Thanks be to Jilly for
pointing out these
aphorisms:
- A good listener is usually thinking about something else.
- Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.
- A woman is like a teabag — only in hot water do you realize how
strong she is.
- To be impartial is to have taken sides already with the status quo.
- There is a crack in everything. It's how the light gets in.
- Borders are established so there is something to fight about.
- You recognize a true friend by how he lies to you.
- To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty; to be a poet at forty is to
be a poet.
Deborah notes that Michael Gushue
has started a recipe exchange among poets. What a great idea.
Michael also has a short
treatise
on pest control for poem infestation.
The Hat Seven is Out. Rae, Reb, GC,
Jonathan, Dara, Zachary, . . . go check it out.
It is apparently Stuart Dybek Month over at
Tricia's place.
Dybek is the latest poet/writer
recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. You can all turn green with envy
now.
~~~
I was listening to food writer Tom Parker Bowles on NPR who was discussing his
book
My Year of Eating Dangerously. One
dish he mentioned was elvers, or baby eels. I have actually had this
(expensive) dish in Spain a couple of times. When it was served to me, I
was looking at a small flattish terra cotta bowl with what appeared to be
vermicelli sautéed in olive oil. It was a bit salty and delicate.
Apparently, there were bazillions of elvers in the rivers of England in olden
times, and Elver Fairs in which people would eat them by the cup-ful. The
life cycle of the eel was not understood until the early 20th century, when
Danish researcher Johannes Schmidt discovered that all European eels begin their
life cycle in the Sargasso Sea. From there they travel in their larval
form (which were originally thought to be a separate species) until they
encounter brackish water thousands of miles away. Bowles also mentioned
eating dog and extremely hot peppers. That reminded me that I have a book
called Unmentionable Cuisine that I
haven't looked at in a while (and never prepared anything from). The recipes in
that book include fried calf's head, brain fritters, pig's face and cabbage,
turkey testicles (I've actually had them with scrambled eggs), horse steak (had
that, too), boiled dog, stewed cat, chocolate rabbit (had that in Spain), possum
and taters, guinea pig creole style, grilled rat Bordeaux style, cock's comb,
pigeon and peas, starlings en croûte, turtle curry, grilled
snake (yep, had that, too with Junie, Ally and John), lamprey casserole, raw
cockles (had in Belgium), limpet pie, crayfish in beer (yep), sea urchin gonad
omelet (no, but had sea urchin sushi), anemone fritters, locust dumplings,
roasted cockchafer grubs, silkworm omelet, red ant chutney, and carp roe on
toast.
~~~
It's not very often that technology just works. We've had this problem at
work where our VOIP phones went to hell in a handbasket whenever we were doing
heavy downloading. The answer is to give the VOIP packets higher priority,
but this is easier said than done. Our workstations and server sit behind
a firewall with NAT, and I would have to put together a new firewall box and
diddle with routing settings and queues and such, and I wasn't ready to take
that on. By a stroke of luck, a lot of googling led me to the LinkSys
DI-102, which bills itself as a VOIP accelerator. I bought one from NewEgg
for about $70 and just plugged it in between my router and DSL modem.
There was two things to change on the small setup menu, and that was that.
It worked right out of the box and immediately improved VOIP quality without
disturbing anything else in our system. If you have Vonage or some other
VOIP solution, you may want to try it, particularly if you notice phone quality
degrading when you're playing World of Warcraft or downloading.
~~~
I've been working on a pitch-invariant speech speedup/slowdown algorithm.
Basically, the idea is to speed up or slow down the playing of an audio book
without changing the pitch/tenor of the voice. It's interesting that the
researchers in this area talk about maintaining the prosody
of the voice.
~~~
American Poet, The Journal of The Academy of American Poets,
showed up yesterday. I always read it as a house organ until they started
having more articles and lots more poetry. So much, in fact, that three of
the poems made it into BAP this year. There's lots of poetry in this
issue, too: Kim Addonizio, Marvin Bell, Hayden Carruth, Michael Collier,
Mark Doty, Forrest Hamer, Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donald Revell,
and others (even Virgil). My favorite article was "A Suitcase Disappeared,
Not Mine" by Jennifer Michael Hecht, which discusses the relationship of
philosophy and poetry. It didn't hurt that her picture was there too, and
she is cute as a button. Ms. Hecht picks Szymborska, Doty and Addonizio's
work to discuss, and I found the analysis convincing without being overly
pendantic (I frankly hate reading anything about philosophy). The journal
has this odd section called Past Emerging Poets: Where Are They
Now? which was kind of interesting.
Their Emerging Poets articles introduce poets by having an "established poet"
sponsor someone by writing a little something. This section discusses what
they've done since then and include blogmates Jordan Davis and Sabrina Orah
Mark. Among the Books Noted are new works by Rafael Campo, Noah Eli Gordon
(who will be reading at an MMM Salon soon), Bob Hicok, Paisley Rekdal, Ron
Silliman, Cole Swensen, Dean Young, and others. I've left out a large
swath of folk, but not because they're Unmentionables.
More tomorrow.
Why
are South American woman politicians always 
I
honestly don't know which is funnier: The picture of Rudy as a Rockette,
the picture to the left, Rudy's promise to ban gay marriage by supporting a
Constitutional amendment, or the
Stantz
and Spengler, doesn't this new CIA anti-terrorist logo have all the maturity level of Saturday morning cartoons?
Perhaps
the more interesting question is not whether 4-year-olds can
I
know a lot of poets and blogmates live in the Chicago area. If you get a
chance, check out the Down and Dirty Blues Band. My son is a guitarist in
the band, and they are really good. Check out their MySpace page
years ago. My sister had V&B dishes in that pattern
where the plant is on the dish and the Latin name under it. They were very
upscale for the time and lovely and exotic. I promised to
pick up something nice on my trip for her in the pattern and took off for Paris.
When I landed in Charles de Gaulle, I was fascinated by how different
everything seemed – the restaurants, the
bookstores, the water fountains, the people's clothes. I entered the men's
room and was struck again by how different the sinks and faucets and toilets
looked. I ambled over to the urinal to do my business and stared down to
find the famous Villeroy & Boch logo staring back at me.