WhimsyLand

Let's see.  I'm a doctor, I love San Francisco, I adore Las Vegas and I'm slowly getting addicted to American Idol.  Maybe CDY and I should start a club.

I failed to mention that I liked a couple of Beth Bachman's poems in the recent APR.  Here's the start of "Elegy":  No shepherds.  No nymphs.  Maybe just one: / the girl the fawn strips like a fisherman's rose."

We have a lot of work now, something like 6 active projects among the three working engineers (including me).  Every time this happens, I find I get up earlier and earlier until I'm awake looking at the alarm clock and it's 3.45 AM and I'm actually thinking about getting up.  It doesn't help that my office/lab is 12 steps downstairs, and I can be working 40 minutes after I get up (25 minutes for walking in front of ancient TV Land programs or whatever's on at that time, 5 minutes for Blue Monster and vitamins, 5 minutes to make the coffee, 5 minutes to email a good morning to Sweet Junie).  It's not so bad in the summer, as the morning light lures me out of bed in the wee hours.  Anyway, there are times when we have a lot going on and I've answered a zillion emails and at 6 PM I get a glass of wine and ask Dima "what have we learned today", just like Stan or Kyle.

I read this fabulous recipe in my falling-apart-old-as-dirt copy of Joy of Cooking called Chicken Campagne.  You start by roasting a 5-pound chicken (or whatever that is in kilos) and then remove the meat from the bones.  Then take the bones, skin and undesirable parts and "vegetable parings" and throw it in the stock pot.  Next, sauté one pound of button mushrooms.  Prepare a cup each of cooked carrots and white turnips à la Parisienne (see page 251, which just talks about salpicon, mirepoix, allumette, and other vegetable sizes, so I'm thinking just chop them up any way you want), and a cup of cooked peas and 3 cups of artichoke hearts and arrange the ingredients in a 3-quart casserole (and I don't know what exactly that is in liters).  Alternate layers of chicken and vegetables making sure the last layer is chicken.  Now melt a half-cup of butter, add and stir until smooth a half-cup of flour, and make a light roux.  Then, add in two cups of "strong chicken stock", a cup of dry white wine, a half-cup of dry sherry, a cup of cream, and a half-cup of chopped parsley.  I LOVE this recipe.  Season this sauce with salt, white pepper and/or (wait for it . . .) MSG!  Cook it over low heat for 10 minutes and pour it over the casserole.  Shake well and cover with Au Gratin (page 342, dried breadcrumbs optionally mixed with good dry cheese like Parmesan or Romano).  Heat for 30-40 minutes at an unspecified temperature (which is odd for JOK).  Does that sound completely decadent or what?

More tomorrow.  Gotta call my Sweet Junie.

Posted by jbahr at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Blue light paints day end.  

Dima, my Russian buddy, would put something like that in an email.  Russians tend to drop articles and avoid prepositions.  I've noticed over the last couple of years that a large percentage of poets do, too.  I don't know why, maybe something they learn in one of those classes I've never had.  I'm all for concision, but often this sounds as overly poetic to my ear as saturated alliteration or mixed imagery.  Could be me, of course. 

The cover of this month's APR (well, actually Mar/Apr, God forbid we should get a magazine bearing a month equaling the one in which we currently reside) has a very retro B&W picture of Spencer Reece, who has written a touching and engaging article called Two Hospice Essays.  By curious coincidence, we also received a submission this week from a Christian poet with some work I thought highly of.  In these days of liberal rage against the excesses of the Religious Right, it's somehow satisfying to listen to people of quiet faith − like my own Sweet Junie.   But, I digress. Much of APR is filled with chatty poems of urbanity

"I knew people who knew people who knew Gertrude Stein and said they helped themselves to cake, it's my thirty-fifth birthday and some old friends are visiting, some would call this heaven − a teenage girl half-naked in the grass, I love my life, she says, but really I would like to be elsewhere, last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, you know, the way bodies do after spending the afternoon having sex."  That was a collage of lines from poems by Bruce Smith, Ed Skoog, Beth Bachmann, D. Nurske, and Matthew Dickman.  It was an unfair sample, but I also found that I had to skip four or five poets who just wouldn't play the game.  One was Joyelle McSweeney with a rather amazing translation of the Aeneid that transports the protagonist to Texas.  Another was Hai Zi with two poems translated by Ye Chun ("Those who grow up on wheat / hold big bowls in the moonlight / In the bowls, the moon / and wheat / are soundless").  Another was Thomas Lux, who will always get my respect for writing the quite amazing and short poem about the dead brother and sister wheeling toward a town under siege.  Another was Our Own Reb Livingston with two short poems ("Together with the Apron whose house infiltrated, her meadow ravaged by tomatoes").  Another was Kevin Prufer who was poetry editor of Pleiades (maybe still is) and whose work I like ("And the shopping center said, give me, give me.").  Kazim Ali has his usual excellent take on things poetic, this time From the Open Sea:  Body and Lyric in the Poetry of Jane Cooper.  Two very nice poems by the recently departed Grace Paley.  Workroom by Clayton Eshleman.  Reginald Gibbons completes his essay on Apophatic Poetics.  Mark Rudman tackles William Carlos Williams in America (Part One), which was quite excellent.

More tomorrow.

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Well, I've spent half the day loading my new system.  I was just going to put this big Quad Duo 2 monster in my existing system, but owing to the incredibly stupid socket 775, I ended up ruining yet another heat sink + fan, and decided to just get another enclosure.  I also found that the ambient temperature inside my existing enclosure was too warm for the Quad Duo.  As CompUSA is going out of business, there were plenty of choices, including this giant box with an 8" fan on the side panel, a 6" fan on the front, and a 6" fan on the back, not to mention the monstrous finned fan arrangement that is perched on the Quad Duo and the fan on the power supply.  Let's hope they don't compete with each other and completely screw up the airflow.  I'm starting with 4GB of DDR2 memory and a couple of 150GB Raptor drives.  The latter run at 10,000 RPM, have seek and write times of about 5 milliseconds, and latency of 3 milliseconds.  They are, in short, bad ass.  I'm also biting the bullet and installing Vista Ultimate, now that they have Service Pack 1 out.  My video adapter is a relatively modest mid-range NVidia card.  I don't play games on this system and I just need hi-res support for the two 22" screens that span my desk.  Most of the work so far has been loading software all over again, which in turn requires me to find the various registration passwords and CD keys.  I've spent 6 hours loading already, and I'm not done yet.  Up and ready are Visual Studio 6.0, VS2003.NET and VS2005.  Also Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, Visio and Project.  I've loaded and tested a Keil 8051 IDE/compiler, Adobe Acrobat, and MySQL Maestro, Ethereal, Cygwin, Source Insight, PKZIP, VNC, and IDA Pro.  I'm probably going to stop there until I find out I'm missing something.  Keeping the old system up and networked will let me grab what I need anyway.

So, is it fast?  Well, yes, it is.  Outlook, which is a complete pig on my old single-core Pentium doesn't cause everything on the system to pause while it does something stupid.  Vista is supposed to handle multitasking and multiple processors pretty well, so that's helping.  Program startup is quick and anything that involves disk access is much quicker.  The system was surprisingly reasonable:  $250 for the processor, $150 for the Gigabyte motherboard, $120 for the video card, $69 for the fire sale enclosure, $40 for the DVD burner, $180 for the DRAM, and $7 for the floppy drive.  All the software was "free" if you discount the fact that we pay $2,000 a year for an MSDN subscription, which provides multiple installations of virtually all of Microsoft's products. 

~~~

The March/April Poets & Writers (which I received a week ago, what is it about publications and their future publication dates?) has Tobias Wolff on the cover looking smug and somewhat lecherous.  Dan Barden pens "A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes", which he contends are occasionally useful but on the whole just the flawed spawn of the seminar, and also tells an interesting anecdote that involves Paul Muldoon.  I don't know if they always did this (I didn't think so) but the Page One section features some initial lines from poetry books now, this from Eavan Boland: "Liffey, tawny and asleep in the browsing dusk, / Clings to the dark, enchanted ovals / of the bridge".  Most of the rest of the examples were equally yawn-inducing.  Literary MagNet gives some props to Pindeldyboz (which I've never heard of) and Narrative (which I might have heard of) and Bellevue Literary Review (who has rejected me countless times).  Paul Graham follows the The Rilke Trail through Europe and reports the results.  Alexandra Enders has an article on The Importance of Place ("Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, D. H. Lawrence under a tree. ... Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub").   I guess my question is does anybody really believe such nonsense?  Can you imagine how wrinkled you'd be if you wrote, for example, Poor Richard's Almanac while soaking in 18th century water, cold as it probably was?  Mark Doty writes a pretty good article on A Poet's Approach to Memoir.  Spring Essence includes poems by "some of the country's most accomplished poets" along with pen and ink drawings of them (Jorie actually looks something like her age in this one).  Poets included:  Cornelius Eady, Jorie Graham, (the ever irascible) August Kleinzahler, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, James Tate, and C.D. Wright.  There were more fiction articles and the usual zillion ads and announcements.

See you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I guess it's time I turn off the soaps, put down my box of bonbons and wander over to Whimsyland.  First, some shots from the trip Sweet Junie and I took to Fabulous Las Vegas.  Just down from Spago's in Caesar's Palace, there is a Roman mini-mall guarded by some stalwart senators.  That's me, third from the left.

Here's a shot of the Venetian's valet parking area.  We skipped the gondola ride and proceeded straight to the slot machines.  There was a time when you couldn't get me near a slot machine, but they're so much fun now that I don't care what my poker/blackjack/baccarat/craps buddies think.  There are, of course, the completely silly slot machine − those with themes like The Beverly Hillbillies and I Dream of Jeannie.  The really fun ones are the penny slots, which even the largest casinos have.  The reason for this is that you end up playing 20 cents on twenty different lines, each line providing another circuitous way that you can win.  That makes it $4 per spin, which is what the casino is looking for you to do, after all.  The other addictive slot machine is the kind that has a bonus wheel at the top.  When you hit certain combinations, the wheel starts spinning and you can win from 20 to 1,000 units depending upon where it ends up. 

As corny as it sounds, our favorite hotel was Paris (which owned by Bally's right next door).  The buffet was outstanding and the shopping "street" actually reminded me of Europe.  Each of the major hotels have shopping promenades, of course, and some of them (e.g., Wynn's and Bellagio) are jam-packed with very, very upscale shops.  It's fun to window-shop at the various Armani stores, for example, but there were interesting shops at the Paris Hotel where mere mortals could actually buy something.

Another hotel that was quite stunning was Luxor, which is pretty old now by Las Vegas standards.  The entire hotel and casino is shaped like a giant pyramid, which is guarded by a giant sphinx.  At night, they shoot a beam from the top of the pyramid like some sort of Close Encounter beacon.  The interior is equally interesting.  Down from the Luxor is Mandalay Bay, one of the newer casinos, in which they harbor a Four Seasons Hotel.  Junie and I had lunch at one of their two better restaurants and it was killerbee.  I asked to have the outrageously good bread basket refilled at least once, and drank Pouilly Fuisse.  I also stole the jam basket from the table next to us (the one with the well-dressed young lady who was paying for the breakfast of a seemingly down-on-his-luck young man who was in fact probably a venture capitalist), and netted a cache of Bonne Maman jams for the next morning breakfast (we had already hit the Boulangerie for breakfast goodies earlier in the day).

We stopped by New York, New York but it was pretty dull actually, if you've ever actually been to NYC.  Junie took one look at the roller coaster that wends its way around the outside of the hotel and said no thanks.

Anyway, we had a great time and I recommend it to the decadent among you.  Meanwhile, on the poetry front, Barb Sorenson hosted another terrific MMM Salon on Friday.  Thad Rutkowski kept the audience spell-bound with a mixture of short fiction and near-poetry.  Thad is an award-winning slam poet, but spends most of his time now-a-days writing fiction . . . you know, where the real money is.  Yes, that was a joke.  The next big bash will be the MMM Volume VIII Extravaganza, where there will be readings by as many of the contributors as we can entice to make the trip to Boulder.  Wine and edible goodies will be on us, of course, and a good time will be had by all.

On a more serious note . . . oh, come on, me serious? . . . I'll be reading with 3 other poets at the Cannon Mine reading on (I think) March 13th, which is the second Thursday I hope.  I haven't read very many places actually, except a few radio shows.  So this should be interesting.  I think I will try to find some distinctly whimsical material.

A couple of people have bemoaned the fact that there's no picture of me or Junie. I was behind the camera, so that explains half of it. Junie's identity will remain my secret, so she stays mine forever. Go find you own Sweet Junie.
More tomorrow.  I'm on a roll now.

Posted by jbahr at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

No, not right next to Waldo. 

Whimsy is, in fact, in Fabulous Las Vegas with Junie.  Just before leaving for FLV, Whimsy killed a backdoor virus that ravaged two systems and wreaked havoc on another two, all the result of mounting a client's MP3 player that he was supposed to analyze for content.  More on that later. 

Junie and I are just about to leave for Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian.  We're at the end of our short stay in FLV, leaving tomorrow so that I can be a more dutiful reporter on life's events.  Meanwhile, I was down $400 yesterday and up $600 today, mostly the result of waiting for 22 to come up on the roulette table, though slots, blackjack, and a couple of raucous craps tables played a part. 

I've wondered in the past why CDY yearns so badly to revisit Las Vegas from time to time.  Now I know why.  Though I've visited dozens of times, it's been 5 or 6 years since the last jaunt and at that time LV was still trying to sell "it's really great for the whole family!".  Now, they're selling "what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas", which is more fitting for this wild place.  Las Vegas has always been fabulous, but the rest of the world got fabulous in the last decade, too.  NYC remained the center of civilization on the West Coast, DC acquired dozens of top-notch restaurants to cope with the oceans of money lobbyists were willing to spend, LA upgraded its whole cultural infrastructure.  Macau got big-time gambling, London kept raising the stakes in fine dining and attractions.  Las Vegas decided to become more fabulous, and succeeded.  Junie has a couple of travel guides that we've used to keep track of the mind-boggling array of exceptional dining, art museums, shows (musicals, comedy, and the ubiquitous variety of Cirque du Soleil offerings).

We're staying at the Platinum Hotel, which is an incredible establishment of suite-only rooms (fireplace, HD TV, separate living room, hot tub, et cetera) which is half the price of a mediocre room in a good Strip hotel.  Best meals were:  breakfast buffet at the Paris, lunch at Spago's and the Veranda in Four Seasons. 

Gotta go.  Pictures to follow.

Posted by jbahr at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So I get back home from a meeting off-site and shortly after I get back my Outlook says it's receiving message 1092 of 65536 emails.  Now, I get a lot of emails, but that seemed a bit excessive.  Sure enough, Outlook 2007 has decided to ask for all the emails on the server that I've already received in the past.  We maintain our own mail server here (MDaemon) and it hasn't gone down in months, my suspicion is that it's on the Outlook side that things have gone awry.  My main system has been an intermittent dog ever since I upgraded all my MS Office to 2007.  The problem (which is apparently well known to all, judging from the negative Google entries) is that Outlook 2007 is slow to begin with, and particularly so with large PST files.  PST files are the large container that represent all your email, folders, contacts and so on that you see on Outlook.  If you aren't running MS Exchange Server (and I'm not that much of a masochist), then it's pretty much certain that you're using local PST files for  your email repository.

My main work system is a decently fast machine with 4 GB of RAM, a 350 GB SATA drive, a slower 20 GB PATA system drive,  and 3.2 GHz Pentium on a recent Gigabyte motherboard.  This system should be very fast, and actually used to be before Outlook 2007.  I run Registry Mechanic and Spybot Search and Destroy regularly, and I don't have any viruses running around the office (thanks to our BSD-based GnatBox firewall/NAT).  What I really need to do is bite the bullet and reload XP Pro on a new 10,000 RPM Raptor hard disk and swap out my P4 for a Quad Core, which I've ordered.  That would get rid of the one slowish 20GB old drive in my system, too.  The real pain − and I means a couple of days worth  − is reloading all the software I use after I've reinstalled XP Pro.   I have about 100 applications on my machine and I use them at one point or another throughout the year.  That includes, for example Visual Studio 6, VS 2003, VS 2005 and VS 2008.  Also, every Microsoft productivity app you've ever heard of.  A dozen media converters.  Et cetera, et cetera.  Some of these would be fairly easy (though time-consuming) to reload, such as the applications from our MSDN subscription.  Others will require me to hunt down the registration information, as I originally purchased them online. 

The cause of all this pain is the near impossibility of just "copying" your Windows system to a new drive.  What you really want to do is tell one Windows system to connect to an existing one and transfer all your applications, including the registry information associated with them.  You also want to keep the same Documents and Settings, so you don't have to start all over again, lose passwords, and other real nuisances that happen when Windows decides that you're a new user or have joined a new domain.  I've been told that Norton Ghost will copy completely everything to a new drive, essentially cloning the old drive.  I may have to authenticate Windows XP again due to hardware changes, but that's OK.  If anyone has done this, drop me a line.

OK, I fibbed a bit.  It wasn't an "off-site meeting" per se, but actually having lunch with Malinda and Barb, except that Barb joined us by speaker phone.  I got out my nifty picnic basket that can hold eatables on one side and two bottles of wine on the other and stopped by Heidi's Deli for sandwiches and birch beer, which isn't as good as having Montrachet with your eggplant sandwich, but not bad.   Barb reminded me to tell you all that we have a number of killerbee MMM Literary Salons coming up.  The next one is on Friday, February 22d and the guest author is Thaddeus Rutkowski, the MMM fiction editor.  He's a great reader (and noted slam poet) and the event should be its usual wine-lubricated success.  We provide the libations and you bring any potluck concoction that fits your budget.  Thad is also running a multi-genre workshop on Saturday.  Details are on the MMM web site.

Well, only 23,000 more emails to go . . . talk to you later today.

~~~

 

Posted by jbahr at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the company was as good as the curry.  12 condiments and 6 kinds of chutney.  Yum.

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Just how awful the poems on the back cover of APR can be.

That disk drives now cost about $200 per terabyte.

That, after 4 weeks of not noticing, I have 30,000 emails in my spam Outlook folder.

That sometimes my job is so much fun, I can't believe they pay me for it.

That Miss Emily can play follow-the-red-laser-dot 6 times every day and still be surprised when she can't pin it down.

The good fortune to live to see that our country will probably have a president that is a woman of a man of color.

That Dean Young is only 5 years younger than I and is still off-the-wall crazy brilliant.

More as I think of it.

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I'm making Curry From Scratch for Cath, Terry, Eileen and Ky tomorrow.  I haven't decided what the world's best curry sauce will wrap itself around, but the nice thing is that I don't have to know right now.  After the basic curry sauce is made, you can split it into separate pots and make each one different:  shrimp, chicken, lamb, even cauliflower.  I have to check to make sure I still have fenugreek in that big 2 quart ziplock bag that holds the curry powder ingredients, but it would be nice to make a run down to Whole Foods to stock up anyway  − or even make a run to Penzey's over in Arvada.  Cath has a whole shelf of Penzey's spices that I lust over every time I'm there and Penzey's spices always come out on top in Cook's Illustrated writeups.  They're not really much more expensive than supermarket spices, too.  For example, an entire half-pound bag of fenugreek is only $5.69.  Anyway, I had always thought they must be in SF or NYC, but it turns out they're in (gasp) Wisconsin, not exactly what you think of as the spice capital of the country.  But, I digress.  I love making curry because I can get everything ready and then sit down with my guests.  Also, it's so much fun passing around the condiments and trying out different chutneys.  Cath is bringing the beer, bless her heart.  Now, if Der and Sweet Junie could only be here.  Junie knocked the last poetry party dead with her idea of following curry with a dish of mixed sorbets, all melon-balled into a cannonball stack, with some fresh mint leaves and those delicious French cookies with the little boy on them. 

NPR cracked me up today with something silly.  Two commentators were singing the praises of the Moray eel:  "When an eel bites your thigh as you go swimming by, it's a Moray!"  I know, I need to get out more.

You know the old joke?  An old man prays every night for years, "Dear God, all I want to do is win the lottery".  After 15 years of this nightly plea, God answers him:  "Larry, meet me halfway.  Buy a ticket".  I've decided that if my Christmas and birthday gift presents are sometimes different than what I'd actually like, I should do something about it.  Since much of my family is finally trained to check in at Whimsyland occasionally, what a great place to put the Wish List!  I can even cross off gifts that I receive and give glowing attribution to the wonderful donor, enhancing everyone's experience.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Whimsy's Wish List.

OK, let's take a poll.  We've all been good eco-friendly protectors of the planet and replaced all of our incandescent bulbs with CF (compact fluorescent), right?  I've even hunted down spotlight and other odd varieties, ending up with a 90% replacement rate in my house, which totals up to probably 30 bulbs (counting the work office downstairs).  These babies are supposed to last 5 to 10 years, right?  Guess what?  So far at least 20% of them haven't lasted 6 months.  Three of the offenders are outside, where temperature changes could be a factor but another half-dozen are all over the house.  So what's up with that?

See you tomorrow, most likely.  Consider that the equivalent of what the Dread Pirate Robert says to Westley: "Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning. ... "

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Sweet Junie has been an active participant in Obamania for some time now.  So it was with some chagrin that I bowed out of the local Colorado caucus on Tuesday, opting instead to sip Lustau Manzanilla and watch the returns.  I was really intending to earn a hug by attending the caucus, but it sounded like it would amount to 3 hours of the Hillary supporters and Obama supporters trying to convince the Undecideds whom to vote for.  It all seems rather 18th-century to me.  If you're like me (and I know I am), you've already gotten a zillion emails; read countless articles on both candidates in Time, Atlantic, Harpers, what have you; cruised political websites and blogs.  So the whole idea of talking at someone until they succumb seems rather silly.  Since I didn't go, it may in fact be that cogent dialogue takes place and convincing arguments about Obama's vision for change or Hillary's ideas about Social Security.  Junie, on the other hand, has become directly involved in volunteer work prior to the Wisconsin primary.  This involved meeting a dozen plus people (many college aged) and shaking the hand of the governor of Wisconsin, who was there for the kickoff.  I told her not to wash her hands for a while.

I'm experimenting on this dish called Recursive Pasta.  It's actually Stone Pasta, since the secret is to find new things to put into it every night.  On Sunday, I made whole wheat spaghettini in a sauce composed of the most common things in my pantry:  tomato paste, diced canned tomatoes, artichoke hearts, capers.  I added some spices and red wine and that was it.  On Monday, I sautéed some garlic and red peppers and threw them in with what was left of the last night's pasta (at that point, about half of it).  Yum.  On Tuesday, I still had half of what I started with on Monday, so I added Kalamata olives, more capers, more fried garlic, and some frozen peas.  Last night, since I still had half a pot of pasta, I added the last two frozen giant scallops (defrosted for 45 second in the microwave, and Ms. Emily got the resulting juice), another red wine (actually a nice Chianti I ordered online) and some frozen collard greens that looked like they were close to their termination date.  Yum.  I still, of course, have half a pot of pasta, but I'm running out of ideas (and ready ingredients).  I could run down to Safeway and get some shrimp, but I'm trying to watch my cholesterol.  More wine is never a bad idea, but where's the novelty in that.  I've tried adding good, firm high-end white albacore in the past, but it always ends up badly.  Peanut butter?  Nah.  I could use any one of a dozen spices to push it toward the Putanesca locus of things, but it seems like cheating.  Mushrooms would be nice, but that means a trip to the store.  Still, I could return the Red Box video that I rented 5 days ago because it's only $1.29 a day and BTW, it was some horrible movie with the current James Bond and (of all people) Nicole Kidman and I only got through 15 minutes of it (which is actually longer than I lasted with Crash) before putting on Road Warrior for the zillionth time.  Yeah, maybe I should do that.

À propos of nothing, Cath was asking me to look up a California State lien on her and me from 1992, which was reported by one of the big three credit agencies.  I got it resolved pretty quickly, but it reminded me of when Sue, the secretary for our department (and with an IQ exceeding our combined total) was dating Larry Michels.  Larry started TRW Credit or TRW Data Systems, I can't recall the particulars.  What I do recall is eating chicken livers and bagels in Sue's apartment and talking to Larry, who was by that time a multi-millionaire.  He told me that the premise was simple:  Take the credit data of people and sell it back to them. Meanwhile, create credit scores and sell them to banks and credit card issuers.  It was a fabulous idea, if you are Larry and not a consumer.  Larry was very nice to me in the ensuing decade, after he started SCO with his son, the first commercial UNIX house.  He showed up in my hotel room at COMDEX and told me I could have any discount level I wanted for SCO products, including that for IBM and Siemens.  Larry has passed away now, and SCO is in other's hands, which is a shame as it was one of those crazy organizations in Santa Cruz, housed in a couple of Victorians one block from a sex shop and the area's best espresso bar.

BTW, nobody really believes the things I say.  Sweet Junie says it's because I suffer from Forrest Gump Syndrome. You'll just have to trust me.

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I added up all the stats from the various counters I've had going since 2004, and it looks like I've surpassed 100,000 visitors.  Well, hits, actually.  There are probably only 15 different people who look in.  The latest stat counter has all kinds of interesting information to report.  One item of interest is what search term got a Whimsy-ite to the site.  There were a number of names, probably from people Googling themselves and no, I won't tell you who for fear of embarrassing someone. The number one search term this week was "d'artagnan heritage blue foot", which came as something of a surprise.  Recent visitors are almost all domestic friends, though there are a few odd lookers-in from France, Australia, Korea and Mexico (oddly, no Canadians).  Anyway, enough about that.  Ron probably gets 100,000 visits a month.

As you may know, my son Derek is studying music and music management at Columbia College.  One of his projects this semester is to produce a record (technically, I guess it's a two-song single) for the band Company of Thieves.  I hopped over to their My Space page and they are really good.  That's Genevieve Schatz, the lead singer.

I was just looking at my page of poetry contest recommendations, sighing at all the broken links, which I will have to fix one of these days.  I was also scanning the poetry manuscript competitions at Winning Writers, a great service run by Jendi Reiter and Adam Cohen.  One thing I've noticed recently is that nearly every small press seems to have gone to contest mode (as opposed to accepting-manuscripts-thrown-over-the-transom mode).  The second thing I've noticed is that reading fee inflation is upon us, with most of the competitions charging $25 as an entry fee.  February is a busy month for manuscript competitions.  There's the Cleveland Poets Series, the Donald Hall prize, the Fence Modern Poets Series, the National Poetry Series, the Violet Reed Haas Prize, the Hudson Prize, the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Kathryn Morton Prize − all with deadlines in the next 30 days.

Posted by jbahr at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Are those cute kids or what?  They're the children of Ilya, who works for us from Russia.  God bless the Internet.

More later ...

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Salutations and best wishes to all my friends at AWP.  I wish I could be there with you.

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