Baby goats never just walk anywhere, do they? Always running, jumping, and cavorting. I have always wanted to cavort, but never learned how.
As for the goat with the backyard trampoline–well, that’s a natural.
Month: May 2019
Comment Contest: Only 50 Left to Go!
Byron the Quokka has found another bicycle which he wants to offer as the prize to whoever wins our current comment contest. Sorry, Byron, it’s not our bike to give away. The best we can do for a prize is an autographed copy of my new book, The Temptation.
At the moment we have 43,950 comments–just 50 shy of 44,000, just 50 shy of a winner.
The contest is open to everyone, and all comments are eligible except for the following: any comments abusive to anyone else on this site; comments containing profanity or blasphemy; commercials thinly disguised as comments (shame on you!); and comments that are just too inane to be published. Other than that, anything goes.
I’ve got to hand it to Byron: he’s done a good job of running this contest. Who knew quokkas could be such capable administrators? But I don’t think he understands how expensive it would be for me to be giving away bicycles. Money does not loom large in any quokka’s way of life.
By Request, Helki and the Killer Bird (‘Bell Mountain’)
This is what he saw–taller than a man, and able to kill a horse with one bite.
Heidi has asked for another excerpt from Bell Mountain, this one featuring one of her favorite characters, Helki the Rod, and one of those giant birds that has lately wandered into Obann. We pick up the scene on Page 197.
“Helki, too, spent the night on the plain; and Helki, too, saw a giant bird.
“It stalked right past him, and looked right at him, and opened its massive beak halfway, as if to warn him not to move. Helki stood his ground, returning the bird’s look. He thought that if he had to, he could break the bird’s leg with his staff. But he very much hoped he wouldn’t have to.
“The bird made no move in his direction. Whatever it was hunting, it wasn’t him. He watched until it strode out of sight.
“Only then did he become aware that he was trembling from head to toe. He threw his staff in the air and caught it, and yowled at the top of his lungs.
“‘Whee-aaaah!’ The whole night rang with it. ‘Lord God, you have outdone yourself!'”
“It wasn’t much of a prayer, but that was how Obst had taught him to pray and that was how he did it….”
Anyone can ask for an excerpt from any book in the Bell Mountain series. There are now 11 titles in print, and Book No. 12, His Mercy Endureth Forever, is being edited. Just make sure you give me the right page number and a brief description of what you’d like me to post as an excerpt.
The Mystery of Spontaneous Human Combustion
There are pictures available for Spontaneous Human Combustion, but I’d rather not post them here. Readers might find them too upsetting.
In Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House, one of the characters, for no apparent reason, bursts into flame and is almost totally consumed–without setting fire to his room. Dickens based the incident on a real case, in Italy, that was reported in 1731.
“Spontaneous human combustion” is a mystery, it doesn’t happen often enough to generate a theory, there is no accepted explanation of it. Somehow, a human being catches fire–“from the inside out,” it often seems to police investigators–and although fantastically high temperatures must be achieved, to reduce human flesh and bone to ashes, usually the person’s surroundings–typically a bed or a chair–survive in reasonably good condition. Sometimes even clothes survive. Sometimes the victim’s legs and lap remain, with everything above the waist totally consumed. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion)
Two recent cases:
In 2010, in Ireland, a man burned to ashes indoors. The coroner found “no adequate explanation” for this and conceded it to be Spontaneous Human Combustion.
In 2017, in London, a man burst into flame while walking down the sidewalk. Passersby put out the fire, but he died the next day in the hospital. In the coroner’s view the fire was “an accident” probably caused by the victim trying to light a cigarette as he walked–although most people would surely pause while they did that.
SHC is often, but not always, linked to habitual consumption of lots of alcoholic beverages.
But in truth, we have no explanation for it.
Stop This Wickedness
Bad enough I have to write about this stuff; I’m not going to illustrate it, too! Here, instead, is a nice picture of a red eft.
I’ve held off on writing about the so-called “Equality Act,” which House Democrats passed on Friday while normal people were coming home from work, because I was (and still am, mostly) convinced it was a stunt. The Democrats were using it to stir up their Far Left Crazy base, while conservatives took advantage of it to scare people into donating more money to their cause.
I expect this abomination to die in the Senate. And if not, President Trump has already said he wouldn’t sign it.
This mischief, disguised as a “law,” would be more aptly titled “the Homosexual Supremacy Act.” It would cripple all opposition, even religious opposition grounded in the First Amendment, to the assorted lifestyle innovations so enthusiastically promoted by Democrats. There’s no way we could have both this and freedom of religion, freedom of speech. One or the other would have to go. Guess which one the Democrat Party would like to see erased.
So let’s see what happens in the Senate.
If they fail to stop it there–well, GOP senators, you’re going to be wiped out in the primaries.
Either Christian America wins, or Christian America dies. It’s that simple.
So let’s make sure we win this fight.
‘Your Tax $$ at Work: the Columbia U. School of Climate Change Hysteria’ (2014)
This is what’ll happen if you don’t give the government fantastic new powers to control your lives!
Far Left Crazy will never drop the ball on “Climate Change.” It’s their ticket to ride, the blanket excuse for extending the strangling grasp of government in every direction. And the colleges and universities help them do it. Like so:
Your Tax $$ at Work: the Columbia U. School of Climate Change Hysteria
Yeah–when you’ve got no facts, got no logic, there’s always hysteria.
I really hate this Save The Planet preaching from the same shysters who are busy paving over every square inch of it. You should see what liberals have done to New Jersey.
“Educators” and tyrants–perfect together.
‘I Need Thee Every Hour’ (in Welsh)
In Welsh it’s “Mae d’eisiau di bob awr,” and we know it as I Need Thee Every Hour. Don’t you find that if you know the melody, the hymn will speak to you no matter what language it’s sung in?
King Arthur and St. David would have understood these lyrics.
Cats Love Laundry Machines
I heard there was a cat aboard a submarine who learned how to fire the torpedoes–most embarrassing for the Navy.
Washers and dryers aren’t as good as a submarine, but cats do enjoy them. If only they’d actually do our laundry for us… I guess you haven’t lived until you’ve curled up on top of a washing machine going full-tilt.
One of the Skipped Chapters of ‘Oy, Rodney’
Turn we now unto one of the chapters skipped over by Violet Crepuscular in her mad rush to Chapter CCC of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. Constable Chumley, with Lord Jeremy Coldsore, the American adventurer Willis Twombley, and Johnno the Merry Minstrel peering over his shoulder, at the start of Chapter CCXCIII, is picking the lock so they can search the attic of Coldsore Hall for the missing Marquess of Grone, Lord Cromleigh or whatever his name is. Sheesh, what a sentence!
“Yeer, us’ll see now,” Chumley mutters, “that’s a fithul bricken yairst…”
Click! The door is unlocked. The constable begins to turn the knob–
“By Jove, the attic’s the only place where we haven’t put in any antimacassars to fend off the spirit of Black Rodney,” Johnno is about to point out. But before he can admonish Chumley to be careful, a tremendous explosion nearly hurls the whole group back down the stairs. “Kaboom!” writes Ms. Crepuscular. “I have always found, in describing an explosion, that ‘Kaboom!’ is preferable to ‘Blasto!’ or ‘Boom!'”
When the smoke clears, the door is hanging from a single hinge and half the roof of Coldsore Hall has been blown off. Lord Jeremy, briefly contemplating the cost of repairing it, faints. Twombley just manages to grab him before he tumbles down the appallingly long flight of stairs.
“We never put any antimacassars in the attic,” Johnno remarks.
“A little late for that, ol’ hoss!” parries Twombley.
The constable’s helmet has disappeared, his uniform is in tatters, his hair disarranged, and his face awash with soot. “He looks rather like Wile E. Coyote after one of those Acme sticks of dynamite blows up in his face,” writes Ms. Crepuscular, in an intimate aside, “but of course I can’t mention that because it would be an anachronism.”
The attic is now in considerable disarray. If the missing peer is there, does he still live?
“I shall divulge that in the next chapter, breaking off here to heighten the suspense,” writes Ms. Crepuscular. She has forgotten that this has already been divulged by her writing Chapter CCC before Chapter CCXCII. So there’s no suspense to speak of.
In Case You Don’t Win…
If by some statistical misfortune you don’t win the comment contest, there’s always this.
For less money than you’d pay for an order of steamed pork dumplings at the Pink Lotus–and they’re very nice dumplings, I hasten to add–you can get a Kindle copy of my new Bell Mountain novel, The Temptation. And if you’re really feeling like a sport, you can get it in paperback.
What would happen if all thousand of this blog’s subscribers bought the book, all at once?
Well, I would run outside and do a cartwheel, at risk of splitting my pants, my publishers would jump for joy, and leftids would feel downhearted. And a thousand people would have a nice book to read.
So much for the commercial.