WhimsyLand

Before.

After.

Well, typical Colorado.  We got just hammered.  Thirty inches in Boulder and about two-thirds of that here, with drifts running 3 to 5 feet.  It started yesterday morning and was spent by this morning.  By 2 PM this afternoon, we had blue skies and a sunny 35 degrees.  I know Buffalo (just to pick a northern, LangPo-friendly town) gets blasted with Lake Effect snow all the time, but this was pretty special for us.  All day, people drove down my street in high-rise SUVs and pickups, but they were the only ones out and God Knows where they were going.  One rumor had it that the closest Safeway was open, but only because half the staff couldn't get out of the parking lot last night.  It would have been nice to have some fresh bread, but none of the passing Suburbans and F150s offered to take me, so I went outside and shoveled alongside my neighbors.  It was the first neighborhood bonding experience I've had since the Homeowner's Meeting of 2001, which was the last one I attended.  The really good news is that while chatting about our children and birthplaces, I mentioned that I was out of wine, and my neighbor Pat ran over to his house and came out with a choice of Chardonnay, Shiraz or both.  I took the Chardonnay and threw it in the snow to chill while I shoveled.  I actually got a good swath all the way out to the street so Dima can navigate his SUV over here tomorrow and get some work done (although I did tell him he could take some days off if he wanted). 

Here's an interesting one, if you follow the machinations of The Evil Empire.  Microsoft has done a deal with Novell to actually resell SuSE Linux and paid down on a whole lot of support contract fees.  The press release says that the companies will "co-develop software to improve virtualization, Samba, server management, and web services in mixed environments".  The Linux community, who are basically raving ideologues (not that I often disagree with them), are incensed that a major Linux company is dealing with The Dark Lords.  Having been around the Tech Biz for a while, I can tell you what happened.  They looked at each other and said what they always say:  "Hey, we're not saying we're not whores, we're just talking price here".

Since there's no mail, there's no litmags and no Time and no Atlantic and no nothing.  Since I got on my no blogroll kick, I can never remember where anybody is, so I get lazy and don't check.  Except sometimes, like today, when I Google "Jane Dark" or "Suburban Ecstasies" or something about Angie or Jordan that might get me there.  Here's a great quote from Joshua in his review of The Queen:   "At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction."  I saw a positive and assuredly deserved review by David Shapiro of Jordan Davis's poetry in the online Boston Review.  I also haven't visited Rebecca since the last time I was waxing nostalgically on the wonderment of Rebeccas In General.  She's the only poet whom I know personally (and I mean that, of course, in that distant, never-quite-met, leave comments on each other's blog, wish you were visiting her city to have lunch with, chatted a lot in one forum or another way) that just seems to write more and more X all the time.  X stands for something for which "better" is a substandard adjective.  It's more like engagingly, interestingly, strangely, exotically, evocatively, compellingly.  Well, you know.  Who can put words to these things, even poets?  But, I digress.  Rebecca also points us to the Whimsy Daybook of imaginary holiday, one of which I will be ordering forthwith.  It occurs to me that you don't really need a blogroll, you just need Ron's blog URL imprinted on the inside of your eyelids.  He's got a the blogroll of all blogrolls, and everybody is just a click away.  Duh.  Ron notes (if you haven't already read this, and you probably have because you are all more conscientious than I) that Dolly Parton has received a National Medal for the Arts but John Ashbery hasn't but Maya Angelou has.  Omigod, there's Kasey's blog.  I'm missing so much being a misfit.  I love his description of Jimmy Durante as "incomprehensibly grotesque".  Oh, look, a link to Mairead Byrne: "I clapped until little drops of blood / jumped out of my finger".  See why I don't do this more often?  I love these people.  I would be consumed by them.  I would not get anything else done, nor contribute to the Great Engine of American Progress, nor pay the mortgage.

Jilly asks if Turing is the Turing of Bletchley Park.  Yes, he was a genius, the father of computer science, largely responsible for breaking the Enigma Code in WWII, and a homosexual.  After a short illustrious career, he was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" and required to submit to hormone therapy.  He committed suicide a couple of years later at 41.

And now, a blizzard poem:

There’s a girl in the park outside my window bending her head back
to swallow the snow that’s rushing from somewhere. I will not go out
and push it around with a shovel the way that Celan plied his mother’s tongue,
the tongue of her loved ones, and that of her murderers. Soon, the roof will moan
with unaccustomed weight, the aspen will sag under pleasant treachery. There will be
no doorbell -- my neighbors are fatalists. This the cure for desiccation, the parch
the surveyor divided with transit and sightline. I can hear the clapping
of erasers, the deconstruction of chalked apologies. And a train making its way
through the town with boxcars of turkeys, an a cappella of wheels
on wet metal. The girl is up to her knees in snow, except now
it’s a sapling wrapped in plastic. We prayed for this in a punchline.
We’re so thirsty in deceit.