Where I’m From

A poem
by Chris Hibbard

Where I’m From

I’m from the loins of good stock.
From Lennon and Marley and Dylan and Hendrix,
A rock and a hard place and other clichés
I’m from optimism and dreams, romance and foolishness
Metaphorical mountaintops and the bottoms of bottles
From Ireland and England by way of Ontario
The school of hard knocks and educated by Life
Not the game nor the cereal, and not the magazine
I’m from social activities and privately public office
The tip of a pen, not the barrel of a gun
One tiny spark of an idea – a forest ablaze
Love under moonlight
I’m from little brother syndrome and baby boy blues
Mandatory Sunday School sentencing
The pages of paperbacks and overdue bills
The ends of the earth and the centre of the universe
Even the bottom of the sea
I’m from treble, bass, and volume control
Cassette tapes and vinyl
Bongo drums and guitar strings
From Russia with Love, from Here to Eternity
I’m from Tarantino, the Death Star, Zip-Zow and Zing!
Kerouac and Kipling, Kafka and Keats, Koontz and King
Rolling Stones and Billboards and Calgary Heralds
From puppy paws and bird calls, kitten whiskers and fish tales
From karma and fate and other coincidence
Accidents planned and pregnancies not
I’m from mistakes I have learned from and ones I repeat
Punctuation and grammar and run-on sentences
Picnic baskets and slingshots, Frisbees and walking sticks
Soft sandy beaches and minnows in nets
T-shirts and ripped jeans, sneakers with grass stains
Callouses and sunburns
I’m from trampolines and tent pegs, back seats and old habits
Jeopardy, chess, tile rummy and cribbage
Bad posture, good manners and Halloween treats
From point A to point Z on a Long Winding Road
I’m from the loins of good stock

Welcome to The Kitchen Sink!

Hi there. This blog is devoted to all manner of creative writing and is updated daily. This means investigations and analyses; poetry and prose; reviews of film, literature, and music. This means dramatic writing, introspective writing, unique and original writing. This means politics and passions, hobbies and recommendations.

I invite each of you to provide comments or criticism, suggestions and feedback at any time. I would also like to invite you all to submit your own original content. Simply e-mail me or insert your copy as a comment. Please include your own ‘byline’ information, copyright information and/or author’s note so you can be credited for your own work. More voices mean more variety. Let’s fill this Kitchen Sink with all the beauty and originality it can handle.

Sincerely,
Chris Hibbard
chris.hibbard@uleth.ca

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A daily poem #31 – June 15, 2009

A poem
by Robert Frost

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last ‘Put out the Light’ was spoken.

A daily poem #30 – June 14, 2009

A poem
by Robert Frost

Out, Out

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then-the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little-less-nothing! and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

A daily poem #29 – June 13, 2009

A poem
by Robert Frost

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

A daily poem #28 – June 12, 2009

A poem
by J. D. McClatchy

Mercury Dressing

To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency—
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face
(His hooded sex its counterpart)—
Unsteadies the routines of the heart.
If I reach out and touch his wing,
What harm, what help might he then bring?

But suddenly he disappears,
As so much else has down the years…
Until I feel him deep inside
The emptiness, preoccupied.
His nerve electrifies the air.
His message is his being there.

A daily poem #27 – June 11, 2009

A poem
by William Blake

London

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

A daily poem #26 – June 10, 2009

A poem
by Robert Frost

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

A daily poem #25 – June 9, 2009

A poem
by Emily Dickinson

I’m Nobody! Who Are You?

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one’s name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

A daily poem #24 – June 8, 2009

A poem
by William Blake

Love’s Secret

Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she did depart!

Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly
He took her with a sigh.

A daily poem #23 – June 7, 2009

A poem by
Robert Frost

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

A daily poem #22 – June 6, 2009

A poem
by Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

To Zoo or not to Zoo…

An editorial
by Chris Hibbard
The Meliorist
Feb. 13, 2008

To Zoo or not to Zoo…

At one point in time, our University lounge, The Zoo, was a weekly hot spot in town, attracting hundreds of drinkers and dancers every Thursday night. From what I understand, there were some fairly major incidents resulting from heavy intoxication, and it was decided between the University administration, the Student’s Union, and the Lethbridge Police Service that this was not such a good idea. Consequently, The Zoo stopped with the Thursday night dance club action. Which brings us to today.

When I go up to The Zoo now, I sometimes feel a little confused as to where exactly I am. Am I in a restaurant? A pub? A sports lounge? I really don’t know anymore what The Zoo is, or what it is trying to be. I presume that there is a whole dynamic business operation running up there, in which there may be logistic and/or staffing issues, but nonetheless: call me crazy, call me off-base, but here’s my logical thinking regarding our University lounge.

1. If The Zoo is a restaurant, I find that the food and the customer service are rather lacking in comparison to the menu prices. A clubhouse should have three pieces of bread, and an extra patty on your hamburger should not cost an extra $4 – half of what a single burger and fries does. On this same note, sometimes I enter The Zoo, only the sit and wait – and wait – and wait – and then give up and go up to the bar and order my drink and a menu.

2. If The Zoo is a pub that caters to University students, and if University students are like myself and enjoy a drink or two after ten p.m., then I think that The Zoo should remain open until at least 11:00 p.m. Going to The Zoo for a drink is currently just that – by the time you are halfway through a jug of beer, the pressure is on to finish up and go somewhere else where our money and patronage is appreciated. To truly be a pub, I think that The Zoo needs to at least stay open later on Friday and Saturday nights, and believe that it could be an excellent venue to see more live performances – such as the last few years’ Bedouin Soundclash, Tegan and Sara; heck even karaoke nights qualify I suppose.

3. If The Zoo is a sports lounge, the TVs should be tuned to sports constantly, with the sound turned up a little bit during the games themselves. As it is, I often find that drinking in my living room watching the Flames game tends to be a more satisfying experience, if only because I can hear the commentary, can serve myself without waiting, and know that even after the game is over, I can still have another beer.

These are just some of my thoughts. I know that the students who work at The Zoo are part-time help, with other things on their minds. I know that The Zoo is a business, with business concerns and budgets etc. I know that I like going to The Zoo, simply because of it’s location and the fact that it is the only place on campus to sit, relax, have a drink and watch TV. However, I also know that The Zoo operates at a loss some years, and likely should not need to. It’s one of the only on-campus lounges in Canada that you can walk into and find it nearly empty, check out the lounges at the U of C or Red Deer College, and you’ll find them packed 16 hours day – true ‘hangout’ places. Some of these places even allow students to bring their own lunches, so long as they pay for a pop or a coffee. As far as a business strategy goes, if you consider that it costs about a nickel to make a cup of coffee or an iced tea, which can then be sold for $1.50, that’s a pretty major profit percentage.

What I don’t know it what The Zoo thinks it is, what it aspires to be, and what it’s staff may or may not think about concerns such as these. Maybe someone can explain it to us? I sure would like to see the U of L have a cool, hip, hangout-place that actually gets busy.

Weird news from around the world

A summary examination
by Chris Hibbard
The Meliorist
March 13, 2008

Weird news from around the world

With information and quotations gleaned from Reuters, Associated Press (AP), and Agence-France-Presse (AFP)

At least once a year, I search out those bits of news that, while seeming to be of little substance to many, provide us with some unique glimpses into luck, life, and the human condition. Ladies and gentlemen, Meliorist readers, the next time that you think you’ve had a bad day – remember these examples and cheer yourself up.

1. A Cleveland company received their expected shipment of spooled steel coil from Singapore last week, complete with a stowaway inside one of the crates. A ‘scrawny’ black and white female kitten was apparently sealed inside the crate in Singapore on February 4th, and set sail across the Pacific three days later. Approximately twelve weeks old, the surviving kitten has been checked out by a veterinarian, has responded well to food, and will be kept in quarantine for the next few weeks to be sure it doesn’t pass any infectious Singapore-diseases to other animals or humans. While the crate sadly also contained the kitten’s mother and three siblings, all of which were dead on arrival, the good news is that the ‘scrawny’ survivor is expected to be adopted by one of the company employees.

Editor’s Note: I suggest the kitten’s new owner choose to name it Gulliver.

2. A 30-year-old Aussie convinced a Melbourne car dealer to let him take a brand new Honda Accord on a test drive last week, then drove off the lot only to take the vehicle 3,200 kilometres deep into the countryside. His six-day test drive ended with his arrest in Australia’s Northern Territory. He was arrested without incident at a road block on his way north to Darwin after he “failed to pay for fuel at a hamlet. His test-drive-turn-joyride was the longest known to Australian police, and was the European equivalent of driving from London to Istanbul. The car dealer who ‘rented’ the car to him was quoted as saying, “He seemed a legitimate gentleman. He stood at the desk right in front of a camera. He wasn’t afraid of being photographed or videoed.” The driver has been charged with aggravated unlawful use of a motor vehicle and unlawful possession of property and appeared in court last Thursday.

Editor’s Note: I wonder if the story would have ended differently had he test-driven a Subaru Outback.

3. Facing an overcrowding crisis in the village graveyard, the mayor of Sarpourenx, France, has threatened his citizens with severe punishment if they die, since there is no room left in the cemetery to bury them. Forced to take drastic action after an administrative court in a nearby town ruled in January that the acquisition of adjoining private land to extend the cemetery would not be justified, Mayor Gerard Lalanne, 70 years old, is running for a seventh term in office in this month’s local elections. Lalanne posted an ordinance in the council offices which read: “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish”, complete with a warning that any “offenders will be severely punished”.

Editor’s Note: In essence, the mayor warns: you better not die, or you will be punished severely. What does that mean? Dismemberment? Necrophila? Yuck!

4. Do you think that dogs have souls? If so, do you consider your dog to be Catholic? It would seem that in the town of Asaya, Nicaragua, hundreds of dogs are dressed up as babies or clowns on one Sunday of every year, and then paraded to a tiny church to celebrate mass. These devout pet owners line up for miles to pass by an image of a saint in the tiny church, wherein the faithful “thank the saint for curing their pets or ask for the dogs to be protected from illness”. This tradition, which locals claim goes back to the colonial period after the Spanish conquest, includes the town’s priest conducting a special canine mass.

Editor’s Note: The Spanish must wonder sometimes why they landed there in the first place.

5. As if we needed yet another reason to appreciate fortune cookies, they can now officially be crucial evidence in criminal investigations. After a pair of break-ins at Chinese restaurants in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police responded to a burglar alarm at a third to find Terrence Middleton, 30, near the scene “with more than $20 in coins and the cookies in his pockets,” one first-response officer said. The officer claims that police were able to “link Middleton to the Asian Express that was robbed because he had possession of the same type of fortune cookies” that were at one of the previously robbed restaurants. Middleton is being held on a $15,000 bond after being booked on charges of second-degree burglary and attempted second-degree burglary. He has previously been an inmate in correctional facilities.

Editor’s Note: I don’t know as much about world religions as I’d like to, but there must be some Chinese version of the notion of Karma that would have predicted this.

6. A little closer to home, last week in Prince George, B.C., a young romantic named Aaron Tkachuk thought he had devised the perfect way to propose to his high school sweetheart. Planning on “popping the question on a moonlit Caribbean beach”, he ended up popping the question to his fiancée Jennifer Rubadeau at an airport security screening station instead. An alert and curious luggage screener at the Prince George airport insisted on having a closer look at the X-rayed contents of a small box in the toe of a sock. When it turned out that inside the box was a white-gold, diamond and ruby ring, “Tkachuk decided to propose on the spot, and other travelers and security personnel cheered as Rubadeau said yes.”

Editor’s Note: After being through a number of airports in the last few years, I honestly can’t think of a less romantic place to propose. However, since neither a Taser nor Anthrax was involved, Tkachuck may have gotten off lucky either way.

7. A house was severely damaged on Friday in a small village in Russia’s Ural Mountains when a Russian military army tank crashed into the corner. After the tank crew stopped to buy more vodka at a nearby shop, footage from a mobile phone camera showed the tank “hitting a corner of the house and a laughing, and apparently drunk, driver awkwardly trying to clamber aboard with two bottles of vodka.” The army promised shortly after the incident to pay compensation and said the tank must have been broken and fallen behind a column heading to a test site for exercises. Earlier, it said the vehicle slid on melting ice. “Of course, there were violations, but the crew acted in good faith to catch up with its unit,” said a spokesman for Russia’s Volga-Urals Military District. All the homeowner could say was “thank God, they didn’t shoot.”

Editor’s Note: Gotta love military jargon. Our soldiers weren’t drunk on our national liquor, no; they were driving a broken tank on slippery ice, and just happened to stop to get some booze for the rest of the way.

8. A controversial scientific thesis claiming that the biblical Israelites may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai was put forward last Tuesday. In a new study, Benny Shanon, an Israeli psychology professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, claims that two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those “found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.” He said that a psychoactive plant called harmal, which is found in the Sinai and elsewhere in the Middle East, has long been regarded by Jews in the region as having magical and curative powers. Shanon hypothesizes in his study that “the thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an ‘altered state of awareness.’” Shanon claims that in advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is often “accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings…on such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being…many identify this power as God.” Some biblical scholars were unimpressed. Orthodox rabbi Yuval Sherlow told Israel Radio: “The Bible is trying to convey a very profound event. We have to fear not for the fate of the biblical Moses, but for the fate of science.” In a double-edged part of his essay, which nearly undermines the hypothesis itself, Shanon also wrote that he was very familiar with the affects of the ayahuasca plant, having “partaken of the…brew about 160 times in various locales and contexts.”

Editor’s Note: I used psychoactive substances during a lightning storm once, and it was rather frightening and awe-inspiring at the same time. Group hallucinations, however, were not a result of the stuff I found in Calgary.

9. The Vietnamese government has initiated a new war, one which it is said will be over quickly.
This war is not with America, or even humans at all, but on hamsters! A wildly popular pet in Vietnam during this current lunar Year of the Rat, the government fears that these dangerous foreign-bred fur balls could spread disease and destroy crops. Starting last Monday, “anyone possessing or trading hamsters faces stiff fines of up to 30 million dong ($1,875),” the state-run Vietnam News reported. The communist government aims to end a youth craze for the fast-breeding animals, previously only imported for scientific research, but now popular enough to have inspired online hamster forums and real-life hamster clubs. Authorities worry that rampant sales of the fluffy pets will spike before International Women’s Day on Saturday, a major annual gift-giving event that Vietnamese husbands and boyfriends ignore at their peril.
After the stern warning was issued, the street price of hamsters (which have become a common illegal import) dropped from over $20 per hamster to less than $10. “Destroying them all is really a big problem,” said one agriculture ministry official. “I think the Vietnam animal health department should take some samples, conduct tests and see how dangerous the hamsters in Vietnam really are.”

Editor’s Note: Ever been bitten by a hamster? I was when I was very young and it felt like a freakin’ cougar at the time. Aren’t there some countries where hamsters are a nice delicious snack? Vietnam could get a whole new economic export going if they play this right.

10. A report last Thursday details how an eight-year-old Brazilian boy passed an entrance exam to study at Paulista University law school, but was nevertheless prevented from enrolling. Joao Victor Portelinha de Oliveira successfully won entry into the law school after completing exams and a writing test last week, but the university said he does not qualify because he has not studied at a high school level. De Oliveira’s mother claims that her son is not a child genius, but that he was brought up in an intellectually stimulating environment at home, and “he participated in our discussions and he took interest in current affairs and interacted a lot with adults.” Brazil’s association of lawyers has complained that a boy so young should never have been allowed to sit a university entrance exam, and has called on the education ministry to ensure that no other primary-schoolers are given the chance to sit such tests. Meanwhile, de Oliveira’s father told the local newspaper he was going to take the matter to court.

Editor’s Note: Talk about a target for vicious TLF action – if the eight-year-old kid in front of me in Corporate Ethics were to get better grades than me (or more dates than me for that matter) I would be a little upset.

11. In a terribly sad story, a letter of love written by a 13-year-old girl to her recently deceased mother was returned to her by the post office, who could not deliver said letter to its address: “Paradise Street, Heaven”.
The young girl from central France wanted to send a “message of love, like a bottle in the ocean”, on the second anniversary of her mother’s death. But two days after she slipped it into a local post-box, marked with her mother’s name but no stamp, her letter was returned to her – along with €1,35 ($2) fine for unpaid postage. Asked to explain the heartbreaking mishap, the French post office said there really was a town in the area called Heaven – “Ciel” in French – but that Paradise Street was unknown, so the letter could not be delivered.

Editor’s Note: Santa Claus seems to receive all our letters somehow, so why can’t people in heaven?

Trillions

An Editorial
by Chris Hibbard
The Meliorist
April 2, 2008

Trillions

I read the other day that the American occupation of Iraq (AKA the War on Terror) has reportedly cost three trillion dollars now, a figure that I couldn’t truly wrap my mind around. I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what I would do with a million dollars if I had it. One billion dollars goes over my head, so what the heck is a trillion, and how does one go about spending three of them? After an amusing hour of Internet research, I found some answers.

A trillion, in North American terms, is a one followed by 12 zeros – one million millions in other words.

It is estimated that there are roughly one trillion bacteria living on the human body, a body that is composed of somewhere near 100 trillion cells.

As of 2002, over one trillion digits of pi are known to mathematicians and 953,467,954,114,363 is the largest known prime number.

It is estimated that there are 3.5 trillion fish in the world’s oceans, and something like a million trillion insects on the Earth.

One trillion American pennies could fill a cube that was 273 feet x 273 feet x 273 feet. This cube would be worth ten billion, one hundred and 66 dollars and 40 cents. If one stacked a trillion pennies into a single tower, that tower would be 986,426 miles high, or if laid flat, would cover an area of nearly 90,000 acres – less than the entire area of Canada that has been reserved for Native American peoples.

There are about one trillion stars in the Pinwheel Galaxy, shown here in a Hubble telescope photograph.

One trillion seconds of ordinary clock time equals 31,546 years.

Needless to say, a trillion is a mighty number, and one trillion dollars is an intimidating amount of money. Frankly, the average human mind isn’t very well equipped to understand such an enormous figure. It’s not like we’ll ever encounter a trillion of anything in our day to day life, so to us, it sounds just like any other big number – 800 million, 60 billion, you get the idea. Yet we all like spending money, so it’s a little easier to think about a trillion in that way.

A trillion dollars would pay for $1.2 trillion would pay for a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every currently uninsured American who suffers from diabetes of heart disease, and a global immunization campaign to vaccinate every child on the planet. After all of these things were completed, we’d still have half of our trillion dollars.
With the rest, we could institute free daycare for every Canadian toddler, restore New Orleans to it’s pre-Katrina state, send a peacekeeping force to stop the genocide in Darfur and beat back the Taliban in Afghanistan with enough left over to both fund the National Cancer Research Institute and feed all of Alberta’s homeless people for the next 100 years. This is all a little vague and naÔve I admit, but anyone of these things sounds better to me than how it’s being used currently.

In the days before the war in Iraq five years ago, the Pentagon estimated publicly that the occupation would last a few months and would cost about $50 billion. One economic advisor disagreed, claiming $200 billlion was more likely, and he was fired. And now here we are: the occupation, equipment, and ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is said to be costing more than two billion dollars per week.

The three trillion dollars referred to above includes more than this weekly expenditure, taking into account the long term health care costs for the 16,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq so far, the ever-rising prices of oil, greater global insecurity caused by the war, and the greatly increased costs of recruitment to continually replenish a military that doesn’t even seem to want to be there at all anymore.
These trillion dollars do not include more abstract societal costs: fragmented Western alliances, loss of US credibility in the eyes of other nations and millions of enraged and frightened Muslims.

This little ‘few-month’ war; this military engagement that has lasted longer than World War I; this war which was supposedly once about a guy named Saddam who had no link to September, 2001; will no doubt result in great future expense as well. Once disability payments and medical costs begin to snowball and neglected social systems like health care and education require repair, I foresee a country in deep, deep trouble.

How did America get into this mess, this financial quagmire that will certainly suck us Canadians in too? Could it really have been as easy as this to pull the wool over 301 million pairs of American eyes? Was this done simply by using some clever accounting tricks to hide expenses until it was too late? Or by using an ‘old-boys’ network of political-corporate cronies and sponsors who shared contracts, mercenaries, money laundering duties and alibis? It’s probably a whole lot of both. In fact, we’ll probably never truly know the extent of the damage caused by the conspiracy/comedy of errors that got us into this mess, but our kids and grandkids will scratch their heads, wondering how their ancestors could have betrayed themselves so badly.

But maybe the more important question is this: how are they going to get out of this mess? Will we end up selling our North American souls to the highest international bidder to work off the national debt? Will we work our collective butts off to make enough money to get by after paying enough exorbitant taxes to replenish the depleted national coffers over the next 100 years? Either way, be it by slowly crawling back out of a three trillion dollar hole or by paying back a three trillion dollar loan to some foreign investor, the future for this once-most-powerful nation on the planet looks a little unsteady. Here in oil rich Alberta, we’re their upstairs neighbours, we’ve got the petroleum products that they crave, and we have no locks on our doors.

More weird news from around the world

A summary examination
by Chris Hibbard
The Meliorist
March 20, 2008

Weird news from around the world Feb. 1 – March. 15, 2008

With information and quotations gleaned from Reuters, Associated Press (AP), and Agence-France-Presse (AFP)

At least once a year, I search out those bits of news that while seeming to be of little substance to many, provide us with some unique glimpses into luck, life, and the human condition.
Ladies and gentlemen, Meliorist readers, the next time that you think you’ve had a bad day – remember these examples and cheer yourself up.

A Cleveland company received their expected shipment of spooled steel coil from Singapore last week, complete with a stowaway inside one of the crates.
A “scrawny” black and white female kitten was apparently sealed inside the crate in Singapore
While the sad part of the story is that the crate also contained the kitten’s mother and three siblings, all of which were dead on arrival, the good news is that the “scrawny” survivor is expected to be adopted by one of the company employees.

A 30-year-old Aussie convinced a Melbourne car dealer to let him take a brand new Honda Accord on a test drive last week, then drove off the lot only to take off 3,200 kilometres deep into the countryside. His six-day test drive ended with his arrest deep in Australia’s Northern Territory. He was arrested without incident at a road block on his way north to Darwin after he “failed to pay for fuel at a hamlet. His test-drive-turn-joyride was the longest known to Australian police, and was the European equivalent of driving from London to Istanbul.

Facing an overcrowding crisis in the village graveyard, the mayor of Sarpourenx, France, has threatened his citizens with severe punishment if they die, since there is no room left in the cemetery to bury them.
Mayor Gerard Lalanne posted an ordinance in the council offices which read: “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish”, complete with a warning that any “offenders will be severely punished.”

Do you think that dogs have souls? If so, do you consider your dog to be Catholic?
It would seem that in the town of Asaya, Nicaragua, hundreds of dogs are dressed up as babies or clowns on one Sunday of every year, and then paraded to a tiny church to celebrate mass. These devout pet owners line up for miles to pass by an image of a saint in the tiny church, wherein the faithful “thank the saint for curing their pets or ask for the dogs to be protected from illness. This tradition, which locals claim goes back to the colonial period after the Spanish conquest, include the town’s priest conducting a special canine mass.

As if we needed yet another reason to appreciate fortune cookies, they can now officially be crucial evidence in criminal investigations.
After a pair of break-ins at Chinese restaurants in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police responded to a burglar alarm at a third to find Terrence Middleton, 30, near the scene “with more than $20 in coins and the cookies in his pockets” one first-response officer said. The officer claims that police were able to “link Middleton to the Asian Express that was robbed because he had possession of the same type of fortune cookies” that were at one of the previously robbed restaurants.

A little closer to home, last week in Prince George, BC, a young romantic named Aaron Tkachuk thought he had devised the perfect way to propose to his high school sweetheart. Planning on “popping the question on a moonlit Caribbean beach”, he wound up popping the question to his fiancée Jennifer Rubadeau at an airport security screening station instead.
An alert and curious luggage screener at the Prince George airport insisted on having a closer look at the X-rayed contents of a small box in the toe of a sock. When it turned out that inside the box was a white gold, diamond and ruby ring, “Tkachuk decided to propose on the spot, and other travelers and security personnel cheered as Rubadeau said yes.”

A homeowner’s house was severely damaged on Friday in a small village in Russia’s Ural Mountains when a Russian military army tank crashed into the corner of it.
After the tank crew stopped to buy more vodka at a nearby shop, footage from a mobile phone camera showed the tank “hitting a corner of the house and a laughing, and apparently drunk, driver awkwardly trying to clamber aboard with two bottles of vodka.”
The army promised shortly after the incident to pay compensation and said the tank must have been broken and fallen behind a column heading to a test site for exercises. Earlier it said the vehicle slid on melting ice.

A controversial scientific thesis was made last Tuesday, claiming that the biblical Israelites may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai.
A new study by Benny Shanon, an Israeli psychology professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, claims that two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those “found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.” He said that a psychoactive plant called harmal which is found in the Sinai and elsewhere in the Middle East, has long been regarded by Jews in the region as having magical and curative powers. He hypothesizes that “the thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an “altered state of awareness.”” Some biblical scholars were unimpressed.

The Vietnamese government has initiated a new war, one which is said to be over quickly.
This war is not on America, North Vietnam, or even humans at all, but on hamsters!
A wildly popular pet in Vietnam during this current lunar Year of the Rat, the government fears that these dangerous foreign-bred fur balls could spread disease and destroy crops.
Starting last Monday, “anyone possessing or trading hamsters faces stiff fines of up to 30 million dong (1,875 dollars), the state-run Vietnam News reported.
After the stern warning was decreed, the street price of hamsters (which have become a common illegal imported) dropped from over 20 dollars per hamster to less than 10.

A report last Thursday details how an eight-year-old Brazilian boy passed an entrance exam to study at Paulista University law school, but was nevertheless prevented from enrolling.
Joao Victor Portelinha de Oliveira successfully won entry into the law school after completing exams and a writing test last week, but the university said he does not qualify because he has not studied at a high school level.
Brazil’s association of lawyers has complained that a boy so young should never have been allowed to sit a university entrance exam, and has called on the education ministry to ensure that no other primary schoolers are given the chance to sit such tests. Meanwhile, Joao Victor’s father told the local newspaper he was going to take the matter to court.

In a terribly sad story, a letter of love written by a 13-year-old girl to her recently deceased mother was returned to her by the post office, who could not deliver said letter to its address: “Paradise Street, Heaven”.
The young girl from central France wanted to send a “message of love, like a bottle in the ocean”, on the second anniversary of her mother’s death. But two days after she slipped it into a local postbox, marked with her mother’s name but no stamp, her letter was returned to her – along with 1.35 euro (two-dollar) fine for unpaid postage.
Asked to explain the heartbreaking mishap, the French post office said there really was a town in the area called Heaven — “Ciel” in French — but that Paradise Street was unknown, so the letter could not be delivered.

An accountant who tried to sue British retail chain Marks & Spencer after he slipped on a grape and injured himself lost his case on Wednesday and was ordered to pay legal costs. The accountant had sued the chain for more than $600,000 over a 2004 incident in which he said a squashed grape from the store got lodged under the sole of his right sandal, causing him to slip and fall. The judge ruled against him last week however, determining that he was not persuaded that the grape was what caused the claimant to slip.

A Chinese bride burned her new husband to death last week after they had argued while drunk about his climbing into bed washing his feet, wrote the official Xinhua news agency. The recently married couple from the province of Hubei, apparently fought quite frequently over trivial things. At about 10 p.m. on March 13, the wife watched her husband get into bed without cleaning his feet, then in “a fit of anger and intoxication”, set fire to the sheet he was sleeping in.” As fire engulfed the bedroom, she excaped, leaving her husband to burn. She has been arrested.

A police station in Corpus Christi, Texas was briefly evacuated last Thursday after a woman decided she should bring in a hand grenade that she had found. After finding the live grenade while cleaning out a relative’s belongings, the unidentified woman handed it over to an officer at the station, who immediately took it outside the building. Police cleared the building just in case, and the bomb squad detonated it about an hour later.

The Florida Senate wants public school students to pull up their pants, so much so that lawmakers passed a bill last week that could mean suspensions for students with saggy bottoms. It won’t become law unless the House of Representatives passes a companion measure. Several other southern U.S. towns have passed similar “low rider” laws aimed at outlawing what some teenagers consider a fashion statement – wearing pants half way down their buttocks, exposing flesh or underwear.

A Macedonian court has convicted a bear for theft and damage after the animals repeatedly stole honey from a local beekeeper. The beekeeper had repeatedly scared the bear away from his apiary by flashing bright lights and playing loud “turbo-folk” music. But when these tactics failed, the bear came back and it attacked the beehives again. Since the bear had no owner and belonged to a protected species, the court in the city of Bitola found the bear guilty, and subsequently ordered the state to pay for the 140,000 denars in damage it had caused to the hives.

Last Thursday afternoon, a 28-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested after attempting to rob a bank in the borough of Liberty, west of Scranton. After waiting in his car for about 20 minutes, the man tried to enter the bank wearing a ski mask and carrying a rifle. But since the bank’s Liberty branch closes at noon on Thursdays, his plans were foiled. While fleeing the scene however, bank employees took note of his license plate number.

Someone bid more than $50 on eBay last week for a Frosted Flake touted to look just like the state of Illinois. Emily McIntire, a sophomore in high school from Chesapeake, VA, said she was grabbing fistfuls of cereal on her way to class when she found the flake. “It was almost to my mouth, it didn’t look like Illinois at first because it was held the wrong way,” said McIntire, but then she noticed the resemblance and said, “Oh my goodness, it’s Illinois.” Her parents suggested that she attempt to sell it just for fun, and so she did, even offering free shipping to Illinois.

An angry restaurant owner in Gloucester, Massachusetts caught a man attempting to steal an armful of meet from his freezer, so took matters into his own hands. Catching up with the thief, Joe Scola, the restaurant owner, raised a five-pound log of frozen Italian ham over his head, then slammed it into the man’s face, The stunned thief dropped his loot and ran.

An Australian couple who took a spontaneous weekend holiday last week arrived home to find forensic officers tearing up their patio looking for signs of foul play and a press conference about their disappearance underway. The retired couple had neglected to tell their daughter about their weekend plans, and had forgotten to lock the house, allowing their dog to get out. Fearing the worst, the daughter called the police, who launched a full-scale missing persons / homicide investigation.

Getting Our Money’s Worth

An editorial
By Chris Hibbard
The Meliorist
Nov. 2007

Getting Our Money’s Worth

As university students, we pay a great deal more for our education than mere tuition. I am referring here to all the little fees and costs that are tacked on to the tuition, most of which we have no choice but to pay. Just what are all these little fees, and just where does our money go?
I started thinking about this topic last week after reading some residual TLFs about the most recent Student’s Union referendum – apparent lingering bitterness about the fact that CKXU 88.3 radio now gets four extra dollars a year. If four extra dollars causes some students major concerns, they should stop reading this right now – because that’s not even the tip of the iceberg.

Before I begin, I should tell you just a little about myself. In the three and half years I’ve been enrolled here at the U of L, I have switched my program three times. I have never used the swimming pool, the climbing wall, or been to a Pronghorns game. I have never been to an LPIRG function or been helped by the Women’s Centre. While I pay the extra grand for health and dental, which many opt out of, I have yet to undergo any major dental operations. (Knock on wood.) I do however, drink at the Zoo from time to time, volunteer at CKXU every Sunday night, and read and write for the Meliorist every week. While I may not be the ‘average’ U of L student, I am certainly not an abnormal one. So in order to do research about where in fact our money goes whilst in the post-secondary system, I used myself as an example.
(Keep in mind that I am not a math major, a business major, an accounting major, or a political science major. I am a writer, a Native American Studies student, and am currently enrolled in the Education faculty.)

I started by printing off all my University payment statements. I then removed any fees specific to my program of studies (Education). Next I removed my tuition costs and any exceptions to them such as bursaries or scholarships, since these things are specific to a select group. The remaining fees are likely very similar, if not identical to yours. Lastly, I added up all these ‘additional fees’ that I have paid over a certain 3.5 year period at this school, only to find that since Fall semester of 2004, I have spent a total of $3087.99 on University Fees and Student’s Union Fees alone.

That’s a substantial amount that I have paid out and barely seen any concrete return on. (In my opinion of course.) I would imagine that many other students have paid approximately the same amount, or will have by the time they’ve been here for as long as I have. Now, in order to be scientifically rigorous, in the spirit of the accounting process, let’s break this down even further shall we?

Chris Hibbard’s University Fees: Fall 2004 – Fall 2007

Athletics – $346.30

This money goes towards the U of L’s Pronghorn teams and other athletic programs, plus gym memberships, a new climbing wall, and so on. Since I’ve already admitted that I am fairly apathetic when it comes to school sports, or even exercise for that matter, I sort of feel that this money was wasted. While I strongly encourage health and wellness, and support our teams (in a way) by including them in the Meliorist each week, it makes me wonder if Bill Cade and other university bigwigs are big fans of sports – thereby putting more money into the pursuit of them than say, I would choose to. However, an employee reminded me that sports facilities and teams are a big draw for potential future students, thus are very important.
According to the Student’s Union, the fee structure of the U of L, including the Athletics department, changes every year. It doesn’t change by referendum mind you, but through a yearly process in which a Student Fee Committee (any student may request to sit on this committee) and university financial planners make decisions for us regarding tuition increases and these other ancillary fees. If I am an example of an ‘average’ U of L student, complete with a common apathy regarding school sporting events, it would seem that we students pay quite a lot of money for our U of L athletics and recreation.

Women’s Centre – $4

The women’s centre had their own referendum a few years back, and now get $1 per semester from each student. Considering that 62 per cent of U of L students are female, this seems pretty reasonable, even if I can’t use their services myself at all, aside from a ‘free condom’ bowl that they have inside their doors.

LPIRG – Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group – $30

This little group uses our money to conduct research on socially relevant and environmental issues, and brings fine films and documentaries to campus in an attempt to enrich our university experience. One of these films was “Waltown”, a documentary about Walmart’s pervasiveness in our world today. I like documentaries, especially ones that confront big businesses, corporations, and other organizations that have a tendency to operate in the shadows, ruling our world one shopper at a time.

Meliorist – $30

Even though I work at this paper, I still have to pay $5/semester fee. I really don’t mind though. It’s nice to have some weekly reading material, especially some that tries to relate to our university lives, is absolutely free of charge, and to which any student can contribute to easily, writing about whatever their heart desires.

Student Administration Fee – $315

From what I can tell, this money went to the Registrar’s Office and to the Cash Office. I have had both good experiences and bad experiences at both of these offices in my time here, but I certainly don’t feel that I have received $315 worth of customer service while waiting in line to pay my tuition.

Student Sport Wellness Contribution Fee – $15

This fee goes pretty much directly to the new Phys. Ed. Building here on campus – or the First Choice Savings Health and Wellness Centre. They get their name on it (passed by referendum), we all get to pay for it, and we all get to use it – provided we choose to do so.

Student Union Building Fee – $155.16

Stemming from an old referendum, these bucks go to maintaining and operating the Student’s Union building. Keeping the carpets cleaned, washrooms stocked, and so on. I am not convinced that my $341 has benefited me per se, but who knows.

S.U. Capital Replacement Fund (CRF) – $341.75

From what I understand, this fund is dipped into in order to buy purchase new couches, chairs, tables, and expand office space etc. While I sit on couches in the SU building from time to time, and have enjoyed Galileo’s once or twice, have I sat down enough to make this money worth it?

Dental Plan: $440 / Health Plan $540 – Total: $980

I know that some students choose to opt out of these benefits, but I am not one of them. Since I am basically a ‘mature’ student (a misnomer, to be sure), I cough up these bucks as insurance. ‘Just in case’ I need dental or medical help while I live and study here. I estimate that about 6000 students out of the 7000 enrolled, pay these fees like I do. This becomes important a little later on. Just hold on.

Student’s Union Operation Fee – $127.62

These fees go towards keeping the SU’s general operations running. This money helps pay SU employees and promote student advancement. Included in this latter category, but tied somehow to our tuition fees, are so-called Quality Initiative Proposals. These are basically decisions made on how to best distribute ‘social’ funds. These funds are reserved for U of L students who present the SU with good ideas that might benefit the University.
Each of these QIPs are decided upon by the General Assembly, and include events like our recent cancelled appearances by sex-pert Sue Johansen and Premier Ed Stelmach, and our new steel U-Wall – the metal wall that now resides on the hill behind The SU building. This wall, that cost $5,500, is an interactive art piece that students and clubs can pretty much graffiti with anything at anytime – within reason of course.

Materials and Service Fee – $755.16

This mysterious category includes computer and science lab equipment, Curriculum Redevelopment, and possibly IT services and even library books. Perhaps a letter to the editor next week may tell us more. (Wink, nudge, hint hint.)

To make a long breakdown short, I’ve spent $3088 in the last four years on these little fees. I remind you that this does not include tuition, bus passes, gas money, daycare, parking passes, books, rent, food, or social life expenses. This is simply money that we give to keep the university running. To make it just that much worse, we cannot pay these fees with a credit card, so can receive no air miles, Canadian Tire bucks, or credit-rating improvement.
Now, I don’t mean to sound overly critical. A lot of the fees that we pay as students go towards payroll, paying some of the salaries of Lethbridge’s biggest employee base. While no one wants to attend a university that is little more than four walls and a roof, neither do we want to attend classes taught by poorly-trained professors or worn-down carpets that are never vacuumed. But consider this: if this amount were to be multiplied by 7000 students (minus the amounts not paid by those who opt-out of the medical/dental fees), the university rakes in $18,531,028 from us students based on these fees, every four years.
I would suggest that the recent writers of TLFs who griped about the newest fee – 4 dollars a year to CKXU radio, chew on these numbers for a while. There are, as the expression goes, bigger fish to fry around here than ‘emo kids’ and their music. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I had better go have my first swim in the University pool, before it’s too late to see any return on my investment.

I’m phoning this one in – Eat me, Chris Hibbard!

A Feature Editorial
by Keith McLaughlin
The Meliorist, Dec. 2007

I’m phoning this one in – Eat me, Chris Hibbard!

So, the Meliorist’s editor-in-chief Chris Hibbard wants words on a page, well, here you go Chris, words. All the letters in my previous sentence when incorporated together constitute words, I believe there was 19 of them, would you like to count them, Chris Hibbard?

I sometimes wonder if my boss knows that I think he’s a total douche-bag. He is constantly on my back about researching and sourcing and “journalistic integrity”, blah, blah, blah. Chris never lets me make up people and attribute quotes to them, he’s always on me to be factual and to “find stories”. Seriously, how does one find a story? Every week he tells me ‘go find a story Keith, go get it’. I’m not a dog @$$hole.

Truth be told, I would much rather make the news by conjuring up fake people and fake statistics. Unfortunately for my precious time, Chris Hitler forbids any and all cheating. So, here I am yet again, half-drunk in the Meliorist office at 3:30 am. I know if I don’t fill this page my fascist tyrant dick of an editor won’t pay me, but I don’t feel like writing, right now I feel like Arby’s followed by some drunk tobogganing. So, I choose to phone this article in. I hope you enjoy your precious words, Chris. I hope they burn your eyes when you read them.

Last week, the Meliorist staff were all sitting around planning this spoof issue and Chris mentioned this really dumb idea to me about making predictions for 2008. I have no other idea how to fill this page so I figure I will embrace Chris’ totally dumb idea of making predictions. I will now make some random predictions, I’m not sure how many I will make; remember, I am simply putting words on a page to appease a despotic micro-managing editor. Once this article reaches a certain word count, I’m outta here and going tobogganing because Arby’s is closed.

I Will Get You For This Chris Hibbard. My first prediction is that I will get you back Chris, for all the stress you inflict on me and the duress you have caused me. I plan on attending your Christmas party, at said party I will deliberately over-consume alcohol. I will then vomit on your couch and your upholstery will be ruined. I will not help with the cleaning up of any empties, nor will I assist any effort to wash my puke from your couch. If dip is to be served, I will put my fingers in it, or I will use it as an ashtray (I haven’t decided yet). Generally, I will behave inappropriately. I might even hit on your girlfriend.

Hillary Clinton Will Become President. George Bush will unceremoniously vacate the US presidency and rightly be remembered as the most putrid president in history. Hillary Clinton will win the November 2008 election; her vice-president will be Barack Obama. Now, I’m a big fan of females and gender equality, but I’m not such a fan of Clinton. Hillary is so fake, she’s like processed meat. Everything she says is so scripted and carefully crafted by focus groups that she can speak for a hour and say nothing at all. Nevertheless her becoming president would be a good thing for two reasons. 1) She is a Democrat. Democrats are moderately more intelligent than Republicans who are stupid and crazy. 2) She is a woman. It would be cool to have a woman in charge of the world’s most powerful nation. I’m all for women in powerful places because I firmly believe that if women ran the world there would be much less war, famine and suffering. Men tend to be indifferent to someone else’s suffering, men also like to kill and blow shit up, just ‘cuz.

I Predict That You Will Find Happiness in 2008, I Will Not. 2008 will bring you much joy and good fortune. You will become truly happy in every aspect of life. You will find love, make lots of money and generally be happy with everything life gives you. I foresee for myself continued –

I just hit my desired word count. This page is now full enough to be printed according to the ‘journalistic standard’ set by Chris Hitler. Screw this, I’m going tobogganing.

CKXU 88.3 Playlist – The Kitchen Sink May 31, 2009

CKXU 88.3 Playlist – The Kitchen Sink May 31, 2009
Listen live on Sunday nights; 7:30 – 10:30 PM (MST)
www.CKXU.COM

1. Morphine – Test Tube Baby / Shoot Em Down
2. Ziggy Marley – 13 Months of Sunshine
3. The Seeds – Pushin’ Too Hard
4. Smokekiller – Out There
5. Sonny Rollins – I Know That You Know
6. Holy Fuck – Echo Sam
7. The Boom Box Repair Kit – Woe (Untitled)
8. Queens of the Stone Age – Monsters in the Parasol
9. Smokey Robinson – You Really Got a Hold on Me
10. Fugazi – Life and Limb
11. The Planet Smashers – Fabricated
12. Unearth – Letting Go
13. Jackie Wilson – Yeah Yeah Yeah
14. Mr. Scruff – Chipmunk
15. The Eardrums – Idiot Convention
16. The Jam – Private Hell
17. Groove Collective – Forgotten Travellers
18. The Riderless Auction – Et Cetera
19. Nick Lowe – Half a Boy and Half a Man
20. TV on the Radio – Red Dress
21. Angelo Badalamenti – Red Bats with Teeth
22. Kirby – The Good Fight
23. Pearl Jam – Hail! Hail!
24. The Rooftop Singers – Walk Right In
25. The Dilated Peoples – Hard Hitters ft. Black Thought
26. The Beasties – What Would Tim Armstrong Do?
27. Slipknot – Sulphur
28. Huevos Rancheros – Who’s Your New Girlfriend
29. DJ Shadow – The Third Decade, Our Move / Halfway Home
30. Vic Damone – But Not For Me
31. The Mars Volta – Agadez
32. Patrick Wolf – Vulture
33. The Lodge – Thaw Me Out
34. Lemon Jelly – Kneel Before Your God
35. Allman Brothers – God Rest His Soul
36. Young Marble Giants – Click Talk
37. The Sights and Sounds – Storm and the Sun
38. Bernie Worrell – Won’t Go Away
39. Tim Smith – Trying to Sleep
40. Electric Wizard – We Hate You
41. Beep Beep – The Whispering Waves

A Daily Poem #22 May 24, 2009

A poem
by Jack Spicer

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

A Daily Poem #21 May 23, 2009

A poem
by Emily Dickinson

I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And being, but an ear,
And I and Silence some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

A Daily Poem #20 May 22, 2009

A poem
by Rudyard Kipling

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!