my town had an open-all-nite copy shop, and I would sleaze in there at 02:00 and spend hours making this stuff. (The copy shop liberally supplied paste and scissors and paper slicers and double-side sticky tape and White-Out. The staff had Other Things To Do and paid no attention to me whatever. I could have made kidnapping ransom notes in the nude for all they cared, I could have cranked out US paper currency as long as I paid for my copies. This all-night copy shop was a Free Environment like us Artists like.)
This is Art -- probably the first Visual Art I ever made. (I had been prohibited from ever again trying to make visual art by my public school art teachers, who believed I was Visually and Chromatically and Æsthetically Deranged. My vision tested fine, but all my art teachers believed there was Something Wrong after the images of the world I saw passed into my Brain. I remember being screamed at for painting a goat purple.)
These links must all be dead by now, and I don't know if they ever caught Roderick Neal Hotham. When I first posted this on "Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep," a very angry lady wrote me an e-mail. She cursed me for defaming a wonderful and completely innocent man.
If you want to curse me, or if you know what happened to Roderick Neal Hotham, Leave A Comment.
If you think my Visual Art sucks, stand in line behind all my Art Teachers, who by now are eternally burning in the fires of Hell.
The Cowboy and the Dutch
Tulip Girl
A Cowboy from Niagara
Falls is highly popular and admired but lonely. At the same time, a
Dutch Tulip-Seller Girl, so recently arrived in St. Louis, Missouri
that she has not yet had time to acquire local clothes or shoes, is lonely.
Each decides to take a vacation and fly to Paris. Paris, city of
innocent gaiety and mirth, where half-clad women dance, show their derrieres
to tourists, leapfrog over Japanese businessmen, and lounge around
in their lingerie smoking and occasionally thinking about Abraham Lincoln.
There the Cowboy and the Tulip Girl meet and fall in love.
Meanwhile, fugitive embezzler Roderick
Neal Hotham has also fled to Paris, where he is hatching an evil
new scheme involving the unwitting young lovers. He spies on them through
the window of a restaurant where they are dining with another cleancut
American couple. Because they are in Paris and think it's the local custom,
they all commence une menage a quatre. Across town, two young nude
women who live with kangaroos practice boxing and calisthenics
in their atelier.
September 1995 / from Dover Clip Art
("Naughty French Illustrations," "Travel") and the Post
Office wall.
Copyright © 2015 by Robert B. Merkin, All Rights Reserved
Child who visited Yosemite National Park
comes down with the plague
CALIFORNIA -- Every year, picturesque Yosemite National Park gets about 4 million visitors. But one arrival this summer is definitely not welcome: the plague.
California’s Department of Public Health and the national park announced Thursday that a child who visited nearby Stanislaus National Forest and camped at Yosemite’s Crane Flat Campground in mid-July had contracted the plague.
That child is recovering, and no other members of the camping party have reported any related symptoms.
Still, authorities are monitoring them as well as warning others to be on guard against the flea-transmitted disease. These extra steps include putting up caution signs at Crane Flat and other campgrounds and urging people to take precautions such as:
• Not feeding squirrels, chipmunks or other rodents or touching sick or dead ones
• Avoiding hiking or camping near rodent burrows
• Putting on long pants tucked into socks or boots with the hope they’ll provide a barrier to fleas
• Spraying insect repellent with DEET on socks and pant cuffs — again, to fend off fleas
• Keeping wild rodents away from homes, trailers and buildings, not to mention pets
2 deadly plague cases this year in Colorado
Contagious and potentially deadly viruses are not new for Yosemite, where throngs of people flock annually to enjoy breathtaking rocky cliffs, refreshing river waters and dense forests.
In 2012, for instance, three park visitors died after contracting hantavirus.
Yet plague cases are rare not just in Yosemite, but across the United States.
The disease killed millions centuries ago, and — while it can be treated with modern medicine such as antibiotics and antimicrobial — it’s never gone away.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the United States has about seven annual cases, over 80% of which have been in the bubonic form.
There have been three cases reported so far in 2015, which is in line with those numbers. The other two happened in Colorado and both resulted in deaths, one being a teenager in Larimer County and the other an adult in Pueblo County, as announced Wednesday by the local health department.
The Yosemite case is California’s first instance of human plague since 2006, according to state health officer Dr. Karen Smith, when there were three cases in Mono, Los Angeles and Kern counties. There have been 42 such cases in the state since 1970, of which nine proved fatal.
“Although this is a rare disease, people should protect themselves from infection by avoiding any contact with wild rodents,” Smith said.