Tag Archives: black and white

And Shipping is Always Free

Posted on by Bill Chance
(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

After church the three ladies liked to buy sack lunches from a truck and a bottle of Chianti from the shabby old liquor store on the way down to the river. They would sit on the bank by the rapids with their lunch and catch up on the weekly gossip.

There used to be old men fishing down there. The fishermen would sometimes whistle or shout at the ladies, which they, correctly, took as a complement. Now, though, the levels of polychlorinated biphenyls in the fish have been determined to be unsafe and the fishermen have been run off by the police. Sometimes the women miss the fishermen a little – but they also enjoy the quiet.

The ladies have a little pool going. Every week each kicks in a ten dollar bill and the first one to spot a body floating down the river wins the pot.

“There's one!” the lady in the middle shouts.

“That doesn't count, that's a swimmer.”

“It's a body isn't it?”

“But the bet is on a corpse, and you know it.”

“OK.” She sounds disappointed.

“There's one!” the lady furthest upstream calls out.

The middle one is not happy. She gives the object a close look. “Wait, I don't think it's a body, I think it's an inflatable woman.”

She pulls her Sig Sauer P229 out of her purse and lets off a round. She is an expert shot. The inflatable pops and shrivels up into the churning water. The ladies hear giggling from a copse of willow trees upstream. The ladies have been pranked.

“Those kids! At it again. Where did they get that thing?” They shout at the kids. “Where did you get that thing?!”

A reedy voice, hard to hear over the roar of the rapids, comes giggling back from the willows. “Dealdash Dot Com.”

“Children now-a-days. What is this world coming to?” the lady in the center complains. The other two nod in agreement. She pulls a little kit out of her purse, screws the handle on the end of the aluminum rod, and begins to swab out the barrel of her handgun.

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness. That's what my mother taught me.”

The other two nod in agreement again, but don't move their gaze from the water. They want to win the pot.

Delta

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.”
—- John McPhee, The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya

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(click to enlarge)

The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where? What was solid, what was not? What was directly below the gates and the roadway? With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole. They saw fish.
—-John McPhee, The Control of Nature

Turtles all the Way Down

Posted on by Bill Chance

“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever, ” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Audubon Park, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Audubon Park, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

Audubon Park, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Audubon Park, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

Ice and Iron

Posted on by Bill Chance
(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

A hungry feeling came o’er me stealing
And the mice were squealing in my prison cell
And the old triangle went jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal

To begin the morning the screw was bawling
“Get up, ya bowsie, and clean up your cell”
And the old triangle went jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal

The screw was peeping, Humpy Gussy was sleeping
As I lay there dreaming of my girl, Sal
And the old triangle went jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal

Up in the female prison there are seventy-five women
And ’tis among them I wish I did dwell
Then the old triangle could go jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal
All along the banks of the royal canal
—-The Auld Triangle, trad, Dominic Behan

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Audubon Fountain

Posted on by Bill Chance

Audubon Park, New Orleans

“i see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you write me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
ANGELS AND GOD, all in uppercase, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’s all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’m not jealous
because we’ve never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame- not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD.”
—-An Almost Made Up Poem, Charles Bukowski

Audubon Park, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Audubon Park, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

Audubon Park, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Audubon Park, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

More Dancers on the Pool

Posted on by Bill Chance

During the concert by the Dallas String Quartet.

Arts District, Dallas, Texas

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(click to enlarge)

Atlas Metal Works

Posted on by Bill Chance

West Dallas, Dallas, Texas

“All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

Belo Garden

Posted on by Bill Chance

Belo Garden, Dallas, Texas

Click for a larger, more detailed version on Flickr.