(English holly [Ilex aquifolium] is a favourite since childhood, though it's invasive here. Owing to sexual reproduction that demands a male and female tree in close proximity, and light requirements hard to meet in our woodlands, most feral North Pacific hollies either bear patchy, uninspiring fruit, or none at all.
But this grand girl grows right out in the open, near a forest well-invaded by others of her kind, and so sets memorable finery this time of year.
Her vibrant berries, scarlet against glossy, forest-green foliage, fairly pulsate in the dreich North Coast Christmastide.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
As the world swings into Christmas, I believe justice demands I use this forum to correct a historical inequity that's been allowed too long to stand.
I'm speaking, of course, of the studious ignoring of the important œuvre of Jimmy. (Also known, in possible reflection of his troubled youth, by the nom de street "Jimmy the Crow". This in spite of the fact that he was actually a raven, but that's The Man for you.)
Obscurity notwithstanding, this gifted thespian appeared in perhaps a thousand features spanning Hollywood's Golden Age, including several enduring classics.
Yet, due possibly to deliberate suppression by corporate media, few today have ever heard of him.
Abducted from his parents in 1934, Jimmy was schooled Artful Dodger-style in a variety of nefarious skills, including typing, opening mail, and driving a motorcycle. He also learned to recognise "several hundred" English words, generally acquiring new ones, according to his handler, at the rate of just a week per syllable.
In short order, Jimmy was estimated to function at the level of the average 8-year-old, an accomplishment that, along with his verbal intelligence, would qualify him for voter registration in most nations today.
So why is December the best month to correct the likely speciesist repression of Jimmy's contributions to Western culture? Because at this time of year, arguably his best-known performance plays on television in heavy rotation. I'm speaking of course of It's A Wonderful Life, which production profits significantly from his involvement.
Said leading man Jimmy Stewart, speaking on-set, "When they call 'Jimmy!', we both answer." He also judged Jimmy the Crow "the smartest actor on the set," and added that the consummate avian artist nailed his scenes in fewer takes than mammalian castmates.
So this holiday season, when curmudgeonly older relatives gripe that cinema today is "for the birds", remind them, in Jimmy's name, that we should be so lucky.
(Photo of Jimmy on the set of It's A Wonderful Life courtesy of National Telefilm Associates and Wikimedia Commons.)
(In honour of Thanksgiving.)
that I was a child before helmets and helicopters
Internet radio
brown rice
pinto beans
cats
dogs
all the music
that this world happened after I had twenty years of enlightenment practice under my belt
this beautiful, teeming, engrossing, unknowable planet
dancing Muppets
(Photo courtesy of Samuel Stone and Pixabay.com.)
Back in 2023 I wrote a post about another post I wrote in 2015 on the topic of forgiveness. As a prime example, I referred to the case of a repentant former Nazi. (Let's be precise: the man had abandoned his dead-end path of his own volition and atoned for his past through public confession and self-condemnation. Such gestures are extremely rare in the judgemental, regardless of their imagined justification for their bigotry, but many in the Internet community chose instead to proceed as if he'd been caught out being an active Nazi by upright citizens who had brought his case to public scrutiny.)
In 2022, person or persons unknown outed my article as "hateful", or at least hate-adjacent, whereupon Google fenced it off from search engine indexing and slapped a locked gate on visitors already possessing the link, requiring a second Google sign-in to read it.
This is effectively a take-down, with the added benefit to the taker-down that the piece wasn't literally taken down, perhaps to puncture potential lawsuits.
The whole experience was Orwell-grade surrealism, but I have more important practice, so I posted my mystifiction over it and moved on.
And now it's happened again.
This situation too involves a Nazi reference, but this time the questionable motivation is Facebook's.
Now in the dock: last week's post, consisting of photographic testimony to Nazi vandalism and a call to arms (or at least a proper Zen hell-no) from Canadian literary lion Félix Leclerc.
Facebook's swift condemnation of my anti-Nazism began the instant I posted the link to its server. Within seconds I was informed that it contained offensive content and so had been removed.
This all happened so fast I suspected malfunction, and reposted.
And seconds later, got zapped again.
Given the speed of the response, it's likely that some artificial stupidity-powered hate detector simply saw the swastika and panicked. The boilerplate notice – identical both times – contained a link to something or someone higher up for reconsideration. I immediately complied, certain this possibly human judge would see without difficulty that:
1. The photo documents a criminal act and couldn't possibly be taken for glorification of Nazis or their ambitions, and:
2. The Leclerc quotation below it reflects both the author's and the poster's combative attitude toward totalitarianism and ideologised narcissism.
The next day I received a response, informing me in the same Hal-esque tones that my monkeyshines would remain barred from the service. It too offered further escalation, though frankly, given that my trust in humanity and its instances was exhausted decades ago, I'm just not that invested in it.
Speculation on the origin of such eerie hostility is pointless; the space in which these ghostly arbitrators spin being so far removed from objective reality as to render any attempt to fathom it a waste of time and effort more productively spent on the cushion.
So at the risk of further discipline, let me make my position on the Nazi issue crystal-clear to anyone who might have been disturbed by last week's meditation:
• Nazis are a thing again, and they can be neither ignored nor placated without sacrificing our integrity.
• The global Zen sangha is therefore called to confront them with greater honesty and courage than we did last time.
Because that brought irredeemable shame upon us.
(Photo of 1878 Japanese painting of Fudo Myō-ō, possibly by Kano, courtesy of the Library of Congress and Rawpixel.com.)
