It's About Time and Life?

Hold On

THE BUREAU

"The idea behind the album is it's a full working day at a job, meaning when it is complete, there will be around nine hours of music - sufficiently filling an entire day of work with electronic noise.
Each moment of a day is timed to a track of music along with a custom comics panel."

I stumbled across Ethan Persoff's 'The Bureau' project when I was researching pogo sticks for an upcoming post I was working on (which is now this post I guess), because of reading about a pogo stick in the novel of Nevil Shute's 'On the Beach'.
In the novel the atomic submarine captain goes on a desperate search to buy his daughter back in the USA (who is most likely dead anyhow) a pogo stick, but all of the shops in Melbourne, Australia have sold out of them.
He becomes obsessed in his pursuit to buy one for his daughter, along with a fishing rod for his son, so he can give them out as gifts to his children.
Unfortunately, in the story the only thing the captain's generation would give to his chlidren's generation was a human-ending nuclear war and radiation poisoning.

The toy pogo stick in the novel 'On the Beach' is used as a plot device in a similar way to the childhood sled in the movie 'Citizen Kane' (well, at least I think it is, although in a different nostalgic, but hopeful kind of way).
But I don't recall the pogo stick playing a part in the movie version like it did in the book.
In fact, I don't even remember it being mentioned in the movie.

"The Pogostick is an unfinished comic book series written by Al Columbia and drawn by Ethan Persoff.

It is a black comedy about the day-to-day struggles of Audrey Grinfield, a mentally disturbed office worker at an industrial design firm.

Two issues were published by Fantagraphics Books in February and December 2003 before the story was abandoned.

The Pogostick was well received by critics and was nominated for a 2004 Harvey Award for Best New Series."

Hmm ... Pogo cartoons and clock punching remind me of my old boring time-wasting job.
The IKEA Monkey

We do some insane things in our lives alright.

I guess some things that Nevil Shute writes about in his novels never really go out of fashion it seems.
They just grow more extreme.

The latest toy catalogue that I found in
my mailbox features pogo sticks 

You might want to stock up on
pogo sticks while you can;-)

'On the Beach', Not Being Able to See the Forest for the Trees and Permaculture?

Hmm ... I wonder how hard it would be to grow your own 

peanuts?-)

Beats working for them, I think.

Cursed Songs?

Song to the Siren by Bonniemarie

I noticed that 'Song to the Siren' didn't make the above Top 10, but I personally think it is rocketing up the cursed song charts now that Chris Knowles at 'The Secret Sun' blog has put the Siren on to the pop-cultural radar she was swimming beneath all of these years.

Listening to 'Song to the Siren' probably won't hurt you in any way, but I don't think I'll be learning to sing it.
It's no 'Gloomy Sunday', but there seems to be something of a curse associated with 'Song to the Siren'.

THE SADDEST SONG IN THE WORLD: GLOOMY SUNDAY

Coffee and the Siren's Song

It's a so-so Saturday in my part of the world right now, but I just hope it's not going to be a 'Gloomy Sunday' tomorrow;-)
Happy listening ... if you dare that is.

Great (Jake) Scott!!! More Siren Connections?

Spooky Hollywood Riff Off: What Doesn't Kill You/Zombie?

July 16th: HelSINKi or SWIM?!

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet on July 16 in Helsinki, according to the Kremlin and the White House

"Kubrick always intended to cast an actual married couple as the movie's leads, but Cruise and Kidman weren't who he had in mind.

The initial pair he thought of was Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger."

Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump on the far right;-)

Hey Alex Jones, why does Trump want to meet with Putin on the anniversary of the 'Eyes Wide Shut' release date?-)
Alex Jones Has the I.Q. of a 10 Year-old?

"The role of the U.S. President in Sharknado 3 was first offered to Sarah Palin, but negotiations fell through. Next, Donald J. Trump was approached and at first accepted, but ultimately backed out, as he geared up for his own Presidential campaign."

HelSINKi?

Don't you just love synchromysticism?

HelSINKi, FINland?

Let's just hope both sides keep the Doors to negotiation open in Helsinki;-)

Putin: New Russian weapons decades ahead of foreign rivals

See You On The Other Side?

I stumbled across a paranormal podcast show called 'See You On The Other Side' yesterday when I was looking for Dr. Jack Hunter's podcast in an iTunes search.
And while I didn't find Jack's own podcast show I did find him interviewed on a podcast show I had never heard of before.
Digging Through Anthropology, Animism and Panpsychism with Dr. Jack Hunter?

I listened to the show featuring Jack and then I listened to the show the SYOTOS guys did about Mary Shelley, because last night I had a ticket to a preview screening of 'Mary Shelley' and Q&A with the writer of the screenplay Emma Jensen.
Curiouser and Curiouser Affection?

Emma Jensen at the Palace Barracks cinema last night

Emma Jensen

I didn't know Elle had green eyes

She's Got Hannah Stocking's Eyes?
But what really got me was the show the SYOTOS guys did in September 2016 about PKD.
109 – ANDROIDS, ANGELS, AND ALBEMUTH: THE PARANORMAL MIND OF PHILIP K. DICK
On iTunes that talk was posted on September 13th, 2016, which is the day my father died.

Taoism and Christianity?

On the 'See You On The Other Side' main website the PKD talk is posted on September 12th, but since Australia is almost a day ahead of the USA my father had already passed away by then because it was September 13th in Australia.

The guys at 'See You On The Other Side' show usually finish the podcast with a Sunspot song and on this PKD show they finish with a song called  'See You On The Other Side'.

I guess I couldn't get more of a personal sychronicity than that when it comes to that September 2016 podcast.
The Gnosis of Philip K Dick and CG Jung?

'See You On The Other Side'.

#0 – MAKE FIRST CONTACT WITH MIKE AND WENDY, YOUR HAUNTED HOSTS TO THE WEIRD REALITY BETWEEN PARANORMAL ACTIVITY AND POP CULTURE

#200 – WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD: OUR FIRST 199 PARANORMAL ADVENTURES

UPDATE: October 10th, 2018

I realize now after reading the post again that the song/tune played at the end of the show was not called 'See You On The Other Side', but Sunspot "shamelessly aping the beautiful soundtrack work of Vangelis with “The Tannhauser Gate”."
I must have got confused when I saw that header above where it seems to read 'See You On The Other Side' by Sunspot.

Either way, it was still a good show to listen to, even if I got the song title wrong in that post.
Now I feel like a PK Dick even more so:-)

'On the Beach', Not Being Able to See the Forest for the Trees and Permaculture?

The stumps of the two trees that
 I had cut down this month

The two trees as they looked
last year when I moved in

I've had a lot of strange personal synchronicities while I have been reading Nevil Shute's novel 'On the Beach' and I will be writing about a few more of those in upcoming posts, but this one involves two trees that I decided to get cut down a week ago, because the roots of the trees were finally starting to impact on my home's water pipes and pavement.

I had been thinking of getting the trees cut down for some months now and kept putting it off because my feathered friends and other wildlife really loved these trees.
It's just that whoever planted these two trees never gave much thought to the confined area they had planted them in, or the impact these trees were going to have on surrounding properties and structures.
The Spirit of the Lily and the Lillypilly?

Since I have been on a strict no dairy-vegetarian diet for over six months I have been thinking of growing some of my own food in the backyard and have been influenced by reading and listening to posts and podcasts about permaculture, like in this post I wrote after reading a post at the 'Rune Soup' blog -

Retrosuburbia?

The week before I had the trees cut down, I was mulling about getting the stumps removed as well, so I could plant a garden over the top of where the trees had been.
I decided to leave the stumps in the ground for now until I decided what I was going to plant in the garden.

The view of my garden from my computer
room with the trees gone

EVIL spelled backwards
is LIVE, by the way:-)

The weird thing was that the day the trees were to be cut down I was reading the novel 'On the Beach' after watching the movie on STAN (and ironically 'On the Beach' was produced and directed by STANley Kramer) at the end of May, and I came across this passage where a discussion was being had about removing two trees from a backyard in order to plant a vegetable garden -

""It's no concern of ours, anyway," he said."Lots of things are going a bit weird these days."
She nodded, and started pottering about the garden while he watered. Presently she said, "I've been thinking, Peter. Could we take out those two trees, do you think?"
He came and looked at them with her. "I'd have to ask the landlord, "he said. What do you want to take them out for?"
"We've got so little space for growing vegetables, " she said. "They are so expensive in the shops. If we could take those trees out and cut back the wattle we could make a kitchen garden here, from here to here." She indicated with her hands."I'm sure we could save nearly a pound a week by growing our own stuff. And it would be fun, too."
He went to survey the trees. "I could get them down all right," he said, "and there's a nice bit of firewood in them. It 'ld be green, of course, too green to burn this winter. We'd have to stack it for a year. The only thing is, getting out the stumps. It's quite a big job, that."
"There are only two of them," she said. "I could help - keep on nibbling at them while you're away. If we could get them out this winter and dig the ground over, I could plant it in the spring and we'd have vegetables all next summer." She paused. "Peas and beans," she said.
"And a vegetable marrow. I'd make marrow jam."
"Good idea," he said. He looked the trees up and down. "They're not very big," he said. "It'ld be better for the pine if they came out."
"Another thing I want to do," she said, "is to put in a flowering gum tree, here. I think that 'ld look lovely in the summer."
"Takes about five years to come into bloom," he said.    
"Never mind. A gum tree there would be justly lovely, up against the blue of the sea. We could see it from our bedroom window."

They go on in the novel planning their garden for the next ten years, but they know full well that come next spring the nuclear winter (ironically enough) will kill everybody in the area.

It wasn't lost on me that Ava GARDNER was one of the main stars in the movie version of 'On the Beach', either;-)

I guess it's a reminder in a way that we only have one planet, so we better look after it before it's way too late.

Now, where can I plant those mushrooms?-)

It's certainly a scary trip reading 'On the Beach' and thinking about the future of my own backyard.
David Griffin, Liz Fraser and Black (Goo) Milk?

Digging Through Anthropology, Animism and Panpsychism with Dr. Jack Hunter?

UPDATE: 2018

Was 'On The Beach' Cursed in Hindsight?