SWIMMING IN JANUARY PART 2

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Foto. They contemplate  Summer Holidays, Beach, Sun and Sand and SWIMMING. Lizzy tried to think about swimming in the last post but drifted into BEACHES. This Summer has been filled blissfully with SWIMMING. This summer Lizzy saw a little lass swim for the first time. I AM A MERMAID- said she. Lizzy is a SWIMMER – not distances and she always feared she would be asked one day to do as Grace Darling did and brave fierce waters to rescue sailors from a sinking boat or swim across shark infested waters. 60 years later she simply SWIMS. Noone has as yet asked her to swim for 24 hours from a sinking ship to reach a wave battered shore upon which she would likely perish at the last moment. She simply swims and prefers swimming with the children to swimming with dolphins. She saw a small girl try to ride a unicorn in a pool this summer. Last Summer, she swam at New Year in a large pool on top of The Hill on full moon. This year, He finally let sun shine on his skinny legs and now he might be able to swim.

	The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it. Woodrow Wilson
	“I concentrate on preparing to swim my race and let the other swimmers think about me, not me about them.” Amanda Beard Olympian
	Swimming is not a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning. That’s just common sense! George Carlin
	My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, “Mom, they weren’t trying to teach you how to swim.” Paula Poundstone quotes (American Comic, b.1959)
	It is easy to swim, when another holds up your head.  (Danish)
	“To understand water is to understand the cosmos, the marvels of nature, and life itself.” - Masaru Emoto in “The Hidden Messages in Water” - Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4
	“Well, my swimming pool problems are solved. I just found myself miles and miles of open lanes.” “What is that smell?” “That’s East River.” “You’re swimming in the East River? The most heavily trafficked, overly contaminated waterway on the eastern seaboard?” “Technically, Norfolk has more gross tonnage.” “How could you swim in that water?” “I saw a couple other guys out there.” “Swimming?” “Well… floating. They weren’t moving much, but they were out there.” - Kramer and Jerry Seinfeld, in “The Nap”

BRIDGES

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate bridges. From here to there one way or another.

I do not know much about gods;
but I think that the river is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities–ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages, The Four Quartets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to
watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly
know everything there is to be known.
A. A. Milne, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

 

 

 Don’t cross a bridge until you come to it. –”Papa” (Grandfather Abraham Lincoln Turner)

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Kahn asks.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco Polo answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they formed.’

Kublai Kahn remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak of the stones? It is onlyt the arch that matters to me.’

Marco Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’

Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn – Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities, 1972

 

 

SCORPIONS

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate THE FROG and the SCORPION and the fox as they cross the river. IT IS IN MY NATURE- says the SCORPION. IT IS MY NATURE. A SCORPION IS INDEED A SCORPION. Thanks for the Ride but sting you I must !

    

We keep an eye on the scorpion and the serpent, but we do not watch out for the millipede.

Sicilian

   That’s the problem with them fables, they’re putting animals together that wouldn’t meet. I don’t know where a scorpion is knockin’ around with a frog.”
-Podcast Series 3, Episode Two

Butch glared balefully across the saloon at Tex, who had been stone dead since the scorpion he had unwittingly sat on had bitten him on the butt some half an hour or so ago, little suspecting that this was going to be his toughest staring contest since the one against old Glass-eyed Juan, during the great sand-storm of ‘42, at the height of the Arizona conjunctivitis epidemic.

Geoff Blackwell
Bundaberg QLD Australia

“God did not give wings to scorpions.” 

If you are bitten by a scorpion in a dream, you will conquer your problems.

    

DAILY PROVERBS FROM AFRICA 

Those who go to examine the rainwater puddle will meet scorpions (around it).
(You’ll get into trouble if you’re too inquisitive.)

 

   The Kathiawari Horse

Photographs & information on the Kathiawari horse breed of India. A slender, wiry horse with ears that curve inward and touch at the tip, called the “sting of the scorpion”.