Groo's Wanderings

A few months before he passed away in 2003, a 74 year old children’s television host sat down in the same studio where he had filmed 895 episodes over 33 years and recorded one last message. It wasn’t for children. It was for the adults who had grown up watching him.

Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on American public television from 1968 to 2001. For over three decades he walked into the same set, changed into a cardigan and sneakers, looked directly into the camera, and spoke to children as if each one of them was the only person in the room. He never raised his voice, never talked down to his audience, and never rushed a single moment.

In that final recording, he looked into the camera one last time and said “I’m just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger. I like you just the way you are.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.

They're talking about DOGE discontinuing important programs that kept hundreds of thousands of people alive and safe. Now those people are dead.

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

So... I heard you like corvids.

Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) screams in the rain, family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, Spain

Carrion crow

Screams in the rain

Order Passeriformes

Corvidae

The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.

She was not wearing a ring. It means something when a woman does not wear a wedding ring. Usually, it means that she is not married. “Seems your ring has also gone missing,” I said. I hoped her dress would join it.

Her red mouth curved upwards. She was smiling a little. “I don’t wear it outside. A diamond that large would only invite trouble.”