No Sissy reply

In my quest to seek Tom Robbins’s inspiration for bestowing Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’s Sissy Hankshaw with huuuuge, ubervoluptuous thumbs, I wrote the author a letter. It read something like this:
Dear Mr. Robbins:
For my master of fine arts in creative nonfiction, I am writing a book of essays revolving around the human thumb. (Imagine, through the [...]

Thumb tips

Say you were inclined to read someone’s thumb. Let’s call that someone hot-Dan-the-beverage-rep-always-in-the-beer-aisle-at-Vons-when-you’re-there. ‘Dan’ for short. Even if you neglected to observe the rest of Dan’s hand, scanning his primary digit would render a good idea of Dan’s character, according to the three hand readers–Sandie Hancock, Rozie Roolz, and Kay Packard–to whom I’ve spoken.  “In [...]

Revealing the soul’s agenda

“Thumbs are about doing, accomplishment, and rearrangement,” says Kay Packard, an International Institute of Hand Analysis-certified hand analyst who operates her practice, Hand Factor, from the oak-studded foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Three Rivers, Calif.
As a hand analyst, Packard reads and decodes the fingertips “to reveal the soul’s agenda to the owner of the [...]

The trip of a thumb

The still below depicts a movie effect explosion tripped by a thumb-activated detonation device.
To create the explosion, special effects wizards hung a 13,000-lb. steel plate by a crane. With the push of a thumb, the plate dropped, crushing the military vehicle.

“What they’ll do in the movie is, they will literally take that plate, frame [...]

Thumb on the pulse

Sometimes when dallying

Last March, Ronnie Gene Crowder had his right thumb yanked off but for a sinew.
“It was the last steer I was gonna rope of the day,” the 65-year-old retired ferrier says, shaking his head.  It’s always the last one, isn’t it?
Crowder, who grew up herding cattle from the Kern River Valley into surrounding Sierra high [...]

The Fury of Overshoes

by Anne Sexton

They sit in a row
outside the kindergarten,
black, red, brown, all
with those brass buckles.
Remember when you couldn’t
buckle your own
overshoe
or tie your own
overshoe
or tie your own shoe
or cut your own meat
and the tears
running down like mud
because you fell off your
tricycle?
Remember, big fish,
when you couldn’t swim
and simply slipped under
like a stone frog?
The world wasn’t
yours.
It belonged to
the [...]

Double, double toil and trouble

2nd Witch:
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. [Knocking]
Open locks,
Whoever knocks! [Enter Macbeth]
Macbeth:
How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
What is’t you do?
Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 44–49
The witch’s clublike digit tingles, signalling to her that evil approaches. It is the Shakespearean equivalent of having the hair on the back of the [...]

Not just another digit on an animated fish-slice

“The movement of the thumb underlies all the skilled procedures of which the hand is capable. The hand without a thumb is at worst, nothing but an animated fish-slice, and at best a pair of forceps whose points don’t meet properly. Without the thumb, the hand is put back 60 million years in evolutionary terms [...]

Mail art call revisited

For those of you mail artists who have yet to conceive of THUMB! mail art, here are some words and phrases I’ve recently come across (you can Google these terms, look them up on this blog, or just be inspired by their odd poetry):
digitus primus 
three-jawed chuck
thenar eminence
golden thumb
Little Suck-A-Thumb
Chocapic
digitabulistic
the fig