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The One Festival Where You Want It To Rain
Today is Rain Day in Waynesburg, PA.
Rain Day got its beginning in the Daly & Spraggs Drug Store, located in the center of Waynesburg. Legend has it that one day a farmer was in the drugstore and mentioned to Byron Daly that it would rain the next day, July 29. Mr. Daly asked him how he knew and he replied that it was his birthday and that it always rained on his birthday. He had a journal for several years in which he recorded the weather and always had noted rain on July 29th. Mr. Daly thought this was too sure a thing to let pass, so he started betting salesmen who came into his drugstore that it would rain in Waynesburg on July 29. The bet was usually a new hat, which of course he would win.
Every year, the town bets someone famous that it will rain, and usually collects a hat from them, because it nearly always rains, at least a few drops. Weather.com is calling for isolated thunderstorms, so it’s looking good for the festival!
Famous bettors in years past include the Three Stooges, Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali), Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, the Dixie Chicks, Johnny Carson, and Punxsutawney Phil, himself associated with another famous Pennsylvania weather-related phenomenon.
I haven’t been able to attend Rain Day festivities in years. Wish I could be home this year. Keep your fingers crossed for rain! And get your Rain Day gear here.
ZOMBIE WOMEN UNITE!!!!!!!!
UNLEASH THE FURY OF ZOMBIE WOMEN AS A MIGHTY FORCE FOR REVOLUTION!!!!!
Zombie women of the world, I ask you: why are we content to shamble aimlessly along behind our brethren, following them willy-nilly, eating the leftover brains, and cleaning up after they senselessly destroy some village? Would it kill them to take a turn minding the zombikins for a change? No, it would not. Because they are undead.
There I was just last week, shambling along after Nigel on Shakedown Street. Like he knew where he was going! “Would it fucking KILL you to stop and ask for directions?” I asked him for the eleventy-fucktillionth time. “I’m pretty sure we are shambling away from the Mutter Museum, not towards it.” I am sure you know what happened next. He just zombisplained me about zombie men’s superior shambling gait and kept on in the same direction.
Eventually we shambled into Rittenhouse Square, which is lovely, but definitely NOT the Mutter Museum. About the time Nigel was ready to embark upon the tenth shambling circuit of the park, hoping a sign for the Mutter Museum would appear, it occurred to me that I could just sit down on one of those darling benches in the park. I won’t lie to you: I’d taken notice of all the humans in the park and, feeling a bit famished, I wasn’t fancying another meal of leftover brains. I begged Nigel to stop the shambling and go with me but he just muttered “We’re making good tiiiiiiiiiiiiiime…..”
Hilariousity Break: Buying Phish Tix
So Mr. Z and I went to that Phish show last Friday night. We bought our tix for that show from a ticket liquidator online. Had to call them to confirm and all because it was last minute. They were all set to walk us through the VERY COMPLICATED PROCESS of opening the email, downloading the emailed tix doc, and printing it. First thing the person on the phone said was, “Hey Phish fan, are you ready to have fun? Are you doing ‘shrooms already?” (We were not, then or later.) Then he began talking very slowly and carefully to Mr. Z. “Do you have a computer? Do you know how to turn it on? Do you have email? Do you know how to open it? Do you have a printer? Do you know how to turn it on? Do you know how to connect your computer to your printer? Do you see the email from us in your email inbox? Do you know how to open the attachment?” and so on. It was hilarious. After we got off the phone we speculated that the ticket liquidator had plenty of experience talking quite a few seriously high Phish fans through the process of printing their last minute Phish tix.
Phish @ Camden 6/25/2010: A Brief Review
Phish, you were fabulously jamtastic, and I dearly loved that sweet cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man In Paris”, but I swear there were times when your light show made me feel like I was strapped in a chair next to Karl in Room 23. What can I say? I freely bought my own ticket.
Also: I neglected to bring along a hardhat, which would have come in handy for the glow stick hailstorm during your version of the opening movement of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Everybody looked like they were having fun and the glow stick tossing was random and joyous, so it was all cool. Thanks for the show.
Oh, P. S.: I know there are those who love Big Green Furry Monster From Mars – enough to fill whole amphitheaters – but that there is a migraine-inducer, boys.
Zuska’s Dreamy New Hunka Burning Love
oh. my. fucking. god.
I sooooooo wish I had thought of inventing FEMINIST HULK!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am in love with Feminist Hulk. In love. LOVE! Love, I say!
Hat tip Rebecca of Adventures in Applied Math.
UPDATE: Ms. Magazine interview with my new love!
How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend
Because sometimes I need to take a breather, here’s this post about fun stuff.
(with apologies to Carl Sandburg…)
Delfest jams on little mud feet.
It dances looking
over mountain and meadow
on singing multitudes
and then moves on.
I can’t believe I have to wait a whole nother year for Delfest 2011.
What is Delfest, you ask?
The Evolution of My Dream Technology
I’ve had versions of the same recurring dream/nightmare for decades. While I don’t particularly enjoy the dream, it is hilarious to me to reflect on how it has evolved over time to keep up with advances in technology in my waking life.
The dream always involves the urgent need to use a phone at some point. Why I need to use the phone, who I’m trying to contact, how I feel when I’m doing so, what I’m trying to communicate – these circumstances all vary. But commonly, I am unable to complete dialing or entering the number – I cannot put through the call.
When I first began having these dreams, the phone was rotary dial. Some of you reading this blog may never have had occasion to use one of these ancient devices. Usually, I would realize that I had not dialed one or more of the numbers all the way to the fingerstop, and would have to hang up and start over, again and again. Then I got my first pushbutton phone and the dream updated itself – now the problem became that I pushed buttons in the wrong sequence, or hit the button next to the one I intended to hit, and so had to hang up and start over, again and again. Eventually, cell phones entered my waking life and soon enough they showed up in the dream, too. Now the problem was the tiny keypad and my too-large fingers – hitting two keys at once, not being able to see the keys well, not being sure I had actually depressed a key, pressing a key and having it enter itself more than once – and thus having to hang up and start over again and again. Interestingly I never had dropped signal problems. The keypad, entering the numbers, being able to “dial” the phone number, remained the source of the frustration.
Last year I got an iPhone. It’s taken awhile, but the iPhone finally showed up in the dream. (Maybe it’s taken awhile because I don’t have the dream as often anymore. Thank you, decades of therapy!) Now the problem is that touchscreen – I touched the number, but did it actually enter? Did I hit two numbers at once? And I’m back to the entering the number in the wrong sequence frustration, as well as the multiple entries from one touch. But it’s all on a beautiful, lovely iPhone, so maybe at some point in the dream I can just tell myself “screw it, let’s forget the phone call and surf the web or check email!”
I’m not sure what you can possibly make out of this blog post, except the fact that I am very, very, very, very old.
A Rose By Any Other Name…Looks Less Thorny To American Eyes
I recently got the chance to view “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”. This is the best film I have ever seen in my life. It is not an easy film to watch. If you are a survivor of sexual abuse and want to see it, you may want to watch it with a trusted friend or two, with planned time afterward to help you process what you have seen. Terrible things do happen to the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, but the vengeance she exacts upon the evil-doers in the film is so perfect and so delicious and so right that you may be okay. Indeed, if men who so casually perpetrate violence against women had to worry about blowback like this, there’d be a helluva lot less of that shit going down. Which makes me sorta wish that this film would be required viewing for young women as a sort of training film: How To Deal With The Patriarchy 101. Ah, a girl can dream.
As you may well be aware, the Swedish title of the book that inspired the film – and of the film itself – translates literally as “Men Who Hate Women”. Now, that’s a perfectly good title, and in many ways far more apt for the film’s subject matter than GWTDT. But I suppose the powers-that-be decided that such a title just wouldn’t fly with American viewing audiences, even in the little arthouse theaters where this film is mostly showing. Why would that be?
Somebody Wants My Balls!
Technically speaking, I believe it’s my ovaries that are the proper object of envy, but no matter. Prof-Like Substance has spoken.
I’m going to try something a little different this week and actually do something organized, rather than just toss out anything that happens to be on my mind. I often get comments, here or IRL, to the effect of “how do you have time to blog?” or “Do you feel like blogging is a waste of time when you have so many other things going on?” Obviously, my answer is no, I don’t think it is a waste of time, but over the next few days I would like to articulate that a little more clearly in a series of four posts, entitled:
Work like a butterfly, focus like a goldfish.
Connecting the dots.
Getting pushed.
I wish I had Zuska’s balls.
I recommend you keep an eye on PLS’s blog this week (and thereafter), if you aren’t already doing so!
Bunny Rock in Zuska’s Garden
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