Poem of the Day Dept.:

". . . and a nasty welt where the nib of his beak

bit down as he came. It was our first date."

From "Pantoum, the Swan" by Maxine Kumin, from the archives at Witness.

It occurs to me that the article I linked to at Fortean Times' site a bit earlier is an exciting story, but doesn't actually say what a seiche wave is. According to "Water Monster or Wave?" at the (Forteanish) UnMuseum, a seiche wave, while a relatively uncommon phenomenon, may be the reality that lies behind stories of the Loch Ness monster and other cryptozoological water-beasties.

Poem of the Day Dept.:

"Haiku Ambulance" by Richard Brautigan. (An antidote for certain kinds of three-liners that seem to proliferate sooo meaningfully and sincerely like mosquitoes on ponds . . . .)

". . . we may be asking hip-hop to do something that it's fundamentally incapable of." "Hip Hop's Gender Problem" by Mark Anthony Neal. "By asking hip-hop to reform, we are essentially demanding hip-hop's primary consumer base to consume music that is anti-sexist, anti-misogynistic and possibly feminist."

I've not read much of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work, and I don't think I've ever read anything at all by Graham Greene (though I found the latest film adaptation of Greene's The Quiet American very well-made and very moving indeed--even though I have no idea how loyal to Greene's original novel it may be)."A Tale of Two Writers" is an appreciation of both by Norman Lebrecht, on the advent of their shared centenary.

"I might be one of the very few people to have observed a rare marine phenomenon–-a monster seiche wave-–at close quarters and survived" From "The Ninth Wave" at Fortean Times' website.