Sighted in al-Mgrib*

AP NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

After Vince Young (once presumed a Muggle) floated at shoulder height above the field repeatedly into the opposing inzone in today's match--resulting in a national record for yards-rushed several dozen times larger than the previous holder Adrian Peterson's 2007 performance, who without the use of superior levitational abilities rushed 296 yards in one game--NFL officials were forced to abscond the record, instituting a new rule that would in all hopes would impede the game from gradually transforming into something resembling the so-called Quidditch, a.k.a. Fantasy Football.

--- Simultaneously seen in Morocco: A man in ElJdida wearing a Tennessee Titans jersey and who unwittingly moved me to tears

&

--- The Sunset to End All Sunsets, in Nkob Centre Ville and surrounding areas,

wherein :

• WHEREIN the dark shadows of the mountains framed a picture between sun and sky that resulted in great quantities of feeling like the Double Rainbow guy in all involved (if this reference is found to be too murky, or ungrounded, please refer to the final two videos in this weblog entry for clarification)
  
• WHEREIN the said shadowy mountains framing the said image before participant(s) were a deep, bruised purple, identified as such both from the participant'(s') first hand observation and also from said person's knowledge of the physical properties of shadows as being not black ever, but rather the complement on the color wheel of the color of the object herein referred to as being 'mountains', as well as owing to the atmospheric properties helping to express the quantity of distance (through deeper and deeper gradients of blue in in relation to participant-- aka, the reason why the sky is so blue is because it is so far away¹)

• WHEREIN immediately ''above'' the aforesaid mountains was a really cool sea of seafoam green², an empty space largely uninhabited by clouds, tranne/ad hoc exemptor those lesser clouds that such space is in the midst of digesting, of a most brilliant and pure golden color

• WHEREIN writing this way is taking way waaay much too long...

So it was beautiful, gorgeous, equal only to two other sunsets seen in Morocco-- one during CBT in Azrou from the roof with Will, and the second during Ramadan when I went to the highest point of our casbah complex to get a panorama view of the sunset stretching towards and beyond each of the horizons. This one today I nearly wrote off until I peeked to my side down the dirt alleyways to the side of the mosque and noticed the most dense set of individually-wrapped cotton fluff-ball clouds of the altocumulus cloud genus. First they were of an overwhelming irridescent gold color but by the time I walked the length of the main drag they'd become fields of pink Peeps® reaching past me towards Tazarine.

Exhibit 1-A

Exhibit 1-B

'' Altocumulus clouds in a clear 'mackeral' pattern'' -- but imagine it glowing yellow, then pink with purple edges higher up where there is less difraction and thus a color resulting closer to blue.

Now imagine them fused together with the Pink Peeps, and that's what this sunset was like: Pink Peeps altocumuli! 'NARLY!

Seated with my supper, a lowly can of كريمي -brand yogurt and the spoon I brought for the purpose. A few people in the intervening moments of my Two Rainbows guy-moment likewise stood or seated near me until the last moment of the stratospheric color explosion passed. I wonder if they were as enthusiastic about the show as I was. Regardless, we all got our money's worth (admission cost: taking the time to sit still and look upwards). Though the area behind me deserved a look as well, its palette was composed of softer, muted pastels and not the neon colors that shot down to us from the sky above the purple-shadowed mountains beyond my Dar Chebab youth center.

Wish you could have been there with me, for those in the USA I hope that this streak of color continues in its unending spiral about the Earth-- just like it's five o'clock somewhere, somewhere there is a beautiful sunset and it will soon make its way to you... Inchallah!

*Not the Tennessee Titans; rather, my first akward, lame-in-one-foot attempt at the literary genre known as ''Hysterical realism'' brought forth from the cauldron of post-war literature by Pynchon, and further refined by DF Wallace ^5

Notes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_perspective

2. Near-pun intended

3. A near-pun, cousin of the near-rhyme, and a word coined just now--you read it here first--is one where you use two homonyms in the same sentence in different ways that forces the writer to notice and point to Readers (in case they might have missed it), but which is seemingly missing an essential element to be a veritable pun upon closer examination

4. ''Grays and dark tones are produced by mixing complementary colours. In pure Impressionism the use of black paint is avoided. '' ref. Techniques of Impressionism, wikipedia.org

5. I have a tremendously larger amount of respect now for David Foster Wallace writing the thousand-pageINFINITE JEST in the Year -5 P-W-E* * ''Minus FivePre-Wiki Era''

** PCV1: ''That's what she said***''.
***PCV2: ''That's what your Mama said last night... while filing her taxes five-and-a-half months late.''

See below (''Miscellania'') for examplary works:

Miscellania

Haystacks (sunset) 1890-1891, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

by Claude Monet

Later painting by Claude Monet, with more rigid rules governing the use and total absence of black

The Cliff at Étretat after the Storm, 1885, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

by Claude Monet

An earlier one with more relaxed rules by the same.

Bal au Moulin de la Galette (detail), 1876 Musée D'Orsay, Paris, France

by Pierre-August Renoir

If you didn't know the shading on her dress was done by an Impressionist, one might be inclined to believe that she'd been rolling around with this guy in the mulberry bush.

Woman in the Bath, 1886, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Conneticut

by Edgar Degas

An even more striking example, in more ways than oneّ.

س. I can tell I've been in Morocco too long -- this painting is tooooo much to handle right now****. I've even forgot exactly the warmth found in the most basic expressions of human touch, let alone nakedness (on that note, the arguments in favor of the veil have a new, largely unethusiastic supporter-- when you're covered from head to foot in cloth with just one/two eyes showing out, and maybe a nose and chin, I have gret difficulty imagining what you're like in coitus) But this painting is otherwise a gorgeous and a great example of the use of complementary colors to achieve the effect of more realistic shading -- either that or she is really dirty and the bath has only just begun. Situationally ironically, this is what 95 percent of Peace Corps volunteers look like when they get their shower on!

**** COUNTER-EVIDENCE: Earlier today though, au contraire, I saw an article in Harper's Bazaar featuring Kim Kardashian in flagrante in order to protest the heinous use of airbrushing and digital retouches to take away their God-given curves. It had a much less pronounced effect on me than this painting, its own merits notwithstanding. That said, maybe they might sell more magazines if they rely less on Photoshop® and more on chiaroscuro.

Another favorite, the cirrus genus, seen while returning home from the bike ride. I'm betting that like me, you didn't know that clouds came in species // Nor did you know that Vince Young's great-grandfather was one of said species.

What is the difference between hysterical realism and magical realism you may ask? One is ''the ordinary done in an extraordinary way'' and the other is the opposite, ''the extraordinary done in an ordinary way''.

And for ye PCVs, fellow brethren that have been here between 2 weeks and 2 years, who are so far from pop culture that the last recorded hit they remember came hearing on American soil was T.I.'s ''Whatever you like'', here is a chance to be filled-in with some more contemporary fanaglia... Stand beholden to the ecstacies of Hungrybear9562: