VISITED BY VENUS OF WILLENDORF

       When the Earth was in the middle of the last Ice Age, still in the stone age, with vast glaciers covering northern regions, when there were no cities, agriculture, metal tools or writing systems, but only foragers of edible plants and hunters using stone blades on spears to kill such creatures as woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and woolly rhinos, when sea levels were low enough to leave land bridges between continents . . . there were artists, who painted fascinating cave art and beautiful body ornaments out of shell beads and animal teeth, and who carved small figurines such as Venus of Willendorf, long before any concept of Venus and before any place named Willendorf.

 

       Today in the mail I received a replica of the Venus of Willendorf.  The original was found in 1908 by a worker during an excavation near the village of Willendorf in Austria, carved from oolitic limestone that came from far away, and covered in red ochre pigment.  It now sits in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.  Its replica now sits in the Lund Library.

 

The Original

 

       I'm so fascinated that I seem to see this art wherever I go.

 

  

Complete Contents of the Butter Rum Cartoon

 

 

OUR HOME

 

Complete Contents of the Butter Rum Cartoon

 

SMOKEY BEAR

  

       I was a Junior Forest Ranger in the 1950s.  In 1960 I bought the True Story of Smokey Bear comic book when it first came out.  And in 1968, while hitchhiking around the U.S., I was privileged to see the real Smokey Bear at the Washington D.C. Zoo.

 

        Imagine how terrible he felt in 1950 as a little cub, scorched by fire and clinging to a tree, having lost his parents.  He died on November 9, 1976 at 26 years of age.

 

 

 

 

Complete Contents of the Butter Rum Cartoon 

 

THEY SAID IT

"When life knocks you to your knees, which it always does and always will - well, that's the best position in which to pray, isn't it?" 

                                                                            - Ethel Barrymore

 

"In war there is no second prize for the runner-up." 

                                                        - Gen. Omar Bradley

 

Lorraine Cugat, accused of having 12 boy friends while married to rumba king Xavier Cugat: 

"I'm flattered at your confidence in my ability."

 
"A low neckline is something you can approve of and look down on at the same time." 

       - Night-club dancer Winnie Garrett

 
"Bend the knees, keep the body upright, take a firm grip on the object to be lifted and push forward with the leg muscles." 

   - Greater NY Safety Council on how to carry brides over the threshold

 
"We have got the bull by the tail and we've got to look him straight in the face and that's an extremely difficult operation." 

            - Retired Gen. Walter Krueger, on the Korean situation - 1950

 
"I told the doctor I was worried about my health, but he assured me I had no health to worry about." 

                             - Joe E. Lewis

 
"It goes like holy smoke." 

                      -Princess Margaret, referring to her new car. -  1951

 
"I find television very educational. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." 

                                              - Groucho Marx

 
"A polite man is one who listens with interest to things he knows all about when they are told to him by a person who knows nothing about them." 

                          - Spain's Count Alfonso Medina

 
"No wonder her voice comes out so well. Look where it's been." 

                                  - Frank Morgan on Jane Russell's singing - 1949

 
"He is so tough, he's ashamed his typewriter has a ribbon." 

                                                                       - Harold Robbins

 
"Sex appeal seems to be something I just can't catch on a piece of canvas . . . nobody ever whistled at one of my women." 

                                                       - Norman Rockwell

 
"I'd throw it away tomorrow if I could find the right man. I want to get married and have three children. I'd much rather leave a few children as my contribution than the finest screen credits in the world." 

                                                                             - Lizabeth Scott

 
"People in my district don't want a housing bill. They live in log cabins, cover the roof with bull's hide and use the tails for lightning rods." 

                            - MO Rep. Dewey Short - 1949

 
"We do not want war any more than the West does, but we are less interested in peace than the West and therein lies the strength of our position." 

                                                         - Joseph Stalin

 
"An obedient wife married to a henpecked husband." 

                                    - resort owner Al Tisch on the ideal marriage

 
Historical novel: "A book with a shapely wench on the jacket but no jacket on the shapely wench." 

                         -Earl Wilson

 

 

Complete Contents of the Butter Rum Cartoon

TURTLES

       "The first known ancestor of Archelon, and of all turtles, was discovered in Africa, where it lived more than two-hundred million years ago.  It took about twenty-five million years after that (in Triassic times) for the true turtles to develop.  From then on they flourished, spreading to all continents of the world as well as living in the seas.  Unlike the dinosaurs, which became well established at about the same time, these awkward, lumbering reptiles survived to be part of our modern world.  Sometimes they are called 'living fossils.'"

                                                  ~ from The Real Book About Prehistoric Life by Dorothy Shuttlesworth 

 

       Turtles are really neat!  They lived with the dinosaurs, and here they are.  Makes me feel really good to know that I've stopped to help them cross the road, and that I saw this one in our yard and just let it be.

 

 

 

Complete Contents of the Butter Rum Cartoon