Loose Leaf Notes

1. Joe and I saw the sculpture above at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  I mentioned it being a Rodin and then saw the exhibit label had listed an unknown artist as the creator. “What a rip off,” I said before I went around to the other side of the sculpture and saw another label read, yes indeed, “Rodin: The Thinker.”

2. I once saw the word thinking on a billboard and thought it said thin king.

3. I can be easily overwhelmed while ordering in a restaurant because there’s so much to choose from, and then the waiter comes and I have no idea, sort of like when I’m playing Scrabble and it’s my turn but I don’t have even the start of a word.

4. We made it to the big sandbox where the sand is too hot to walk on without flip flops, where young architects make castles with moats and beach goers plant umbrellas like the astronauts planting flags on the moon, where small planes with banner ads for Geico insurance pass overhead and you can’t help but look up. You hope that the dolphin fins you see far out in the ocean aren’t sharks.  More HERE.

5. Listening to Pandora on my iPhone while driving home from Bethany Beach, I felt like a judge from The Voice or America’s Got Talent, yes or no, listen and decide to turn my chair, to press the buzzer, to fast forward to the next song, or not.

6. While I don’t like some of Hillary Clinton’s choices, I’ve had a hard time watching her be demonized and referred to as dishonest and untrustworthy by Republicans and Bernie supporters as if it’s an accepted fact. “Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years”. – Click HERE to read about how the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest has been accepted as a given, where the swift boating of her began and how it stuck.

7.  “I’m going to put a bar in the back of my car and drive myself to drink.” – A song title by the band “Eggs Over Easy.”

8. “A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it’s supposed to snap.”  – Kurt Vonnegut

9. Seen on a billboard while on the road: Yummy Buffet, but I thought it said Jimmy Buffet.

10. My son and is on the road in Baltimore with the Mobile Community Brick Factory. It’s an interactive public art project where neighborhood people can make bricks and are invited to decorate or stamp bricks with something they want to say.  The bricks being made will be used in a future public art installation, and since it’s a project for building community, everyone that makes a brick takes home a limited edition fired brick with the word “Community” stamped on it. There are also dance parties involved. See HERE.

11. What do Wild Thing and The Yellow Brick Road have in common? THIS and THIS.

12.  Sometimes on a slow day even junk mail feels like mail and makes me less lonely.

13.  I call the photo below of an old mail slot: The Post Office’s Near Death Experience

________Thirteen Thursday