WhimsyLand

Morning Treadmill:  I couldn't help but notice how in the ubiquitous hit, Umbrella, Rihanna's warbling sounds like she's channeling The Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan.  Add a new workout show to match Hip Hop Abs and Yoga Booty Ballet:  I didn't catch the name but it has something to do with wiggling around a dance pole. JAG is on for the 124th year in a row.  ESPN appears to have as many channels as all the TV stations we had as a kid.  Every morning this bouncy buxom redhead and her partner show us how to make "gumball slippers" and foil-wrapped pencil holders and butterfly appliqués and other stuff I used to dread getting from the kids when they came home from school projects.  Reverend Creflo A. Dollar spent 25 minutes preaching on 20 words in Genesis, I kid you not (doesn't "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. / And God saw the light, that it was good" make God sound like a nursery school teacher?). 

Dana Gioia describes himself as "perhaps the only person ever to get an MBA to become a poet".  Surely, that can't be so.  I, for example, was two courses away but as I was getting a doctorate in business anyway, and declined to take the extra classes (though I did run over to the other side of campus and get an M.S. in Computer Science).  Are there any other practicing poets out there with MBAs?

Whoda thunk?  Dick Cheney is his own branch of government or his own rogue nation or something.

Eileen has renamed her blog Poker Poetics, which is almost an infringement of my Whimsical empire.  Also, congrats, Eileen, for getting a panel approved by AWP.  I've heard it's easier to get an audience with the Pope nowadays.  I wouldn't mind attending the prose poem panel that Ms. Nezhukumatathil is on with Hicok, Addonizio, et al.  Josh enjoys Venice with the same wonderment that I always have.  Like Henry, I feel crushed by indifference this week.  I like these lines from Catherine Wagner's Macular Hole:  "Well who then is saying it.  Trucks in the offing / finch on the phonewire, movement of tree".  Kristy has Dusie chaps to trade.  Knocked Up joins Joshua's film list.  Stephen is giving away poetry books.  Jessie contributes a recipe for my culinary section:  Green, Eggs, and Ham.   Among many other interesting notions, Kasey posits that a poem is competent if it tends to play well with other poems in the journal it appears (yes, that's a simplification, read the article).  Simon continues to amuse: "the quack medicine of Marxism is a tool just as much as the insane, egotistical or megalomaniac, manifestos and poems that are produced by much of the avant garde." What's interesting is that Simon's response was motivated by Kasey's comment thread, which wandered all over the place in interesting ways, pulling in links to other blogger's thought, and sparking a discussion between Kent and Joshua ("Does [Flarf] believe, with Badiou, that we shouldn't cringe at the idea of massive State Terror after the Revolution and that certain School of Quietude Poets might well best be sent to the guillotine?")  One interesting link (cited by Jordan) was Jonathan's hypothesis regarding literary context.

In any event, I probably lean more toward Simon and Kent's view of Marxist theory as anachronistic.  In the two largest enterprises in which I had up-close-and-personal views into the machinations of the owner-manager class, the constant goal was to get rid of people altogether.  In the best of worlds, according to this über-class, the company would be run by computers and machinery, all of which was built by yet more computers and machinery.  No pesky unions, no expensive pensions.  

I got Scientific American for 20 years and then stopped because I thought it had gotten dumbed down, then started again because I figured I had, too.  Some interesting bits from this month's issue:

• The 1.4 billion cattle in the world contribute significantly to methane production (a putative contributor to global warming), perhaps 115 million metric tons per year.  There were far fewer ruminants in pre-industrial days (which included 60 million American bisons) that contributed an estimated 10 million metric tons of methane.
• The oily seeds of the jatropha plant, native to Mali and Tanzania, may be the ideal source of biofuel.  The plant favors hot, dry climates, and could benefit developing countries with large areas of semi-arid land.
• The Memjet, a radically advanced ink-jet printer, is tiny and prints color photographs up to 30 times faster than conventional printers.  Developed by Silverbrook Research in Australia, the Memjet heats ink to a boil and fires it through nozzles.
• Ray guns may be real soon.  The Defense Department's High-Energy Laser Joint Technology Office is testing a laser gun whose high energy could knock down incoming "mortars, artillery shells, rockets and missiles".
• A species of fish in a Turkish hot spring have adapted to feed off the skin of the tourists who use the spring for therapy. 
• Go is one of the few games that have eluded mastery by computers (IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997).  A new algorithm by a pair of Hungarian researchers may change all that.
• The Skeptic debunks The Secret, a book on positive thinking lauded by Oprah.
• Human-induced climate and hydrological change is likely to compel hundreds of millions of people to relocate in the next few decades.
• Creationist argue that DNA is so complicated and so dependent upon (the very differently constructed) proteins that the whole system could not have evolved without divine intervention.  Robert Shapiro believes that a simpler self-replicating chemical precursor is the answer.
• Modern anesthetics work by not quite killing you.  New anesthetic regimes will attempt to target individual human systems.
• Conservation biologists have proposed a "bold plan" to repopulate America (specifically the Dakotas) with the animals similar to those that humans wiped out in the Pleistocene:  lions, elephants, horses, and camels.
  

Zelda Update:  I'm stuck trying to beat Morpheel in the Lakebed Temple.  I'm bringing the Wii over to Cath's tomorrow, though, so Ky and Der can use their long experience and amazing reaction times to get me through a couple of Bosses.

Here's the only poem I every wrote that mentions Scientific American, called Western Devolution:


Your phone call caught me reading Scientific American. They say
each star attracts a twin, too dim to see. Ours moves an arc-second
every other generation -- out beyond the Oort Cloud, rustling among
the comets-to-be, no tidal pull, no evidence beyond the second
order effects, dark and faithful to ellipsis.

~~~

There are only the geese
in the air and those beneath
the sugar mill, arranged like an army
of the mute: frozen mud, stubbled
wheat. Above, a lancehead caroms
off the horizon, returning with the same
aimless determination. They say
it’s a thing in their head and the iron
hidden in Long’s Peak.

~~~

Two men meet
in a cowboy bar,
one bleeding from
a razor cut, the other
with his hat on backwards.

~~~

The moon is hubris.
No sea to sway, a eunuch
singing to the stone.

~~~

In an uncharacteristic paroxysm of self-promotion, I have added the Court Green poems to my web page.  See you tomorrow.  Sweet Junie is back in Wisconsin and I have time on my hands.