Since You Asked

Josh Marshall's brief refresher course on civil rights.
Lesson:Don't trust anyone who says he's a libertarian.

Today's Poem

Is terrific. If you like it, you'll probably like her friends, too.

Hey You by Adrian Blevins Back when my head like an egg in a nest was vowel-keen and dawdling, I shed my slick beautiful and put it in a basket and laid it barefaced at the river among the taxing rocks. My beautiful was all hush and glitter. It was too moist to grasp. My beautiful had no tongue with which to lick—no discernable wallowing gnaw. It was really a breed of destruction like a nick in a knife. It was a notch in the works or a wound like a bell in a fat iron mess. My beautiful was a drink too sopping to haul up and swig! Therefore with the trees watching and the beavers abiding I tossed my beautiful down at the waterway against the screwball rocks. Even then there was no hum. My beautiful was never ill-bred enough, no matter what you say. If you want my blue yes everlasting, try my she, instead. Try the why not of my low down, Sugar, my windswept and wrecked.

© 2010, Academy of American Poets. All Rights Reserved.

Headline O' Teh Day

Prices Jump After Germany Bans Naked Shorts

What can I say? It's a slo-o-ow news day unless you care that Arlen Specter may lose the Penn. primary and some guy in Connecticutt got outed by the New York Times for falsely claiming — once — that he fought in Vietnam.
Tha-a-at's all, folks.

Baby Sloths

Seem to be the internet video drug of choice this week.

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

Another Good Poem

from the folks who will send you one a day so they're not filtered by Contrarienne. But maybe you like that.

Anybody Can Write a Poem by Bradley Paul I am arguing with an idiot online. He says anybody can write a poem. I say some people are afraid to speak. I say some people are ashamed to speak. If they said the pronoun "I" they would find themselves floating in the black Atlantic and a woman would swim by, completely dry, in a rose chiffon shirt, until the ashamed person says her name and the woman becomes wet and drowns and her face turns to flayed ragged pulp, white in the black water. He says that he'd still write even if someone cut off both his hands. As if it were the hands that make a poem, I say. I say what if someone cut out whatever brain or gut or loin or heart that lets you say hey, over here, listen, I have something to tell you all, I'm different. As an example I mention my mother who loved that I write poems and am such a wonderful genius. And then I delete the comment because my mother wanted no part of this or any argument, because "Who am I to say whatever?" Once on a grade school form I entered her job as hairwasher. She saw the form and was embarrassed and mad. "You should have put receptionist." But she didn't change it. The last word she ever said was No. And now here she is in my poem, so proud of her idiot son, who presumes to speak for a woman who wants to tell him to shut up, but can't.

© 2010, Academy of American Poets. All Rights Reserved.

Link O' Teh Week

Dickipedia does not play favorites.
From the Billy Crystal entry:

Though Crystal has appeared in several successful movies – When Harry Met Sally … (directed by his friend dick Rob Reiner), City Slickers, City Slickers II, Analyze This, Analyze That, and the (probably) forthcoming Analyze The Other Thing – he is most closely linked to his directorial debut Mr. Saturday Night, a wildly self-indulgent fiasco that looked back at the life of a now-old Borscht Belt comic, providing Crystal with just the excuse he needed to appear on screen in some of the worst makeup in cinema history.

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