Toulouse, France resides beside the River Garonne, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. It is the headquarters of Airbus and site of the largest space center in Europe. Archaeological evidence dates human settlement in Toulouse to the 8th century BCE.
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Direct TV has these channels where you can see 10 channels, all at once. Maybe the cable guys and Dish have them, too, I don’t know. I watch the News channel and flip among Morning Joe, Imus in the Morning, some CNN person, Bloomberg, the Weather Channel, some other financial channel, and I don’t remember the other ones except Fox and Friends. Fox and Friends is where two guys and a blond lady sit on a couch and announce headlines that are usually meant to disparage Democrats. Or they play a clip from Hannity or O’Reilly. It’s the most self-referential world you can imagine, like being in a Fox bubble. Sometimes — actually pretty often — I’m looking at the 10 channels, trying to figure out where to move to, and every single one has a commercial on. Sometimes the same commercial is on two or even three channels.
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I drove up to Nederland yesterday. It’s that small town up the mountain from Boulder that has the Frozen Dead Guy Days. Which, come to think of it, are coming up in the next few weeks. I was actually going up to check out Eldora, the nearest decent ski resort. You can’t see from the picture, but the sky is blue and the temperatures were decent. Ten minutes away, Eldora was gray and cold and windy, so I took one look at the lift lines and crowded parking lot and turned around.
On the way back, I stopped again in Nederland to look at the fossils and amethyst forests and such. They also had these switch plates made out of stone for ten bucks and I was tempted.
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A road is not a street is not a drive is not a boulevard.
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Rebecca is in Bedlam. And Hercules Road. And Westminster Bridge. And . . .
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I had just been chatting with my biking/snowshoeing buddy Jean about Bellingham, where her daughter lives, when I ran across this article in the ever-fascinating TYWKIWDBI about enclaves, and Point Roberts in particular:
You’ll notice that it’s not an island, yet it is a completely isolated piece of America.
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Intelligent, Condescending Life Discovered in Distant Galaxy: “Members of a highly arrogant alien species responded, saying it was “nice to finally hear from [our] quaint planet” and that it “certainly took [humanity] long enough.”
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I awoke a few nights ago in the VERY early morning and read Harper’s to get back to sleep. There was a fascinating article on fasting — one of those articles where the author intersperses descriptions of his fasting experience with sections on the history of fasting. More on that over at Elisa’s place.
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I have twice run across Joe Wenderoth’s poem, “Twentieth-Century Pleasures”. Once was in a micro-review by Ron Silliman (he didn’t care for it), and once in a recent posting by John Gallaher.
A woman has two children:
one is seven, a girl with Down syndrome,
and one is five, a deaf-mute boy.
Every day, the woman’s husband beats her
and calls her a lazy whore.
I am a poet, not a poetry critic. I have engaged in those online arguments where people say, “but, that’s not even a poem”, and listened to countless people explain what a poem is and isn’t. I have my own criteria, but the last of them is “it’s a poem if the poet says it is”. This is one of those poems that only survives as a poem because of that last criterion. You know, to me. And yet, I liked many of the other poems in Wenderoth’s No Real Light. It makes me think that I’m missing something, that I should be more open-minded somehow.