Poem of the Day Dept.:

"Darkness," by George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose birthday it is today.

The sky must be getting boring; today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is of a book--"The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript."

I guess exploding galaxies and nebulae have become banal. Okay I realize the manuscript contains pictures of astronomical phenomena--some real and some fantastic--but still it seems like a stretch. Interesting, though.

"A Radical Intellectual with Captain Cook" by Harry Liebersohn at Common-place.

"The invention of the 'consumer' identity has been an important part of a long process of eroding workers' power, and it's one reason working people now have so little power against business. According to the social historian Stuart Ewen, in the early years of mass production, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernizing capitalism sought to turn people who thought of themselves primarily as 'workers' into 'consumers.' Business elites wanted people to dream not of satisfying work and egalitarian societies--as many did at that time--but of the beautiful things they could buy with their paychecks."

From "Down and Out in Discount America" by Liza Featherstone at The Nation.

A wavefunction for the universe or "God's Rays." By Bruce DeWitt at Physics Today online.

Poem of the Day Dept.:

Speaking of Miniver Cheevy, here's the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Miniver Cheevy Redux

"Downhill Since Milton" is a review by Carolyne Larrington of The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker, at the TLS website.

"Protests mark Bush inauguration" at Aljazeera.

Poem of the Day (Yeah, right . . .) Dept.:

John Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Keats mistakes Cortez for Balboa, the first Spaniard to "discover" the body of water which has come to be called the Pacific (see previous post); but it's still a great poem.

"Naming the Pacific" at Common-place.

"Shocking images revealed at Britain's 'Abu Ghraib trial'" at the Guardian Unlimited website.

"Tsunami Reveals News Gap" at In These Times.