News Flash: I Am an Old Man

But I traipse musically through the briar patch. Sometimes.

Not right now. No way.

Joanne, thank you for the flower on Facebook.

I can't do applications on there but thanks. Also if you message me there I'm not ignoring you. I can't go on Facebook. It drives my computer nuts.

Facebook has the same effect on my computer the vacuum cleaner has on my cat.

I'm tired and didn't sleep long enough so I'm going to try to go back to sleep, but I signed on to fact check something so....

I see so many interesting things in my blogroll right now I want to read. Everybody is making great and also important posts (I saw a few worrisome political type dealios like at Nicholas's blog). And lots of great poetry stuff.

I was supposed to be writing something, but Antiques Roadshow was on and I can't walk away from that!

Ms. Zaffino, thanks for your comment and hello! Are you a bloggeuse? I'm a bloggeur. Your Facebook photo is tres glam!

Antiques Roadshow taught me about Boston's Saturday Evening Girls.

Two adorable tiles (one of two geese) produced by the girls were fetching a handsome seven thousand dollars.

They had a really great old etching from 1630, a postage stamp sized Rembrandt auto-ritrato.

He had the strangest expression....sort of a hybridization of the grotesque and the comic.

It made you like him as a person.

He was twenty-four then.

That was appraised at sixty thousand.

Then they weirded me out because they appraised this crafts item from 1993. It was a chair made out of sections of a tree, like George Nakashima used to make. I saw a moving documentary on him one time. His daughter continues his work, and she speaks so well of her father and his spirit. This chair wasn't by a well regarded or well-known craftsman. It wasn't an antique, so I didn't get why they covered it. They did stress that the market had shifted rapidly in favor of these chairs in just a few months time and the appraisal revealed a decent appreciation on the man's minimal investment in the chair. I just didn't get why they even included it.

I mean I guess I could have just brought Dru's water bowl or his Mizrahi placemat from Target that he likes to look at when he eats, and had them appraise it.

They closed with a gorgeous Stella painting of a fish which was a tropical hotbed of colors and had great angular forms throughout.

The woman had had it appraised around seven thousand dollars, but the new appraisal was for a quarter of a million dollars.

I would like to do a film where you just showed people's responses in the seconds after they've received the appraisal but when they are silent.

Because you see something very interesting happening in their faces in those moments.

They are usually old people, and suddenly they look very mortal.

The thought of all this money has made them realize how futile everything is, and how much work will be required to get at the money, how this will need to be protected and insured and all that bother, that it's another process which will tire them out most likely, or they're worried about what their children will do when they find out about this money.

They pretend to be excited but often they look so tired suddenly.

If you zoom in on their features, they will start to have the seriosity of the other Rembrandt figures. The ones with which we are more familiar.

Young people are different. They can get all WOO HOO! and OH MY GOD, THAT'S AWESOME!

One guy had to be a hustler pawning his late john's Tiffany Lamps. I could smell it a mile away. He got a $200,000 appraisal. Somebody call Forensic Files.

There were some other pretty items and then the usual stupid items like Confederate Army items.

If I were the appraiser, I would say: "Your great great grandfather was a racist and a scumbag. NEXT!"

Oh hey, Chelsea Lately is one of the funniest things on television. She's a terrible interviewer (she talks over her guests constantly!) but I think she's the funniest person on television. And her round table quick fire discussions with other stand ups are classics.

I felt I had to read something innocent earlier tonight so was looking for good children's literature.

I needed a rainbows and unicorn night.

But it ended up being Caperucita Roja (Little Red Riding Hood in Spanish) and C.S. Lewis.

I wanted to comment up a bunch of C.S. Lewis passages but I'm too tired and there are other things to do.

I think he was a good man and there were some really moving passages, and some deeply sophistical passages. It was a daybook with quotations, and I suspect they were a vast cross-section chronologically, because some of them seemed to be written by a young man and the logic was rather muddy. He was especially moving on friendship. Didn't Bronk write a celebrated book on friendship? The excerpts from Screwtape were still funny. I haven't seen that book in like a quarter century. I remember being greatly amused by it when I was in my teens.

I saw some hideous shirts I own in my closet and I thought wouldn't it be great fun to do a site called Horrid Shirts?

God knows I see so many in the thrift stores on my rounds.

I would hunt out the Crafts Store one-of-a-kind specials, the Bedazzled, the sequined Christmas nightmares, the Christian hellfire sermons on t-shirts, etc.

Oh, I'm sure somebody has a site like that. Probably several sites like that out there.

I flirted with the idea of doing one with odd book titles and covers.

I have bought a few twenty-nine cent specials at the thrift store, just because of the unbelievable missed sexual puns in the titles.

I'll have to digicam some of them sometimes. Some you just can't believe slipped through. Usually these are religious books. I guess the virtuous minds don't think like the rest of us do. Sigh.

I need to go mack on Morpheus.

Even my spleen is tired.

And you know that's the last part on me to go.

Like duh.