Cement Dolphins

It was sunny and blue while I waited for the Bus Route 1 in Newport Beach...cyclists pic...Dolphin pic is from just before on side of Fashion Island building...but when I hopped off in Laguna Beach, it was "gloomy", word used in newscast when I got home reporting Lightning Bolts from the Blue in Venice Beach, which is a ways up North, but the Sky in Laguna looked capable of same...walked about one of the Art Shows...there's three major ones going on, each with admission prices...show didn't allow photography, or I'd have my fish pic for the day, as a lot of art of Sea Creatures...Cement Dolphins will have to do!...it was a kinda Cement Sky day too!...have Rudyard Kipling's Kim along...was re-reading it to try and find where I left off in my tent at Young's Lakes four summers back!...hmmph...one purpose of the Bus ventures is to toughen myself up, so I can go backpacking again...chapter I'm at is the Curio Shop and it's curious proprietor, Lurgan Sahib (based on a real person just as curious), and where I get snagged here is the mind trick he tries on Kim...Lurgan lures Kim into breaking a large jar, and while Kim is looking at the broken pieces and dripping water on the floor, he causes, somehow, Kim to hallucinate and see the Jar become whole again...but Kim fights the hallucination by switching from thinking in Hindi to English and reciting a mathematical table in English to himself...Lurgan is puzzled why Kim doesn't fall for his trick, and Kim keeps what he did a secret...

quote

You sent him to me to try. I tried him in every way: he is the only boy I could not make to see things […] Under my hand, as I told you. That has never happened before. It means that he is strong enough...
http://www.shmoop.com/kim-rudyard-kipling/lurgan.html
end quote
from comment site

Reading as far as I have, it has become apparent that Kim is being trained as a British spy, and looks forward to having a Letter and a Number! The emphasis in the story is acuity, how aware Kim is of his surroundings and near events, which is an emphasis in the Deerslayer too...hold that thought for my Deerslayer posts!...(I'm trying to sort out if Deerslayer had an influence on Muir)...Teddy Roosevelt says somewhere that Kim was his favorite book...and there's a game taken from the Curio Shop chapter called Kim's Game that Boy Scout's Play...

quote

The younger Kermit Roosevelt noted today that the tradition of naming boys Kermit, without a differing middle name or a Jr. or a Roman numeral, could be confusing. He added that alternate Kermits were also known as Kim, and that was the case of his spy father.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/11/us/kermit-roosevelt-leader-of-cia-coup-in-iran-dies-at-84.html

unquote

Kermit Roosevelt was Teddy's great grandson, and a spy...one of Teddy's sons flew with the Lafayette Escadrille...

quote

 His youngest son Quentin, a pilot with the American forces in France, was shot down behind German lines on July 14, 1918 at the age of 20. It is said that Quentin's death distressed Roosevelt so much that he never recovered from his loss.

from wiki
end quote

quote

Despite his health issues, Roosevelt remained active to the end of his life; he was an enthusiastic proponent of the Scouting movement. The Boy Scouts of America gave him the title of Chief Scout Citizen, the only person to hold such title.

from wiki
end quote

lemesee if I can find Kim's Game...

quote

Kim's Game is a game or exercise played by Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Girl Guides, and other children's groups.[1] The game develops a person's capacity to observe and remember details. The name is derived from Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel Kim, in which the hero, Kim, plays the game during his training as a spy.[2]

from wiki
end quote

sheesh...in trying to find Roosevelt quote about Kim novel being favorite, I find site that lists favorite books of all the presidents, and under Teddy Roosevelt is this one:

quote

Book: Influence of Sea Power Upon History by Alfred Thayer Mahan Teddy Roosevelt found himself something of a kindred spirit when Alfred Mahan published his cornerstone of naval history in 1890. Roosevelt was in New York at the time, working on the Civil Service commission, but that didn’t stop him from writing to Mahan and beginning a relationship that would last for years,

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daveodegard/the-favorite-books-of-all-44-presidents-of-the-united-states

end quote

I was just reading about Mahan the other day...and I can't recall at the moment why...brb...oh, no!..it wasn't Mahan, it was someone who too wrote an influential book of Navy history, James Fenimore Cooper...

quote

On May 10, 1839, Cooper published History of the Navy of the United States of America. It was a work he had long planned on writing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fenimore_Cooper#Service_in_the_navy

end quote

hmmph...

quotes

And yet—this is not widely known, even in New England—Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous, and many of his most familiar poems on the crest of a hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view

... ... ... ...

Kipling sees empire as something a civilized country reluctantly assumes as a duty. He predicts that the “savage wars of peace” will engender nothing but hatred for whatever benefits they bring: “And when your goal is nearest / The end for others sought, /  Watch Sloth and heathen Folly / Bring all your hope to naught.” Teddy Roosevelt, to whom Kipling had sent an early copy of “The White Man’s Burden,” approved of the sentiments but judged it “rather poor poetry.”

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115694/rudyard-kiplings-poems-reviewed-christopher-benfey
end quotes

quote

Kipling, observing the events across the Atlantic in the Spanish-American War, sent this to then-governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt as a warning regarding the dangers of obtaining and sustaining an empire. Roosevelt would then forward the poem to his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”
  http://www.gradesaver.com/rudyard-kipling-poems/study-guide/section16/

end quote

quote

In 1901 he published what many critics believe is his finest novel: Kim, the story of an orphaned Irish boy who grows up in the streets of Lahore, is educated at the expense of his father's old Army regiment, and enters into "the Great Game," the "cold war" of espionage and counter-espionage on the borders of India between Great Britain and Russia in the late nineteenth century.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rudyard-kipling

end quote

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling                            

The last stanza is all wrong, but the second to last is very good...wanted to quote just that one, but the poem is made in such a 'what's next..' fashion, the tale teller's knack, that I can't snip from it!...from poemhunter's site
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/if/

lol!...and while editing the post, Anderson Cooper is scuba swimming with Nile crocodiles on tv...maybe that counts!!