Look Alikes

???

Hideki Tojo and Housefly in laser glasses

Firstborn Son

A clay statue of a nude Britney Spears giving birth to her firstborn son on a bear rug - in Brooklyn's Williamsburg gallery - a 'Monument to Pro-Life', in April. Hey, what d'ya think??? A bear rug!

RIP Ken Brewer

Utah's Poet Laureate died Wednesday, March 15th. Brewer published several books, including "The Place In Between" and "Lake's Edge." He was 64.

Happy Birthday Robert Frost (1874-1963)

...

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

*Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Here Am I

Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness.

"This is what I believe: that I am I.
--D.H. Lawrence

"Here am I, my body made of elements that once were stardust, drawn from the far corners of the universe to flesh out, however briefly, the pattern that is uniquely me, my soul, a thing that can breathe in the enormity of such awe-inspiring origins."


--The Quantum Self


(**Baby at 20 weeks, and The Omega Nebulae)

We Look Back at Angels...

So. Winter is officially over, and while I am glad to see it go, there are things that I will miss. Snow angels for one. Poet Nancy Willard wrote of them saying, "...we look back at angels, blurred fossils of majesty and justice..." There are lots of things coming to look forward to: A baptism in May, a new baby in August, taking the dogs for more walks in the sunshine.

Today is the birthday of Flannery O'Conner, who first became famous as a 5-year-old in Savannah, Georgia, for teaching a chicken to walk backwards, and later said, "Everywhere I go people ask if I think universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

Maybe this is the summer I will write the Great American Novel. Or teach a chicken to walk backwards.

In the Yellow Head of a Tulip

In the yellow head of a tulip
in the sound of the wind entangled in the forest
in the haphazard combination of things
for sale on the sidewalk
an iron next to a nail-clipper next to a can of soup
next to a starling's feather
in the silence inside of stone
in tea in music in desire in butter in torture
in space that flings itself out in the universe
in every direction at once without end
despite walls despite grates and ceilings
and bulletproof glass
the sun falls through without refracting
in the wind hanging out its own sheets
on all the empty clotheslines
in the bowels of rats
in their tiny moving architectures
in a world that is always moving
in those who are unable to speak but know how to listen
in your mother who is afraid of her own thoughts
in her fear of her death
in her own derelict loneliness
in the garden late at night
between the alder tree and the ash
she rocks herself to sleep in the hammock
a little drunk and wayward
in everything she is that you are not
in the well of the skull
in the fish that you touch
in the copper water
in its breath of water
in your breath, the single bubble rising
that could be you
that could be me
that could be nothing

--Malena Morling, from Astoria

Happy St. Pat's

Did you eat a bowl of Lucky Charms? Did you download 3 Irish drinking songs, or build yourself a pub? Did you wear GREEN all day? Did you do a Jig? Then you must be IRISH, and this is your Lucky Day!

WINNER

Gee, I guess I win the Whiney Liberal Award for today ... sorry.

Moussaoui Trial

What's the matter with the prosecution attorneys of Zacarias Moussaoui? It seems the government lawyers coached four witnesses. This is the second significant error made by the government team. The defense, of course, moved to have the judge dismiss the death penalty as a possible outcome, saying, "This is not going to be a fair trial." The alternative, they say, should be to dismiss the witnesses from the case. The prosecution says that would exclude half the government's case. The prosecuting attorney admitted that the witness coaching was "horrendously wrong."

Now. What's the matter with these guys? Why do they do something they know to be horrendously wrong? Time after time, even in high profile cases of great importance, they think themselves above the law and break the rules, and screw the case. WHY? Somebody explain this to me ...

The Z Machine

"Why is this plasma so hot? Physicists aren't sure. What is known for sure is that the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratory created a plasma that was unexpectedly hot. The plasma reached a temperature in excess of two billion Kelvin, making it arguably the hottest human made thing ever in the history of the earth and, for a brief time, hotter than the interior of stars. The Z Machine experiment creates high temperatures by focusing 20 million amps of electricity into a small region further confined by a magnetic field. During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z Machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second." (From Astronomy Picture of the Day--italics mine)

My gosh. What's next? We're going to unexpectedly blow up the world ...

FYI

Today is the anniversary of "The Great White Hurricane," of 1888, one of the worst blizzards in American history. It lasted for 36 hours, killed 400 people, and dropped 40 inches of snow on NYC. Drifts were piled up to the second story windows, and frozen pigeons were dropping off window ledges like...well, pot pies, I guess, and people who weren't able to get to the market cooked them for dinner.

We here in Slick City had a blizzard of our own last week, a Great White Hurricane. Fortunately, ours only lasted 45 minutes, left 4 0r 5 inches of snow, and wrecked 200+ cars around town (20 of them sliding like snot down First South into one big pileup). Now, don't you wish you'd a been here to see it???

The Mozarts We Don't Know

From an article by Bernard Holland in this morning's NY Times, concerning Mozart and music in general: "The people on the streets never abandoned him. Classical music was not isolated from popular music, as it is today. There was one musical language and grammar operating on a sliding scale of sophistication. Music slid both ways -- indeed, carefully written tunes by Schubert and Dvorak, subjects of art songs and symphonies 'descended' to folk music status and can still be heard in the wee hours, sung by beergarden patrons all over central Europe."

For lack of radios and television sets, I suppose, he says that "those musical and rich enough kept private orchestras, or at least wind bands or string quartets," and invited their friends over, or even sold tickets. All of which kept composers clothed and well-fed. "Mozart spoke to three (or four, if you count the Church) audiences. First, the emperor, second, the Viennese rich, who let him put on concerts in their house, and third, the people in the streets."

Gee, might something like this not be ideal for our own young struggling composers of music today? -- those who love The Flaming Lips, Smashing Pumpkins, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, and the Beatles, and who also want to compose great operas and symphonies?

Just wondering.

Bert Munro, a New Zealand Legend

Yesterday I had the good fortune to see "The World's Fastest Indian," the story of an old man from Invercargill with a bad ticker and a good bike. He rode an Indian Scout motorcycle across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to speed records that still stand. What a terrific movie! Don't miss this one!

FIXED POINTS

I just finished Garrison Keillor's WOBEGON BOY -- a familiar landscape to all who love and listen to "A Prarie Home Companion," wherein the Tollefson boy John discovers what is truly important: Cheer Up, Make Yourself Useful, Mind Your Manners, and Avoid Self-Pity.

The back cover says: "This dark night of the happy Lutheran soul, spun out of Keillor's clean, elegant prose, makes WOBEGON BOY a midlife crisis well worth living." And reading about. One of my favorite lines: "How lucky I am, praise God -- how fortunate to have fixed points, like oarlocks, from which to fulcrum yourself forward through the water."

How lucky indeed.

How to Leave the World ...

How to Leave the World that Worships Should

Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the hush
of other people's halls. Let deadlines burst
and flash like glorious fireworks somewhere else.
As hours go softly by, let others curse
the roads where distant drivers queue like sheep.
Let emails fly like paniked, tiny birds.
Let phones, unanswered, ring themselves to sleep.

Above, the sky unrolls its telegram,
immense and wordless, simply understood:
you've made your mark like birdtracks in the sand -
now make the air in your lungs your livelihood.
See how each wave arrives at last to heave
itself upon the beach and vanish. Breathe.

--Ros Barber

OTHER THINGS

Today is the birthday of Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur, born in NYC in 1921. Of the major poets of his generation he is one of the last still living and writing. Today is also the birthday of poets Robert Lowell and Robert Haas. Hass once said: "Everyone ... wants to say in their own terms what it means to be alive.... Take time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day."

Here's one of Wilber's, called ELSEWHERE

The delectable names of harsh places:
Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.
In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,
We hear no ill of brittle parch and glare.

So late October's pasture-fringe,
With aster-blur and ferns of toasted gold,
Invites to barrens where the crop to come
Is stone prized upward by the deepening freeze.

Speechless and cold the stars arise
On the small garden where we have dominion.
Yet in three tongues we speak of Taurus' name
And of Aldebaran and the Hyades,

Recalling what at best we know,
That there is beauty bleak and far from ours,
Great reaches where the Lord's delighting mind,
Though not inhuman, ponders other things.

Closeup

Inside the Eagle : faraway it looks like an eagle. A closer look shows a bright open nursery where a whole cluster of baby stars are forming.

Broken Dyke

See what you did--I am storming out to play through the broken dyke ...

Old Man, Get Your Hand Off My Knee

Old Man, Get Your Hand Off My Knee


Old Man,
your time is up.
Get your greedy hand
off my knee.

I'm not yours
yet.

Woo me
with heroic tales
of your victories,
show me your etchings,
tell me how delicate
are my ankles,
how delicious
my lips and fingertips.

Tell me again
what a friend you are,
and how desperately
you want me.

I believe you. I do.

Someday
you will make our bed
amd I will lie in it.
Someday
when other embraces
have all grown cold,
perhaps
I will even welcome
your impassioned touch.

Someday, Old Man.

Not yet.

--JED

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region to all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

-- William Stafford

(William Stafford (1914-1993) taught English at Lewis & Clark for three decades, and was, in 1975, appointed Oregon Poet Laureate.)

One More for the Road ...

REPO MAN

"Will I dream?"
--HAL 9000


Sing me to sleep
A Father-song of make believe
Before I'm repossessed.
The lullaby:

When my thick cells forget
The signature of sex
And foursquare time, and blood
Forgets to color in the lines,

And my thin breath cannot remember
What a fat weight life is,
And my face becomes a public place,
And revolutions bore me,

Then death's a clever art
That can be practiced, like the harp,
Or flute, or backstroke,
Wherein the players are overturned

And all the naked swimmers drowned.

--Me (as Me)

Me, Myself, & Emily

When Death Comes By My Door

When Death comes by my Door
And smiles at me Within --
I'll gather up my dancing Shoes
And Waltz away with Him --

My feet, tho' never touching Earth
Will Waltz up Wind and down --
And I will wear my Wrapping Shroud
As a Wedding Gown.

When Death comes by my Door
And brings me to His Bed --
I'll ask of God no Other dark
Lover in His stead --

But hold Him close and seal his lips
With bold Kisses forever --
Nor Moon nor Stars shall shake us
While we abide Together.

My feet, tho' never touching Earth
Will Waltz up Wind and down --
And I will wear my Wrapping Shroud
As a Wedding Gown.

--Me (as Emily)

The Second Visit

A poem by a friend of mine, Ken Brewer, dying of cancer.

The Second Visit

This night he wears a red dress,that sleek Flapper style for dancing,
and a Flapper hat low on his face
though I can see black-curled eyelashes.
Red heels and red gloves, small red
Purse hanging from one shoulder. "Sharp," I say.

Death turns as if to blush. Imagine that,
I think, Death blushing at a compliment.
Then he crosses his legs, smiles,
asks, "About time, don't you think?"
And I do, but I say nothing yet.
Bedridden, bloated with Ascites, no tux, no bow tie.

"What did you wear for my mother?" I ask.
"Beige tent dress with a light brown collar,
beige sandals, a white orchid in my hair,"
he said. "Nice touch," I said. I wasn't
bargaining this time and would dance if I must.
But Death smiled and left. I'll guess bib-overalls next.

Grimm

Today is the Birthday of Wilhelm Karl Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany in 1786. Along with his older brother Jacob, he published the collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812, the first collection of folklore in modern publishing history.

Of the two brothers, Wilhelm was more romantic and literary. Jacob did most of the theorizing about folklore. At first, the story collecting did not go well. The idea was to find ordinary peasants to tell their stories, but the peasants were too intimidated to talk. In a letter to Jacob, Wilhelm wrote, " The fairy tale collection is going along wretchedly."

Wretchedly? How Grimm!

Happy Birthday

Today is the birthday of two of my favorite people. It's the birthday of columnist and humorist Erma Bombeck. She wrote, "My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?" My thoughts exactly.

It's also the birthday of W. H. Auden, who grew up in an industrial area of northern England. He lov ed the huge mining machines designed for breaking up huge rocks. He originally wanted to become a mining engineer but, one afternoon when he was 15, a friend asked him if he ever wrote poetry. He never had, but being asked the question made him want to start. So he did. From As I Walked Out One Evening:

Nonsense Song

My love is like a red red rose
Or concerts for the blind,
She's like a mutton-chop before
And a rifle-range behind.

Her hair is like a looking glass,
Her brow is like a bog.
Her eyes are like a flock of sheep
Seen through a London fog.

Her nose is like an Irish jig,
Her mouth is like a bus,
Her chin is like a bowl of soup
Shared between all of us.

Her form divine is like a map
Of the United States,
Her food is like a motor-car
Without its number-plates.

No steeple-jack shall part us now
Nor fireman in a frock;
True love could sink a Channel boat
Or knit a baby's sock.

The Eschatological View

The Horsehead Nebula in Orion, up close.

"The eschatological viewpoint is that which sees and judges everything in terms of a great eternal plan. Whether we like it or not, we belong to the eternities; we cannot escape the universe."

--Hugh Nibley

Just wondering ....

So, why has the U.S. put a firm from the United Arab Republic in charge of 6 U.S. seaports???

Suitsat 1

A spacesuit floats away from the International Space Station. It will orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes until it burns up in the atmosphere in a couple of weeks. It must get pretty boring sometimes for those folks working in the Station, the ones who filled the suit with old clothes and a radio transmitter, and pushed it out the door ....

Long Distance Warriors

I find something about this very disturbing, although my significant other justifies it by saying the goal of the warrior is to simply kill without being killed. Still.

An article in TIME MAGAZINE, written in December 2005 by Sally B. Donnelly, describes how a modern warrior named Shannon Rogers "kisses his wife and two young kids goodbye and wheels his battered 1989 Chevy Cavalier out of the driveway of his suburban Nevada home ... But Rogers will end up in a place far different from that of his fellow commuters:when he arrives at work, he will be at war in Iraq." Rogers is part of an "elite" group. He sits at his computer in Nevada and controls a Predator drone that flies over Iraq, tracks down insurgents, and kills them as they flee. "For us, it's combat," says Rogers. "Physically we may be in Vegas, but mentally, we're flying over Iraq. It feels real."

At the end of the day, he rushes home to jump in the pool with his kids, eats dinner, and sleeps in his own bed. The article describes the "stresses" and "demands" of this job, including problems in the personal lives of these warriors. I don't wish him any misfortune, I think he is probably a nice guy doing a job. But something in me keeps thinking: What's wrong with this picture?

War, the killing of one's fellow man, ought to be a passionate occupation, one driven by the heart as well as the intellect. The insurgents, despicable as they and their car bombs and rigged vests that blow so many innocent people to pieces might be, at least were passionate about their cause, however foul and monstrous and atrocious it may be. They gave their lives for it. They didn't go home and "jump in the pool" with their children.

What does this mean? I really don't know. I'm just thinking that there is something here that doesn't feel right.

Another Good One...

THE WHIRLPOOL GALAXY. A Classic spiral galaxy, visable with a good pair of binoculars, but it won't look like this!

Death of a Superstar

"Puppis A," used to be a massive star (not unlike John Wayne, or Mae West). Now its life ends as a supernova, blasting its outer layers in a huge shockwave into space. Light from this super-explosion first reached Earth just a few thousand years ago, a mere second as measured in space/time. Now they're all gone, John, Mae, Red Ryder, Little Beaver, and Puppis A.

Photo by Chandra and ROSAT.

RIP?

Should we just let the Dick Cheney story die a dignified death? Why/Why not?

10 Ways Dick Cheney Can Kill You

Of course, there are more, says Grouchy Old Man. But, hey.

Dick Cheney: A History of Violence

. . . .

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

HALOS

Trudi haloed
the ones she loved
like God lit the angels on judgement day.
It was not that they had done no wrong.
It was that she loved them,
loved them without condition,
loved them beyond thought,
so she learned to lighten the area
around them, to brighten their darkness,
lighting their background so they glowed
ethereal with a shimmer of their own
that lit their steps,
smoothed the wilderness paths
before them.

--Mikal Lofgren

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY to all my haloed ones! May the shimmer of your halos light your steps and smooth the wilderness paths before you all!

superbubble

The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


What made this gigantic bubble? One possible answer is that the expanding shells of old supernovas have sculpted this unusual space cavern. Photo taken by the huge Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachon in Chile.

Earth, Moon, and Milky Way

Beehive

Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
and I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey
Getting drunk with silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

--Jean Toomer

Night Milky Way

Banks of a Stream Where Creatures Bathe

...

I know the hoof
Imprinted on my clay,
His bulk and poise
Who drinks you, enters you;

And hold you close,
Too close to make the best
Of that recurrently
Real beast in you.

At dawn asleep
In fairness take these colors.
Do not sweep me
Downstream with the stars.

--James Merrill

An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery

A COSMIC TORNADO. The cause of this spiraling space tornado, light years in length, is still a mystery.

What, Me Worry?

Just an interesting note: Andromeda, one of the galaxies in our own group of galaxies, and the largest of them, and the closest, is tearing toward the Milky Way at the speed of 300,000 MPH. At this velocity, it will collide with us in only 2-2 1/2 billion years!

"...convulsed with laughter."

Today is the birthday of S.J. (Sidney Joseph) Perelman, born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1904. He worked first as a cartoonist, but switched to writing humorous essays for various magazines, including the New Yorker. When his first collection, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge came out in 1929, Groucho Marx wrote him a letter saying, "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

Laughter must be good for you. Today he is 102. Happy Birthday, Mr. P.!

Sucking Chest Wound?