Something perfect

Your Face by Bill Plympton

Your face is like a song
Your sweet eyes whisper
And I want to sing along
Your features are in tune
Let's sing together
And turn every month to June
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only


Your lips with mine will rhyme
And when they touch me
It's a symphony divine
Your cheeks your nose your hair
Sing me a melody
A melody so rare
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only


This is great.

Even more here.


Update - see comments for corrected lyrics and the source performance.

Update, twelve years later in 2018: Per the comments below, "the song was composed and sung by Maureen McElheron".  Can't immediately find a primary reference.

A new verse, free

I learned a song somewhere or other - it's Rilkekind's favorite:

Up in the forest in a nest in a tree
Lived an old mother robin and her little chicks three.
"Chirp!" said the mother; "we chirp!" said the three;
And they chirped and were glad in their nest in the tree.

Out in the city in a cage in a zoo
Lived an old mother lion and her little cubs two.
"Roar!" said the mother; "we roar!" said the two;
And they roared and were glad in their cage in the zoo.

Down by the river on a bank in the sun
Lived an old mother toad and her little toad one.
"Croak!" said the mother; "I croak!" said the one;
And they croaked and were glad on their bank in the sun.

Well, the above is how I sing it, anyway. Rilkekind especially likes it when I roll the "r"s and do the first "chirp" etc. in a chest voice and the second in a head voice. No doubt I'll find a link to the melody one of these days.

Here's another verse I've started adding:

Out in the vacuum far away from the sun
Lived an old mother nothing and her little not none.
"Don't!" said the mother; "I won't!" said the none;
And they didn't and were glad far away from the sun.

Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker on reactions to Bush

The essay's not online, but I want to point out one of the stupidest statements I've read in a long time:

There are two not completely congruent theories of the war in [the documentary] "Highjacking Catastrophe." One is that neoconservatives, who had been thinking for years about enshrining the United States as the world's lone superpower, and who had always felt that a disastrous attack could be used to mobilize the public, seized upon September 11th as the way to achieve the invasion of Iraq that they longed for. The other is that big corporations--especially oil companies--wanted war, and used their friends in government to get it. (The reason the two theories aren't congruent is that one rarely encounters oilmen in neoconservative circles, and vice versa[...].)

Emphasis added (and note that "congruent" here is just a fancy no-courage-of-its-conviction way of saying "consistent".) Lemann is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and either a) both incapable of using the simplest logic and ignorant of the commonest facts about the administration or b) the most feckless oh-those-"Bush-haters" broderist yet.

The great slit in Lydia Bennet's skirt

Jane Austen has a way of kicking the reader in the head at the end of novels. I just reread a few and forgot to duck. In particular, there's Lydia Bennet, the out-of-control vulgar man-chasing girl who precipitates _Pride and Prejudice_'s closing actions, writing to a friend, "... tell Sally to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown ..."; there's Mary Crawford's "saucy playful smile, seeming to invite in order to subdue me" in _Mansfield Park_; there's Emma's slip of the tongue on Box Hill. The first two are surprising because of the intrusion of open sexuality, the third because few people get to say the simple truth in these novels. I was also greatly surprised by Darcy's "I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men" - it's just too rude to be consistent with the later part of the novel. Also Mary Crawford's late letters are impossible to imagine being written to Fanny - she's a modern character forced into a 1790s-1800s or whenever it is era, but even so she should be aware enough not to tell the kind of people scandalized by the idea of friends and family performing a play that an act of adultery was stupid or that an older brother's death has the positive benefit of making the younger son wealthy. But she's a wonderful character - I wonder if some later author has freed her from her bonds and seen what she could do.

Along with the hair issue

Rilkekind has an issue with his insides. Nothing too terrible, but he has to drink some yucky medicine and may need surgery in a year or two. To quote Bacon: He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

(As usual, click image to expand.)