Bull In A Museum Shop

There was an article on CNN this morning about a piece of sculpture that was knocked over and destroyed. It was one of Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs. (Notice how authoritatively I write this in spite of the fact that I never heard of a balloon dog until today, and barely knew Mr. Koons’ name to boot).

Anyway, there was some sort of cocktail party going on at the museum, where only the créme de la créme would have been invited to attend, when a patron accidentally kicked the pedestal that the sculpture was resting on. It fell to the ground, shattered, and that was all she wrote. $42,000 down the drain, but the gallery was appropriately restrained in their criticism of the clumsy attendee, and appropriately downcast about the loss of an artwork.

The article did mention that Koons made 799 of these things, so it’s not exactly the tragedy that stomping a hole in the Mona Lisa would be, but we are now down to 798 balloon dogs, so let’s all pay better attention, shall we?

I have some suggestions that I will forward to the museum, to try to avoid such accidents in the future.

• Do not put breakable art pieces on teetery pedestals where a casual bump can do such damage.
• Do not put these pedestals in rooms where alcohol is being served. In all of the history of all of the booze that has ever been served there is not a single recorded instance where it improved the drinker’s coordination.
• Be sure to put the guilty patron’s name on a list where they will be given repeated breathalyzer tests during the course of such evenings in the future. If their levels climb, move them to the part of the gallery where only rubber art is being displayed.
• Call security whenever they see anyone at a gathering where art is being displayed, drinks are being served, and the person is wearing shoes like those below. Dead giveaway, this footwear, that there may be trouble ahead.

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There is a bill before Congress that is long overdue. Eighty-one years ago President Roosevelt signed an executive order that sent 125,000 Japanese-Americans into forced internment camps. This bill would be a belated attempt to prevent anything like that from ever occurring again.

My early civic education being the tapestry composed of huge holes surrounded by a thin lattice of spiderwebbed information that it was, I didn’t learn about this whole ugly episode until I was in the Air Force, serving with an OB/GYN named Lt.Col. Don Okada. To say that Don opened my eyes when he told me about his days as a child in the camps would be a major understatement.

The Korematsu-Takai Civil Liberties Protection Act would establish clear legal prohibition against incarcerating Americans based not only on race, religion, and nationality but also sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability. The bill seems like a slam dunk – a way to speak truth to power when we say, “Never again.”

CNN February 20, 2023

It doesn’t take much sensitivity to see how racist the original document was. No matter that there was all sorts of panicking in the early days of WWII, the fact is that when Roosevelt signed his order we were at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan. No one ever uprooted the German- or Italian-Americans and sent them inland. Only those of Asian descent.

Good on Congress if they can get this one passed. The article suggested that it should be a slam dunk. With the number of white supremacists in that body right now, I’m not as sure that this will happen as the author is.

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To take a very short trip from the serious and worthy to the silly and comedic I offer this music video from 1980. Whatever it says about my musical tastes I liked it then and still do. About as purely ridiculous as rock and roll gets.

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(Even the most casual observer will have noted that my favorite cartoons are those with a bit of absurdity in them. Or alternatively, a lot of absurdity in them. I have no interest in trying to figure out why this should be the case. To do so would be less interesting than listening to beans soak.)

From The New Yorker

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Yesterday I took Elsa and Marc on a small voyage of discovery. We went to Delta, Colorado, in search of its resident population of sandhill cranes. And we found them. To be more descriptive, we found about 400 of them in a picked-over cornfield about four miles from the village.

The flock obliged us by doing their flapping dances, croaking like the ancient creatures that they are, as well as just standing there looking like something straight out of Jurassic Park. There was even a handful who beautifully circled the field before coming in for a landing. It was about all you can ask of a bunch of cranes, actually.

An ornithologist described them as one of the most successful life forms on earth, having persisted unchanged for 2.5 million years. To put it in perspective, that’s way longer than you might spend waiting for a sensible word to come out of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mouth.

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From The New Yorker

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(Over the years I have offered to accept the writings of my readers and publish them here. Granddaughter Elsa’s most recent submission was this limerick)

I’d like to submit the following for consideration:

There once was a man called Pappy
He had humor that was quite snappy
He loved his cats
And always wore hats
And seldom was he unhappy

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