WhimsyLand

There's always a Christmas present you know instantly that you will not be able to live without.

I received the lovely Whimsy Daybook 2007, a collaboration between Maryrose Larkin (holidays) and Nita Hill (paintings).  Each month begins with some lovely artwork by Ms. Hill, followed by daybook entries for all the most important whimsical holidays, including:


Miracle Making Wednesday
Punctuation Holding Cell
Amazing Cleaning Amy Invented
PEONY+MEMORY+PILLOW BOOK
Flash Mob Hunted Out of Existence
Ask Me About My Glitter Bone
Feline Career Day
Feast of St. Rage
Buddha Bean Distribution Day
Kick Your Husband If He's Mean
Sun Enters the Sign of the Chevy Suburban
Scare a Crow Day
Error History Day
Let's All Visit Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle
I Live In A House Made of Fish Ladders
Nobody's Mother Day

For the nominal price of the daybook, you also get Ms. Larkin's chapbook, Inverse:  "The name of this intersection is frost broken up // heavy spar reign heavy phrase ravishment /    strands careening // let us unfurl instead: weather /     see also river // see also   self and the less restricted sense". 

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There's been the usual loquacious tussle going on over at QED, this time a minor altercation regarding Muhammad Yunus, microcredit and the degree to which he deserved the Nobel Prize.  As usual, the libertarians face off against the libs and socialists.  It's always entertaining and often illuminating.  HP, the resident libertarian and Randist, contends that only real capitalism can save the poor and that the debt created by microloans is not much better than the burdens of debt anywhere.  That got me to thinking about the truly ludicrous state of student loans.  Try to buy a car or a house without good credit and what happens?  Try to finance either of them for more than they're worth and what happens?  And yet, any young person with an optimistic point of view can take out student loans approaching 6 figures with no credit whatsoever except, perhaps, the co-signing of their parent — for whom there are no strict credit-checking procedures either.  Thousands of schools qualify for student loans.  You can rack up $80K getting an MFA or even more getting a PhD in Art History.  You can indenture yourself for just as much at 4-year "art schools" where you will be lucky to make $30K a year when you graduate, assuming you can get a job.  These are loans that can cost between $400 and $800 a month for up to 20 years, all of it after tax dollars.  I really find the situation quite incredible.  I know that it would be politically dicey to start ranking job prospects, but if you were a bank wouldn't you rate the prospects of med school grad a bit higher than that of an undergrad with a major in philosophy?  The reason it all works is that, through a variety of government-sponsored loan guarantees, there's no risk to the banks. 

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I'm hoping to get some sort of poetry literature in the mail shortly.  It's certainly been long enough.  However, the Weather Underground says that we may get from 6 to 12 inches more of snow tomorrow and Friday.  I don't know what's happened to my sunny state of infrequent snow.  Maybe we annoyed one god or another.