Yipes, Stripes!

I went to market the other day and when I got there I realized that I had forgotten my hearing aids. Oh well, I’ll get by, I sold for many years being HoH and one more day won’t be that difficult. Maybe I’ll get lucky and some customers will know ASL and I will still be able to sell. Of course, that’s never the case, but one can hope.

Then, as I was setting up the rubber sole of my shoe came adrift. Having a shoe sole flapping around while trying to sell is never a good look, so with two good reasons to go home, I jumped in my car and made the drive back to Rancho Deluxe.

As I was looking around for proper footware I happened to see my cat Eadweard, AKA Eddie, sitting on my bed and managed to get this picture of him. He blends.

I had with me a new bowl that I turned last week. This was another colorwood piece, but rather than a bowl, I went with the UFO theme, in keeping with the sleight of hand that “news” reports are hyping these days. We now know that there are no sentient beings in our solar system, and until the laws of physics are repealed, we also know that inter-galactic travel is impossible, so the stories of space aliens landing on earth are fabrications (I am being polite here) to distract the gullible from what the other hand is doing.

But I thought that design could be jazzed up a bit and that I could expand on the ET theme so I commissioned an artist to embellish that picture to further my vision for this line of stripey bowls.

Art by David English.

That works for me. Now to procure some clear domes and tiny green men, once I get those pieces in place I should be able to branch out into a new, totally new realms of bowl turning. Strange new worlds, etc.

Another stripey bowl, with more to come.

In other matters, I picked up a free copy of the book “Dune”, by Frank Herbert. I read it the first time back in 1970 or so, when it was still a relatively new book, long before the franchise changed hands and hewed to its weirding ways. I hear the others in the series are less good. I won’t read them, so hearsay is all I know about them. But ol’ Frank was pretty good at spinning a yarn. As with the book and movie “The Fifth Element”, by Luc Besson, Dune is a whole universe contained in one book. Rich in detail and history, with interesting characters, and plenty of space travel and many explosions. Unlike Luc’s book, Dune really doesn’t lend itself to a concise movie treatment. Many have tried, and, in my opinion, all have failed. The story is too large to fit into a movie. It also features no redheads, so that’s a strike against it.

But back to the matters at hand - I am not sure that reading a book about a desert planet where wealth is measured in water is the right tome to be immersed in while we are in extreme drought conditions. Not saying that my yard is becoming an endless stretch of sand dunes full of giant sand worms, nope, it’s not that bad yet, but my trees really would appreciate a soaking rainfall about now. I would too.

Back when I was a yute, I watched “The Outer Limits” and I recall an episode entitled “The Invisible Enemy”, based on a 1955 short story by Jerry Sohl. In that story there are apex predators that swim through sand like a shark swims through water. This is an artist’s rendition of an astronaut encountering that beast. If you watch that epi be sure to look for Adam West before he became Batman. You can’t miss him, even absent Robin.

Was Frank Herbert influenced by that story? I have no idea, but I saw the similarities.

Obviously Mr. Herbert changed the scale of the sand worms.

They look very bitey.

And all things considered, I prefer to live in a place where water falls from the sky and the animals I encounter in my yard are squirrels and rabbits and mice. I think the birds here and on Arrakis are similar, hawks and buzzards and so on, but I am guessing, there are fewer rainforest birds there. Maybe it is time I replace my trees with creosote bushes (Larrea tridentata) - they are long lived and hardy, if you consider living 12,000 years a long time.

Well, it is another hot rain-free day, so I better get to work. Must go erase the footprints I left in the dust when I walked out to the mailbox.