Whimsy Speaks Again

In case you haven't heard, Gonzo is gone.  Only a dozen more to go, and then we can redirect the Potomac through the rest of the Augean Stables.

"Alberto Gonzales is the first attorney general who thought the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth were three different things. The President should nominate a new attorney general whose loyalty to the Constitution is greater than his loyalty to the Republican Party."

— Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.
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I've gotten interested in all the services that Google provides.  I should have known more about them, but now I'm motivated (I found out that there's a Google office in Boulder).  The online apps are all organized on the trademark "clean" page at Google Labs.  First up is their simple web-page constructor.  I used it to add a one-page website.  Then, I downloaded and installed their Web Accelerator (which requires a DSL or cable connection, and I haven't had enough experience with it to know if it's helping my system).  Google Mars is like Google Earth, only, well, Martian.  I was zooming over the Marscape this morning to see if I left my car keys in the Moreux Crater Dunes.  Using Google Trends, and typing in "poetry", I discovered that although news references for poetry have been steadily increasing, actual searches for it have declined.  A similar application is available for music trends (Linkin Park is #1 and #2?).  Google's online source code searcher accepts regular expressions and pops up open source examples that match (I tried "Initialized empty Git repository" and it came up with a C module from the git package, as expected).  Google Transit helps you plan trips using public transit (only a few cities are available).  Google Sets creates a new set of items from your example.  I tried "pinksy, hass, collins, olds, levine" and it gave me a few of them back and also included links to "spiritual leaders", "life coach", and "die broke", the last of which cracked me up.  There is a second set of applications that have "made it out of the lab" and graduated to fully-supported Google App status.  These include Google Reader (an RSS feed aggregator), Google Docs and Spreadsheets and the even more comprehensive Google Apps (a web-based competitor for MS Office business), Google Desktop (which combines new customizable desktop wallpaper with search, sidebar, and other gadgets), Google Mail, Google News Alerts (that emails you alerts regarding topics of your choice), Google Groups (which takes you to forums and listserves, based upon topic),  Google Scholar (that helps you search scholarly papers; a search for "New Sincerity" took me here), Google Maps (I notice that my lawn needs mowing), Google Video (search videos by keyword(s)), Google Notebook (an online clipboard that you can access from anywhere), and a variety of applications accessible from your cell phone.  Those boys have certainly been busy.

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The latest Poets & Writers showed up.   Amongst the astounding number of ads for MFA programs, I found:  An article on the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.  Another on The Guerilla Poetics Project, a collective of poets and publishers whose activities include "sneaking poetry broadsides . . . into bookstores and libraries [within] . . . target books".  Small Press Points has a nice plug for Octopus Books and a quote by Zach Schomburg.  Literary MagNet provides short props for 1913: A Journal of Forms, Alehouse, Avery, Cadillac Cicatrix, and Rattle.  Teresa Weaver talks about losing her job as book editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Peter Selgin borrows liberally from Bill Bryson in A Short History of Everything, which actually discusses his novel-writing.  Mark Allen Cunningham tells us how to read Cormac McCarthy and lauds his "lavish prose".  Edwidge Danticat (what a great name) is the feature (and cover) article discussing her Brother, I'm Dying.  Stephen Dixon talks about writing in his 70's (go, Stephen).  The story of Junot Díaz and his 11-year hiatus between novels.  Long article on the elfin Bin Ramke, our local editor of the Denver Review, who has survived the Foetry/CPS affair to go on to publish his 9th collection (it also mentions that he had an early love of mathematics, whodathunk?).   An Annual Look at Independent Presses includes our own Kristy Bowen's Dancing Girl Press (Der says he met Kristy briefly at the Columbia library last year).  Lightning Strikes Thrice discusses small presses that have won big awards, including Margie/IntuiT House for Troy Jollimore's Tom Thomson in Purgatory which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.  San Antonio's Wings Press has been literatontos for 30 years.  Timothy Schaffert on how to assist in book jacket design.  My favorite curmudgeon, John Poch, has an article called "Pimp My Writing", in which he advises CW profs to let students fall on their ass a little more often.  Zillions of more ads, awards, contests.  The Stadler Center for Poetry announces that G. C. Waldrep is the "New faculty member & Director, Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets".  Good for you, GC.