Tortured Poet

These roses are red
Yet those violets aren't blue
Haiku is hard, man

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Poetry Hour...

To quote Robert Burns:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

Professor Yamane has an interesting callback to that piece in the NYT by Harel Shapira and the stir it caused on the gunternet:

There's a post accompanying it, which you can read at this link.

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Dehydrated Beowulf

This is absolutely wonderful!

BRECUNG! If you couldn’t get through all 3k lines of Beowulf, I give you a world-exclusive ‘nano-translation’ from its greatest living interpreter, Professor Michael Alexander (dad). It’s 15 lines long. pic.twitter.com/sUv80lVraP

— Patrick Alexander 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@i_padawan) November 27, 2021

Who had "Donald Gets the 'Rona" for October?

The Commander-in-Chief 

Caught a case of covfefe

On the eve of the national election

This wretched annum

Of closed circenses and homemade panem

Inevitably led this direction

Pöpcýcle Fïsh!

Found on Facebook, with help from a friend...

Holden approved!

Holden doesn't look to be a purebred example of any of the three main cold-weather landraces: Maine Coon, Norwegian Forest Cat, or Siberian, although one or the other of his parents likely was. I've taken to just referring to him as a Northern Floofloaf.

He's got the dense multilayered coat and ear tufts, as well as the big furry paws, complete with tufts of fur between his toes that give him often hilariously terribad traction on hardwood floors when pursuing Huck.
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A Ballad of the Republic in the Current Year

The Washington Post had a clever riff on the state of baseball in the Sabermetrics/Moneyball Era entitled "Casey @ the Bat":

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney whiffed again, the eighteenth K that night,
A sickly silence fell, for somehow baseball wasn’t right.

A straggling few got up and left, annoyed they even came;
And most who stayed were kind of drunk or wagered on the game.
Yet still to come was Casey, whom the fans had long extolled,
Though at the age of 31 the metrics deemed him old.

But first ahead of him was Flynn, a player much accursed;
His BABIP was atrocious, and his WAR was even worse.
Another guy came up as well, his name recalled by few;
Confusion sowed by double switches made in hour two...

Go and read the whole thing. It's brilliant parody and I wish I'd written it.
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#MyLifeInPictures

Hi Chew is not just
A sort of Japanese poem
Today I learned this pic.twitter.com/UUIpTW6awn

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 10, 2018

Fight The Future!

"The U.S. counted just 190 one-hour photo shops in 2013, according to new Census data, down from 3,066 in 1998. Extinction looms over other retail niches oriented around analog media. The number of newsstands dropped by nearly half over the past 15 years, and video-rental stores dwindled by 85 percent. But nothing can rival the 94 percent death rate for America's photo-processing shops, which are vanishing faster than all business categories tracked in the Census."

Good thing I found The Darkroom!

(Also, I am such a nerd that I read that paragraph and saw the animated map and my first thought was a couple lines from "The Battle of Maldon":

“Will the harder, heart the keener
Courage the greater, as our strength lessens."

Normal people immediately connect dwindling numbers of photo labs with old Anglo Saxon war poems, right? Right?)
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There's a song in my heart!

I have promised myself to not be cynical on patriotic holidays, but pedaling back from Kroger with a bicycle basket brim-lippin' full of BATFE-compliant Class C Consumer Grade fireworks, my otherwise-unoccupied frontal lobes got to lyricizing...

Oh, beautiful for drone-filled skies
A tax code so arcane!
A voting class on their fat ass
From Houston to Fort Wayne!
America! America!
You voted stuff for free
You made your bed, ye overfed
Go watch some more TV!

There. I got that out of my system, and now I can be all festive and happy tomorrow.

Cultural Literacy Night...

I am sure that all of my readers are familiar with the poem "Horatius At The Bridge"*:

But the Consul's brow was sad, and the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall, and darkly at the foe.
"Their van will be upon us before the bridge goes down;
And if they once might win the bridge, what hope to save the town?"

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods..."

However I am not certain that one can count one's self a True American if one is not aware of the companion verse, "A Ballad Of The Republic"...


*You are, are you not?

Poetry Corner.

Back in the day, my daily round-trip commute was 100 miles. On a motorcycle.

Stuck inside a helmet for that amount of time every day, you tend to invent ways to amuse yourself; mine was reciting Kipling poetry.

That's right, as that pink-and-blue Suzuki crotch rocket was peg-scraping down side roads or weaving through interstate traffic, inside my helmet there was a steady monologue of The Gods Of The Copybook Headings and The Young British Soldier...

...but I never thought to sing it!

Cat haiku.

Paws tucked daintily
Under her chin, she's sleeping
Dream mouse dies screaming