WhimsyLand

For a real kick, watch Jo read the latest and last Harry Potter.

Rebecca, Reb, and that guy who looks like Harold Ramis are all at Caffeine Destiny.

Deborah's right.  Bloglines works pretty slickly.  I had tried to organize RSS feeds before, including from Outlook 2007 before I found out the already dog-slow application turned my machine to mud.  Anyway, it's nice getting a list of who has a new post, instead of clicking on blogroll links, just to find out that Jordan's on vacation or something.

Charles Simic is the new US Poet Laureate.  That's kinda strange.  Speaking of whom, Tricia may target him for parody.

Does anybody know how to get hold of Colleen Ryor at Black Lawrence?  I've got the press email address and her gmail address, but no answer to either.

Gabe has a new book coming out.  Among those in the acknowledgments are Henry Gould and The Toyota Corporation.

Morning Treadmill Fare:  What happened?  They rotated my favorite shows out.  Now, there's Dora and Blues Clues and Oobi which is this creepy kid's show where all the hands wear eyeballs like some kind of 3-year Beetlejuice.  Aside from the Bose informercial and the guy who wants us to clean our colons, there's only the usual Jesus channels, including that guy who sells you Blessed Miracle Water.  Codename:  The Kids Next Door isn't bad.  This morning, in one episode, they had sly allusions to Star Wars (Luke hanging from the ice-cave), Indy Jones (the tie-monster crashing down a cave shute), Harry Potter (the basilisk-like tie-monster, again), The Matrix (can't remember what left this impression, but it was the Abominable Snowsuit episode).

I would go to Richard's blog just for the artwork.

Rattle has audio.  Pretty cool, actually.  I am SO going to steal the idea for MMM, except make sure that it's streaming.

In about 6 months, I will have been programming for 40 years.  A couple of years after I got the bug, I had read every major computer science book written.  I knew all the major languages, and worked with all the computers available (all 5 of them).  I just couldn't keep up.  There are zillions of technologies with which I'm not proficient.  However, they all come pretty easily, I just have to find someone to pay me to learn them, which actually happens a lot.  Sometimes, unbeknownst to my clients, but I don't charge them for learning curve time.  I love programming.  I also love Junie, but for different reasons.  Having two things you love is a blessing, methinks.

Thanks to Maureen for the link to Why People Have Sex.  The researchers start out by opining that "Why people have sex is an extremely important, but surprisingly little studied topic".  Why is that?  Are the wrong people having it?   Are we all having it for the wrong reasons?  My favorite reasons in the list of answers were:  "Because I was bored", "Somebody dared me", "I was slumming", "It was a favor to someone", and "I wanted to end the relationship". 

Goodness, am I out of touch.  Kasey and Joshua do film reviews.

I've been waiting for this Big Job for months.  I know it's coming, it's just that involves a couple of companies, one of which has 9,000 employees and revenues of $3-4 billion, which makes for glacial decision-making.  It's basically a spin-off of my work on the Playaway, but should be even more fun.

Jimmy's at it again.  He snagged bestamericanpoetry@gmail.com. 

Sonnet Beatrice Butterfield.  What a beautiful name.  Congratulations, Caterina.

Once, Dave, Kevvy and I drank $2,200 worth of wine at one sitting.  That was back when I had a cellar, say, 1992.  I have three enormous cardboard boxes full of corks, together the volume of a 55-gallon drum, I would guess.  I always thought I would take an Exacto knife and cut the corks down the middle and adorn an entire wall of one room with them.  I had a friend that did that, but that's another story.  I don't drink extremely expensive wine much anymore, mainly because I'm not on an expense account anymore.  But I have discovered an interesting fact:  box wine isn't too bad.  You can buy decent Australian white wine for $12 for a 5-liter box.  That's 7 bottles of wine, more or less, or about $1.50 a bottle.  Cheaper than Two-Buck Chuck.  Heck, if you just going to lubricate a poetry reading, or serve it to the slush-pile readers after spritzering it with ginger ale, what's the difference?  Red wine is a different story, of course.  Somebody once said that the only real wine is red wine, which is basically true if you ignore the Montrachets.  But, I digress.

I just noticed that on Ron's mega-blogroll, there's a Chris Mansel and a Chris Mansell and they're different people.  Another funny entry is "Olde Quietude" that actually links to The New Criterion.

When I was a kid, all adults were Mr. This or Mrs. That.  Even if they were 22.  I suppose it was like an episode of The Brady Bunch.  Then, I got older and it started to wear off.  By the time I was teaching, all the undergrads vied to be the first ones to risk calling me Jeff.  By the time I got my doctorate, nobody used Mr. unless they were sucking up.  Now, of course, I've gotten in the habit of calling everybody by their first names (or what we quaintly used to call their Christian names).  Well, not everybody, I still address MJB as Ms. Bang, out of some weird neo-Victorian respect.  Since I've left teaching, the only person who calls me Doctor Bahr is Dave P.  He sees my phone number on the Caller-ID and says "Doooccctttooorrr Bahr, how are you?".  Even if I felt like calling my elders by their Mr's and Mrs's and Ms's, it's probably too late.  I think Mr. Silliman is the only blogmate I know who is actually older than I.  My dad, of course, is still Dr. Bahr.  Answering the phone, signing correspondence, making reservations, opening the door to greet the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Before he was Dr. Bahr, he was Colonel Bahr, so he was probably already used to it.  Come to think of it, he used to make everybody call him Colonel Bahr.  Except my mom, who called him Dick under normal circumstances and Fred when she was angry. 

Enough screwing around, see you tomorrow.