smiling Accusation

Look, I've fulfilled my duty 100% by telling you about the character in THE SCARLET RUSE by John D. MacDonald who says "I look like a big goggly owl." Yes, a subsequent owl has appeared in the text, but our contract states that I am under no obligation to tell you about it. HOWEVER! It's the same character talking about owls again. This time, she is with Travis McGee's sidekick, who she says is "smiling at me like some kind of owl." She must have owls on the brain. Unlike me. NOW! Over the years, we have collected here quite a trove of owl imagery, and owls have been accused of a lot of weird things by authors of varying insight and ability, but as I search the files, I cannot find a previous example in our catalog of anyone ever thinking of an owl as smiling. I am ready to be corrected! In any case, you can see why I had to attach this footnote. We are constantly making new discoveries in the area of literary owl usage.

Ice-Cream Technology

I know everyone will be excited to learn that I finished reading this Henry James novel. I skipped almost all of the footnotes, but I am glad I happened to glance at this one: "American ice-cream technology and distribution far surpassed British."

Old "Blog" Business

Now it is time for the worst part of the "blog," which I enjoy even less than you do - the time when I babble about some fact I just discovered that should have gone into the cigarette lighter book I wrote, which was published in 2016, so it just doesn't matter, so why bring it up? Yes, though I don't "blog" anymore, there are certain pieces of "blog" business that return to haunt us. So, last night I happened to be finally reading the memoirs of President U. S. Grant, in a glossy, maniacally annotated hardcover, which I purchased at Square Books for a no-doubt princely sum long forgotten. In late 2017! So even then, nearly two years after the publication of my so-called cigarette lighter book, it all would have been for nothing. Like everything! So that's no surprise. Anyhow, Grant has some things to say about tobacco smuggling operations between Mexico and the USA in the late 1830s (maybe? The book is big and heavy and sitting in the other room and I'm tired), and about the popularity of cigarettes at that time in general, which (the latter) is a subject that vexed me during my research for the cigarette lighter book. I suddenly realized one day, whilst mooning away at my writing desk, that I needed to know about the history of cigarettes. Otherwise, I might accidentally describe a cigar lighter, wasting everyone's valuable time! I'd hate to tell you, even if I knew, how many hours I brooded about the differences between a cigar and a cigarette. What I liked about the cigarettes that Grant was going on and on about was the corn husks they were rolled in. That put me in mind of the first possible recorded cigarette, at least as far as I could tell on a quick deadline, which (the cigarette) had been coincidentally offered to a travler in Mexico... in 1518! Oh, how my little heart pitter-pattered as I ran to the shelf whereon sat the seldom-opened book I wrote about cigarette lighters. After some scuttling around, I found the passage, but a telltale ellipsis, the lazy typist's best friend, magaged to obliterate the part of the sentence that I vaguely recalled might have had corn husks in it. Oh, wouldn't that have been something, though? My corn husk research might have changed the world, if only I had tried harder.

Sitting

I've been sitting on this for a while. Yes, yes, checking my records, I see that on August 2 of this year, I became fascinated by wombats for a couple of hours. As a result, I "tweeted" on the subject, to which someone responded with the fact that Dante Gabriel Rossetti (pictured) kept wombats as pets. Naturally, I scurried around the "internet," seeking corroboration, which I found immediately, via a scholarly article, which quoted a poem about wombats by Mr. Rossetti. In the poem, Mr. Rossetti compares wombats favorably with owls and bats (two creatures often linked in literature, as we have seen, though seldom in the company of wombats). As you well know, I no longer "blog," although I am required by state law to maintain my famous list of books with owls in them. However! The article had no footnotes, as I recall, and now I am much too tired to check. So I have no way of knowing if the wombat poem (which appeared in a letter) was ever published, either in a book of Rossetti's poetry or in a book of his correspondence, or whether the author of the article was just rummaging around in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's things, looking for wombat information, a quest to which his life is no doubt devoted.