The Donkey’s Egg

There was once a young man who saw some pumpkins growing in a farmer’s field. He had never seen pumpkins before and he asked the farmer, “What are those things?”

“Donkey’s eggs,” answered the farmer.

“Donkey’s eggs? If you hatch them out, do little donkeys come out of them?”

“Yes,” said the farmer.

“Then sell me one.”

The young man took the pumpkin home and told his wife to sit on it. She sat on the pumpkin for a fortnight. Then he took her place and sat on it for a week. At the end of that time he was tired of sitting there and he still saw no signs that the egg was about to hatch.

“The egg doesn’t seem to be a good once,” he said. So he took it out into the orchard and tossed it down a deep bank.

The pumpkin broke rolling downhill and scared a little rabbit from under a bush. who ran off as far as it could.

“What a shame!” cried the man. “If I had sat on it just three days more I would have had a nice little donkey. It has fine long ears, but it has only a little wisp of tail.”

- French absurdist tale, from Carl Withers’s A World of Nonsense

“When you get lost, your attention is focused.”
Jay Allison, from his PRPD Benediction talk
From the book Undercover: A Collection of Little Known and Unrelated Facts About Milwaukee by K. Dyble Thompson (pub 1981)

From the book Undercover: A Collection of Little Known and Unrelated Facts About Milwaukee by K. Dyble Thompson (pub 1981)

Song of the day: Heron - Upon Reflection

Everyone needs to listen to Upon Reflection

Song of the day: Hospitality - Friends of Friends

Song of the day: Standard Fare - Suitcase

Song of the day: Wake the President - In Youth There is Pleasure

Song of the day: The Holiday Crowd - Pennies Found

This video shot entirely on an iPhone! It’s from their new record, Over the Bluffs, on Shelflife Records.

Song of the day: Momus - Love Wakes the Devil

Song of the day: The United States of America - Garden of Earthly Delights

Song of the day: Lightships - Two Lines

“

By the third week, the best thing about living at home, I’d decided, was the square footage. I don’t cherish the ranch house as an architectural form, but my parents’ house ran to so many rooms that, in daylight, I could fall into a stride and imagine myself aboard the Hispaniola. I came to think of the kitchen as a galley; and the living room as the main hold; and the long dark coffin of a dinning room in which I endured countless suffocating family dinners, I renamed the roundhouse, not knowing what that meant but liking the idea of its not having any corners. In this way the stale homestead became a vessel of fresh adventure, though once I made the mistake of picking up the phone when Aunt Boothie called and listened to her talk, quite brazenly, about what it meant that both my sister and I were living rent -free in our parents’ house.

“Quite frankly I don’t think of this as a house,” I said.

”
Sara Levine - Treasure Island!!!
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Cavil - I Confess

Good song I hadn’t heard in ages.

“Later we cut a hole in the windward side for the romantic view of the sea and perverted the genius of the builder. For the undoing there was no atonement. The original shack, by the grace of common sense, had faced inland, not romantically seaward, and when we got the boys’ club spirit, combined with my dreamy horseshit (“We need a Weltanschauung!” I said), and cut a four-by-four hole, we invited an unstoppable, hourly legion of stinging pests into the shack and there was no screening them then, they could just let the wind push them gently through the wire like little hungry Houdinis, so we only put up shutters, iron-hinged, green, warped things Taurus got from Charleston, for larger pestilence, like hurricane.”
Padgett Powell - Edisto

Song of the day: Hauschka - The Key