Year's End

I start with a lie. That's too strong. A falsehood. How about a miscalculation? The year has not ended. That's a fact. We are not at year's end, not fully, not yet, not now. I start with the half life of a half truth. I start with a start, a stutter start. I stutter my strut of a start because I have nothing to say, nothing to say except to lament the rubble and ruins, the strewn limbs and blood rivers of Putin's nightmare backward lurch into history. To think that World War Two was over? And to honor, I can't find proper synonyms, the bravery, heroism, patriotism, valor of Ukraine, its people amidst the smoldering slaughter, that mother on a gurney outside the bombed maternity ward they later said she and the baby died, that image to remember, like the silent scream freeze-frame shot to the head in Saigon, or the white man brandishing the US flag against the restrained black man, the soiling of old glory, Stanley Forman, and so on, ad nauseam, till death do us unite. Even before year's end I want to flip the calendar, turn the page, close the books, hurry before there's more, hurry up, there's time, and that's both horrifying and hopeful is it not.

Heaven's (Not Hell's) Bells

Although I consider Edgar Allan Poe vastly overrated, maybe he was onto something concerning the magic of bells.

A story in The New Yorker of April 27, 2009, about the bells of Russian monasteries, states:

"The curative and purifying properties of church bells are elaborated on numerous Russian Orthodox Web sites."

According to The New Yorker article, folklore, popular belief, and legend assert that the ringing of church bells:

• prevented the spread of plague and epidemics
• provides pain management
• kills flu viruses
• produces ultrasonic waves that "curdle the proteins of jaundice-causing virus cells"
• combats mental retardation in children
  
• encourages flax to grow (what exactly is flax? it was always listed as a major product in fourth-grade geography)
• purifies the air by activating super-lightweight microleptons
• wards off hurricanes
• dispels radiation
• relieves constipation
• stimulates erotic control centers in the cerebral cortex
• enables baseball hitters to hit more home runs
• turns Rush Limbaugh into a rational commentator

Okay, okay, so the last four bullet items were ringers (HAHAHAHAHAHA!) put in there by Pavel Laughorismovich Kokonuts. Just wanted to see if you were still reading.

Hey, even if half those things are true, ring away, ring my chimes!

(Remember The Gong Show?)

Spell Right. . . .Or Die!

Spell right . . . or die!

I guess that's how it would've been in the Old School days of Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia. These days, if you screw up your spelling or grammar, you're just sent back to school. . . .rather than sent to a gulag in Siberia.

The governor of Lenin's hometown region of Ulyanovsk (who presumably is a flawless speller and grammarian) was so fed up with bad spelling and grammar that he ordered some 2,000 bureaucrats back to school.

What next? Serial killings as punishment for the the abuse and misuse of serial commas? Would these be commakaze missions?

What awards go to the "Most Imporved Speller"?