ABAS ESNE GLEY AZOTH and the power of WORD

This isn't an abstruse prayer or some incantation from a wizard's manual.

These are considered words by Words With Friends, my not-so-secret addiction. Except for guff (and I had the wrong definition) and perhaps oasts and one or two others, I didn't recognize the following concantenations of vowels and consonants.

There must be a handful of word maniacs out there who know these are words and who might even know some definitions. Not I, said the cat. Meanwhile, we others can merely gawk:  

odyle waur

quelea coteau ono braxy hheze

oxo utevoera tooner qanat olla

skirr coloni tophes buhl

jora sike dedal feus

guff exon cexil litten vid

edg minify dawt gooral  botel

ratite naoi euoid nide

neuk reid tical adown

ryokan frag

guyot redd thacks

deash leu jarl nipa mun elhi

panne latu sones alular sozin mem

leu jurels hao azon dorr jun upo moai

Mako dhuti resh

lustra hod edg zamias

oasts pein

exon dawen roband oidia azine

eme cains

aa nonelite

gumutis exon

veejay urodele

disme mho fano mured rya
edh torc ghaut hacek ghaut keir
tuque avion linga snath biota yetts
teud yar nurl odyl ceil pules alvine
garget terbic tigon eyra

FASHIONASTY - a brief rant

Are we back to the 'fifties? As in nineteen fifties, with those imprisoning latex girdles, cashmere sweaters, tight frocks with short sleeves? Occasionally. We're seeing some dresses that look like they were lifted from an Imelda Marcos's closet. Tight repressive lines and form-fitting by materials that don't deserve to mold a female body.

Fifties clothes were a kind of repression on steroids.

Late sixties rebellious stripes and minidresses are being referenced.

Designers are over all over the map in fashion.
It's back to the sixties in fifties pink.
Minidress + trimmings.
Note the eighties-inspired broad-shouldered jacket.
From Olympia Le Tan's Spring-Summer 2015 collection:

 

Below? Balmain -- surprise me! Spring 2015 Paris Fashion Week--pops us back to Mondrian, stripes, Pop Art and elephant pants, but you have to admit, 21st century Balmain class.

Still and all (a lovely connector phrase my friend Janice used to use), there is flattery in imitation, and there's a whole lot of that flattery these days.
There are exceptions:  the pink jacket below makes this model's hips look pregnant, with a blocky torso effect.  Instead of the boring old tailored jackets of the past, let's have a jacket that cancels out all a woman's best features like waist, breasts, curves!

Below left a late fifties/early sixties party dress.

Right, contemporary prints, skirts in all lengths

A Lonely Heart from Sgt. Pepper?

ECLIPSE ECLIPSED

what it should have been

Toby Melville UK
what it was

Dusky skies. Like a miracle that didn't happen, Geneva was drenched in obscurity with a ghost-feather jet d'eau. 

10 am: hunched over morning coffee outside the chalet café behind the Brunschwig monument, guarded by freshly sanded stone lions and gryphons. Moms with prams, the unemployed, the rich, the retired or a combination of the above with their fresh tartines and quince jam, engaged in conversation. Miraculously only one woman squawking into a cell phone. 

10:15 am: light through haze like foreign news penetrating complacency, not quite real. 

10:34 am: sitting feeling stupid with my pinhole card, reflecting card and binoculars facing the big nada eclipse. My app let me down, informing me of a sunny Geneva at 9 am. The app subtly laid a virtual cloud over its virtual sun, but too late.

10:45 am: The grey of 68% virtual obscurity. A disappointment of sky over Lac Léman. I pay and leave.

The day of course improves, with scattered sunshine in the afternoon.

Waiting for the next one in 2026.

Not quite an obituary of Leslie Gore......

but the memory of someone buried deep in the silt of the soul, a musician who was popular back in the day, replaced by stars of today, screaming or purring into state-of-the-art hardware, enhanced by state-of-the-art software and streamed through earphones the size of a finger-nail......

So yes, Leslie Gore was a heroine of our time, singing her guts out into an early 'sixties microphone, hair in a lacquered bouffant, a heart and soul of rock 'n' roll and voice, and yes, a burning and yearning young woman of her time, as the  drum-roll of mid-twentieth century feminism was about to begin.

"It's My Party And I Can Cry If I Want To" and more tellingly "You Don't Own Me" which, amazingly, sounded radical at the time!! We were harnessed to pointy bras that would show something tempting, but oh Lord not too much sweetie, or you're a tramp. Skirts, matching high heels, just-so hair and smile, like you don't have period cramps or are late on your homework and your best friend has a crush on your boyfriend.

When Leslie Gore's death hit the news, it hit this early boomer in the solar plexus: my age and now dead.  She who was part of who we really were back then and a harbinger of what we would or could become.

1963 version of "You Don't Own Me", demure at about 17:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QEqLTbEXy0

and 1964, this time standing up, not as shy, eyes flashing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUjeR01wnU

and for a varied picture gallery, giving you most of the hairdos of the '60s:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/lesley-gore-pictures.html

DAVID CARR

                                                                   David Brabyn/Corbis

What the French call "une série noire"...... for US journalists.
Two tragic and sudden deaths and a fall from grace for fabrication (or "conflation") of a former hero.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/13/david-carr-new-york-times-columnist-dies-suddenly-at-office

BRIAN WILLIAMS -- THE BIG CONFLATION. BOB SIMON - THE LETHAL CRASH. TV NEWS IN CRISIS.

                        Bob Simon
Andy Kropa/Invision/AP

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Brian Williams
Brad Barket/Invision/AP
Burned wings, tarnished rep, fall from grace



After feasting for days and nights on the Brian Williams fall from grace, we now have a real person to mourn in Bob Simon.

Brian Williams:  the lie, described as "I conflated...." (a giant fart of a lie)  tarnishes Williams, but with him perhaps the entire image of a TV newscaster as a god, albeit a lesser god.

In the US people adore a man delivering news from battlefield, earthquake, flood, tsunami or massacre,  digesting the exotic and dangerous and transforming sometimes unspeakable news into an information bolus the public can re-digest.

I am totally with witty, enthusiastic sportscasters, who are sports heroes in their own right.

But to promote almost-handsome newscasters to star status is also to warp our understanding of the news, and be vulnerable to their flawed content and delivery.

One can say the same thing about print news and internet news--they can manipulate.
But the direct human delivery and the subtle but real emotional impact of a talking head are hard to beat for influence.

People are now chastising NBC for their severe reaction, that they might ruin his career.
Ten million for looking serious and lying? Why are people treading on eggshells?
I think it's because the newscaster-as-hero may be changing and the networks are scared as hell.

Meanwhile we can certainly mourn the untimely death of Bob Simon.
He didn't need to make things up, he was actually there.
RIP.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/12/bob-simon-dies-in-new-york-car-crash

THE DANCE OF THE OTOLITHS

Last time I posted something referring to ears, The Child's Ear, which was metaphor, I was amused that there were hits from people/sites looking for medical information.
This concerns a brush with vertigo, but medics, sufferers and hypochondriacs and anyone else looking for answers may prefer to abstain from reading this and return to their Google search.

About that bout -- not so humorous-- it began in the early hours following a mediocre night's sleep, accompanied me to the kitchen, persisted through my first coffee and through a fruitless discussion about coffee and insomnia as I tried to ignore the countertop rocking like a boat on rough seas and couldn't hold my mug upright. I hadn't had alcohol for days, it wasn't that. Was I off kilter? Uncentered? Displaced? Distressed? Depressed? Was this the final punch of a month-long cold before it left the arena? Perhaps all of the above. Damn, I can't balance life in ten minutes, so what can I do?

Well it's all about otoliths: tiny crystals in your inner ear that clump in the wrong way and don't move around properly, so they can't play their role of helping you adapt to changes of position.

Otoliths..........barbaric crystals of suffering. 

Ibuprofen and a long walk helped, but I could still feel those buggers hanging in there, waiting for another opportunity to dance, or rather stumble around like evil sugarplum fairies and mess up my day.

So I'm blogging to blast the otoliths to hell.

There, I feel better already.

Probable diagnosis:

Benign Paroxysmal. Positional Vertigo  (BPPV to the cognoscenti)

Therapies, exercises and other possible forms of torture

Brandt-Daroff exercises

Cawthorne-Cooksey treatment

Canalith repositioning procedure

Semont Liberatory Maneuvers

Dix-Hallpike Maneuver

(some of which may involve coordinated and not-so-coordinated eye movements)

........to name a few.

Gotta tilt those labyrinths.

Can't wait.