Pews

It's Sunday. Something from Robert Louis Stevenson, though the pews in the picture are above the alter in a Catholic church, scene to some different temptations perhaps.

YOU looked so tempting in the pew,

You looked so sly and calm -

My trembling fingers played with yours

As both looked out the Psalm.

Your heart beat hard against my arm,

My foot to yours was set,

Your loosened ringlet burned my cheek

Whenever they two met.

O little, little we hearkened, dear,

And little, little cared,

Although the parson sermonised,

The congregation stared.

Celebration in a rear view window

Landscape catching the light

I often wondered where Hieronymous Bosch got his ideas for the Garden of Earthly Delights. I think this is it!

There's something about the colors, the odd proportions of the bodies and especially the mindless, restless, questing in the mud that irresistibly reminds me of Bosch's bizarre vision.

Cloudy day, looking down, not up.

The background is water, not clouds.

In another bird's image.

There is something very satisfyingly ambivalent about the picture. At least to my eye, the bird in the air looks as though it is right over the one in the water. Actually, if you look at the reflections, it seems as though the bird in the air is much closer.

White egret in the pink

The pink is a Roseate Spoonbill, a remarkably ugly bird (on the face of it) with a wonderful scientific designation of  Ajaja ajaja (genus species). The egret is a Great White Egret, somewhat nondescriptly known as Ardea alba.

Landscape with lines

A woven landscape

Beasts in a landscape

But lazy vapours round the region fly,

Perpetual twilight, and a doubtful sky:

No crowing cock does there his wings display,

Nor with his horny bill provoke the day;

Nor watchful dogs, nor the more wakeful geese,

Disturb with nightly noise the sacred peace;

Nor beast of Nature, nor the tame are nigh,

Nor trees with tempests rock'd, nor human cry;

But safe repose without an air of breath

Dwells here, and a dumb quiet next to death.

Ovid - Metamorphoses: Book The Eleventh

Highlighted hills

Cloudy mountains

Is there a catalog of cloud shapes? These are "clouds masquerading as mountains".

A landscape of butts

Or maybe it's just me, then again maybe it's just me off to Orlando again. Very amusing - rather elegant butts really.

Flowers catching the light

Long and winding road

Actually it's a path on a certain Redmond Corporate campus that can remain nameless. 

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,

From up and down, and still somehow,

It's cloud illusions I recall,

I really don't know clouds, at all.

Joni Mitchell

Christmas lights - where's the tree?

Christmas ornament, there is a darker side.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

From Yeats, The Second Coming, responding to World War I perhaps.

Surly cherub

Reflections

A certain soldier
    had to fire a cannon at six o’clock sharp every evening.
    Being a soldier he did so. When his accuracy was
    investigated he explained:

I go by
    the absolutely accurate chronometer in the window
    of the clockmaker down in the city. Every day at seventeen
    forty-five I set my watch by it and
    climb the hill where my cannon stands ready.
    At seventeen fifty-nine precisely I step up to the cannon
    and at eighteen hours sharp I fire.

And it was clear
    that this method of firing was absolutely accurate.
    All that was left was to check that chronometer. So
    the clockmaker down in the city was questioned about
    his instrument’s accuracy.

Oh, said the clockmaker,
    this is one of the most accurate instruments ever. Just imagine,
    for many years now a cannon has been fired at six o’clock sharp.
    And every day I look at this chronometer
    and always it shows exactly six.

Chronometers tick and cannon boom.

Miroslav Holub

Cell-phone Christmas