Driving around in the cold taking random shots of the country side

The Dead Poet Bar Gives You Free Drinks on Your Birthday — With a Brilliant Catch

(New York) The Dead Poet Bar at 450 Amsterdam Avenue near 82nd Street likes to celebrate birthdays, and will happily celebrate yours by pouring you some free booze. It’s one of the rare remaining local spots that gives freebies to people celebrating their special day, the Wall Street Journal recently found.

But there’s a catch. To receive free drinks — excluding shots, premium beers and liquors and some cocktails — you have to share a birthday with a famous writer. There’s a list of birth dates at the bar. If you don’t have the rare luck of sharing a date with someone like Edgar Allan Poe (January 19) or Virginia Woolf (January 25), you’ll have to find another literary great who shares your birthday and then convince the bartender that the person is worthy of the liquor (no your Uncle Barney who sends around emails with dirty limericks doesn’t count). So enjoy your birthday, and dedicate your next cold one to a great dead poet.

 

The wonderful Carmen McRae

 Carmen Mercedes McRae (April 8, 1922 – November 10, 1994) was a jazz  singer who is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics. McRae was inspired by Billie Holiday but she established her own voice. She recorded over sixty albums and performed worldwide.

Black and White photography is so wonderful

a pig ran through grandmas wedding photo - 1927

The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna (1817) Charles Wolfe

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning;

By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light

And the lantern dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him,

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest

With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow;

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,

And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed

And smoothed down his lonely pillow,

That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head,

And we far away on the billow!

Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone

And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,

But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on

In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

But half of our heavy task was done

When the clock struck the hour for retiring;

And we heard the distant and random gun

That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

From the field of his fame fresh and gory;

We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,

But left him alone with his glory.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Untitled. from the series Chicago. 1960s

The underappreciated Mr. Bukowski

The beats, whom I now realize were greatly overrated

And now for a little Norman Rockwell, because I enjoy his work and because his work REALLY annoys culture snobs

Look at the expression on his face

May 1930 (Chicago) Seven children at the Harvard school were scratched and nipped about the arms yesterday by a stray dog with which they had been playing. one was seriously Injured. The dog, described by' witnesses an overgrown pup, was believed to have become excited when the children started mauling it. 'Policemen IL J. Cavanaugh and Walter Howard of a, Gresham flivver squad chased it for an hour before capturing it. The owner was identified as Henry Trenton.

Cannonball Adderley

Julian Edwin Adderley (September 15, 1928 – August 8, 1975) was a jazz alto saxophonist of the hard bop era of the 1950s and 1960s. Adderley is remembered for his 1966 soul jazz single "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy",a crossover hit on the pop charts (it was also covered by the Buckinghams). He worked with trumpeter Miles Davis, on his own 1958 Somethin' Else album, and on the seminal Davis records Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). He was the older brother of jazz trumpeter Nat Adderley, a longtime member of his band.

and now, a nod to the Beats...

  

“On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There’s no need to say another word.” Jack Kerouac

  

”I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.” Jack Kerouac

“Grinding my teeth for lack of love, walking into a cathedral is like walking into a cold stove, like into a glove.”— Writing Poems is a Saintly Thing, Peter Orlovsky

The writer and the author

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. 

Wien

Ernest Hemingway, as photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Cuba, August of 1952

William Somerset Maugham

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

The tragedy of love is indifference.

Two pieces of GREAT advice for a writer.