Poem(s) of the Day Dept.:

A gathering of odd, mostly light-hearted and intelligent little gnomes (and appropriately enough from Scandinavia . . .): "Grooks by Piet Hein." I honestly don't think I've ever heard of Hein, though obviously somebody at wikipedia has.

(Perhaps there's a connection here with the word grok. I know I know Heinlein supposedly invented the word in Stranger in a Strange Land, it's from the Martian language; but Hein's expression dates from the same era in which Heinlein wrote his novel--Hein's grooks predate the publication of Heinlein's novel by two decades, in fact--and Hein appears to have been the sort of person whose work Heinlein might likely take an interest in . . . and then there's the Hein and Heinlein thing . . . and this is getting nuts so I'll quit now . . . .)

Anyway amusing stuff. One of my favorites is

"Dream Interpretation (Simplified)"

Everything's either
concave or -vex,
so whatever you dream
will be something with sex.

Poem of the Day Dept.:

Oscar Wilde's poignant "The Harlot's House" archived at neuroticpoets.com.

"You know, after I wrote Nickel and Dimed, so many middle-class people would say to me: Oh, what's wrong with these people? Why do they take it? Well, they didn't just take it! Even if they expressed defiance in ways that were not too productive like laughing at the boss behind his back or regularly breaking little rules. With the white-collar people, though, it just seemed so internalized. I couldn't get over it, how beaten down people were, how they had internalized obedience. The fear of standing out in any way that might be noticed seemed to grip them."

That's Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and now Bait and Switch, from "A Guided Tour of Class in America," an interview conducted by Tom Engelhardt for Mother Jones.

(Ehrenreich also now has a blog, of course.}

New and Improved

Still limping along. So anyway this is what the new stuff is gonna look like. I call it the Halloween on Peyote Mix, or the Slightly Spooky One-Minute-to-Midnight Retro-Hallucination Model. And as usual there are big bits of the site missing--more bits than usual, actually . . . but have no fear! Zorro, Robin Hood, Baretta and Casper the Friendly Ghost have all been contacted and are on their way!