A friend came by yesterday afternoon with plants--the excess from his greenhouse--two tomatoes, three "not-too-hot" peppers, and four petunias (purple, he thought), so this afternoon I dug up the appropriate plot and put 'em in. Now if the weather will just cooperate. . . . I'm particularly taken with one of the tomatoes, a 'Brandy Boy,' apparently ( Read more... )

My current favorite in the din of tv commercials: "The most sophisticated piece of technology you will ever pee on." Some sort of pregnancy test. Gol-lee! Can they say that on television?

Count it a guilty pleasure or not, just finished watching "The Janus List." I do like the show.

At the end, the father, Alan Eppes (Judd Hirsch) makes a statement that sounds to me like a poem. At this distance I can't even offer a coherent line, and a web search doesn't seem to be helping. Does anyone recognize the words he speaks?

Heard a wonderful reading last night at the university as part of the English Festival. It was a joint endeavor between English and Foreign Languages, the "first annual" International Poetry Reading. Students, faculty (native and visiting), and I think some townspeople, 38 readers in all, read poems in 29 different languages. There was a program ( Read more... )

"Any time you're being attacked by someone called Head-Splitter, you've got to be concerned" (History Channel).

From this morning's WRITER'S ALMANAC http://writersalmanac.publicradio.orgRead more... )

A day that dawned bright and sunny here, though cold (-8 when I woke up, +11 now). Haven't decided whether or not I envy you to the south who seem to be enjoying 1.5-2 feet of snow.

Was just spending a few minutes over at youtube catching the McNeil-Lehrer tribute to Molly Ivins that I missed earlier, the clip of a feature she did on "ort" in ( Read more... )

Even though we're 11 days past the 70 days of the Poetry Project, I'm managing to keep up one a day--most much shorter--and Saturday tackled my first sapphic (from, ofcourseof course, Sappho's example). Maybe now, while I'm editing the Grandmother Tilda poems, is the time to go more seriously into forms. The first serious poems I wrote were sonnets ( Read more... )

St. Brigid's Day, Imbolc, Candlemas. May all your candles burn brightly ( Read more... )

Molly Ivins was one of the really great ones. She should have lasted at least another 30 years.

Damned cancer.

Perhaps if we didn't work so hard to poison our planet, we wouldn't be losing so many good people at ages much too young.