WhimsyLand

Now that Christmas is over, I can go back to buying modest numbers of poetry books.  From about November on, I'm prohibited by my loved ones whom I don't wish to disappoint by buying books that they've already bought for my Christmas or birthday present (yes, I'm a Capricorn).  Now that the leash is off, I'm ordering Rebecca's Navigate.  I'm expecting it to be something like MJB's Louise in Love, but it doesn't really matter as I like Rebecca's poetry and I'm sure it will be killerbee.  Hey, I see that Radish King is finally out and only a Paypal click away.

I like to read intelligent stock market appraisals, including those of Jim Jubak and the Motley Fools.  I particularly like the way Jubak weaves a story to convince himself that a given company's shares will rise.  It seems not at all dissimilar from recommending poetry books, for some reason.  Maybe I should end all my recommendations with Full disclosure: I will add a copy of Radish King to my personal poetry portfolio three days after this column is posted.

I just bought another yearly subscription to the Microsoft Software Developer Network.  For about $2,500 you get something like $50,000 in software (not that a small firm could use all of it).  In addition to providing access to the MSDN articles and archives, you get a large collection of DVDs with virtually every Microsoft product.  This includes all current and past operating systems (XP, Server 2007, Vista), the extended Office suite (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Visio, et cetera), development tools (Visual Studio.NET, 2003, and 2007), useful applications ( Publisher 2007, OneNote, Office Accounting) and dozens of other programs that I didn't even know existed.  I'm particularly confused by the range and number of Microsoft server products.  I'm familiar with Exchange Server and Commerce Server, but what do you do with Forms Server, SharePoint Server, BizTalk Server?  And what in God's name is Groove Server?  I suppose I could install them on one of our boxes and read up on them, but I suspect they are targeted at large organizations with the IT staff to keep them running. 

I didn't realize Tricia had extended her now-famous Wallace Stevens birthday party to include other famous poets.  Tricia is one of the funniest women on earth, with the possible exception of Paula Poundstone on one of her good days.  She's also one hell of a poet.  Tricia, I mean.  I think Paula specializes in gothic novels.

I've become accustomed to Rimbaud stealing things (reading glasses, glue stick, pencils), but he actually eats the breath mints.

Now, here's something macabre:  Every year around late November, flies start to accumulate in my master bedroom around the large window that faces the Rockies.  They are nowhere else in the house.  Not anywhere, really.  By mid-December, there are dozens of them if I don't vacuum them up (which I never seem to do enough).  They just sit there on the ceiling and around the windows until they die and fall onto the carpet.  Now, being a bachelor sans resident sons, I'm not the most meticulous of housekeepers — but, I do take out the trash and clean the litter box and mop the kitchen floor and Pine-Sol the bathrooms occasionally.  There is something very Anne Rice going on here.  Flies (or as Twain called them in Letters From The Earth, God's Favorite Bird) have a typical lifespan of 30 days, although they can live for months in warm climates.  Their normal reproduction months are from April to September and they live on waste matter.  They can't become flies without first being maggots, and I've never seen a maggot in my house.  Ever.  This is Colorado, where There Are No Bugs.  I mean no bugs, really.  Not in the flour.  Not in the 3-year old box of Cheerios.  Not scurrying around when you turn on the kitchen light.  So where do these spawn of the devil come from?  How do they live to become the proven carriers of Typhoid, tuberculosis, amoebic dysentery, bubonic plague, gangrene, and listeria that they are.  They are despicable creatures and Ich hasse fliegen.  But they still show up every late November like clockwork.  10 points if you can figure out how they get into the bedroom.  20 points if you can figure out what they are eating in their larval stage.  30 points if you can figure out how to get rid of them before they lounge around my bedroom gazing at Long's Peak.

Sigh.  I'm out of disk space on my C: drive again.  Sheesh, you'd think 40GB would be enough, considering I have another 350GB disk in the box for most everything.  However, there's 8GB in Documents and Settings, 7GB in my Windows directory, and .  It's time to uninstall and re-install applications on the big drive, I suppose.  Someone should write a utility to move installed programs elsewhere, while keeping any user-agreement restrictions in place.  I would just wipe the drive and re-install everything again, including XP, except I have installed dozens of programs over the years and finding the original CDs would be a major pain in the ass (you would have to take a look at the office shelves to get an idea why).  Hmm, I could de-install Office 2003 and install MS Office Ultimate 2007.  Then, I would get OneNote (which I haven't played with) and Groove (about which I am clueless). 

One nice thing about cleaning up my system and doing lots of installations is that I have a perfect excuse to blogwalk.  I have missed so many months of so many good people that it was easy to stay engrossed for hours.  Entertaining stops along the way included:  Jordan's review of Daisy Fried's My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again.  Reading some poems Kate Greenstreet has at here site.  Robert's defense of his demystifying of Adorno.  Gabe and Rosanna read in an uptight town.  The world's most difficult general-knowledge quiz.  Laurel clues me in on Jordan and Ali's marriage (BTW, Junie and I met on an Internet poetry site).  Little-known things about Kasey, which led me to Poets in Need.  Tony reports that The New Sincerity is the subject of two graduate term papers.