Saturday Morning Amuse Bouche

This is how I know there is a God. Because there is no reason why making extreme art with sheep dressed in LED saddles helps us evolutionarily. It's just awesome for awesome's sake, which is the best kind of awesome.



P.S. I am going to marry one of those shepherds, if he will have me, and we and our children will make extreme sheep art for the rest of our born days.

Updated: Let's Go Mets! (See Y'all Tomorrow)

I'm a Mets fan going to a Yankees game tonight, people, so I've no time for posting. I have an outfit to plan, and evil plots to hatch and implement.



Updated: Thanks to The Anchoress, I have discovered that the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton results are in, so if you like laughter with your literature, do go read the winning entries by clicking here.

Thoughts from Elsewhere

From C.S. Lewis:

In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely "First Servant." All the characters around him-Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund-have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his master's breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.

Indeed.

Ah! Sweet Cafe Con Leche of Life, At Last I've Found You

Morning perfection...

The only thing missing from this picture is the steamy goodness rising from the top.

It May Be Too Soon To Tell...

...but if this is true:

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists have developed a "trojan horse" therapy to combat cancer, using a bacterially-derived nano cell to penetrate and disarm the cancer cell before a second nano cell kills it with chemotherapy drugs.

The "trojan horse" therapy has the potential to directly target cancer cells with chemotherapy, rather than the current treatment that sees chemotherapy drugs injected into a cancer patient and attacking both cancer and healthy cells.

Sydney scientists Dr Jennifer MacDiarmid and Dr Himanshu Brahmbhatt, who formed EnGenelC Pty Ltd in 2001, said they had achieved 100 percent survival in mice with human cancer cells by using the "trojan horse" therapy in the past two years.

Then well done indeed!

May I Have a Word?

The book that sends me to the dictionary today is Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis. But first: I have decided that if I could write like any author who has ever lived, I would choose Lewis. Surprising, ne'st pas? But it's true. His language is modern, clear and strong, and his analogies are a source of terrible envy. They are razor sharp, and when he employs one, you always understand his concept better. He never wastes words or rambles (a terrible habit of mine), and though his writing is very rugged, he can still be beautiful.

So, something to consider today. Who would you write like if you were given the option?

In the meantime, Perelandra is no Herculean task like A Thread of Years, but I did have to look up mandrill, which Merriam-Webster defines as "a large baboon (Mandrillus sphinx syn. Papio sphinx) of central Africa west of the Congo River with the male having a bright red and blue muzzle."

The quote:

He remembers seeing the Enemy for a moment looking not like Weston, but like a mandrill, and realising almost at once that this was delirium.

The second item I had to research was not a quote but a poem, a reference to The Battle of Maldon. Here's the reference:

Once he was actually astride the enemy's chest,, squeezing it's throat with both hands and - he found to his surprise - shouting a line out of The Battle of Maldon...

Here's a bit o' the poem:

Now room is meted you, come swiftly to us,
Warriors to war. Only God knows
Who at the end shall possess this fight's field.

I don't know if those are the lines Ransom shouts out during his battle with the enemy, but they seemed appropriate. If you're curious, here's the whole thing.
It goes without saying that if I were to write like Lewis, I'd also need his prodigious smarts.

Awwww, shucks.

I just...I don't know. I just always liked this guy. He had real earthy American charisma.



Rest in peace, Billy.

Sunday Morning Palate Cleanser

Lovely story about a totally different pop star. Stevie Wonder last week:

My wife works at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta on the AFLAC Cancer Center. One of her patients is Leo, an 18-year-old kid with terminal cancer, and his dad told her early on that Leo is a huge Stevie Wonder fan.

Beth (the wife) works with Rock Against Cancer, and through their local volunteer and the Atlanta NBC station, she got in touch with Stevie's management ahead of the concert he played here last night. Leo and his family got to meet with Stevie before the show, and not only did Stevie walk out and dedicate the show to Leo, he brought the kid out onstage, sat him down on the piano bench next to him, and kept him there the entire show. We were up on the lawn (the Ampitheater at Encore Park in Alpharetta), and you could literally see the grin on the kid's face from way back there. They also had dinner together after the show.

Read the whole thing.

via The Corner