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Rick Rosner
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Audio & Podcasts
- Hits: 2101
A brilliant interview with the "World's highest IQ" - Rick Rosner, this is strangely compelling viewing. It demonstrates the total disconnect between measured intelligence and achievement, personality, vocabulary, or anything else for that matter. Were you not told or otherwise aware of Rick's prodigious mental capacities, you would never guess from the hour long interview. You can view the rest of the documentary/interview here. Note things like the directors use of disconnected puzzle pieces, the obviously transplanted hair, and heed the warnings that "Intelligence isn't everything". In it's own way, a curious bookend to his more successful cousin, Karl Pilkington.
Richard Pryor's Hairy Ass
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1851
I'm in a room speaking to an older woman, her husband designed the 1949 Silver Canadian Dime. It looks just like the regular dime, but the queen's head is split into half, the one half the same formal representation on every dime, the other half is a sort of Matisse - styled abstraction, a bit like the figure on the French Centime...I'm impressed, I don't know why, this isn't something that would ordinarily impress me, I ask her how many were minted but she postpones my questions for her husband, I look around her house, it's nice, darker, furnished with fine antiques and paintings, she gives me a dime to keep....
And now I'm escaping from someone, don't know or remember who, I duck into a church, the 7th Day Adventists...It's like a church basement, no chairs, people sitting in the middle of the floor, too brightly lit....
Richard Pryor is there, he's naked and conducting a sort of Bingo, everyone's got some sort of scratch card with a bunch of different playing cards depicted on them, he's calling numbers and they scratch off the corresponding card...I decide to play to pass the time while hiding out....
He turns around, and while I shouldn't look I can't help but notice how hairy his ass is, really, a beard that grows down between his legs and balls, but nobody seems to mind...
The Nibelungenlied
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1793
Curious, 12th or 13th Century tale of the death of Siegfried and the subsequent revenge by Kriemhild upon the treacherous Hagen. Filled with a sort of cartoonish, Hollywood style of violence wherein the protagonists prevail (for a time) against seemingly insurmountable odds, introducing and slightly fleshing out characters such as Brunhild and Rudiger, it served as my introduction to the medieval German myths and legends. Now, to be truthful, while it's a classic I wasn't overwhelmed by it, the translation I read (A. T. Hatto) sought to preserve the narrative at the expense of the poetry, and not speaking medieval German I'm not in a position to comment on whether he did a good or a bad job, I suspect the former. But it was redeemed in the numerous appendices and footnotes, which clarified and interpreted certain passages and generally raised my estimitation of it.
Now the introduction is often, in my view, something to be avoided, it frequently presumes you are familiar with the plot and outcome of the story and makes free with spilling events and offering criticisms and interpretations before you've had a chance to appraise it yourself. But in this instance the introduction and notes were saved until the end, where they served the proper function of clarifying the text and comparing the outline with the various antecedent poems and stories that preceded it. Which was a good thing.
Or is it? While I don't like "spoilers", it should be noted that it's original audience was very familiar with the plot, and the telling of the story was simply a different "interpretation" or fleshing out/tying together of various of the legends surrounding Siegfried and the Burgundians. So in this sense, to have the same appreciation as it's audience, forewarned might have been forearmed....
Other observations? Curious as to the events that actually led to the creation of the myths of Siegried and Kriemhild, curious as to how the audience reconciles the 2 halves, the first in which Siegfried is the hero treacherously murdered, Kriemhild the cruelly widowed Queen, then the second half where she weds King Etzel and becomes a vengeful sort of demon who sacrifices all in her quest for revenge, Hagen's role switches from that of traitor to that of hero... But then these become questions of our culture and time, and my absence of sympathy is largely due to my lack of understanding and context.
And the treasure of the Nibelung's, Kriemhild's dowry from Siegfried sunken into the Rhine...
Francis Parkman - The Oregon Trail - Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1716
An interesting read, in the genre of "Travel Literature", a firsthand account of the prairies and the Oregon Trail as recounted by Francis Parkman, circa 1845.
Colorful locations and characters, and a world that while only a 165-odd years ago might as well have been the ice age...Fierce and savage Indian tribes, Buffalo herds numbering in the tens of thousands, and everywhere they went wildlife...dozens of snakes underfoot, a cup of water taken from a stream is filled with tadpoles and frogs, and where the author notes there is no game to be shot he clarifies "No buffalo, deer or antelope", because always there are the wolves, the coyotes, the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes....
And I think, I've been to these places, some of which are still wild, yet where is the game now? It's rare enough to spot a frog or snake in the wildest of places, and the buffalo have long been gone from the prairie...
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