Best Christmas Card Yet

Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year
is what I should be saying.

However, I for one think that
"shibbang
bim bam
yeehaa"
sounds much better.

What do you reckon?

shibbang bim bam yeehaa it is!

The Country and The City

'Is it anything more than a well-known habit of using the past, the "good old days," as a stick to beat the present? [I Want to be a Cowgirl] It is clearly something of that, but there are still difficulties. The apparent resting places [open range, children's books], the successive Old Englands [The Wild West] to which we are confidently referred but which then start to move and recede, have some actual significance, when they are looked at in their own terms [Giddy Up, Cowgirl!]. Of course we notice their location in the childhoods of their authors, and this must be relevant [Susan Lowell]. Nostalgia, it can be said, is universal and persistent; only other men's nostalgias offend. A memory of childhood can be said persuasively, to have some permanent significance[Cindy Ellen, Little Red Cowboy Hat]. But again, what seemed a single escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England [Old West], settlement [cattle drives], the rural virtues [gender roles]--all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought to question [gender, identity, power, imagination].'

-- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(1975, 21-2; notes mine)

Cowgirls & Pirates

There exists in the world multiple series of combinations that make my heart pump. Strawberry & Mango. Compass & Anchor. Grapes & Cheese.

And until now, I wondered if I was the only one fascinated by the possibly strange combination of Cowgirls & Pirates. Apparently not:

Meet the best find I got on my cowgirl pirate picture book pursuits online today: Adventures of a Cowgirl-Pirate by Critter. The world is wonderful sometimes.