WhimsyLand

I get a lot of spam in Russian.  I don't know why.  One sample from this morning was titled Быстро и качественно!!!  Babelfish says this means "It is rapid and qualitatively", which usually signals the beginning of a Viagra advertisement.  The email goes on to say "Реклама для Вашего бизнеса!!!":  which Babelfish translates as "Advertisement for your business", so perhaps it's a sales pitch.  There's a phone number and some bulleted points:  "Any form of payment", "we allow the complete report of server after the distribution", and "the preparation of mock-up free of charge on the given by you text. Before the payment we send mock-up to you to the assertion".  The email closes with "WE will free of charge consult you on any questions: the selection of base, reduction, picture in the letter, the composition of the text".  Perhaps this firm wishes to redo my website in Cyrillic.  The only other emails of note that I received this morning include one from Amazon suggesting (inexplicably) that I buy Desperate Housewives - The Complete Third Season and another advising me "this is not good.  If this video gets to her husband your [sic] both dead." with a bogus link to YouTube.

The German police arrested two men who poured a long ribbon of white powder across an Ikea parking lot as a trail for their jogging club.  The police thought this was some form of terrorist threat, until they figured out that the powder was flour.  In their defense, the men said that their club were composed of "drinkers with a running problem".

I've been reading Wikipedia today, after reading about Wikiscanner, a program/process that has unmasked various corporations and individuals who have modified Wikipedia for their own purposes.  I've always wondered how Wikipedia manages to survive as a credible source of information, given the thousands of pranksters who might be bored enough vandalize entries (it turns out that there is a lot of auditing by Wikipedia contributors, and Administrators can correct, reverse or delete errant changes).  I also wondered how Wikipedia entries come to be.  I mean, can I just start writing my autobiography?  Well, I can, but it is not advised.  There's nothing that prevents my adoring public from doing so, however, as long as they follow the Principle Rule:  all facts must be verifiable.  Following a virtual trail of breadcrumbs led me to entries on  Flarf poetry (in which Josh Corey, Kasey, Jordan, and Nada make an appearance) which links to Mr. Mohammad's entry, which led me after one hop to Lawson Fusao Inada (Oregon's Poet Laureate for 2006), and then to William Stafford to Robert Bly to George Plimpton to The Paris Review to Linda Gregg to American Poets to Dana Gioia to Jello to Ghostbusters 2 to England to T. S. Eliot to Poetry Magazine to Objectivist Poets to Ron Silliman to School of Quietude to Robert Archambeau (which turned out to be a Canadian ceramic artist, so I back-clicked) to Tony Tost to Walt Whitman Award to Geri Doran to Bread Loaf Writers Conference to C. Dale Young to Yaddo to Ted Hughes to Crow.  That seemed like a good place to stop and go read a little bit from Crow, which is probably the first real book of poetry which thrilled me.  I used to buy used copies at Powell's and give them to friends.  Powell's still has a used paperback for $7.50, Amazon has 15 of them for about the same price, and Alibris has a signed first edition for $500. 

Fox's Anchorwoman, a scripted reality show featuring "buxom blonde Lauren Jones" survived one episode before getting the axe.  Slate comments on the extent of TV's Aryan Sisterhood.  I particularly liked the Periodic Table of Blondness.  Slate also reports that the art market is about to tank, as hundreds of its patrons find out that their hedge fund bonuses have disappeared.  Take, for example, the plight of James Simons of Renaissance Technologies.  Last year he made 1.7 billion dollars.  Simons is a former mathematician and Renaissance Technologies employs almost 100 more of them (including physicists and statisticians).  The trading in their $27 billion Medallion Fund is entirely quantitative, and RT's computerized activity are so numerous that they sometimes account for 10% of all NASDAQ trades.

So, that's where Camille Paglia ended up.  She certainly has a lot to say without often saying anything.

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I made some more Potato-Leek Soup Colorado last night.  Safeway was out of leeks, so I substituted a pound of shallots.  I left out the saffron and used a whole big jar of roasted red peppers and a little more Tabasco than usual.  Instead of risking The Potato Glue Syndrome, I used my bigass KitchenAid mixer with the large hoop whisk attachment to get everything smushed up.  It came out less silky than usual, but the chunkiness was rather nice with french bread and a new Spanish red I found.

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I mentioned that WhimsyLand in its various incarnations is 3 years old today.  Turns out that it's Jilly's blog's birthday, too.  Jilly's funniest entry today is Poet Takes Extra 5 Minutes To Vague Up Poem:  "After completing a poem originally titled "Last Dawnbreak," local poet Keith Taylor spent five additional minutes removing verbs and punctuation in order to give the piece a level of vagueness more suitable for publication."  I don't know what it says about the state of poetics and publication that it took me a moment to realize that it was an article from The Onion.

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Our Robert Archambeau (not the Canadian ceramic artist) write an engaging piece on The Poet as Specialist.  I found out that Sir Walter Raleigh and I are not, in fact, poets.  That's why my masthead has all those other categories.