Anaïs Nin November: Daily Batman — Always punished

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives.

At the end they are always punished.


(“The Mohican.” Under A Glass Jar, 1944.)

Daily Batman: Phantasma-Gorey

Art by Jesse E. Larson.

Take-two Tuesday — The Way They Were: Egon and Wally

This entry was originally posted March 1, 2010 at 11:50 am.

Yesterday I was reminded that I had a bunch of these “Way They Were” entries planned and had only followed through on one (Jayne and Mickey). That’s cowardly. I’m going to try to motor through more in the coming months.

“Sitzende Frau mit hochgezogenem Knie”/”Seated woman with bent knee”, 1917.

Although artist Egon Schiele had been separated from Valerie “Wally” Neuzil and married to Edith Harms for two years by the date of this painting, most everyone agrees this is from an earlier study of Wally. It looks too much like her not to be, and he uses the colors that are associated with the Wally work. It’s my favorite work by him. It was on the cover of the Schiele book that my husband, who is a painter, had at our house in Portland, and was the entire reason I found myself opening and reading the book one day. I was interested in Schiele’s work, which is provocative and weird and has many shockingly modern features, all things I like, but, because his life was tragically cut short by disease, his career arc is brief. Coming away from the slim book about his life and art, I felt that his work was dominated by the chief feature of his life, which is to say in a nutshell his time with the real love of his life, which he royally fucked up, and it was the story of that, of Egon’s eventually jacked-beyond-repair relationship with Wally Neuzil that really sucked me in.

“Das Modell Wally Neuzil”/”The model Wally Neuzil.” 1912.

Artist Egon Schiele and his model, Valerie “Wally” Neuzil, were together from 1911 to 1915. He met her in Vienna when she was seventeen and he was twenty-one. Supposedly they were introduced by Gustav Klimt. Supposedly she had been Klimt’s mistress before she got together with Schiele. These things are all conjecture because everyone involved is dead, and they happened before the Great War, which so influenced the German-speaking art world in the years just following it that anything which contributed to or influenced an artist’s work before the War kind of fell by the wayside until later generations resumed their scholarship of turn of the century artists. That’s fair. Such radical changes happened during and after the War that I imagine it seemed crazy, outdated, and irrelevant to really consider too deeply the little emotional outbursts and criminal trials that came before the dramatic political events of the 1910’s and 20’s that literally reshaped the landscape.

“Rothaarige hockende Frau mit grünen Strümpfen (Valerie Neuzil)”/”Crouching figure with green stockings” (Valerie Neuzil).” 1913.

Egon and Wally left Vienna because they considered it too oppressive. They sought an inspirational, romantic, and bucolic lifestyle of freedom in the countryside, moving to Krumia — which also had the more practical benefit of much cheaper rent than Vienna — where, though Schiele’s mother was born there, they were summarily run out of town not too long after for being a little too inspirational, romantic, and bucolic: they’d been using the town’s teenagers as “models”. There’s a Schiele museum there now, so I guess that, like cream cheese, their hearts eventually softened to a spreadable cracker topping. That analogy got out of control in a hurry. It’s almost time for me to grab lunch, sorry.

“Wally in roter Blouse mit erhobenen Knien”/”Wally in red blouse with raised knees.” 1913.

Essentially fleeing the angry mob in Krumia, Egon and Wally moved again, this time north to Nuelengbach, where it was apparently same shit, different day, as they were not there even six months and Schiele was arrested for seducing a minor. Once in custody, they dropped that charge (apparently the young lady changed her tune when the absinthe wore off?) and an abduction charge the parents had insisted be levied originally, and instead tried and found him guilty of displaying inappropriate art in a place where minors could see it. He was released from prison after serving twenty-four days in April 1912 — are you getting the idea of what an awesome prince he was? such the lucky girl, that Wally — and they moved back to the Vienna area.

“Auf einem blauen Polster Liegende mit goldblondem Haar (Wally Neuzil)”/”Reclining female figure with gold blonde hair on a blue pillow (Wally Neuzil).” 1913.

Settled with Wally in Heitzing, a Viennese suburb, Schiele wrote to a friend in early 1915 that he was going to marry one of the Harms sisters, two locksmith’s daughters named Edith and Adele who lived across the street from his studio, for money. I guess running around for three years painting erotic pictures and pissing people off while sleeping with teenagers and doing jail time had not turned out to be the lucrative life of luxury he’d anticipated; the cash flow was getting low, and, despite that he considered Wally his partner and soulmate, marrying for money was Schiele’s timeless solution to their financial woes. He followed through on this, marrying the older of the daughters, Edith, on June 17, 1915, exactly 91 years before my own wedding day.

“Frau in Unterwäsche und Strümpfen (Valerie Neuzil)”/”Woman in underwear and stockings (Valerie Neuzil).” 1913.

A few days after his wedding, Schiele was called to the war, but managed to always serve in Austria, so he was able to continue with his art and stay close to his ties in Vienna. Wally had broken up with him when he told her he was getting married. Schiele wrote to friends expressing shock and grief: he’d actually expected her to understand and stay with him. He wrote a letter to Wally asking her to meet him at a billiards parlor that he liked to go to. There he gave her another letter, proposing that every year they go on an extended holiday, without his wife. She did not write back or respond positively to this. Instead, she left him and never saw him again.

“Frau mit schwarzen Strümpfen – Valerie Neuzil”/”Woman with black stockings – Valerie Neuzel.” 1913.

I was furious when I read this. I still remember sitting in my little house in Portland and my jaw dropping, and my blood boiling, all this anger and resentment simmering in me, directed at people I never met who’d been dead nearly a century, but I couldn’t help it. I hate him for marrying someone else, I hate him and I hate the story of how they were because it reveals that through all that time they spent together, Schiele must have considered Wally lower than him, and though she stood by him , asshole though he could be, he thought her to be the unimportant one, expendable and suppressable, and he literally threw her away like garbage even though she was the best thing that had happened to him; his drawings of her are the best things he did. But that is how some stories are, and I deserve to feel angry because I need to accept that, I have to work through my sadness about the fact that nothing and no one has ever been perfect not even for a day or an hour or a moment, every joyful thing is secretly riddled through with the knowledge that this is so good now because there will be pain later and every lucky penny has a tail side of the coin, and if I have to search my soul and see if there is any gold in the dross of this love story that I in my infantile understanding of human nature found so devastating than I guess I must say that I do love that Schiele really loved Wally in an incredibly broken way, and had that time with her in which there must surely have been good moments.

Photograph of Wally and Egon from the Schiele Museum online.

Schiele died only three years after his breakup with Wally, on Halloween 1918, in an influenza epidemic which had several days earlier killed Edith and their unborn child. He passed away completely unaware that Wally Neuzil had herself succumbed to death from disease around Christmas of the previous year. She’d become a nurse for the Red Cross and, stationed at Split in Dalmatia, she caught scarlet fever from one of her patients and died in the same hospital at which she’d been working for over a year.

edit 7/6/11. Question for discussion: on a large enough timeline, aren’t we and all our petty passions and tragedies truly sound and fury, don’t we signify nothing after all? I want to think not — likely only because of vanity and childish fear of my own meaninglessness — but it seems so true.

Movie Moment: Stop. Margot time.

By Esra Roise, Norway.

“I think I’m in love with Margot.”
“Margot Tenenbaum?”

(Richie and Royal. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001).)

Flashback Friday, New Years’ Resolution Reality Check #1 — Music Moment: Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Goofus”

This entry was originally posted on January 12, 2010 at 3:55 pm. It contains the second of my New Years’ Resolutions for 2010. Over the next several Flashback Fridays, I will be taking them out, dusting them off, and seeing how well I followed through. I do not anticipate it always being pleasant, but the truth can’t be.

Les Paul & Mary Ford – Goofus

This recording of “Goofus” (King-Harold-Kahn, 1930), one of my favorite songs, is just instrumental. It’s performed by legendary husband-wife duo Les Paul and Mary Ford (so, so, so much more on them another day).

The Paul-Ford version topped out at #21 on the Billboard chart on its release in the early Fall of 1950. The ensemble Paul and Ford had gathered is plucky and fun, although I have heard recordings from the ’30’s with saws and washboards which sort of put ukes and slides in the shade, but you work with what you got, and they did a great job re-popularizing a well-loved classic.

It really gets me that there was a time in this country when there was a) a set of songs that everyone knew, and b) a time when you picked up an instrument and sat down together and played, sometimes just as a family, but often as part of a larger community group. What happened? Radio killed the vaudeville star, but, moreover, the vaudeville star took group singalongs and skit shows down with him. No more public singing.

People just don’t do that often enough anymore, I think. I remember reading, quite a few years back, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (I consequently did not see the movie), and, in one of the super-tolerable parts, a character aged in her mid-70’s during the 1990’s was remarking on the emptiness of the sounds one hears walking the streets in the present day. She recalled being a child and teenager in the ’20’s and ’30’s, and how you could not so much as hang the laundry without hearing someone whistling or singing a street over or while walking past the yard.

“One Last Tickle on the Ivorys,” St. Ebba’s Lunatic Asylum, by Christopher O’Donovan on the flickr.

The idea of that touched me very deeply, because it resonated. I have always liked music, and always known a little about the history of radio and the record industry, being a big vinyl guy, and I’m not saying even at all that radio itself massacred town talent shows, I think increasing materialism and isolationism happened to dovetail with that new mass media, and long story short: it should change back. We need more of that old way of doing things, especially now, when so many people have lost hope and there are young people growing up for whom there are no stories about uncles who sang Irish tenor or great-grandmothers that could play the spoons.

It’s always fun to find out what hidden talents your friends and neighbors have (unless those talents are taxidermy and soundproofing basements), and it brings communities closer together. I think I remember hearing that a song is like a prayer times two, or some such thing, and I believe it. Everything is better with music.

“I Wanna Be a Majorette,” by Eleanor Hardwick.

I used to perform in singing groups and church choirs, and even participated in competitive choral groups in High School. The older I’ve gotten, the more I have grown very shy about my singing, but why? Half of what I hear on the radio has been triple-processed and slickly produced, and who cares if someone hears me fall a little flat? The spirit and song in my heart that made me so happy, that urge to open my throat that I couldn’t repress, that hasn’t changed, so why do I let fear and modern ideals of social behavior fence me in?

Holy cow, I think I just found my second resolution of 2010: Make a joyful noise. Join me, y’all!


Reality Check: I did not do as well as I wanted on this one. I started sporadically singing in my friends’ “band practice” Rock Band video game nights, but I did not join my church choir, which was what I really wanted to do. Partly intimidation because the director is an old friend, partly feeling too busy (excuse). I guess where I feel I really failed is I did not keep that song in my heart that I felt when I had written this originally. I need to try to get that feeling back.

Hot Man Bein’ Hot of the Day: Faceless internet drawing edition and skinny-jean PSA

via hhhelloalex on the tumblr.

If he is only in it for the pussy … it’s working. I am not deterred by today’s Hot Man’s facelessness nor non-existence. I can break down exactly why this sketch of a gentleman melts my cold, cold heart.

a) Girls Like A Boy Who Plays Music.
b) Dressed like Han Solo.
c) Dressed like Han Solo (counts at least twice).
d) Looks like he could not borrow my jeans.

Emo boys, I have given you warnings in the past, but I’m still seeing these skinny jeans and “jeggings” hanging off your narrow heinies all around the town. Let me phrase it to you less delicately than in the past.

PSA:

If you look like you could literally get in my pants, you are not getting in my pants.

/End PSA. Now please refer to the handsome faceless internet drawing of what a real man looks like, and eat some spaghetti, Slappy.

edit: The lyrics are from “Awake My Soul” by Mumford and Sons. Here is what I assume to be the inspiration for the drawing:

Nothing to complain about, but is it weird that I like the drawing better? It isn’t anything so explicable and logically psychological like that the facelessness implies more tantalizing possibility: I genuinely just prefer the drawing to the dude. Could be the camera angle making him look shorter and thinner. Don’t worry, guy, you are still okay. Maybe give the other one a Twinkie, though.

69 Days of Wonder Woman, Days 9 – 35

I was wayyyy too lazy about actually posting up my thoughts each day on the reading and research I was doing on Wonder Woman and I’m playing catch-up now. In order to make up for that lost time and have something properly worthwhile to represent the span of days lost, here’s a little drawing and expounding on the Amazonian from superfly amazing Adam Hughes, whose Catwoman work has been spotlighted here numerous times in the past.

Wonder Woman is the greatest comic-book superheroine of all time, and I can prove it with math. If you need proof of Wonder Woman’s stature as the greatest comic-book superheroine of all-time, then, PLEASE, go add up all the issues of any other female character and see if you come close to SIX HUNDRED.

No other female character has remained in print, consistently, since the Second World War. Think about that. Are there ANY? From ANY company? Nope. Sometimes, simple statistics speak volumes: Wonder Woman has been around, month-in-month-out, for almost 70 years. How many heroines (or heroes!) can boast such a feat? How many PUBLICATIONS have been in print since WWII?

She has inspired, intrigued, and entertained – NON-STOP – through 5 American wars, 13 U.S. presidential administrations, and she’s even outlasted regimes like the Soviet Union. Wonder Woman endures because she’s the best of the best, the baddest of the bad, the bluest of the blue.

(Hughes, Adam. Posted by Alex Segura via the DC Universe Blog.

Dang if that is not a convincing argument. Actually what I’ve found is that I am growing to like her the same as I do any of my regular favorites (perhaps with more respectful acknowledgement than, say, fervent love), and wonder why I didn’t before. Like it’s not even a big deal.

69 Days of Wonder Woman, Day 8: Super Dictionary, “I am against the people who make trouble.”

It’s interesting how quickly, even before the infamous code descended and cut out some of the popular gory lines, comics became dominated by superhero/crimefighter stories, due of course to the mad success of Superman. Sure, there have always been pulp adventure and horror comics, but when most people even think of comic books, it’s the heroes with which they associate the genre. The writers are driven by the publishers, who are driven by sales, which are driven by readers — so the natural conclusion is that a story about a badass goodhearted hero who fights crime is what the audience wants to read.

Drawing by Anthony Tan via fyeahww on the tumblr.

Comics are such manifestly wish-fulfillment-meets-folktale, flimsy-and-touching paper myths, that I think there’s a beautiful lesson here: we want to read about the hero who fights crime, who is “against” troublemakers and waiting with her golden lasso to show them what real trouble is, because we, ourselves, wish to do that. We wish to have a secret identity and fight for those who have no voice, to put a stop to injustices against our fellow men. All these generations of readers have wished to make the world better, not just for accolades or girls but because it is the right thing to do. And that’s really a great and inspiring thing. It’s sweet and charming and kind of triumphant, isn’t it?

Daily Batman: Hiding from writing

“Catwoman 3” by 89g on the da.

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.

Douglas Adams

If one more person uses my recent illness as the basis of a “you should” type sentence whose predicate is, “finish some of your writing,” I am going to jump off the roof. This threat is less dramatic than it seems: I live in a one-story house. I just figure that if I’ve got a lot of stitches and splints, maybe it will give these well-meaning loved ones something else to talk to me about.

Music Moment and Movie Millisecond: Don’t say I never gave you anything and please do have a laugh

Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2005). Jessica Alba portrays Nancy Callahan. Rescued from kidnap and rape in her youth by Detective John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), Nancy is now an exotic dancer at a divey downtown night spot guarded by my crowd-pleasing favorite character, Marv (Mickey Rourke).

Nancy as drawn by Miller in the original comics.

Things have been kind of heavy for me lately. Et tu? Seems like everyone I know is kind of down this week; guess Mars is in retrograde or some kind of similar jello salad. So I encourage you to hit “play” on the song below and watch in amazement as Nancy Callahan “dances it out” in the exact same beat at that there ol’ Kadie’s Club Pecos in fabulous Basin City, a sunny place for shady characters.

FIRST PLAY THIS:
Les Paul and Mary Ford — Goofus (1950).
THEN WATCH THIS:

Actually, it works with all kinds of songs, but “Goofus” is the one that struck an absurd and juvenile chord of laughter in me. If you’ve been feeling a little out of sorts today, please do have a laugh and promise to try and make some of your own fun.

Daily Batman: Bent and broken into a better shape

Catwoman by phenomenal artist Shelton Bryant.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.

(Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. 1861. The speaker is Estella, addressing Pip in Chapter 58.)

Daily Batman: “Wanted” feat. Bette Davis

by Adam Hughes unless it’s not. Credit correction welcome?

“I’m the nicest goddamned dame that ever lived.”

(Bette Davis.)

Daily Batman: Joker sez “Eat spaghetti” and the nature of funny business

EAT SPAGHETTI.

via

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

(Joseph Conrad.)

Daily Batman: the Color of the Soul

via

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

(Marcus Aurelius)

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: 19 Man

Last year my friendoh’s rad son came up with a superhero who was made out of number 19s and was named, appropriately, “19 Man.” That drawing has been lost to time so he made me a new one.

19 Man has a sidekick and a nemesis who has his own sidekick, and they all have kickass pets. Please click to enlarge and enjoy the awesome creativity. I especially like Mustache Dog — the very combination of the words of his name is something like “cellar door” or “fiddlesticks;” it pleases, yes?

I think I’ll start including some of my daughter’s work in liberated negative space as well. Like Picasso said, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

R.I.P., Harvey Pekar

October 8, 1939 — July 12, 2010.

Photographed by Peter Ross.

R.I.P., Harvey Pekar.

Daily Batman: Big Chief Talks-With-Fists

via batmanpunchingpeople on the tumblr.

If you know the provenance of this panel — like, its backstory and the issue in which it appeared, etc — please, please don’t tell me. I want it to stay exactly like this. Because this? Is gold.

Talk nerdy to me: Art of the Nerd

‘Nam-native Beetle-Bailey ear-necklace update: I still suck.

But seeing me hunched over and going through a ream of paper trying to do studies inspired kidlet to grab one of her own most recent “commissioned pieces,” the last assigned coloring project she had before school ended. Speaking of Jurassic Park and bloodthirsty drawings:

When she first brought it home, knowing what a girly-girl she can often be, I asked naively, “Is your T. Rex a girl dinosaur? With lipstick and fingernails?” She gave me a long-suffering, how-sad-that-my-mother-is-Grimace-from-Ronald-McDonaldland expression and said, “Mommy. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a killer. That is blood.”

Check. It was already all cut out so we put it on a couple popsicle sticks so she could use him as part of her various paper puppet shows.

Think about it: wouldn’t every single puppet show you’ve ever seen have been improved by the introduction of a tyrannosaur? It’s like a recipe for Imaginary Awesome and you just kicked it up a notch. T. Rexes are truly the paprika in the potato salad of the toybox.

So I was trying my hand yet again at drawing Beetle. The problem is I want his shirt open to display the necklace to best advantage as well as convey how unhinged he’s become, but both the open shirt and his chest itself are giving me trouble as far as drawing them as simply but representatively as possible, and I can only imagine my plan for his right hand to be flashing a peace sign will also end in tears. Meanwhile, kidlet, like I said, went and fetched her T. Rex puppet.

She made “Blarrrghhh, Gahrrrrr, Rawrrrrr” kind of noises at me from the other side of the table, kneeling so only the puppet showed and, when that did not sufficiently distract me, she snuck up beside me and pounced, pretending the dinosaur was biting my hand (very convincing flesh-tearing noises accompanied this move), and I said, “You’re very scary, but I’m kind of in the middle of this. Why don’t you go eat a Barbie? We can play later. Promise.”

First the T. Rex turned his cap backward, then they started the arm-wrestling. If you do not understand this humorous reference and you want to get in on the cheesey action flick joke, rent Over the Top (Menahem Golan, 1987). Don’t necessarily buy it though, heh.

Kidlet danced the dinosaur away, making stomping noises with her feet to simulate his weight stalking out of the room, then stuck the puppet back around the corner and said loudly in a deep, ominous voice, “You haven’t seen the last of Tyrannosaurus Rex!!”

I said, “I’m pretty sure I have, actually.” Extinction is a bitch. But the whole exchange cracked me up and lightened my mood. She’s so wonderful. I don’t know where she came from but I’m damned lucky she’s here.

Lastly, the best thing I have ever seen, a comic panel that never fails to cheer me up:

via

Everything is right in that picture. Especially how psyched the tyrannosaur pilot looks. I told you: they are the paprika in the recipe of AWESOME!

All apologies

Where is this afternoon going? Super-sorry. I know I’ve been poo about posting up the usual shenanigans today — no Blake, no Girl of Summer, no Batman, like practically nothing at all yet — but I was fully absorbed in a project this morning. Must’ve been all this Vietnam talk lately, but I basically woke up today with only one goal on my mind:

Draw Beetle Bailey with a necklace of human ears.

Reference image.

Not in a funny way. In a dark and serious, satirical but sad way, like to make a point.

Way harder than it sounds, as it turns out. Reminds me of this great idea I had a few months back for a single-panel comic of a rat in hawaiian shirt and boater hat with a little cane and tiny specs, standing upright, top legs like arms spread grandly, saying, “Welcome — to Thoracic Park!” And the rat-John Hammond saying this was to be inside a rotting human rib cage along with little precious mousey-rat versions of Doctors Sattler, Grant, and Malcolm, and it would have been wonderful (is there a name for what’s wrong with me?) but for the ass-huge stumbling block of my complete inability to transfer the idea in as effective a way as I’d hoped from mind to paper. Blocked it fifteen different ways and it never gelled.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. Did You Know?

Looks like that’s going to be the story with Beetle going Apocalypse Now-style native. Another for the Fail tray. I’m going to try a little more later today. Keep you posted.

I hate it when my ambition oustrips my art skills. Blarg.

The flag is NOT a weapon

“USA 101” by amadteaparty on the flickr.

I was taking a break from yardwork to make lunch and my daughter was dancing around me swinging something little and slappy on a stick at me. This exchange followed:

Me: Dude! Quit hitting me with that.
Kidlet: (continues trying to hit me)
Me: What even is that?
Kidlet: (stills long enough for me to see it is a miniature U.S. flag on a thin wooden dowel)
Me: Oh, no. That is not — (starts hitting me again) — Hey! Not okay! The flag is NOT a weapon!
Kidlet: The flag IS a weapon! (holds up the dowel end and mimicks stabbing the air Psycho-style)

“American Headache” via the awesome broken spectre on the tumblr.

Tomorrow is Flag Day here in the United States and while I am wary of overdoing it in an oppressive way such as our founding fathers would not have favored and accidentally sewing the seeds of jingoism, I do expect informed respect for patriotic symbols, especially the flag. (See my vitriolic Memorial Day entry for expansion on the issue of this inner conflict and dislike of corporate co-optioning of patriotism) Guess I’ll use it as a jumping-off point to explain to her about flags and traditions, etc.

Steve McQueen.

I did a good, short unit on the National Anthem with the Scamps. Maybe I’ll dig that out of my current tutoree’s textbook when I see her this week, since her mom muscled the school library in to letting her take all her books home for the summer (I’ve said it before but the woman is literally a bulldozer in pumps; it is all I can do not to submissively pee when she enters a room). I remember some of it.

via hellobaltimore
Did You Know? The giant flag about which Francis Scott Key wrote seeing wave over Fort McHenry at the end of the Battle of Baltimore was made in just about six weeks by Mary Young Pickersgill, with the aid of her mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Caroline, along with her nieces and two freed African-American houesmaids. They were commissioned by Major George Armistead to make the largest flag ever to be flown over a fort up until that time — the apocryphal story goes that he told the women he wanted to make sure the British could see it. The flag is presently going through a restoration to the tune of 18 million dollars right now in preparation for its centrality to the new, redesigned Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

via leotarded on the tumblr.

A widow with a spine of steel, Mrs. Pickersgill was one of the first independent female business owners in America. She successfully negotiated contracts for her flagmaking business with the United States Army and the Navy. She was also a passionate humanitarian, being notable in town for “color-blind” hiring in her sewing shop, with a special bent for women’s issues: she founded the Impartial Female Humane Society, which provided school vouchers for young girl children of any race or religion to be educated, along with the provision of networking and employment to their single mothers.

The More You Know.

Flag kicks from Converse. Chux are cool, yes, but please remember they are owned by Nike. I’m just sayin’.

Guess I should have saved all these flag facts for tomorrow, but I figured I had better strike while the iron of my interest was hot — I know what a fickle creature I am, and by tomorrow the flame of my curiosity about flags, Mrs. Pickersgill, and the history of the women’s movement would have died down to embers at best.