Stormy Nights, Foggy Mornings & Musings On Curse Words

July 27, 2015May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 26 Comments

Butterfly in the sun.

IT’S RAINING HERE AGAIN this morning.

We had a few days of blue skies and sunshine last week, but late yesterday afternoon the thunder and rain rolled in again. It was just about the time we were getting ready to have a cookout. Natch.

I’m beyond caring about the weather. What more is there to say about it?

Well, what more is there to say about it without resorting to swearing? And you know, gentle readers, that this is not that kind of blog.

Oh no, we keep it polite here at The Spectacled Bean. Or, at least, polite enough to not offend the delicate sensibilities of any reader over 40 years old.

• • •

OCCASIONALLY I WONDER IF I wrote in a more, shall we say, direct way using curse words, then readers would perceive me as being more authentic and edgy, therefore interesting.

If I’d done that kind of writing, which I easily could have, I wonder if I’d have been more popular as a blogger, than I am now.

Cherry tomatoes in the rain.

I’ve no moral objections to curse words, I say them irl. However when it comes to writing I hesitate to use them.

I’m content as things are on the blog, but observing the language used by revered bloggers, I do [sometimes] question my decision to keep it clean here.

I’ve Read 23 Out Of 35, But I Don’t Know About This Book List

July 24, 2015May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 45 Comments

Earlier this week Time magazine published 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime. I’ve added the list to the bottom of this post. The list, compiled from responses by Reddit users, attempts to answer the question:

“what is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?”

# # #

WHAT IMMEDIATELY STRUCK ME about the list is that out of the 33 authors, only 3 are women: L.M. Montgomery [Anne of Green Gables]; Harper Lee [To Kill A Mockingbird]; and Margaret Atwood [The Handmaid’s Tale].

Considering that the first two books are about children for children, and that the last one is about a society in which women are slaves, this list doesn’t lend credence to the idea that in 2015 we are living in a post-feminist society.

You with me here?

# # #

I THINK THAT WE can all agree, to use the article’s words, that: “Books have the profound capacity to stay with us for the rest of our lives.”

This is good + positive.

But by accepting this premise I think that it becomes even more important to turn a critical eye toward all the possible books that one can put on a list such as this. If one is going to have these books with him or herself forever, one must be discerning.

N’est-ce pas?

# # #

TO MAKE THE LIST more balanced, I’d suggest that we include &/or replace on it, at a minimum, the following books written by women:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

There must be more. Suggestions?

# # #

Time’s List of 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime

{ bolded ones I’ve read – asterisked ones I’ve never heard of before }

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Forever War* by Joe Haldeman
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Kafka on the Shore* by Haruki Murakami
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Animal Farm by George Orwell
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* by Philip K. Dick
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1984 by George Orwell

# # #

And Now, Class, We’re Going To Learn About The “Bee’s Knees”

May 28, 2015May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 27 Comments

[Occasionally when I’m researching Serious Subjects For Important Projects, I stumble across Fascinating Other Things To Know. The following, my gentle readers, is a non-serious thing that I have learned & will now share with you.]

• • •

{ Source: The Bee’s Knees Cocktail }

SO LET’S SAY THAT I’m a flapper, which isn’t that big of a stretch because if this was the 1920s you know that I’d be one.

Free spirit. Flapper. Very similar.

And let’s say that I wanted to tell you that someone or something was OUTSTANDING – ADMIRABLE – COOL. Then there’s a good chance that I’d say that he or she or it was the BEE’S KNEES.

Unless, of course, I was using other slang from that era. In which case I’d probably say that he or she or it was the:

cat’s meow,
monkey’s eyebrows,
skeeter’s elbow,
cat’s pajamas, OR
eel’s ankles.

HOWEVER BEING THAT I AM Thoroughly Modern Ally I think that I’d go with bee’s knees because it sounds cute to say and because there’s an actual logic behind the saying.

You know how I am about lurving the logic.

So to wit, and in conclusion of, what has turned out to be a rather lengthy post about an antiquated, but memorable, slang phrase, I give you this bit of information [from an unexpected source]:

“‘The Bee’s Knees’ is a term indicating excellence – the highest quality. Because bees carry pollen back to the hive in sacs on their legs. The allusion is to the concentrated goodness to be found around the bee’s knee.”

~ San Diego Bee’s Knees Business Guide

Bunny Haiku & To April I Say Adieu

April 30, 2015May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 24 Comments

April is one of my least favorite months of the year.

I’m allergic to it and I don’t groove on all the mud courtesy of the rain and I have to pay taxes and I have to watch on the news while “patriotic” wingnuts get their panties in a wad over what it means to be an American and et cetera, et cetera.

Blah.

However, one thing that I do like about April is that it’s national poetry month. I didn’t learn much of anything about poetry when I was in college because my English major program was much too practical for such things, but I did learn how to write a haiku.

Thus I give you the following poem, with stunning rabbit-y photos taken yesterday, as my good-bye to April, a month that makes me sneeze like no other month can.

Ah-choo.