Jive talking

Hey, there. How you doing? Last night I dreamt I was being chased by killer robots in the post-apocalypse. I had to hide on the roof so they didn't see me. Usually I post songs on here; I don't feel like it this time, and I need to wait a day or so to have more bandwidth.

So, let's just get to know each other a little bit, OK? What's your favorite color? Mine is probably blue. Well, unless you can really call rust a color.

I'm grateful Robert McCormack has been posting new works daily. Also, I am fond of this picture of Jackie Mittoo playing a toy piano.

My favorite historian of medieval/ early Renaissance life (better than Carlo Ginzburg even) is the late Piero Camporesi , who I've been re-reading lately, along with Roger Shattuck's The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, the last great book he wrote before he cracked-up, a wonderful companion piece to Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All: The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser.

I mean, I guess it's obvious: both works deal with real-life cases from around the same time (1800 and 1828, respectively) of the responses to "wild boys," kids raised in the wild or in total isolation, who had no sense of language or socialization at all, who'd been abandoned or worse, and who just appeared all of a sudden in the center of a village. The "scientific" approaches to these cases were fascinating, and terribly sad. I do find it awesome that, as Kaspar Hauser had not been taught a tongue, it was assumed by some he must speak Hebrew, as that was the language of the Bible. Also, I like the fact that the Aveyron "wild boy" was accepted and cared for by the rural peasants he first appeared near, who simply fed and clothed him and didn't turn him over to the authorities.

Ohhh, by the way, this dude who is a researcher in rheumotology has a theory about the whole K.H. drama, which continues to captivate people, like Jack the Ripper or Bobby Vinton...