WhimsyLand

Denver apparently got 16 inches of snow, but we only got 3-4 inches.  Longmont is about 500 feet lower than Denver and Boulder, both of which are mile-high.  Let's hope it keeps up at this modest pace, which the snowplows can handle, at least around here.  Travelers at DIA are getting inconvenienced again, but not as much as the guy who thought he was flying to Australia, only to end up on his way to Montana.

From BBC's 100 Things You Probably Didn't Know:  Experts say that 200 million people have stopped posting to their blogs.  The lion costume for the Wizard of Oz was made from real lions.  The pope has been known to wear red Prada shoes.  Sex workers in Roman times charged the equivalent of 8 glasses of red wine.  Barbie's full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.  Cows have regional accents.  Nelson Mandella stole pigs as a child.  The Himalayas cover one-tenth of the earth's surface.

I just finished Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain.  Junie gave it to me and, though not as good as CM, it was a fine read.  The book takes place in the early 1800's, and one noticeable aspect of the book is that everyone drinks all the time.  This shouldn't come as a surprise to me, as I once read in a Scientific American article that the 1830's was (by far) the most drunken decade in American history.  As I recall, it was largely a result of farmers finding that the only way they could profitably store grain and corn was in the form of licker. 

I'm back to doing my treadmill walking in the morning and there's a whole new lineup of cable shows available in the 5-6 AM time slot.  The biggest difference seems to be the diet plan shows.  It seems like a year ago every other channel was promoting some kind of magic pill.  Now, it's eating plans whereby, for $10 a day, a company will send you "breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert!"  Judging from the ads, millions of pounds and thousands of inches have been shed by eating lasagna, milkshakes, and chocolate cake.  They actually look pretty good, but I wonder if the servings have been photographed through a magnifying lens and they're really doll-sized.  There are still a couple of exercise regimens, but my favorite is Yoga Booty Ballet.  I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up.  One woman after another looks at you with a straight face and exclaims "I'm back in a size 4, and all due to Yoga Booty Ballet!"  I like to start at Channel 101 and just click up to the 200's, stopping for a few minutes if I see something interesting.  Recently that has meant: old episodes of Star Trek, before Shatner had that ghoulish pumpkin face; Xena: Warrior Princess, whose androgeny fails to excite; BBC World News (unless I'm not in the mood to be depressed); Who's Number 1? with that great rap intro; hiphop and rock videos; the ever-hilarious Fairly Odd GodParents; Fresh Prince with Will before he got so buff; Kenneth Copeland Ministries (why does that man always look so angry?); Xiaolin Showdown and all those Japanese animated characters with exaggerated movements.  I can't bear Fox Friends or Imus in the Morning, but the rest of the mix is pretty good.  I don't know how people just go to a gym and get on a spinner.  I'd be bored to tears without my morning Wiggles.

I loaded Vista on one of our PCs yesterday.  First, I downloaded the Vista Upgrade Advisor, which pokes around your machine and tells you if you have enough stuff (RAM, CPU horsepower, disk space) to run Vista, and whether your video card is capable of running Aero (Vista's fancy 3-D desktop experience).  Most systems purchased in the last 2 years should run Vista as all you need is a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of memory and a modest video card.  To appreciate the full Vista user interface, you'll need 1 GB of RAM, a bit more beefed-up video card and 40GB of disk.  The system I loaded had a 3-year old ATI 9500 video adapter, 1 GB of RAM and an Opteron 140, and it runs the full Vista Business just fine.  Vista has been market-targeted into four versions:  Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate.  The latter three support Aero.  Home Premium and Ultimate tack on media management software and Xbox connectivity.  I like the way Aero works, but it's not clear that Vista is any faster than XP Pro, which I run on all my systems that aren't servers.  I'm certainly not loading it on my main development machine until I've messed with it a lot more.

Most of the 20th anniversary Poets & Writers focuses on writers this month, with the following poetic exceptions:  Literary MagNet mentions Rattapallax, "the bimonthly literary magazine published in NYC by Ram Devineni", and Poetry Kanto, published in Japan, but including work by Jennifer Michael Hecht, Gregory Orr, and Sarah Arvio.  John Freeman intersperses biographical anecdotes about poets with the work of Frederick Seidel.  20 Years includes the thoughts of editors, publishing execs, governmental directors and litbiz higher-ups on Then and Now.  Joan Houlihan, an interesting choice, laments that while two decades ago poetry was a "furtive, cornered, back-of-the-room, secret-doodling, window-gazing" kinda thang, now it's a biosphere where poets chase book contests to get published to re-enter the hive that is the current MFA-laden poetry microcosm.  Don Lee, editor of Ploughshares, allows as how all journals have become more professional with the advent of technology, but grants are dwindling and retail sales are "way off".David Fenza of the AWP mentions in passing that the number of creative writing programs now stands at 320 in the US (imagine!) and is generally happy that dozens of poets have sold more than ten thousand copies of a poetry book (which is the sales of the next Harry Potter in the first 14 milliseconds).  David Hamilton of the Iowa Review is stunned by the sheer number of submissions — 526 envelopes of poetry in the first 6 weeks of their reading period alone.  Tree Swenson, currently executive director of the Academy of American Poets, notes that their site gets a million hits a month (though I suspect that a large number of them are looking for poems to inscribe on their anniversary card to their spouse).  In other news, Bob Hicok is judging AWP's Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.  Hmm, I might actually take a shot at that.

More tomorrow.