Quote of the Day

Even if one's whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change.

--Henry Miller

via

Photo of Henry Miller from Banned Books.

We can't all be Queen.

Source: mapetitemelancolie.tumblr.com via drawdrawdraw on Pinterest

Queen Marie of Romania, ca 1920

Life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Roumania

-- Dorothy Parker (via and hat-tip to Deni McInyre @Pinterest)

p.s. I think I need to become a member of The Dorothy Parker Society.

"Climate change is not a joke."

From the British Museum: On this day in 1611, Shakespeare's The Tempest was first performed.

Title page of the First Folio

Christopher Plummer as "Prospero" in The Tempest (2010 Stratford Shakespeare Festival)

Photo credit here.

Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor's 2010 film

John Cassavettes (with Susan Sarandon as Ariel) in 1982's loose adaptation by Paul Mazursky. Image via

John Gielgud in Peter Greenaway's quirky Prospero's Books (1991)

The Goblin Spider

From the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum:

Noted writer and linguist Lafcadio Hearn’s 1910 English translation of the ancient Japanese ghost tale, The Goblin Spider, transports children of all ages to an exotic world of samurai warriors, haunted temples, and monstrous goblin spiders.
According to the tale, there used to be many goblin spiders in Japan. During the day, they looked just like common spiders—but late at night, they transformed into huge spiders with bulging eyes and menacing pincers. Capable of terrible things, these monstrous arachnids also had the magical power of taking human shape.

Sadly, no credit given for the illustrator.

L' Haunting

Henri le chat, on Halloween.

"Here's the last thing that I'd like to throw out there before we all go 1856 all over for a while..."

Excellent post from Charles P. Pierce:

Here's the last thing that I'd like to throw out there before we all go 1856 all over for a while. This entire campaign has been fought out over the issue of whether or not we are all members of a viable political commonwealth with implicit mutual obligations to act through our government — a self-government that is, or ought to be, the purest creative project of that commonwealth — for the common good, or whether that government is a some sort of alien entity repressing our fundamental entrepreneurial energy. Over the next few days, I believe, we are going to see that argument brought to the sharpest point possible. If you want to see how this event will "impact the election," look to what answer to that question emerges from the storm. It will tell us a lot about the election, and about ourselves.

Read more here.

Hurricane Sandy from space

Stay safe, everyone.

Ballet at 1000 frames per second

via Swiss Miss

Vintage

via the New Yorker

Uh-oh

Just in time for Halloween!

From Mother Jones:

Experiments on mice have shown that it is possible to rejuvenate the brains of old animals by injecting them with blood from the young. [Saul Villeda], who led the work, found that blood from young mice reversed some of the effects of ageing in the older mice..."Do I think that giving young blood could have an effect on a human? I'm thinking more and more that it might," said Villeda.

I was sure this was the plot of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie with Tor Johnson, but I was wrong.




It was Bela Lugosi!