The Blue Whales and I

 A Frenchman in a red knit hat came on television and told me about Blue Whales.  

Is it bigger than an elephant?
       It's bigger than six elephants.

Is it bigger than a brontosaurus?
       It weighs twice more than the Brontosaurus.

It's bigger than three school buses.  It's bigger than a jet airplane. Its food is smaller than your pinky finger.  Its heart is enough for a boy like you to stand up inside.  Its brain is larger and more complicated than yours.

To find each other through the broad, dark, deep ocean--they sing.  They sing through their giant bellies, the bones in their nose, and the nostrils on the top of their head.  Their song fills the water and travels for miles until it finds another behemoth, a deep, long, sad song of cold and food and sunlight and life and beauty.  

When I was a boy, the Frenchman in the red knit hat said that the Blue Whales were dying.  We were poor companions for it on this living blue ball, and they were dying.  In my dreams, I could see the last few blue behemoths swmming through endlessly deep oceans, praying they would live.

They did live.  Though their extinction was thought all but certain, they came back out of the pure blue depths.  They are the largest animals that ever lived.  We are the animals with the largest environmental impact that ever lived.  Maybe we are bound together.  Maybe their songs I hear in my sleep have a messge.

A New Perspective On The Academy

 Some of the best students of literature and history I ever met were electricians and plumbers in the daytime.  Some of the best carpenters and electricians I ever met were lawyers, doctors, and accountants in the daytime.

For forty years, I've advocated that Millsaps could work with Hinds Community College to offer joint degrees.  That way, your sons or daughters could get a degree in modern language and plumbing, history and carpentry, theater and cattle science.  So far, precisely zero people have taken up my idea.

You spend four years in college.  It costs a great amount of money.  The best thing we can do for these young people is to help them create a framework they can hang their life on, recognizing that their brains go in many different directions, and sometimes what they're best at isn't what they're best at making money with.

Can you imagine how useful a person with a theater and carpentry degree or a theater and electrician's degree could be for theater artists?

William Tuttle

 Every artist has a very recognizable style.  William Tuttlel was responsible for some of the most remarkable prosthetic makeups in film (prior to Planet of the Apes). Here are two examples of his work.  Eye of the Beholder, an episode of The Twilight Zone, and a Morlock from The Time Machine.  

King Cake

They seem to be loosening the rules on what comprises a King Cake.  When they get to chocolate, somebody send me a text message.