#Richard Whisker

[deargravity]

[woodlnds]

Bigwig / Thlayli

I wanted to try to capture both styles of his 1978 rendition as well as his BBC rendition, while still keeping his design somewhat realistic to that of real european rabbits. The design blended together quite nicely I think! I also gave him a little beard on his chin, because why not? :p

[notnotnightwing]

Um..so hey..my names...Richard...but you can call me Ric if you want....I'm emo now..because Mr Kitty Whiskers Jr didn't want to be my cat...this is me now..

If you don't like it *flips hair* then deal with it posers.

[adventuresofalgy]

To all Algy's friends: old friends, new friends, and friends he is yet to meet…

Although undeniably beautiful – that is, on those few days when it is visible at all and not entirely obscured by dense Scotch mist or driving rain – the remote spot on the wild west coast of the Scottish Highlands which is Algy's home is also a pretty lonely place for a fluffy bird who was born into a busy colony of many other birds, far, far away.

Having washed up here, on this shimmering beach, after falling into the ocean one day long ago when he was still little more than a wee fluffy chick, Algy found himself alone and without friends, until one bright spring day he decided to try sharing his adventures with the inhabitants of that remarkable world known as tumblr.

At first Algy continued to be alone, but a fluffy bird does not give up easily, and before long he found that he had a handful of friends, then a few more, then a few more, and then more, and more, and more!

But one day, after he had enjoyed many happy years on tumblr, Algy fell asleep, and he slept for a long, long time… in fact, for very much too long! And when he did finally awake, and realised how much time had passed, he was terribly afraid that his old friends would have forgotten him, and that he might find himself alone once more, just as he had been all those many years ago.

But it was not so! To Algy's astonishment and delight he discovered that most of his old friends were still inhabiting the tumblr world, and not only had they not forgotten him, but they positively welcomed him back. What joy!

And since that day when he returned, a month or so ago, Algy has been able to share his adventures again, with all kinds of amazing people around the world: old people and young people and people in between; people of many different countries and cultures, and people of widely varying personalities and persuasions. What an amazing privilege and delight for a daft fluffy bird!

Algy has known some of his friends for many years, and some for only a day. Some have seen a large number of his adventures, and some have only seen one or two.

But to all his friends out there in the tumblrverse Algy says a truly enormous THANK YOU. Algy loves you all, and he sends you all the fluffiest of fluffy hugs. 🤗

And to anyone drifting in the tumblr world who is still feeling lonely (and Algy guesses there are quite a few…), he dedicates this poem, and says that if you were to come by one evening and look into Algy's home, and say to yourself "I wish somebody loved me… I wonder if there are any fluffy birds in there" then Algy would love you too, and be your fluffy friend ❤️

If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by    one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge    of my affection and think, “It’s beautiful here by this pond. I wish    somebody loved me,” I’d love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be    at peace, and ask yourself, “I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like a perfect place for them.”

[Algy is quoting the poem Your Catfish Friend by the 20th century American writer Richard Brautigan, whose work had quite an influence on his assistant when she was younger ☺️]

[livvidaloca]

what!? liv made human designs for the watterson family again!? yes, she did, and here’s her train of thought for these under the cut:

so, these are actually for my fic that i’m writing on ao3 in which gumball finds himself transported to another universe in which everyone is a human after the events of the inquisition. this is why there’s very few animal traits on any of them, or magically colored anime hair. i wanted them to look like people who could exist and walk around.

in this, nicole is blasian and richard is a white latino (with frankie being white non-latino and jojo being latina). (also these headcanons were based on a lot of convos with some of my friends back in the day, i don’t remember anyone’s reasonings for these but they’ve been true for so long in my brain) gumball and anais are mixed, and i tried to nod to gumball taking more after nicole and anais taking more after richard without making them carbon copies. and then darwin of course is black thats just canon

as for their designs themselves, i’ll start with nicole. i tried to make her look decently muscular (although the simplistic style i used doesn’t exactly show it off). her blue bandana and shoes are obviously a nod to her canon design, so she doesn’t look like an entirely different character. as for her hairstyle i looked into relatively low-maintenance styles, since she’s a busy woman! and her hair is starting to gray from all that STRESS!

richard’s design is the most straightforward, yet it took me the longest because i was never satisfied with how it was turning out. i’m still not sure if i’m crazy about it. all i know is that i was dead set on making him bald, since there’s literally a whole episode about that. I didn’t commit all the way because the design without any hair was making me lose my mind. i gave him some freckles as a nod to his whiskers because they’re a lot more prominent than nicole’s (which is why she doesn’t have any). this also translated to gumball’s design. also, how could i ignore the obvious choice and not give him pink bunny slippers!? it fits him so well!

gumball was fairly easy for me, because i kinda always have human designs for him in mind. i always give him those blue sneakers because duh, and i always give him dyed-blue hair that he visibly doesn’t maintain. i always had this human-version-only headcanon that gumball BEGGED to dye his hair for the longest time, and nicole finally allowed it on the condition that he’d keep up with it on his own. he didn’t. classic gumball

darwin’s design is also usually an easy one for me. big orange hoodie, green shorts and sneakers. this time i also made the decision to have his hair tied up to resemble his little fin. it’s not really visible with their clothes and stuff blocking the original sketch, but i also tried to make his legs a little bit lankier than gumball’s, just to make them appear longer like they are in the show.

as for anais, i always have trouble nailing the design without it looking like a completely different character. i cant dye her hair pink, because she’s supposed to be four, but i also can’t give her pink shoes, because she’s of course the only one who actually has shoes! then i remembered ribbons and my day was saved. still not sure if i’m completely sold on her design yet, though. i think she looks a little older than four.

anyways, i’m planning on doing other designs like these with other characters! let me know if you’re interested. as for that fic, here’s the link:

[until-i-set-him-free]

the strong wind at my back, so i'll lift up the only sail that i have; this tired white flag

edith whiskers, home / 9-1-1 s2e09 "hen begins" / maggie stiefvater, the dream thieves / langston hughes, poem // richard siken, editor's pages: the long and short of it // sleeping at last, neptune / jane fisher, black pj's // keaton henson, small hands / the irrepressibles, in this shirt / noah kahan, stick season // finneas, i lost a friend / 9-1-1 s2e16 "bobby begins again" / the fray, how to save a life / vance joy, mess is mine // the amazing devil, inkpot gods / imagine dragons, wrecked // arctic monkeys, do i wanna know? / bucktommy in a softer world, pt 15 / richard siken, dirty valentine / the amazing devil, shower day // la dispute, such small hands / steve walker, memories / falsettos, i never wanted to love you / 9-1-1 s7e04 "buck, bothered and bewildered"

[aeide-thea]

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by    one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge    of my affection and think, "It's beautiful here by this pond. I wish    somebody loved me," I'd love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be    at peace, and ask yourself, "I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like a perfect place for them."

   —Richard Brautigan (1989)

[guttersniper]

LIST 5 SONGS THAT INSPIRE YOU TO WRITE YOUR MUSE.

trouble's braids, tom waits

nature boy, nat king cole

running kind, merle haggard & the strangers

old man, neil young

the city of new orleans, arlo guthrie

bonus songs: the partisan, leonard cohen; hot and dirty in the city by labi siffre; you should've seen the other guy, nathaniel rateliff; hobo's lullaby, pete seeger + playlist

LIST 10 QUOTES THAT INSPIRE YOU TO WRITE YOUR MUSE.

try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this -- swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood on the first four knuckles. -- richard siken

those years gaze up at me like a hound. the centuries watch as we walk off the sheer cliff of them. my eyes adjust to the dark, but my heart never. -- hua xi

one of the things i try to do: memorize the smallest, most mundane and ordinary, unprepossessing, and virtually invisible of physical moments: the look and feel of a certain wall at a certain time on a certain day. those walls, those little shacks, those cats in the sun: all that is lacking in self-consciousness i seek to hold in vision, memory. (simple composition, color tints, a wash of light, crumbled brick, cold shadow, stillness, rose-color dirt, a twitching whisker.) -- michelle anderson-binczak

people talk of "social outcasts." the words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but i feel as though i have been a "social outcast" from the moment i was born. if ever i meet someone society has designated as an outcast, i invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness. -- osamu dazai

he knew french and german. he knew the periodic table. he knew--as much as he didn't care to--large parts of the bible almost by memory. he knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. (and then he knew things he wished he didn't, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.) -- hanya yanagihara

the girl fits her body into the space between the bed and the wall. she is a stalk, exhausted. she will do something with this. she will surround these bones with flesh. she will cultivate night vision. she will train her tongue to lie still in her mouth and listen. the girl slips into sleep. her dream is red and raging. she will remember to build something human with it. -- lucille clifton

what voice is this cut in the air as though a wound itself had speech / give her small hands / give her dark hair / give her a wound no word can reach -- christian wiman

what does it feel like to be lonely? it feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. it feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. it hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. it advances, is what i'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing. -- olivia liang

maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. i don’t know. maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away--you know?--from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. but then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood. -- james baldwin

out there where small things scratched and sometimes touched. where words could be spoken that would close your ears shut. where, if you were alone, feeling could overtake you and stick to you like a shadow. out there where there were places in which things so bad had happened that when you went near them it would happen again. -- toni morrison

bonus quotes: there is nothing in this story that’s not a dagger. (hieu minh nguyen); this may be unpleasant to consider, may even be a bad place to begin, but if there were a nicer way to tell this story it wouldn’t be this story. (catherine lacey); most of it happened without music, the clink of a spoon from the kitchen. / someone talking. silence. / someone sleeping. someone watching somebody sleep. (marie howe); look now: my heart is a fist of barbed wire. (analicia sotelo); now you wear your skin like iron and your breath as hard as kerosene. (townes van zandt); i seize on little things / you can tell a lot about people / by the way they comb their hair / or the way they don't look you in the eye. (nikki giovanni)

[emailsfromanactor]

Happy 60th first-wedding anniversary, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor! Here's some of what Hume Cronyn had to say about the couple:

The entire undertaking was enveloped in the mystique of the Burton-Taylor romance. It was a replay of the hysteria that had existed throughout the world press during the latter half of the filming of Cleopatra in Rome. It was inescapable. Never mind about the film Cleopatra or the play Hamlet: what were the lovers Richard and Elizabeth up to? The play was to rehearse and open in Toronto, and it was there that the news­paper caption “Dickenliz” first appeared. The public interest in the Dickenliz phenomenon seemed unquenchable. Poor old Shakespeare didn’t stand a chance—at least not when it came to publicity. The hullabaloo continued throughout the To­ronto and Boston engagements and on into New York. In each of those three cities, I remember at least one incident that was illustrative of the general madness. With Elizabeth in Toronto to hold Richard’s hand through­out rehearsals, the pressure from press and particularly the photographers (Richard called them the “Canadian papa­razzi”) was enormous. There came a point when Dickenliz would have sold their souls for a couple of days of peace, quiet, and solitude. Since I knew them better than anyone else in the company and, as a Canadian, was on my home turf, I under­took to find them a bolt hole. I couldn’t have done it alone. My niece Katie Grass and her husband, Ruliff, together with their friends Tony and Lou-Ann Cassels, arranged to spirit them away for a weekend at Lake Simcoe. The preparations were all very cloak-and-dagger. Rully was to pick up Elizabeth, Katie was to pick up Richard, and we would all meet at my apartment for what was ostensibly a supper party. After a de­cent interval, Elizabeth would leave with the Cassels, Richard would leave with Katie, and at some trysting point or other the cars would meet, exchange passengers, and Dickenliz would be on their way to the lake. There, in February, they could actually leave their borrowed cottage and take a walk together without photographers popping out of the bushes to harass them. A few weeks later I was to be party to a similar charade. Again there was to be the business of switching cars and indi­rect routes, but this time the destination was the Toronto Air­port. Somehow or other we managed to get the cars, separately, out onto the runway so there was no exposure to the terminal crowds where—short of whiskers, wigs, bandages and smoked glasses—an appearance would have inevitably led to recognition. As it was, the cover was blown when they reached Mont­real. On March 15th, 1964, Elizabeth and Richard were married in their suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. The ceremony was performed by a Unitarian minister. Quebec law did not re­quire either blood tests or a license.

[wetwaluigi]

I wonder now, what are your Zeti OCs + Idris's voice headcanon, WetWaluigi? What would they be and Where Did they come from?

OOOOH FUN QUESTION good question i wrote these down somewhere (grim helped me with some of the hard ones)

currently i have- zolus- roger clark as arthur morgan zovvie- richard horvitz as crimson zroxxy- elizabeth maxwell as hollyberry cookie zoray- chuck huber as android 17 zio- john chancer as snufkin zinerva- eartha kitt as yzma aaand my bunny whisker- david tennant as scrooge mcduck

notes: i dont think ill ever find a perfect voice for zovvie, crim is the closest so far but i wish i could something that sounds slightly russian and also a bit shrill then ones like zoray and zio both sound much older than the closest voice counterparts i could find also this could become harshly outdated its just what i have rn anyway ty for the question, i usually take forever for questions because i usually draw something but i dont NEED to draw something here so HA edit: forgot to add i dont have a voice for zixzo yet!! i will update if i find something squeaky and energetic and crackly

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Richard Dawkins

Published: Nov 13, 2023

“I say, Jarvis, cluster round.”

“Sir?”

“Close on me – if that’s the right expression?”

“A military phrase, sir, employed by officers requiring the presence of their subordinates.”

“Right, Jarvis. Lend me your ears.”

“Equally appropriate, sir. Mark Antony . . .”

“Never mind Mark Antony, Jarvis. This is important.”

“Very good sir.”

“As you know, Jarvis, when it comes to regions north of the collar stud, B Woofter is not rated highly in the form book. Nevertheless, I do have one great scholastic triumph to my credit. And I bet you don’t know what that was?”

“You have frequently adverted to it sir. You won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at your preparatory academy.”

“Yes, Jarvis, I did, to the ill-concealed surprise of the Rev Aubrey Upcock, proprietor and chief screw at that infamous hell-hole. And ever since then, although not much of a lad for Matins or Evensong, I’ve always had a soft spot for Holy Writ as we experts call it. And now we come to the nub. Orcrux, Jarvis?”

“Very appropriate sir, or ‘nitty gritty’ is these days often heard.”

“The point is, Jarvis, as an aficionado, I have long been especially fond of the book of Genesis. God made the world in six days, am I right, Jarvis?”

“Well sir . . .”

“Beginning with light, God moved swiftly through the gears, making plants and things that creep, scaly things with fins, our feathered friends tootling through the trees, furry brothers and sisters in the undergrowth and finally, rounding into the straight, he created chaps like us, before taking to his hammock for a well-earned siesta on the seventh day. Am I right, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir, if I may say so, a colourfully mixed summary of one of our great origin myths.”

“But now, Jarvis, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Dregs Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation . . .”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859, On the Origin of Species.”

“That’s the baby, Jarvis. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jarvis, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Dregs Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jarvis.”

“If I might take the liberty, sir, you appear to be labouring under a misunderstanding. Mr Darwin does not say that we are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and we are descended from a shared ancestor. Chimpanzees are modern apes, which have been evolving since the time of the shared ancestor, just as we have.”

“Hm, well I think I get your drift, Jarvis. Just as my pestilential cousin Thomas and I are both descended from the same grandfather. But neither of us looks any more like the old reprobate than the other, and neither of us has his side-whiskers.”

“Precisely sir.”

“But hang on, Jarvis. We old lags of the Scripture Knowledge handicap don’t give up that easily. My old man’s guvnor may have been a hairy old gargoyle, but he wasn’t what you’d call a chimpanzee. I distinctly remember. Far from dragging his knuckles over the ground, he carried himself with an upright, military bearing (at least until his later years, and when the port had gone round a few times). And the family portraits in the old ancestral home, Jarvis. We Woofters did our bit at Agincourt, and there were no apes on the strength during that “God for Harry, England and St George” carry-on.”

“I think, sir, you underestimate the time spans involved. Only a few centuries have passed since Agincourt. Our shared ancestor with chimpanzees lived more than five million years ago. If I might venture upon a flight of fancy sir?”

“Certainly you might, Jarvis. Venture away, with the young master’s blessing”

“Suppose you walk back in time one mile, sir, to reach the Battle of Agincourt . . .”

“Sort of like walking from here to the Dregs, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir. On the same scale, to walk back to the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, you’d have to walk all the way from London to Australia.”

“Goodness, Jarvis, all the way to the land of cobbers with corks dangling from their lids. No wonder there are no apes among the family portraits, no low-browed chest-thumpers to be seen once-more-unto-the-breaching at Agincourt.”

“Indeed sir, and to go back to our shared ancestor with fish . . .”

“Wait a minute, Jarvis, hold it there. Are you now telling me I’m descended from something that would feel at home on a slab?”

“We share ancestors with modern fish, sir, which would certainly have been called fish if we could see them. You could safely say that we are descended from fish, sir.”

“Jarvis, sometimes you go too far. Although, when I think of Gussie Hake-Wortle . . .”

“I would not have ventured to make the comparison myself sir. But if I might pursue my fanciful perambulation back through time, sir?  To reach the ancestor that we share with our piscine cousins . . .”

“Let me guess, Jarvis, you’d have to walk right round the whole bally globe and come back to where you started and surprise yourself from behind?”

“A considerable underestimate sir. You’d have to walk to the moon and back, and then set off and do the whole journey again sir.”

“Jarvis, this is too much to spring on a lad with a morning head. Go and mix me one of those pick-me-ups of yours before I can take any more.”

“I have one in readiness sir, prepared when I perceived the lateness of the hour of your return from your club last night.”

“Attaboy, Jarvis. But wait, here’s another thing. This Darwin bird says it all happened by chance. Like spinning the big wheel at Le Touquet. Or like when Bufty Snodgrass scored a hole in one and stood drinks for the whole club for a week.”

“No sir that is incorrect. Natural selection is not a matter of chance. Mutation is a chance process. Natural selection is not.”

“Take a run-up and bowl that one by me again, Jarvis, if you wouldn’t mind. And this time make it your slower ball, with no spin. What is mutation?”

“I beg your pardon sir, I presumed too much. From the Latin mutatio, feminine, ‘a change’, a mutation is a mistake in the copying of a gene.”

“Like a misprint in a book, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir, and, like a misprint in a book, a mutation is not likely to lead to improvement. Just occasionally, however, it does, and then it is more likely to survive and be passed on in consequence. That would be natural selection. Mutation, sir, is random in that it has no bias towards improvement. Selection, by contrast, is automatically biased towards improvement, where improvement means ability to survive. One could almost coin a phrase, sir, and say ‘Mutation proposes, selection disposes.’

“Rather neat that, Jarvis. Your own?”

“No sir, the pleasantry is an anonymous parody of Thomas à Kempis.”

“So, Jarvis, let me see if I’ve got a firm grip on the trouser seat of this problem. We see something that looks like a piece of natty design, like an eye or a heart, and we wonder how it bally well got here.”

“Yes sir.”

“It can’t have got here by pure chance because that would be like Bufty’s hole in one, when we had drinks all round for a week.”

“In some respects it would be even more improbable than the Honourable Mr Snodgrass’s alcoholically celebrated feat with the driver, sir. For all the parts of a human body to come together by sheer chance would be about as improbable as a hole in one if Mr Snodgrass were blindfolded and spun around, so that he had no idea of the whereabouts of the ball on the tee, nor of the direction of the green. Were he to be permitted a single stroke with a wood, sir, his chance of scoring a hole in one would be about as great as the chance of a human body spontaneously coming together if all its parts were shuffled at random.”

“What if Bufty had had a few drinks beforehand, Jarvis? Which, by the way, is pretty likely.”

“The contingency of a hole in one is sufficiently remote, sir, and the calculation sufficiently approximate, that we may neglect the possible effects of alcoholic stimulants. The angle subtended at the tee by the hole . . .”

“That’ll do, Jarvis, remember I have a headache. What I clearly see through the fog is that random chance is a non-starter, a washout, scratched at the off. So how do we get complex things that work, like human bodies?”

“To answer that question, sir, was Mr Darwin’s great achievement. Evolution happens gradually and over a very long time. Each generation is imperceptibly different from the previous one, and the degree of improbability required in any one generation is not prohibitive. But after a sufficiently large number of millions of generations, the end product can be very improbable indeed, and can look very much as though it was designed.”

“But it only looks like the work of some slide-rule toting whizz with a drawing board and a row of biros in his top pocket?”

“Yes sir, the illusion of design results from the accumulation of a large number of small improvements in the same direction, each one small enough to result from a single mutation, but the whole cumulative sequence is prolonged enough to culminate in an end result that could not have come about in a single chance event. The metaphor has been advanced of a slow climb up the gentle slopes of what has somewhat over-dramatically been called ‘Mount Improbable’, sir.”

“Jarvis, that’s a doozra of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in for it. But I wasn’t too far wrong, was I, when I called it ‘evaluation’ instead of evolution?”

“No sir. The process somewhat resembles the breeding of racehorses. The fastest horses are evaluated by breeders and the best ones are chosen as progenitors of future generations. Mr Darwin realised that in nature the same principle works without the need for any breeder to do the evaluating. The individuals that run fastest are automatically less likely to be caught by lions.”

“Or tigers, Jarvis. Tigers are very fast, Inky Brahmapur was telling me at the Dregs only last week.”

“Yes sir, tigers too. I can well imagine that his Highness would have had ample opportunity to observe their speed from the back of his elephant. The nub, or crux, is that the fastest individual horses survive to breed and pass on the genes that made them fast, because they are less likely to be eaten by large predators.

“By Jove, Jarvis, that makes a lot of sense. And I suppose the fastest tigers also get to breed because they are the first ones to grab their medium rare with all the trimmings, and so survive to have little tigers that also grow up to be fast.”

“Yes sir.”

“But this is amazing, Jarvis. This really prangs the triple twenty. And the same thing works not just for horses and tigers but for everything else?”

“Precisely sir.”

“But Jarvis, wait a moment. I can see that this bowls Genesis middle stump. But where does it leave God? It sounds from what this Darwin bimbo says, that there’s not a lot left for God to do. I mean to say, Jarvis, I know what it’s like to be underemployed, and underemployed is what God, if you get my drift, would seem to be.”

“Very true sir.”

“So, well, dash it, I mean to say, Jarvis, in that case why do we even believe in God at all?”

“Why indeed sir?”

“Jarvis, this is astounding. Incredulous.”

“Incredible sir.”

“Yes, incredible, Jarvis. I shall see the world through new eyes, no longer through a glass darkly as we biblical scholars say. Don’t bother with that pick-me-up, Jarvis. I find I no longer need it. I feel sort of liberated. Instead, bring me my hat, my stick, and the binoculars Aunt Daphne gave me last Goodwood. I’m going out into the park to admire the trees, the butterflies, the birds and the squirrels, and marvel at everything you have told me. You don’t mind if I do a spot of marvelling at everything you’ve told me, Jarvis?”

“No indeed sir. Marvelling is very much in the proper vein, and other gentlemen have told me that they experience the same sense of liberation on first comprehending such matters. If I might make a further suggestion sir?”

“Suggest away, Jarvis, suggest away, we are always ready to hear suggestions from you.”

“Well sir, if you would care to follow the matter further, I have a small volume here, which you might care to peruse.”

“Doesn’t look very small to me, Jarvis, but anyway, what is it called?”

“It is called The Greatest Show on Earth, sir, and it is by . . .”

“It doesn’t matter who it’s by, Jarvis, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Heave it over and I’ll have a look when I return. Now, the binoculars, the stick and the gents’ bespoke headwear if you please. I have some intensive marvelling to do.”

==

Note: "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" is by Richard Dawkins. It's a little self-referential, tongue-in-cheek joke.

[friendsoftheabaisse]

El-ahrairah 

from Watership Down, by Richard Adams - “The Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of  Inlé” (I like his description when he gets his tail replaced with clematis and his whiskers with ragwort, then later dock leaves for his ears.)

Medium: Pen and Ink, Graphite, Marker, and Paint; on Paper

[phantom-trollbooth]

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by    one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge    of my affection and think, "It's beautiful here by this pond.  I wish    somebody loved me," I'd love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be    at peace, and ask yourself, "I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond?  It seems like a perfect place for them."

Richard Brautigan

[davidpwilson2564]

Bloglet

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Note: I had it all wrong. Yesterday was not my alma mater's Homecoming Weekend game. No. For Homecoming the U of T has to have a sure win. The game is next month, again Connecticut. Assured to be a blowout. (On Saturday they did win over Texas A and M, but it was by a whisker.)

Nice weather. Must walk. Must get out the kinks.

Big sports news: The Jets pull out a win against the Eagles. Their first win over the Eagles.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Jordon really wants that gavel. Is making phone calls, twisting arms. His becoming Speaker of the House, should this happen, would be a real setback.

The news from Israel continues to be bad. Gaza may be reduced to rubble before it's all over.

The plumbler hasn't called me. I am nervous about all of this.

I go see Dr. Seecoomar. My gastroenternologist. Nice man. It is time for me to get a colonoscopy. I am due for it, not having had this procedure for five years. He tells me something interesting, something I'd have not known: this is my last one. No more after this. After the age of eighty it is assumed death will claim you in some other way. Sobering thought, this.

Note: Jim Jordon really wants that gavel. He continues to make phone calls. Twisting arms. To think of him as Speaker is stomach turning. There is going to be a vote tomorrow. (Just a further note: Jordon is tortured by an incident from his past. When he was a wrestling coach in Ohio a number of students reported having been molested. Jordon covered up for his friend, wrestling team physician [musicians will be amused by this] Richard Strauss.)

I find the paperwork on the fridge. It is ten years old. I suppose ten years is a good run for a little fridge. I am ready for a replacement, but first have to deal with the pipes under the kitchen sink. (Old building, faulty pipes. Dammit.)

[radianceandmist]

but is it short for whiskers richard

whiskey dick is such a beautiful phrase if I had a gorgeous maine coon cat I would name her whiskey dick

[dserwer1]

Harris is not risky, the demonstrations are

Tonight’s opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago will rightfully bring back memories of the 1968 convention. Then a police riot against anti-Vietnam war demonstrators contributed to wrecking Hubert Humphrey’s prospects for defeating Richard Nixon. Humphrey came within a whisker (42.7% to Nixon’s 43.4%) of winning the popular vote but lost definitively in the Electoral College…