Yesterday was Draw a Bird Day . This is a "holiday" that I didn't know about until yesterday evening. Still, I participated. Here's my bird: I've titled this one Awkward, Undaunted . ----- Also, I know it's been a long time since I've posted a poem. [Not that anyone's noticed.] There are poems waiting. I've just been busy not typing them up. A shame too, considering that we're now deep into National Poetry Month . I promise that I'll resume posting poems by the end of the month.

You have an extraordinary talent for voicing a "meanwhile…back at the Hall of Justice". It makes me sad that you never exercise it any more. It is one thing I miss about the you you used to share with me and no longer do. 3/26/02010 A sad poem about longing for something my darling wife used to do to amuse me and has ceased to do. In case you don't get the pop culture reference, there used to be a Saturday morning cartoon on the teevee about the DC superheroes. There was this narrator who used to say, "meanwhile…back at the Hall of Justice". Beth used to do a spot-on impersonation of said narrator.

I participated in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day on May 20, 02010 by drawing Mohammed thrice…not because I am ignorant, immature, or xenophobic; but because I believe that while there is a universal right to be offended by substantially harmless things that other people do, the acceptable options as regards recourse to any such offense DO NOT include violence or threats of violence! "Stick Figure Mohammed" "Mohammed, In From the Cold", or "Mohammed Ponders a Cup" "Mohammed Basks in the Darkness" In order, these are the three Mohammed drawings I did today. The first is a pencil sketch, which I basically did to ensure that I would have something to show even if the rest of my day was unproductive. The second is the first charcoal drawing I've done in probably 15 years. The third is the second charcoal drawing I've done in the same time span.

I present here argument number 5,279 (approx.) in favor of having a solipsistic worldview. What follows is, of course, a completely true story. I promise, plus I can't make this stuff up (unless I am making everything up). A few nights ago, I decided to watch Love Actually on DVD. A fine motion picture. I highly recommend it, in case you haven't seen it. Anyway, I've watched it a bunch of times and I don't get tired of it. However, I do get tired, and so I did not make it all the way through this viewing on Thursday night. I fell asleep. On Friday night, I resumed my viewing when I went to bed. Again, I fell asleep. Yesterday, I watched a bit more while I was hanging laundry in the early afternoon. Again, I didn't get all the way through to the end of the movie, as I stopped watching when the laundry was all hung. At some point a little later in the afternoon, Beth was watching the teevee and a commercial for Aciphex came on. Without really paying attention to wha...

I spent some time today doing a bit of research on various tools for self-publishing. The reason: My thirty-seventh New Year's Resolution of 02009: I resolve to get around to formatting and self-publishing my 02005 novella, in hopes that it might find an audience. I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 02005. I was not a "winner" because instead of ending up with a 50,000 word "short novel", I only managed to write a 40,000 word novella. I suppose it's fair to say that I didn't really fully embrace the "reckless abandon" aspect of the activity. Instead of throwing in a random plot line to continue my story (and thus increase my word count) beyond what felt like a reasonable stopping point, I stopped typing. The result was a cohesive piece of fiction that I am proud to have written. Had I gone the other route, I might've gotten a certain satisfaction from "winning" NaNoWriMo, but I am sure that it would not ...

One of my coworkers decided a few days ago that she was sick of the music on her iPod. (She used the word "hate", but I don't think it was entirely accurate.) So she proposed an iPod swap. I went for it, and we've spent a few hours on each of the last few days listening to each others' collections. This is a wonderful exercise, which I highly recommend to anyone who is in a position to do it. My greatest joy of the exercise, so far, has been the discovery of a singer/songwriter named Joanna Newsom. I am absolutely hooked, and intend to buy her albums when funds become available. She has this magnificently unconventional singing voice which she uses to great effect with a unique delivery. Plus, the woman is a rhyme machine! My favorite lyric goes like this: I killed my dinner with karate - kick 'em in the face, taste the body; This artist is definitely my musical discovery of the year, and I can make no stronger suggestion to you, reader, than this: Listen to J...

I got invited by some Facebook friends to participate in this sharing exercise. To participate, you make a list of 25 random facts about yourself and share the list, inviting 25 friends to do the same. I found it an entertaining and challenging exercise. Just for fun, I figured I might as well also post my list to my blog. Here's what I came up with: 1) I tend to think in long, rambling sentences or even paragraphs, rather than simple declarative statements. 2) I have an astonishingly bad memory. This is especially true when it comes to remembering people's names, but that's certainly not the end of it. 3) I have started in the last few years to remember certain things about my childhood that I had thought were lost. For example, I now remember that at various times I thought I might like to become a stuntman, a lawyer, and a philosopher. These were never dreams, rather just ideas. 4) I am quite certain that I never had any desire to be a fireman, police officer, or soldie...

As you will recall from previous posts, my New Year's Resolution this year is to try my best to resist the urge to cut my hair, with the ultimate goal of donating it to Locks of Love . Last week, my hair started really annoying me because it keeps getting into my eyes. Grrrrr... Anyway, here are the September 2, 02008 photos. My apologies for posting them so late. For those few of you who will get the reference, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror a couple of days ago while I was wearing a baseball cap. Suddenly, I'm thinking of dressing up as a member of the Baseball Furies for Halloween.

Surely there are people who spend their time trying to devise neologisms (new words or expressions). I suspect that there is a whole subculture of these linguistic hobbyists. I think it's fair to say that the most blatant (and for a time, the most famous (and possibly the most prolific)) of these neologists in recent memory was Rich Hall. His "sniglets" (words that don't appear in the dictionary but should) were featured for a time on Saturday Night Live and he published a few volumes of them, which I believe were bestsellers. [Note: Hall was a cast member of Saturday Night Live during at least one of what I think of as "The Forgotten Years". In recent years, when I have sporadically caught reruns of SNL on E! , I don't believe I have ever seen one of the episodes from this era rerun. These were actually my favorite SNL years (probably more than for any other reason because they're the years when I started watching, and they therefore have a real...

First, Michael Phelps was spectacular. There's no denying that. What he did was amazing. Congratulations to him and his teammates. (Note: The most impressive moment of all of the swimming events that I saw was Lezak chasing down and passing Bernard in that 4 x 100 m freestyle relay.) However, given the coverage and praise that has been heaped upon Phelps, Usain Bolt has not gotten nearly enough attention in the television coverage here in the U.S. Once again (as happens every time the Olympics comes around), I am reminded that our televised Olympics coverage really is way too America-centric. I wonder what the coverage in Jamaica has been like. I hope Bolt has been getting his due there! Unfortunately, it seems that half the commentary I have heard about Bolt has been disparaging remarks about his poor sportsmanship (exuberance) and showboating (premature celebration) . I feel somewhat cheated by not seeing what he would have done in the 100 m if he had really given it his all. B...

or: If I'm Destined to Get a Pulitzer Prize for 02008, This is the Line of Thought That Will Earn It For Me I'm pretty sure that it's been at least two decades since the idea of The Bell Ringer Joke started knocking around in my head. (I've mentioned the joke in a previous blog post .) There has been hope and despair, laughter and great disappointment, spread out over more than half my lifetime! On Thursday morning, out of the blue, I had a few epiphanies regarding the joke for all of these years. Epiphany #1: The first and second parts of the joke are spectacular, and if I had not been told at the time that I first heard them that there was a mysterious third part floating about in the ether, those two known parts would have been deeply satisfying. There would have been no disappointment associated with The Bell Ringer Joke whatsoever. The two parts stand together as a complete and brilliant story, riotously funny. Which is to say that the third part is only relevant...

I can't begin to tell you why I have been thinking of this recently, just that I have. I remember in third grade, we had a classroom spelling bee, which I won. My winning word was "government". I remember pausing after the "R", considering whether the "N" belonged or not. It did not occur to me to ask for a repeated pronunciation or for alternate pronunciations, and it occurred to me that when I had heard the word spoken, it was most often the pronunciation in which the "N" is dropped — which is a legitimate alternate pronunciation in the dictionaries I consulted this morning before starting this blog entry. I opted to throw in the mysterious "N", and I won the bee. Surely my finest moment in this life. Presumably, winning the classroom spelling bee would have qualified me to go on to compete against all of the other classroom champions in a school-wide bee. However, I have absolutely no recollection of any such thing. I would be a...

There are a few things I would like to share with my readers today: For the last couple of years, I have been enjoying listening to the tail end of the Vinyl Cafe on CBC Radio , when I get out of the book store on Sunday afternoons. I don't think I've ever caught an entire episode, which is a shame. I was thrilled to hear a couple of months ago that they are making weekly Vinyl Cafe podcasts. It's a free subscription, so of course I subscribed as soon as I learned that the podcasts were happening. I'm a bit disappointed that the podcasts are not the entire shows. However, they're absolutely worth listening to. If you've never listened to the Vinyl Cafe, you really should give it a try! And with podcasts, it's easy to fit the listening into your schedule, rather than trying to fit your schedule around listening. This Stuart McLean fellow is a truly amazing storyteller. Really, a Canadian national treasure, in my opinion. ----- If you've spent years using ...

I recently watched all six of the Star Wars movies, in the order that George Lucas prefers. That is, episodes I-VI, rather than in the chronological order of their production. Here's what I came away with, as far as opinions are concerned: 1) The saga holds up very well, in terms of a narrative flow. To some degree, I think this is a bit of a feat. On the other hand, there was plenty of time between the production of Episodes VI and I, to ensure that the plot points were all ironed out in a way that keeps things consistent. I'm not really all that sure of just how much tinkering Lucas did to alter Episodes IV-VI to achieve that end. I did notice, with a bit of disgust, the insertion of the Christensen ghost and the appearance of celebratory Gungans at the end of Episode VI. Neither insertion improved the movie in any meaningful way. 2) Hayden Christensen is a phenomenally awful actor. He's dull on the grandest of scales, rivalling Kevin Costner--and that's no small ant...

Well, it's been a very long while since I've posted, but I'm back now. I noticed that my tendency has been to not blog any time while work had me miserable. I was miserable at work recently. Well, as of this past Wednesday, I've left that job behind. I'm optimistic that I will be considerably more in a cheery mood in the future. Here are some things I've neglected to mention: 1) This year, Beth and I became baseball fans. Strange, that. I think it means we're getting old and our brains are slowing down. When I was younger, I just couldn't understand how anyone could be a fan of such a slow and dull game (I still refuse to consider it a sport). But now I actually find that it's somehow exciting. There are things about it I despise. (For example this business about "checked swings". As I recall, when I was a kid, I never saw the "checked swing". Is it really a new innovation, or am I imagining things? As I recall, in the past, if th...

A few weeks ago, we were watching Jeopardy , and one of the questions was about George Orwell's 1984 . I said, "I really should read that one of these days." A few days later, we were at a tag sale and Beth spotted a paperback of the book for a buck. So she bought it for me. Now I've read it, finally, quite a lot of years after I should have done. I had read Animal Farm a long time ago, but I had just never gotten around to reading 1984 . Now I'm sad that I let it wait for so long. So I provided one of my little capsule reviews to the book store on Wednesday. But since the blog allows me to spend as many words as I want, I'm going to publish a somewhat longer review here: Stylistically and structurally, Orwell's 1984 is a masterpiece. In addition, it is a triumph of imagination. Orwell imagined a world so thoroughly as to make it seem less a fictional setting than an alternate reality. His book, while fairly short, is as complete as could be hoped for. T...

Of all the pithy sayings I've ever devised, the following is surely among my favorites: You can say anything with words. If one keeps in mind what I wrote a few days ago about original ideas, one might wonder whether I was the first to formulate this sentence. I'm quite certain the answer is no. A quick Google search shows that whether I was the first or not, I'm surely not the only, although the sentence does appear surprisingly infrequently in the Google database. I think the statement is true, although it may sometimes be difficult to find the appropriate words, and it may (on rare occasions) be necessary to invent new words to achieve the objective. An interesting side-effect of this ability to say anything with words is that it's possible to say things that make no sense. Even more exciting: It's extraordinarily easy to say things that nobody has ever said before. This, despite many people's claims that "there's nothing new under the sun" or ...

I also happened to invite the Linguistic Mystic to have a look at my July 31 post. He did so and was kind enough to give me a nice credit as the inspiration for his latest post , an interesting discussion of the mysteries of whether "tomorrow" begins at midnight or at wakey-time. Thanks, Linguistic Mystic. Today's the third in my little series of linguistic discussions, again inspired by newscasters: Why would you say "an historic event"? I believe Peter Jennings used to do this. I always considered Peter Jennings to be the perfect exemplar of accent-free American English, despite his Canadian origins (Eh?). (Of course, it's all accents, really...and what I think of as "accent-free" is just as much an accent as is Apu-speak from The Simpsons . At the very least, however, Jennings didn't drop his R's or his H's and there was no chance of confusing the white race with the white rice.) So why Jennings (and others who don't drop their ...

Here's another of those little "Staff Recommendation" reviews that I write for the book store: The Ice Storm , directed by Ang Lee. Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Tobey Maguire, Joan Allen, Katie Holmes. If you're a movie fan, these names should mean something to you. This low-key gem may actually be the best piece of work any of them has ever been associated with. We named our first dog after the Katie Holmes character. "Libbets? What kind of a name is Libbets?!?" The movie is centered around a couple of families during a strange and tragic Thanksgiving weekend in the 1970s. It probably won't make you cry, it may not make you laugh, but it might just leave you in awe.

I know that I haven't been the most regular blogger. I would like to do something about that. I doubt that I'll get to the point where I'm posting something new on a daily basis. But I would like to post something new at least a few times a week. So, I've devised a new strategy. While I certainly don't want to turn this into a photo blog, I have come to realise that my photography is what's getting me more hits than anything else. (Why doesn't my dictionary project seem to capture anyone's attention? I don't know. I've found it absolutely fascinating!) So what I'm going to start doing is posting photographs more regularly, particularly when I don't have anything else to contribute for a few days. Some of these will be old photos that I haven't previously posted, but that I happen to like a lot. Some will be new photos. For today, an old picture of Newton, from when he was still a little baby, 4 1/3 years ago. Strategy shift number 2:...