Quote of the Day

"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing."
--Benjamin Franklin

Anti-War Haiku

Bells toll as trees sigh;
they weep leaves where soldiers fell;
stream flows where blood ran

--Christopher T. George

morning of bombing
amid apple-tree blossom
scent of kerosene

--Serge Tomé

Find more at: Anti-War Haiku Wall

This just in . . . .

Trapeze Artist Attacks Rival with Castration Tongs

And you thought you had problems?

English as a Second Language

There is something irresistibly charming about the fractured English of some Japanese folks (to me, anyway). You'll find plenty of such scrambled syntax at Natsuko has a weblog!, the home page of Natsuko Murakami. Here's a small sampling:

"My English still it is not complete and therefore I practiced and began this webpage. The Blogging is large! Enjoy my place! . . . . Everything which I can say is as follows: What a Cute! is good, being for the sake of being here, you become like me, but, the fact that I am loved must be learned! Hard!"

My Life, My Duct Tape

I've been advised to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape, just in case a chemical warhead explodes somewhere in the vicinity. (I live near a major Northeastern megalopopolitanapolis that is, in fact, favored by terrorists.) Plastic sheeting is in short supply around here, but duct tape is no problem--I'm always well supplied, as I have a near fetish about the stuff. Every winter, I tape up the condo's drafty windows with white duct tape, and many of the tiles in our bathroom are held in place with it. (We're saving up to remodel the bathroom, needless to say. Meanwhile, waterproof duct tape is literally holding our walls up).

Those are just two of the many practical uses for this amazingly versatile adhesive. I've even been known to hem my trousers with duct tape. It works--sticks--until you wash them, at least.

There are all sorts of other fun uses for the stuff. A girl I once knew in my salad days was a real blabbermouth, and I threatened to tape her mouth shut one afternoon. She loved the idea (having perhaps seen too many movies about kidnap victims). I taped her up, and she enjoyed going "mmm, mmmm" for an hour or so, while shaking her head and rolling her eyes. I taped her wrists and ankles, too, at her request. Childish fun!

Go out an get a roll. You can never have too much.

Quote of the Day

John: Everyone always talks about a good thing coming to an end, as if life was over.
Paul: Ends are beginnings and beginnings are ends.
Ringo: This is the end of the beginning.
George: Well it's always the end of the beginning isn't it? Play the game existence till the end of the beginning.

This Space for Rent

It seems like we see advertisments everywhere today. Well, not everywhere. The human body--except for T-shirts and baseball caps, of course--has always been advertising free. Until now, that is:

Getting a "head" in advertising

Marx said that, under capitalism, everything would eventually become commodified. He may have been right on that point . . . .

Haiku 142

While I stand and dream
A pirate buries his gold
As the sunlight shifts

Write Stuff

Here's a site that offers a variety of free text tools. You can insert text and then automatically remove carriage returns, change all upper case to upper and lower case, convert your deathless prose to HTML, etc. cOULd bE A reaL TiMe sAveR.

For The Birds

I took my wife and 12-year-old son to see Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds last weekend. A local theater, Loews Jersey, a restored 1920s "movie palace," was showing a new, "archival quality" Technicolor print of the film. It was gorgeous! You would have thought it was filmed yesterday, not in 1963. The special effects are crude by today's digital standards, but the movie builds up a huge amount of suspense (after a slow start). Everyone who sees this film wonders why the birds attack. There's no definitive answer, though I think it has something to do with nature's revenge on people who cling to unnatural relationships. My son had an interesting theory: He thinks the birds were angry because the characters in the film were smoking too many cigarettes!

Poem for a winter's day

My poem, The Thaw, has just been published by Red River Review.

Homeless man with a website

Check out the I hate my life website. This guy--an unemployed writer, he says--claims to be living in his car, and I believe him. (Do you?) You might wonder how a truly homeless person could have a website, but he says he uses computers in public libraries and that a website designer volunteered to create his site. Whether or not he's actually homeless, he offers plenty of information about coping with that unfortunate condition.