June 4, 2004

• Feel lucky?
  Well, do you?
  

    This entry was inspired by the following…
  1.  A British blogger’s comment today.  This man, feeling
  like a miserable failure himself, was cheered up by the following
  practical joke: “If really fed up you could try putting in, miserable failure, (no quote
  marks) into Google and pressing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.”

  2. The page, excerpts from
  which are shown  above, that you get if you put lucky (no quote
  marks) into Google and press the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

  3. My own entries of May 31 on Language Games and of June 1 on language and history,  Seize the Day and One Brief  Shining Moment.

  4.  The related June 1 entry of Loren Webster, Carpe Diem, on the Marilyn Monroe rose.  Images from Carpe and Shining are combined below:

  

  5.  The fact that the “day” to be
  seized in Language Games is numbered 22, and that on day 22 of November
  1963,  the  following died:

  C. S. Lewis
  John F. Kennedy
    Aldous Huxley.

  6. The fact that November 22 is the feast of  Cecilia, patron saint of music.

  7. Yesterday’s entry about the alignment of stars, combined with the alignment of Venus with Apollo (i. e., the sun) scheduled for June 8.

  All of the above suggest the following readings from unholy scripture:

  A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

  B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just
  to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on
  in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and
  went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the
  heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic
  tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I
  was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was
  information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where
  they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is
  found, and it was all information.”

  – Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

  C.  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in,
  lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it.  Live
  burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of
  arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their
  burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

  – Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

  • 11:22 am
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