Title: Swallows over Field

Medium: Oil on board

Size: 15.5 in x 11.5 in.

Walkabout

Just look at all the lush skunk cabbages swamp lanterns and bracken fern!

Oregon grape. The low growing variety.

You can see the contrast between the new leaves I'm holding and the old leaves (darker). The old leaves are tough. The new leaves are very tender. Very good eating. Lemony-sour-tart-twang. And very good for you.

Good old vanilla leaf. The sight of them always sings to me of the PNW. You dry these leaves and the smell is glorious (hence its alternative name: sweet-after-death). Their white stamens also smell wonderful.

A long while since I laid down in the deep grass. That's an old apple tree. Its branches reach over the spot where I took the pic.

Everything I know about the desert
was taught by Gary Larson: two men
crawling on their fours with thirst
over a vacant tract, collide head first,
with all the white page space about them.

Four square absurdity, instant as ink
the comfort of scenario's remove,
cacti and cow skull: that what else occurs
in a desert? Impossible things on cue,
beaten adrift like the dance of side-winders

shaped to the endless, beveling dune
and vapours that writhe from the changing brink,
take place at the place of the far, far side,
where heads that bump and how do you do's
are anciently surfeit as kitchen sinks.

Monday Links

Catholic in Brooklyn writes very well about the truth that Christianity is about dying. Mark Mallett has a very helpful post about the simple threefold foundation to building the house of peace. Heather King writes in honour of the feast day of St. Damien of Molokai. Bill Still covers a great speech made by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Paul Stilwell reveals an astonishing bread hack that you just have to see to believe. John O'Brien has an excellent review of the Russian film The Island. Actually, all his film reviews are great.

Try this amazing bread hack!

 So you have a loaf of bread and it's not been sliced!

 So you take a knife. This is key. It should be a serrated knife. It works like a saw. Awesome!

And you draw the blade over the loaf of bread, back and forth, back and forth.

Eventually it makes a slice of bread.

So amazing.

Just wait until you see my amazing selfie stick hack. It's awesome!

The new Roswell photos

Face it people - all you UFO hopefuls. Learn to see something that is staring you in the face. The so-called alien bodies from the Roswell crash site were the bodies of human beings. They were not extra-terrestrials. They were human beings subjected to experimentation.

People want to reject this immediately as too far-fetched. For many, it is more far-fetched than saying they were aliens. Yet something as destructive and demonic as the atom bomb was made, and dropped - twice - in 1945. Why is it so hard to believe that extensive, dark, cruel human/genetic experimentations were being carried out, with horrific accomplishment, in those years and earlier?

A great thwack of Catholics online give their wholesale trust over to the voices of bloggers, columnists and internet personages claiming to see the truth of our times, rather than trusting in the voice of the shepherd who has been given to us for these times, Pope Francis.

Contrarily, as we have seen, these dupes actually posit the pope as either the source, cause, conspirator, enabler - what have you - of all that makes them "duty-bound" to speak out. In fact, they are rejecting the shepherd that has been given to them. For them, the reality of the Catholic faith is just as much "only when convenient" as the polyester pant suit bongo player.

This truth is simply astonishing when you think about it.

Anyhow, I thought this post by Steve Kellmeyer from a few weeks back was excellent on what exactly is the purport and purpose of certain online petitions: Shilling for Donors.