Wrong Channel

It's a while since I've taken pictures for the sake of aesthetic exposition. (This one from the files printed up nicely.) I'm glad to wake up and bring forth something beautiful (to me - someone else might think it garish) because last night I felt suppressed by the loathsome. I just can't bear vulgarity any more.

I rarely watch television. Having disconnected the cable years ago and passed on a dish, all I'll occasionally do is load a cassette for an evening of a PBS. This I did yesterday during prime time, the whim acted upon where more often than not I'll think to, then forget. After setting the VCR, I took a moment to watch a show on another channel. I don't mean to be churlish but it was definitive of defining deviancy down. Cloying voyeuristic grasp in the cheapest sense. Then the local news and more of the same.

This morning, contravention:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.

and blessed be the these lovely buds and brilliant petals.

Turning the TV off, I took up The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow. Well into it... a glorious read. I must confess a weakness for English cultural histories of this sort having had to repress any repletion of identification with my paternal ancestors on account of the inconvenience of being associated with the "oppressor class" where one was raised amidst some several folk of Irish extraction, as were my maternal forebearers. This book regales upon commercial men of applied science; potters, miners, physicians, chemists and toy makers. (Yes, that was a new one on me; toys were anything fabricated of metal for ornamental purposes... the head of a cane, the hilt of a sword, candelabra.) in the proto-industrial Midlands. They are more representative of the American "founding fathers" than any misrepresentation current in the theoretics of the Marxist political economy.

The quaint title is exactly that. These men dined and commiserated on the Sunday nearest the full moon so as to have light to find their way home. The Lunar Society. Such a much better place to be than enduring the dreck on television. Dissenters, they were. Splendid.