Bottle and Glass Trees

I just watched "Ray" again. I saw it twice on the big screen and now once on DVD. It is an outstanding portrayal of an artist of my time by a young artist, Jamie Fox. That is not the point of the post.

In the Ray and Mama scenes, there are trees decorated with glass of all kinds and especially bottles. The structure is not new to me. I have seen it elsewhere, but where. Ah. Yes. Because of Winn Dixie. The last movie that I took my now twenty year old daughter to. Cecily Tyson's character has a bottle tree in her hermitage.

I grew up in a section of the South where flower beds were constructed with tractor tires. Trees trunks in yards were white washed. As the times progressed it became popular to save the old hay rake that set up cut and wilted hay into windrows for the balers. They were painted usuallyr ed or blue depending on whether your state university of choice was the Cats or the Cards. The most intriguing cultural relic was the claw foot bathtubs that were buried upright about three quarters exposed and a Madonna was contained there in. Some were plain. Some had a spotlight. Some were trellised over with roses. Some were further clad in geodes. The mix was myriad. I have not however seen any bottle trees. I have visited every southern coastal city from Jacksonville, NC to South Padre Island. I have visited slightly inshore and it the backwaters of the croppers villages and the various islands of African culture near the coasts. I have tramped around Eatonville, Florida with my copies of Zora Neal Hurston. I experienced some "Sniglets" but no bottle trees.

In the village in which I now live there is a long settled and owner inhabited neighborhood where the wafting of illegal mangrove smoke is mixed with mullet drippings. That is inter mixed with ribby clouds of smoke and a big pot of well seasoned collards sitting on the side. It is all for sale. Just bring your own tote bowl. It is all quite illegal and on occasion the city and county fathers crack down a bit. I know people there andI visit. I sit on porches with couches knocking back 40s and a little smoke. I also siton screen enclosed pools just outside the living areas of fine Florida homes. Yet. I have not seen a bottle tree. I have never even seen a statue of MLK set up in a claw foot bath tub.

I may just be the first on my block . . . hell, in my village to have a bottle tree. I have the resources - lots of wine serving restaurants in the retail neighborhood and there are at least two martini bars that have gin and vodka bottles of every color.

I am glad that I am 62 and I can think about really important things.

"I am just an old hippy, and I don't know what to do. Should I hang on to the old or grab on to the new?"

LB

I have been experimenting with blog editors. I am composing this on Google Docs. I usually compose post here using the lnative Blogger editor. The reason I am posting from Docs now is that I have also been experimenting with Scribefire. It is a Firefox Add-on recently estranged from its nest at Performancing.

Much to my disappointment the Scribefire linking to this Blogger site is buggy. I have Googled for comments and a fix but to no avail. For now I will continue to keep the Scribefire pane open on my screen because it is a very nice tool that incorporates my del.icio.us categories into the Categ. button. The buggy linking will eventually work out. I do have one gripe about the del.icio.us functioning. Whenever I close out the original window in my speed browsing, I have to sign back in when I want to post another bookmark. There is no remember me next time and Firefox does not invite a remember.

I have been a user of Google, Firefox, del.icio.us, and other web based services for things that here-to-fore I kept on my HD. Well, that is not completely true because I am not fully trusting of the off HD storage just yet and I back up to CDs by category and project.

Old school blogging has been a practice of getting your thoughts out there in as many places as possible and to have a blog on one or several blogging hosts. I have had several experimental sites that reached my email list and some of the sites that usually turn out to be cat fight venues. Otherwise, I have been spammed dizzy by every sort of racket. The recent rise of social network sites has not changed the cat fight game. Those sites (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and others ) have become notorious for "Girls Gone Wild" and stalking content. As an aside, much to my delight I have found a Google Group that is named after my home county in Kentucky and draws contributors from surrounding counties. It is quite amazing. I know some of those people personally, I may know their families and I may even be related to them by either blood or marriage. There are the usual curmudgeons there but there is an amazingly deep and simpatico number of individuals with whom I would have never communicated otherwise.

The newest push in blogging is in the direction of what has come to be called web2.0. It is the new school. The goal in web2.0 is high quality original content and monetization from the presence of clickable ad placement. In other words, if you are good you get checks. I can go for some of that. How about you.

In these four short paragraphs, I have discovered why I would prefer to be able to post to my blog from Scribefire. The foremost reason is that I have several words that I always misspell and even though Google Docs calls my attention to it, it does not allow me to correct with a right click. I have just noticed that my Firefox Spell Checker has disappeared since a recent update. The linkmaker that presents you with the Blue Links is also a bit clumsy. 'm'I bad! I just spotted the Check Spelling button.


I believe that I will post this at that my home county Google Group site.

Got to go. I heard a noise in the yard. I believe that a coyote is trying to get in my new chicken run.

Duck is gone.

the chicken remains. It is even beginning to pay its way. I have moved the chicken from the pool lanai to an enclosure in the yard with much more room. I may add another half dozen chickens.

It's like . . . being a post modern suburbanite. I am also sprouting mixed baby greens in shallow plastic mortar tubs. I will pitch them to a small local foo-foo eatery when I get the process down.

LB