Art and Life

I feel sorry for that Dr. House. Every time I'm walking thru a room and his show is on? He's either suffering some dread health problem, or getting fired, or both. I bet Obamacare is somehow to blame.

Headlines are always fun. Sometimes they can be poignantly evocative, even though topic is sad. A real good one from this week? "Naked man beaten outside Bar."

But my brand new fave headline is... "Superman saves family from Foreclosure." Yeah, they were about to get evicted, packing up from home that'd been in family more than fifty years. And down in the basement they found a box full of Billy Jack movies!
Naw that's not it! They found a box of comic books. And there he was, Superman no. 1 from 1938; est. auction value $250K.

Sweet human interest yarn; authenticity already verified, should sweep the major news organs soon.
I bet this story will lead to LOTS of basements & attics getting a long overdue cleaning, I betcha!

And it kind of reminds me of George Weller. In retirement, George spent many days in his old recliner bitterly regretting loss of his greatest journalism work in post-nuke Japan. Army censors destroyed his dispatches. All that time, and eight feet above George's head was a steamer trunk up in the attic, full of the carbon papers on those dispatches.

In Engineering, one considers a system by imagining its extreme boundaries. That means in most every human life there is some form of comic books and carbon papers.

Not everybody gets to run around post-nuke Japan. But many people think they've been robbed of something, when a quite serviceable form of what was lost lies well within reach.

Not everybody has Superman no. 1 in their basement. But many people have something of wonderful usefulness nearly in hand through good times & bad, just waiting to be found.

Y'know, somebody put that comic book in that box. But some hand had to pull it out of the box. In the emotions attending losing one's home, I can easily imagine the Man of Steel could've ended up in a dumpster, huh?

So it takes a forgiving heart to look for carbon papers in the attic. Takes a hopeful heart to recognize a comic book in a basement full of junk.

Now I got to get details on "Naked Man beaten outside Bar." I sure hope it wasn't Dr. House; he's already got enough problems.