poetical bits

The Acts Of The Holy Ghost ~ Scene 1

2012-02-12T05:39:00.012-06:00

Heaven. LORD (HAROLD) and (H.G.) TAYLOR are in bed reading their NOOKs.
 
H.G.
[Puts NOOK on lap.]
I've been thinking, Lord.
HAROLD
Now what, Taylor?
H.G.
I know you created this universe together and all that, but I've always wanted to raise a son of our own.
HAROLD
We can't even raise a universe. Look at the mess it's in. We have all our angels around us to keep us company. What's the ultimate power gay couple like us going to do with our own flesh-and-blood son? I mean I love you always, Taylor, but ...
H.G.
But, Lord, they have been around us, like, forever. I love you always too, and I want him to be yours, I mean with your, uh, stuff. You know, "Thy kingdom come"?
HAROLD
Oy.
H.G.
And maybe raising him on Earth with his T-B-D surrogate mom is best. When he becomes a man, he could help them clean up their mess.
HAROLD
If I go along with this, I want him to call me 'Father'.
H.G.
And he will call me 'Dad'.
HAROLD
So what do we do?
H.G.
We find a suitable mother on Earth. In Judea. You sort of payed special attention to the people there, like they were your hobby or something.
HAROLD
Don't be cute.
H.G.
Tomorrow, I'll take some of your "kingdom come" down and impregnate her.
[Opens bedside table drawer and takes out a glass beaker.]
 Ready?
HAROLD
Now? I have a headache.
H.G.
[Starts getting frisky with HAROLD.]
I can make the headache go away.
[LORD HAROLD and H.G. TAYLOR start going at it. Fade to black. Light back on.]
H.G.
[Holding flask.]
Well that's taken care of. I'll put it in the fridge and take it down in the morning. Got the syringe handy too. [Holds up syringe.]
HAROLD
I want Gabriel to go with you.
[Rings GABRIEL's bell.]
Could you come in here please?
GABRIEL
[appears]
Yes, Lord?
HAROLD
Taylor is going in the morning on a little mission. He'll fill you in. Be an angel won't you and go with him?
GABRIEL
Yes, Lord.

The Acts Of The Holy Ghost ~ A Play In One Act

The Acts Of The Holy Ghost ~ A Play In One Act

2012-02-11T05:12:00.006-06:00

Places

Heaven
Judea

Main characters

Heaven:

LORD (HAROLD)
(H.G.) TAYLOR
GABRIEL
MICHAEL

Judea:

MARY
JESSE
JOHN
PETER
THOMAS
JUDAH
MAGGIE
(HIGH PRIEST) CAI (pronounced "K")
THE COUNCIL
(GOVERNOR) PYLE
JOSEPH (OF ARIMATHEA)
PAUL

Over the next Sundays running through Easter (April 8, 2012), successive scenes of this play will appear. —pt

Scene 1

CPAC 2012

2012-02-09T18:44:00.002-06:00

Blowhards on CPAC TV.
Blowjobs in room ten three three.

some things gay

2012-02-07T08:07:00.000-06:00

Cloudversed Publishing > some things gay

bowl bawl

2012-02-06T07:42:00.000-06:00

I was for the Patriots just because I lived near them for 8 years. I only lived near the Giants for 1.

(There were no Panthers around when I grew up, and I don't care about the Cowboys.)

bits and strings

2012-02-01T07:34:00.000-06:00

Cloudversed Publishing > poetry

2012 U.S. Figure Skating Championships' men on ice

2012-01-30T00:40:00.010-06:00

SAN JOSE, CA - JANUARY 29: Adam Rippon, Jeremy Abbott, Ross Miner and Armin Mahbanoozadeh pose for photographers after the Men's Competition during the 2012 Prudential U.S. Figure Skating Championships at the HP Pavilion on January 29, 2012 in San Jose, California. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

Results

video link as available

Senior Men
1 - Jeremy Abbott, Detroit SC
2 - Adam Rippon, SC of NY
3 - Ross Miner, SC of Boston
4 - Armin Mahbanoozadeh, WA FSC
5 - Douglas Razzano, Coyotes SC of AZ
6 - Stephen Carriere, SC of Boston
7 - Keegan Messing, AK Assoc of Figure Skaters
8 - Max Aaron, Broadmoor SC
9 - Jason Brown, Skokie Valley SC
10 - Scott Dyer, All Year FSC
11 - Jonathan Cassar, All Year FSC
12 - Grant Hochstein, St. Clair Shores FSC
13 - Richard Dornbus, All Year FSC
14 - Brandon Mroz, Broadmoor SC
15 - Alexander Johnson, Broadmoor SC
16 - Joshua Farris, Broadmoor SC
17 - Wesley Campbell, Colonial FSC
18 - William Brewster, Detroit SC
19 - Alexander Aiken, Atlanta FSC
20 - Daniel Raad, FL Everblades FSC

Junior Men
1 - Nathan Chen, Oval FSC
2 - Timothy Dolensky, Atlanta FSC
3 - Philip Warren, All Year FSC
4 - Harrison Choate, SC of Boston
5 - Lukas Kaugars, Broadmoor SC
6 - Timothy Koleto, Broadmoor SC
7 - Jay Yostanto, All Year FSC
8 - Troy Tomasello, Strongville SC
9 - Ryan Hartley, Queen City FSC
10 - Andrew Nagode, University of DE FSC
11 - David Wang, All Year FSC
12 - Emmanuel Savary, SC of NY

U.S. Figure Skating Championships (other results)
AP: Jeremy Abbott wins 3rd U.S. crown

Verner on ice

2012-01-26T14:40:00.000-06:00

Tomas Verner

Men's rankings

Reynolds on ice

2012-01-23T06:42:00.001-06:00

Kevin Reynolds

Men's rankings

Takahashi on ice

2012-01-21T06:40:00.000-06:00

Daisuke Takahashi

Men's rankings

Boitano on ice

2012-01-20T06:30:00.002-06:00

Brian Boitano

Men's rankings

Chipeur on ice

2012-01-19T06:26:00.000-06:00

Vaughn Chipeur
2010 Olympic Games

Vaughn Chipeur
Interview

Men's rankings

Lambiel on ice

2012-01-18T06:42:00.000-06:00

Stéphane Lambiel
Art on Ice 2011

Stéphane Lambiel
Opera on Ice in Verona

Men's rankings

Curry on ice

2012-01-17T02:51:00.002-06:00

John Curry
Innsbruck Olympics 1976

John Curry
Scheherazade 1980

Men's rankings

Shibata on ice

2012-01-16T14:42:00.000-06:00

Ryo Shibata

Men's rankings

Bradley on ice

2012-01-15T04:30:00.001-06:00

Ryan Bradley

Men's rankings

Joubert on ice

2012-01-14T06:33:00.000-06:00

Brian Joubert

Men's rankings

Weir on ice

2012-01-13T06:49:00.000-06:00

Johnny Weir
2004 Nationals (his first title)

Men's rankings

Chan on ice

2012-01-12T05:27:00.000-06:00

Patrick Chan

Men's rankings

Dornbush on ice

2012-01-11T07:52:00.001-06:00

Richard Dornbush

Men's rankings

Březina on ice

2012-01-10T02:48:00.000-06:00

Michal Březina

Men's rankings

Rippon on ice

2012-01-09T06:19:00.004-06:00

Adam Rippon

Men's rankings

on ice

2012-01-09T00:44:00.000-06:00

This blog is being put on ice for the next couple of weeks while I edit two collections of my poetry to be published this month.

So in the interlude, I am posting some of my favorite figure skaters — on ice!

Closing Plato's Cave

2012-01-08T06:24:00.015-06:00

Jan Mycielski

February 7, 2012 will be Jan Mycielski's 80th birthday. He is known perhaps to topologists and graph theorists for his work in those fields, but I know about him for his work in mathematical logic and his interpretation of mathematics: intentionalism (Mathematics is "a description of finite structures consisting of finitely many individually imagined objects"). I wrote about that in Mathematica materialis, or How not to be lured into Plato's cave.

What is this all about?

Mathematics as generally taught in schools is thought to commit one to the existence of sets with an infinite number of elements.

Take one of the axioms of arithmetic of natural numbers:

(forall (m) (if (natural m) (exists (n) (and (natural n) (succ m n)))))

Here I'm using a formulation of the axioms with S-expressions for the object language. (succ m n) says n is the successor of m.

(forall list-of-variables expression)
(exists list-of-variables expression)

are interpreted in the standard way as the universal and existential quantifiers.

What Jan Mycielski does is add a domain of quantification:

(forall P list-of-variables expression)
(exists Q list-of-variables expression)

where P and Q are the domains over which the variables range.

The above axiom becomes

(forall P (m) (if (natural m) (exists Q (n) (and (natural n) (succ m n)))))

and the interpretation is that when domains of quantification are nested, then the domain of the inner quantification is a superset of the domain that encloses it. (The inner-more you go, the bigger the sets get.) And not only that, but all domains of quantification are finite! (When the domains are the same as in standard logic one is committed to an infinite set of natural numbers, but this is not the case for nesting domains.)

If one has an entire mathematical theory (expressed as a collection of S-expressions) then one is talking about variables only ranging over finite sets, but one gets bigger and bigger finite sets as needed in any practical application of the theory. Lavine's book (discussed in the previous post) likens this to getting bigger and bigger bags of beans when needed. (I guess it helps to be a bean counter.)

So whatever Platonic infinities mathematicians hold dear can be dispensed with (with the Mycielskian change of quantification, of course).

Plato's Cave is closed.

Politics, be a sport

2012-01-06T02:31:00.001-06:00

Of politics, the sport I view,
like others watch the balls
that fly above the fields run through
the dulled suburban sprawls:

It's back and forth, dialectic'ly,
and people are its pawns.
It's making myth and cunning pleas,
and language is its brawn.

The others: frivolous delights,
but do not have the heft
of history-made human plights
and all that we have left.

The team who wins will change our lives
much more than people know,
the people who themselves deprive
of watching Maddow's show.

It's about time

2012-01-03T03:46:00.002-06:00

The beginning of a new year (calendrically speaking) is a timely time to think about time, whether it's pinning down the details of the difference between a year and the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun, or reading about what philosophers have to say about it. But with all the December news of the results coming from the Large Hadron Collider, I thought about time from a quantum particle's perspective.

We (humans) remember the past, but wonder about the future. (Curiously, it's not the reverse.) This has to do with a complicated explanation that involves the second law of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and boundary conditions set at the origin of the big bang (Huw Price, Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, prce.hu/w/TAAP.html). We "perceive" an arrow of time.

At the level of quantum particles, there is no time arrow as such. "The behavior of the microworld appears paradoxical only when we insist on applying to it concepts from the macroworld that have no meaning at the elementary level" (Victor Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum, colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/localepr.html): "A quantum system can thus be viewed as being influenced by its future as well as its past. The final condition defines all the possible outcomes, with a quantum mechanical probability calculated for each. One of these outcomes happens in accordance with these probabilities. As long as the dice are being tossed to determine the outcome, that is, we do not have deterministic hidden variables, then the macroworld can develop with a future that is not already written in the stars."

There is a wonderful story in the Huw Price book (mentioned above) about an imaginary planet, Ypiaria. The following comes from an edited version of a post on a board on The Straight Dope.

boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-279859.html
JasonFin 10-08-2004, 07:22 PM

By modern standards the criminal code of Ypiaria (pronounced "E-P-R-ia") allowed its police force excessive powers of arrest and interrogation. Random detention and questioning were accepted weapons in the fight against serious crime. This is not to say the police had an entirely free hand, however. On the contrary, there were strict constraints on the questions the police could address to anyone detained in this way. One question only could be asked, to be chosen at random from a list of three: 

(1) Are you a murderer? 
(2) Are you a thief? 
(3) Have you committed adultery? 

Detainees who answered "yes" (Y) to the chosen question were punished accordingly, while those who answered "no" (N) were immediately released. (Lying seems to have been frowned on, but no doubt was not unknown.)

To ensure that these guidelines were strictly adhered to, records were required to be kept of every such interrogation. Some of these records have survived, and therein lies our present concern. The records came to be analyzed by the psychologist Alexander Graham Doppelganger, known for his work on long distance communication. Doppelganger realized that among the many millions of cases in the surviving records there were likely to be some in which the Ypiarian police had interrogated both members of a pair of twins. He was interested in whether in such cases any correlation could be observed between the answers given by each twin. 

As we now know, Doppelganger's interest was richly rewarded. He uncovered the two striking and seemingly incompatible correlations now known collectively as Doppelganger's Twin Paradox . He found that

(8.1) When each member of a pair of twins was asked the same question, both always gave the same answer;

and that

(8.2) When each member of a pair of twins was asked a different question, they gave the same answer on close to 25 percent of such occasions.

It may not be immediately apparent that these results are in any way incompatible. But Doppelganger reasoned as follows: 8.1 means that whatever it is that disposes Ypiarians to answer Y or N to each of the three possible questions 1, 2, and 3, it is a disposition that twins always have in common. For example, if YYN signifies the property of being disposed to answer Y to questions 1 and 2 and N to question 3, then correlation 8.1 implies that if one twin is YYN then so is his or her sibling. Similarly for the seven other possible such states: in all, for the eight possible permutations of two possible answers to three possible questions. (The possibilities are the two homogeneous states YYY and NNN, and the six inhomogeneous states YYN, YNY, NYY, YNN, NYN, and NNY.)

Turning now to 8.2, Doppelganger saw that there were six ways to pose a different question to each pair of twins: the possibilities we may represent by 1:2, 2:1, 1:3, 3:1, 2:3, and 3:2. (1:3 signifies that the first twin is asked question 1 and the second twin question 3, for example.) How many of these possibilities would produce the same answer from both twins? Clearly it depends on the twins' shared dispositions. If both twins are YYN, for example, then 1:2 and 2:1 will produce the same response (in this case, Y) and the other four possibilities will produce different responses. So if YYN twins were questioned at random, we should expect the same response from each in about 33 percent of all cases. And for homogeneous states, of course, all six posible question pairs produce the same result: YYY twins will always answer Y and NNN twins will always answer N.

Hence, Doppelganger realized, we should expect a certain minimum correlation in these different question cases. We cannot tell how many pairs of Ypiarian twins were in each of the eight possible states, but we can say that whatever their distribution, confessions should correlate with confessions and denials with denials in at least 33 percent of the different question interrogations. For the figure should be 33 percent if all the twins are in inhomogeneous states, and higher if some are in homogeneous states. And yet, as 8.2 describes, the records show a much lower figure.

Doppelganger initially suspected that this difference might be a mere statistical fluctuation. As newly examined cases continued to confirm the same pattern, however, he realized that the chances of such a variation were infinitesimal. His next thought was therefore that the Ypiarian twins must generally have known what question the other was being asked, and determined their answer partly on this basis. He saw that it would be easy to explain 8.2 if the nature of one's twin's question could influence one's own answer. Indeed, it would be easy to make a total anticorrelation in the different question cases be compatible with 8.1—with total correlation in the same question cases.

Doppelganger investigated this possibility with some care. He found, however, that twins were always interrogated separately and in isolation. As required, their chosen questions were selected at random, and only after they had been separated from one another. There therefore seemed no way in which twins could conspire to produce the results described in 8.1 and 8.2. Moreover, there seemed a compelling physical reason to discount the view that the question asked of one twin might influence the answers given by another. This was that the separation of such interrogations was usually spacelike in the sense of special relativity; in other words, neither interrogation occurred in either the past or the future light cone of the other. (It is not that the Ypiarian police force was given to space travel, but that light traveled more slowly in those days. The speed of a modern carrier pigeon is the best current estimate.) Hence according to the principle of the relativity of simultaneity, there was no determinate sense in which one interrogation took place before the other.

This is the problem posed by the EPR experiment in a nutshell, but instead of twins we are talking about entangled particles and instead of answers to questions we are talking about measurements of the particles' "spin" along their 3 axes (there is an uncertainty relation between these spins). As the great physicist Richard Feynman said, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics ... do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will go 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." The weirdness of QM, and the difficulty with imagining "how can it be like than" in a way consistent with the view that reality exists before we observe it, extends to other famous experiments and thought-experiments, like the Double-slit experiment and the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment. (Is the cat "really" alive or dead before it is measured?) But Bell's theorem and the EPR experiment show most clearly what the basic problem here is for a realist.

A number of different "interpretations" of quantum-mechanical weirdness have emerged over the years, with none yielding any new physical predictions (and thus being experimentally indistinguishable) but each offering a different way to conceptualize what's "really" going on in these sorts of experiments. 

1. The Copenhagen Interpretation

Basically, the Copenhagen interpretation says that we shouldn't worry about how what's really going on in the first place—science can only deal with correlating and predicting the results of various measurements, but it can't tell us anything about what goes on when we're not looking. This is basically a logical positivist perspective, and it was preferred by Bohr.

2. "Objective Collapse" interpretation

Here the wave-particle duality is taken literally—the world exists as a wavelike potential when it's not being observed, but somehow measurements periodically "collapse" the wavefunction into a definite state. Some versions of this suppose that it's consciousness that does the collapsing, others suppose that an entangled system collapses once it reaches a certain limit in mass. Unlike the other interpretations, these might actually be expected to yield different predictions than orthodox QM—so far, there's no evidence for anything like this though.

3. The Bohm-de Broglie interpretation

Bell's theorem shows that no local hidden variable theory can explain the results of the EPR experiment, but that leaves open the possibility of a nonlocal hidden variables theory where particles can communicate faster than light. This is the route taken by Bohm and de Broglie's interpretation. In the Ypiarian story, this would be like the twins having a psychic link which allows one to know what question the other was asked, and adjust his own answer accordingly.

4. The Many-Worlds interpretation.

This interpretation takes the mathematical formalism of QM literally and proposes that the wavefunction is all there is. This means that when I measure the state of a particle that's in superposition, instead of "collapsing" it into a definite state, I just become entangled with it and enter into a superposition myself; basically, I "split" into two versions of myself, one of whom observes one state and another of whom observes another. In popular accounts this is sometimes explained in terms of the entire universe splitting into parallel histories all the time, but it's a bit more subtle than that, since different "worlds" can interfere with each other and cannot be viewed as totally "parallel", although thermodynamics may explain the appearance of splitting through a phenomenon called decoherence. For technical reasons this interpretation preserves locality, and it's also 100% deterministic to boot (although it suggests an odd kind of subjective indeterminacy in which my first-person experience randomly chooses which split copy to become—hence a variation of this interpretation is the many-minds interpretation which deals with this issue a little more explicitly). This interpretation is seen as being the most theoretically elegant one by a number of physicists, and it seems that it is sometimes implicitly assumed in quantum cosmology, although physicists are often agnostic about whether other worlds/histories are actually "real." Many-worlds could also make sense of quantum computation, which some physicists believe can be understood in terms of the quantum computer performing different computations in different worlds and then combining the results through interference.

5. Transactional interpretation [Time symmetry, or Advanced action]

The EPR experiment can also be explained if you assume the future can affect the past, so that the particle's original properties are affected by the measurements that will be made on them later, once they are separated. In the Ypiarian story, this would mean that the twin's choices to commit or not commit various crimes would be affected by which questions they would be asked much later when they're interrogated. This isn't as strange as it sounds, since all the laws of physics we currently know of are time-symmetric (they look the same forwards as they do backwards) and apparently the apparent "arrow of time" emerges solely from statistical mechanics, perhaps because the universe started off in a very low-entropy state. Huw Price's book Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, which I quoted from above, deals with this problem, and he favors a version of this interpretation.

So, those are the various interpretations. As I said, the main problem is that none of them really gives any new testable predictions, which is a bit unsatisfying. There's some good reason to think that a theory of quantum gravity would transform our understanding of QM somewhat, so perhaps such a theory will depend on a modified version of one of these interpretations that is testable in some way. In any case, Bell's inequality shows definitively than no classical, realist picture of the world can explain the EPR results, so whatever the truth turns out be, it's guaranteed to violate our cherished assumptions in one way or another (... faster-than light signaling, parallel universes‚ the future affecting the past — take your pick!)

So there it is. I pick the last one: A particle (as opposed to a person) remembers and wonders about its past and future in equal measure!

added 2011/01/23: Does Time-Symmetry Imply Retrocausality? How the Quantum World Says "Maybe"

As You Post It

2011-12-31T07:28:00.002-06:00

All the world's a blog,
And all the men and women merely posters ...

I have, I feel sometimes, too many streams of my own to feed: Blogger, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, ...

Two of each, up until LinkedIn, which I totally neglect, as well as a couple of others I forget right now ...

And now I'm producing ebooks as well. These are bigger chunks than these posts for sure ...

This doesn't count comments I post on posts in other streams: other's blogs, other's Google+ posts, NYTimes.com, ...

And all those circles (Google+) and lists (Twitter) and RSS streams (Google Reader) I need to read and manage ...

People say they don't blog, but they are probably lying. Every time they make a comment on a blog, or on Facebook, or whatever ... they are blogging (publishing posts) too.

It's all one big blog and we are all blogging into it.

"Doesn't he ever talk?" a prisoner in Cool Hand Luke says, referring to the 'Man With No Eyes, the guard who then shoots a bird from the sky. "I think he just said something," Luke replies.

photo from Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Antiwar Horse

2011-12-26T02:00:00.005-06:00

I agree with Indiewire reviewer Peter Knegt: War Horse is a "bizarrely gay" movie. But it is bizarre in the sense that it is totally unexpected. People going in probably know it's about the love of a young man (Albert) for a horse (Joey) and vice versa. But who would know it's also about the love of the horse Joey for another horse (the "black horse", Topthorn)? It's like the two "war horses" are the first openly gay soldiers in the military. A breakthrough moment.

It helps of course that Albert (played by Jeremy Irvine) is incredibly beautiful — the camera loves him as much as Joey — but there are others too worth noting who come along and display compassion for Joey (e.g. Gunther, played by the German actor David Kross). That I heard sobbing throughout the sold-out theater during the last twenty minutes of the movie means it appeals to everyone (not just gay men).

But what Spielberg does with this movie is amazing. It is like John Ford (The Searchers) on steroids. Some reviewers and commenters take the movie down a notch or two because they think it is too schmaltzy, or the dialog too corny. But they are missing it completely. There is so much going on here, and it's not only the homage to Ford. The trench warfare scenes bring back images of Stanley Kubrick's antiwar movie Paths of Glory.

At the heart of the movie is a scene in "No Man's Land" between British and German forces. A Englishman (Geordie, played by Toby Kebbell) and a German meet alone to rescue Joey who has been caught in barbed wire. One has no idea what the war is about.

In all, I think that this is the best antiwar movie I've ever seen. War is a shitty deal for humans — and horses.

2011 in collision

2011-12-25T05:06:00.004-06:00

Gravity supersymmetric'ly reigns:
That's what Large Hadron is trying to love.
Strings and branes and peppermint canes.
Is that what the M-verse is made of?

Arab protester's front page on the TIME.
Libyan rebels have raised a new flag.
Occupy's message has started to climb.
What happened to Tea Party's teabags?

Ebooks bypass the printers' ink jets.
Kindles and tablets and NOOKs, oh my!
The publishing world is hedging its bets.
The old-fashioned bookstore is starting to die.

Osama Bin Laden gets one in the eye.
Republicans give credit to Cheney and Bush.
"Obama's a weakling," Republicans cry.
"Tax cuts and shutdowns is all we will push."

Sheen and Weiner. Casey Anthony.
Jerry Sandusky? Sports fans' heads in sand.
Apes and War Horse just want to be free.
Time now to strike up the New Year's Eve band.

photo: LHC reports discovery of its first new particle, BBC News

placed in Poets United Poetry Pantry #81 and in dVerse Poets Pub Poetics—Endings & Beginnings

M's Gödel

2011-12-18T03:33:00.024-06:00

Machine M thinks it's a real smarty pants that believes it will never print false statements and will eventually print all true statements. For the sake of argument, let's say it can print with at least the characters A-Z and *.

For example, M could print out ONE*PLUS*ONE*EQUALS*TWO, which could be a long-winded way of printing 1+1=2. Count that as a true statement.

ONE*PLUS*ONE*EQUALS*THREE ?
Count that as something M would never print if it's true to its belief that it will never print a false statement.

Now strings printed out by M of the following forms have particular meanings (M is "speaking" in the first person here):

P*x	"I will print x."
NP*x	"I will never print x."
PR*x	"I will print xx."
NPR*x	"I will never print xx."

For example, NPR*FOO means "I will never print FOOFOO." NP*FOOFOO means the same thing. If M ever did print both FOOFOO and NPR*FOO, then its belief in its truthfulness would be violated.

Now consider whether M would ever print

NPR*NPR* ("I will never print NPR*NPR*.")

If M does print NPR*NPR* at some point, it has printed a false statement.

But if M never prints NPR*NPR*, then NPR*NPR* is a true statement that M never prints.

So either M sometimes prints false statements, or there are true statements that M never prints!

Sorry, M. Not such a smarty pants after all.

* * *

The above is derived from World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem, which relates all this to the limits of machines that produce only true statements in arithmetic.

High-speed sonnet

2011-12-13T02:17:00.011-06:00

Let every boarding be a Hitchcock thrill,
a mystery express from east to west,
a silver bullet train that kills the still,
revive a broken, stagnant land distressed.

And high-speed lines, like healthy arteries,
send lifeblood to the countrysides and towns,
and trains of populated coaches be
America's corpuscles world-renowned.

Reactionaries want no part, it seems,
and therein lies bemusing irony:
When once rail moved a country and its dreams,
it now could be its high-tech destiny.

What fuels romance at every turn? The trains,
that also are the dreams of bright geek brains.

Commentary: Obama should set as his goal his legacy to include the USHSRS (United States High-Speed Rail System), in the way the Interstate Highway System is in the legacy of Eisenhower, the moon landing of Kennedy.

photo from US HIGH SPEED RAIL ASSOCIATION

placed in imaginary garden with real toads Open Link Monday and in dVerse Poets Pub OpenLinkNight

Gingrich's new site

2011-12-10T08:54:00.000-06:00

I, of Newt, in tow of blog.

BTW: Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

Feed of streams

2011-12-08T10:08:00.006-06:00

From every stroke a feed of streams

that run throughout the sphere

of internetting clouds and teams

of current technogear.

They go by names—the streams, that is—

that brands their place to be

the kings of social network biz

that range from A to Z.

Of all the posts that do flow in

and sent electric'ly,

some subset only just begin

to wind way to me.

Then tap into that world, I say,

and send your bits of rhyme.

Who knows on whose crystal display

they'll spend a bit of time.

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads ~ Fireblossom Friday: Arrivals & Departures

Steven Wright, b. December 6, 1955

2011-12-06T03:41:00.000-06:00

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."

"I bought some batteries, but they weren't included."

"I intend to live forever. So far, so good."

"I invented the cordless extension cord."

"I like to reminisce with people I don't know."

"I was at this restaurant. The sign said 'Breakfast Anytime'. So I ordered French Toast in the Renaissance."

"I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done."

"I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography."

"If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?"

"Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time."

"I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research."

"How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?"

"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met."

"When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety."

"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths."

"Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?"

"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."

"I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place."

"I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly."

"Borrow money from a pessimist - they don't expect it back."

"Five out of four people have trouble with fractions."

"My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted."

"I mixed this glass of water myself. Two parts H, one part O. I don’t trust anybody!"

"There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators."

"When I was little, my grandfather used to make me stand in a closet for five minutes without moving. He said it was elevator practice."

"How young can you die of old age?"

"I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five."

"I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out."

"It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature."

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

"Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country."

official site: stevenwright.com

Hermku

2011-11-30T14:43:00.003-06:00

I propose a new poetical form: The Hermku.
(It's 9-9-9 syllables instead of 5-7-5.)

Fast women get me into trouble.
I gotta keep my dick in my pants.
I'm taking the next bus to nowhere.

Re: Transportation chief Janette Sadik-Khan says city will use haiku to boost street safety

Thanks for . . .

2011-11-24T18:34:00.005-06:00

Nerdy stuff and food enough.
Brian Greene and film's James Dean.
"Occupy" and asking "Why?"
Up with Chris^* and YU's miss^*.
Hawking's book^* and Noble's NOOK.
Gaga songs, buff boys in thongs.
Krugman's blogs and chili dogs.
Google's cloud and Maureen Dowd.
Network friends and Hubble's lens.
iPod Touch. Thanks, Steve, so much.

* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_with_Chris_Hayes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_YU55
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Design_(book)

placed in Poets United Poetry Pantry #76 and dVerse Poets Pub Giving Thanks

Night Chant by Andrew Demcak — Review

2011-11-20T06:36:00.000-06:00

First, an editorial issue, and then on to the poems.

I purchased (a month ago now) Night Chant by Andrew Demcak (ebook at Smashwords) to read on my NOOK and iPod Touch and noted a problem that is common with ebook versions of poetry books: Longer lines are not indented when they need to wrap (reflow) to the next line. When they are indented properly, the reader can easily distinguish one line from the next (as they obviously can in the print edition). But this is easily solved. All one has to do is to add two lines to the class selector that wraps lines in the source. (In this case, EPUB, and the class selector happened to be ".western8", and I added them after the ".margin-top: 0;" line):

padding-left: 1em;
text-indent: -1em;

What does this do? When lines are longer and they need to wrap, the line continues by being indented slightly rather than flushed margin left (and looking like they are the beginning of a new line, which they aren't). When you change the font size reading the poems on your device, you will see what I mean.

I did this and can now can pleasurably read these poems on my iPod Touch, which they are now perfectly fitted for.

And these poems are fun to read. Lines of gay-sexual intrigue abound. Like in the poem 'Hustler': "The tattling ripples of rolled-in sheets. / My limbs are golden accoutrements. // Persuasive, served like sashimi." These are the poet's memories of men and sex and becoming. "My first sex, spread-eagle on a tern's nest" ('Abalone Cove'). I like self-referential 'Font': "It is a merciless desert here, this page. / The nouns wince, jot by jot." Pop-cultural references, like in 'Death Portrait of Gene Kelly'. Sexy poems, like 'Eros'. Bringing in technology, like "My iPhone spits out nubile syllables, / his voice chattering back to the bones' receiver" ('Pulse'). At the end of Part 2 is the poem 'Night Chant' itself.

If you are a fan of gay poetry, this is a must-read. It has everything, I think.

If Jesus had been executed in Texas

2011-11-17T19:08:00.003-06:00

If Jesus had been executed in Texas, there would be figurines of a little Jesus on an execution table with a needle in his arm for Catholics, and just an empty execution table for Protestants.

Why I don't watch The Walking Dead (AMC)

2011-11-14T01:11:00.004-06:00

I get this series on my teevee and have watched bits of episodes, but haven't gotten enough interest in watching more yet.

I realize the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for a world following a Tea Party takeover, but I get enough of that watching the Republican debates.

The grackle fill November sky

2011-11-13T17:49:00.000-06:00

The grackle fill November sky —
I don't know why —
then stain the autumn field with black,
before their own crude yakety-yak
tells them to fly.

I don't know why.

Doxologies 2.0

2011-11-08T04:13:00.016-06:00

play and sing along

Holy, holy, holy! Lord Net almighty!
Early in the morning our words shall post to Thee.
Holy, holy, holy, erudite and flighty!
Net in three Portals, bless-ed Trinity.

Praise Net, all creatures' daily posts;
Praise Net above, ye heav'nly hosts;
Praise Net, from where we make a fuss;
Praise Facebook, Twitt-er, Google Plus!

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads

Saint Philip Thrift

2011-11-07T01:29:00.004-06:00

The Cathedral of Saint Philip Thrift House has been an important ministry of the Cathedral of Saint Philip since 1949. It sells a wide variety of donated items, including clothing, toys, furniture, kitchen and household items and books. All profits are distributed to benefit the needy. — BuckheadPatch

And I didn't know I was in the running!

Weekend morning dialectics with your breakfast

2011-11-06T18:22:00.005-06:00

Up w/Chris Hayes (Sat. 7am-9am ET, Sun. 8am-10am ET) on MSNBC stands apart in the medium of weekend TV news commentary. It actually does dialectics.

Pundits sit around a table with mostly-ignored continental breakfast fare (Is it supposed to suggest the show's continental flair?) and actually engage in constructive argument and analysis. This is unlike shows like NBC's Meet The Press or ABC's This Week, where their panel segment consists mainly of restrained participants saying their bit in their allotted time slots without the back-and-forth dialogs found on Up. This is orchestrated with fine skill by the host, Chris Hayes.

The Twitter hashtag for viewers is #uppers, and the show's profile is @upwithchris.

Good show.

I like the fall

2011-11-04T06:35:00.003-05:00

There are places where the leaves don't dry
or color-patch the blue fall sky,
where 'autumn' seems like a foreign word,
though early morning light's deferred.
The air is lightened of its humid yoke,
but darkness sooner pulls its cloak
as welcome coolness rules the day.
All in all, I like the fall, I have to say.

placed in the Poets United Thursday Think Tank: The Waning Days of Fall

Poets United: Interview

2011-11-02T17:40:00.002-05:00

There's an interview of me at Poets United. Sherry did a wonderful job putting it together.

Hallowqueens

2011-11-01T01:53:00.004-05:00

On Halloween — high holy day of gay —
the ids raid stores and closets for
the ego costumes that they hope will say,
"Tonight — this once — then nevermore."

The Mormons and some Christians say, "No-no,"
to guys who want to dress like girls,
"boys should dress like a Spider-Man" — who's so
more gay than wearing mink and pearls.

The night is done with costumes on the floor,
the day is brightening the sky.
The hallowqueens return to daily chore
of back-to-working shirt and tie.

LDS ward’s ban on ‘cross-gender’ costumes draws boos, The Salt Lake Tribune

The Bible Sonnet

2011-10-30T23:00:00.002-05:00

You cannot argue with the Bible, man,
because the words therein are what they are:
a trashy bric-a-brac of tales and tolds
of tribal strictures from a land of sand,
of sects who knew no physics of the stars,
and now to dim know-nothing souls is sold.

The Bible is a tinseled B-rate script:
of genocidal romps and bigotry,
of poetry that sometimes is sublime,
of magic shows and dead raised from stone crypts.
It does not bode well for the thinking free:
the world, you see, is just on borrowed time.

But I would change not one thing in its books,
all sixty-six: they've moved both scribes and schnooks.

placed in the Poets United Poetry Pantry #73

When writers' brick walls crumble not

2011-10-28T04:25:00.009-05:00

When writers' brick walls crumble not,
cementing out the muse,
I turn to chips made kettle-pot
and sweet hamburger blues.

On top is stacked tomato red,
lettuce with purple fringe.
It's all on salty pretzel bread
that's griddled just a tinge.

Add spicy mustard, pickled dill
cucumbers, onions too.
I hope the burger doesn't spill
when I add cheese fondue.

That may not let the muse go in,
but one thing is for sure:
My tummy's left with one big grin ·)
— one writer's fond detour.

placed in Poets United Thursday Think Tank #72: Writer's Block

back-alley Wednesdays

2011-10-26T01:44:00.001-05:00

the white liquid blasts
with sounds of ahh!
a row of cum-filled men
so gallantly streaming
into the air
from cannons size six to ten

their faces are frozen
their lips are bared
their muscles are flexed and taut
there's no other moment
that's frozen in time
that memory's so magically caught

white glistening streams
like lightening strikes
electrify the scene
it's like a church service
and chorus sings praise
a Wednesday night routine

the camaraderie
of men who replay
these moments of cum commune
to free their elixir
from anxious ball sacks
beneath the bright full moon

Flying Spaghetti Monster

2011-10-22T17:22:00.011-05:00

Strings and branes and M-Theory tales:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.
Oodles of noodles wave out as He sails
Into the twilight with nothing but love:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.

Flying Spaghetti vibrating in rhyme:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.
Eleven dimensions — de facto space-time,
Seven dimensions are bended and shoved:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.

Supersymmetric He makes gravity:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.
Filling His churches with grand levity,
Large scales and quanta now sing hand and glove:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.

All worlds' religions He mocks tongue in cheek:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.
Churches are filled with the bard and the geek
Hearing His psalm, not a hawk but a dove:
That's what the Fly-Monster's made of.

photo from the pews of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
placed in the Poets United Poetry Pantry #72

#SpiritDay

2011-10-20T05:44:00.007-05:00

The day the Purple beats the hate,
repels the negatives,
leaves bogus churchmarms in its wake
without their big-hair wigs.

It's Purple mountain energy
that 'lectrifies the scorned —
the ones in search of dignity
but just are this way born.

The Purple people eat the love,
digest its hopeful seed,
reminding generations of
what's real humanity.

#SpiritDay

placed in Poets United Thursday Think Tank #71 - Energy

#OccupyPoetry

2011-10-17T08:02:00.003-05:00

They're camping out in social nets,
they write outside the range,
before the current world forgets,
before the stock exchange.

What difference does their crafted lines
make in the scheme of things?
If they could nourish those with signs
with bold linguistic strings.

#OccupyPoetry

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads' Open Link Monday

Southern Baptist Conventions

2011-10-16T04:58:00.004-05:00

And every other one's a Mormon cult
or a Catholic fake. Or like the Jew:
an incomplete.
The only books I will consult —
they number sixty-six: the New
the Old repletes.

The only Jesus I will ever know
believes in atheist Ayn Rand
on government:
It is the Devil that takes dough
from Godly rich men in the land
from Heaven sent.

My Holy Bible sets the rule for all —
as long as it aligns itself
Republican
and Jesus text is trumped by Paul.
It sits right-side upon my shelf
and bedside stand.

written for Poetics — Taboo Subjects in dVerse Poets Pub

Stay hungry

2011-10-14T04:48:00.011-05:00

And there is really so little room! So little time!
The poet becomes an expert packer of suitcases.
— Sylvia Plath

Tweet constraints make for creativity —
what can be said should be said sparingly —
while bloviators need the extra space.
What once was bloated words now filled with grace.

The clever twibes stay hungry all the time —
they learn to thrive by living on a dime.
They fast enough to only just consume
the room they need for crystal thoughts to bloom.

Carol Ann Duffy: texting and Twitter 'help students perfect poetry' The Telegraph

quote from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts by Sylvia Plath

this poem placed in Poets United Thursday Think Tank #70: Hunger

I use both Twitter and Google+. Google+, though, is like Twitter on Hulk-sizing steroids.

poetry in "e" major

2011-10-13T04:20:00.010-05:00

There seems to be a mindset in the poetry world that poetry is primarily to be published in print, and that electronic versions are an afterthought or annoyance. As one publisher (who publishes print and now electronic books) wrote, "For poetry and eBooks to REALLY work, you need short lines. Even the indentations on longer lines bug me (poetry is so much about form and intended line breaks)."

I think this is completely wrong. If you look at how Whitman or Ginsberg poems (which have lots of long lines) reflow in a properly marked up ebook, it is vastly more pleasing to see the long lines indented when they need to reflow than just being flushed left as if they were new lines (indistinguishable from the actual next line). When that happens, the poems are virtually unreadable. (In fact, print books reflow these lines depending on the publisher. There are always constraints, even in the print world.)

I recently bought a poetry book from Smashwords and this "feature" (of not indenting longer lines when they needed to reflow) was annoying. So I put it into Sigil (an ePub editor) and added two lines to a class selector definition (the one in that particular ebook that "wrapped" each line of the poems) in the stylesheet.css file:

padding-left: 1em;
text-indent: -1em;

Now the poems are visually pleasing and readable.

(Want proof? Go to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" at Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745), do a View→Page Source, and you can how this principle is applied in their markup. And it's for a reason they do that: It's to make sure the poem is readable whether on desktops/notebooks or on smartphones. I am looking at it right now on my MacBook and on my iPod Touch and lines are reflowed correctly in each case. This poem would not be readable otherwise.)

I think a lot of people produce content (poems in this case) in Word or something like that (really meant for producing things to print) and then rely on some automatic conversion (perhaps at Smashwords) to produce the HTML/CSS that ends up in an ebook. Markup that one intends to control how the ebook looks can be lost. This is the completely wrong way to do things if one cares about how their poems look on nooks and Kindles and smartphones. Unfortunately, this is the case of many poetry ebooks on the various vendors it seems.

I’m a believer in poets doing (or getting help to do) their own HTML/CSS coding. It turns out that that code is part of the poem itself, just like the words.

And actually, the reluctance to change from a "p" (print) perspective to an "e" (electronic) pespective is beside the point. The public wants "e" now, and interest in "p" versions is waning. So moving to an "e" perspective for creating and disseminating poetry is a given. It's a new age.

Printed books are the hallmarks of elite societies, but today "e"-devices are proliferating in underdeveloped countries like those in Africa <allafrica.com/stories/201011230539.html>, enabling youth to access thousands of books they would never have access to in a print world. The "e"-world is liberating, the "p"-world one of confinement and isolation.

Mystery of 3:19

2011-10-12T04:14:00.006-05:00

Why do afternoon baseball games start at 3:19pm?

arlington.org/articles/?action=view&articleId=783:

[Game 2 began at 3:19pm om Monday, October 11th in Arlington.]

Game 3 of the A.L.C.S. begins at 7:05pm central on Tuesday, October 11th at Tigers Stadium in Detroit. Game 4 is Wednesday, October 12th at 3:19pm at Detroit. Game 5 (if necessary) is Thursday, October 13th at 3:19pm.

Games 6 & 7 (if necessary) would be played in Arlington at Rangers Ballpark. Game 6 would be Saturday, October 15th at 7:05pm. Game 7 would be Sunday, October 17th at 7:05pm.

Why is it 3:19pm? The 5 minute "buffer" (7:05pm) makes "sense" (it's not 7:04pm — if 3:19 is "correct", why not 7:04?), so why isn't it 3:05pm? or 3:20pm? (Those two times would make sense.) Why 19?

3:16 makes sense for Jesus-loving Texas.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

3:18 would be a bitch.

... whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

I don't think 3:19 is much better, though.

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.

So what's the deal with 3:19?

The GOP Show

2011-10-11T07:47:00.011-05:00

to the tune of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966)

Meet Romney, who's been most everywhere,
And Gingrich, who's had the most affairs.
But Michele's only seen the light
A girl can see from Christian Right —
What a crazy stare!

They're the can-didates,
GOP candidates all the way,
Running to be the president
of the whole USA.

Where Perry adores succession threats,
And Jon likes science and Paul no debts,
Herm Cain disputes the ozone hole,
Santorum, it's Google he can't control —
What a wild octet!

Still they're can-didates,
Republican candidates and you'll find
They laugh alike, they walk alike,
At times they even talk alike —

You can lose your mind,
When candidates are eight of a kind!

Mitt Romney, Ron Perry, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum appear today in the GOP presidential nomination debate at Dartmouth College.

Writing for Derrida

2011-10-10T17:01:00.017-05:00

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn’t understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
– Jacques Derrida

Yesterday (October 9, 2011) was the seventh year since the death of Jacques Derrida, the inventor of deconstruction.

Most people (including writers) don't think much about Derrida, but I think his invention may have been most significant philosophical development of the second half of the twentieth century.

I write this being one who has read only a moderate selection of what he wrote and not being anywhere close to being a 'Derrida expert'. But like everyone else, I have my own pithy definition, which is probably wrong:

Deconstruction begins with recognition that writing is a natural entity without metaphysics.

Once that step is made, where it goes from there may be useful or not.

One thing is for sure: Derrida raises the hackles of religious fundamentalists and secular foundationalists alike. That makes him attractive right there.

Now he is compared to a variety of anti-foundationalists — Nietzsche, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Quine (who dissed him), Rorty, Foucault — but what distinguishes him is his claim of writing itself as the object of his study.

I've read that some deconstructionists say that since virtually anything humans make or do can be considered writing (a statue, a film, a dance, a walk in the park, ...), anything can be deconstructed.

I'll just say that I define writing to be that which I can type on a Mac keyboard into a simple text editor.

Now forty years ago, I was using an APL keyboard. And one can do some interesting writing (APL programs, naturally) with that. And then there's the infamous Space-cadet (Symbolics Lisp Machine) keyboard . But I'll just stick to the Mac keyboard.

But still there are things one can consider to be writing sticking with that. Math is writing when it is done in LaTeX math mode, for example. One could do it in MathML, but LaTeX is the most elegant language for writing mathematics ever invented. Math is not writing if it is done in Word or PDF.

Here is Schrodinger's Equation:

i\hbar\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t} = \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\psi + V(\mathbf{r})\psi

Copy and paste it here and see. (Also see math.etsu.edu/LaTeXMathML and right click on a formula to see its MathML translation.)

The proofs of Euclid's Elements are literature like any other.

Computer programs are writing. (See 433 Examples in 132 (or 162*) programming languages.) The way they are portrayed sparsely on a screen make many look like poems.

Writing web pages and ebooks in HTML/CSS/JS is certainly writing. (You need some of this to make poems look good on various displays, for example. You don't write poems in Word or PDF.)

I'm sure I'll think of other things that are writing.

So whatever it is you write, give a nod to Derrida.

Current events note: How would Derrida respond to 'Operation Wall Street'? The excerpt below seems to be right on target.

The ‘New International’ is an untimely link, without status ... without coordination, without party, without country, without national community, without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of New International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who ... continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism. It is a call for them to ally themselves, in a new, concrete and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers’ international, in the critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalize it.
— Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International

"Derrida seeks to do the work of inheriting from Marx, that is, not communism, but of the philosophy of responsibility, and of Marx's spirit of radical critique."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specters_of_Marx

Comedism and M-theory

2011-10-09T06:13:00.029-05:00

In the beginning was the Joke, and the Joke was with God, and the Joke was God.

Steven Gimbel, author of the blog Philosophers' Playground, is the founder of Comedism — the philosophy qua theology of seeing the funny side of existence. Its revelation comes in a continuing series of posts.

Comedism -- The New Religion
That which is holy is that which is funny. Our God is funnier than their God.

Its central object of worship and study is the Joke.

Comedist Basics
Jokes have two parts, a set up in which a normal situation you think you understand is sketched (a chicken crosses a street or the pope, a rabbi, and a Viagra salesman walk into a bar) and then the punchline that forces you radically rethink how you understood the world of the set up (to get to the other side or at least the beer isn't flat anymore). The humor exists in that moment when your brain is split, trying unsuccessfully to resolve the tension between the two incompatible interpretations. The very possibility of a joke presupposes that reality may always be looked at in more than one way.

Its scripture is only beginning.

The Comedist Manefesto
In the beginning, there was the LORD. And He was funny.

On the first day, the LORD made light. He made light of everything. And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the second day, the LORD created the Heavens and the Earth (in a way that is completely consistent with our best current geological theories). And He created the sun, and did moon the Earth. And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

[and so on]

That Comedism is at odds with Fundamentalism is no joke.

Comedist Anti-Fundamentalism
For a joke to be a joke, there must be more than one way to look at the world.

And that is the central belief of Comedism. There are always different ways to look at reality. The world is a multifaceted place and it is the appreciation of these distinct perspectives, even ones that seem irreconcilable, that makes life rich, interesting, and most of all, funny.

[F]undamentalists ... think there is one truth and one truth only ... They do not even allow the possibility that there are multiple ways to understand reality.

A year ago, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow published The Grand Design, a book on all things M-theory. (M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity.) The scientific point-of-view promoted in this book — which they name "model-dependent realism" — appears to be very much in the spirit of Comedism.

Wikipedia: Model-dependent realism
Model-dependent realism is a controversial philosophical approach to scientific inquiry, which accepts that reality can always be interpreted in a number of different ways, and focuses on how well our models of the world do at describing the observed phenomena. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the "true reality" of the model. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.

A quote from their book:

It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations. Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.

And what does Hawking say of M-theory?

Stephen Hawking - M-theory Makes God Unnecessary
M-theory is the theory of everything. It explains how the universe was created out of nothing in the Big Bang and how it behaves now. It governs everything we think and do.

Now it's a matter of debate what the "M" stands for.

Wikipedia: Introduction to M-theory
In 1994, a string theorist named Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study and other important researchers considered that the five different versions of string theory might be describing the same thing seen from different perspectives. They proposed a unifying theory called "M-theory", in which the "M" is not specifically defined, but is generally understood to stand for "membrane". The words "matrix", "mother", "monster", "mystery", "magic" have also been claimed. M-theory brought all of the string theories together. It did this by asserting that strings are really 1-dimensional slices of a 2-dimensional membrane vibrating in 11-dimensional space.

"M" for the many universes it can create? For the many ways to see it? With the holy alliance of Comedism and M-theory, I know what the "M" in "M-theory" could stand for.

"Mirth"!

Nomen est omen?

2011-10-08T09:06:00.026-05:00

Was I to be true to my given name^•, I asked,
if horse would nag my every lifetime task?
Would I be bridled with the bit through every lap,
or hold my steed through every handicap?

But horse I soon began to quietly like, you see,
the studs that came undone and played with me,
and found I could not say neigh to that love. And I
just met my destiny with whinny sigh.

^• Philip is "a given name, derived from the Greek Philippos (Φίλιππος)", meaning lover (or friend) of horses.

Placed in the imaginary garden with real toads. (Use your first name in a poem.)

Nomen est omen: the name is a sign ("true to its name").
Photo: Daniel Radcliffe appears in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”.

Adam Smith in Zuccotti Park

2011-10-07T06:49:00.023-05:00

Adam Smith (from 1774) is transported into Zuccotti Park (2011) via an m-brane wormhole created by an unexpected Large Hadron Collider collision event. He sees an an oddly-dressed, mostly-young collection of people with signs that don't make sense to him. The stunned but curious Smith wonders, "WTF?"

A young "Occupy Wall Street" protester comes up to Smith.

Protester (to Smith): Hey, are you one of those Tea Party dudes?

Smith: Tea Party? No, I ... I heard about something like that that just happened on some boat in Boston. But I wasn't involved.

Protester: Oh, you're British. I can tell.

Smith: You sound American. I was just sitting around with my friend, David Hume, and ...

Protester: Who?

Smith: Is this America?

Protester: Uh, yea. New York. You OK?

Smith: (quizzically to self) OK? (Protester takes it as an acknowledgment) What is going on here?

Protester: We are here to protest against the powerful bankers and corporations. They are robbing us ninety-nine-percenters of the wealth of this nation.

Smith: Hey, I'm writing a book on the economy. (to self) Wealth of nations. Hmm ... (slight pause) Corporations are abominations. And bankers unregulated by government are left to deceive and even oppress the public. I'm on your side, lad. What are the ninety-nine-percenters?

Protester: The ones not in the richy-rich one percent. Really, we're the ones being screwed by bankers and corporations and a government that serves them, not us.

Smith: Government has to regulate banks and businesses, especially when they grow large, to protect workers and to maintain the well-being of the social fabric. Capitalism of individuals in a viable market of goods, services, and inventions cannot flourish otherwise. The alternative is corporatism, a scourge on the people.

Protester: What's your name, man. You really talk the talk!

Smith: Adam Smith.

Protester: Hey, the crazies who support the corporations always talk about someone with that name. He's supposed to be against government spending on infrastructure and social services that care for the people.

Smith: Well, that's definitely not me. That "Adam Smith" sounds deranged. The people who follow that one are misguided.

Protester: Hey, gotta march. Later man!

Protester walks away.

The Large Hadron Collider-produced wormhole, which was unstable, closes. Adam Smith is transported back to 1774 Britain and his friend David Hume.

''The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from (dealers ... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures) . . . ought never to be adopted till after having been ... examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public.''
nytimes.com/1990/04/15/business/l-adam-smith-s-warning-to-bankers-829490.html

''There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.'' Adam Smith, 1776

What Would Adam Smith Say? Justin Fox, Time Magazine, March 25, 2010

apple seed

2011-10-06T03:57:00.017-05:00

you planted quite a seed
that set the goal of what computers do —
us from the crass you freed

you followed Darwin's law
that gave us Mac OS and iOS —
you gave us, geek and all

you made them sleek and cool,
the casings your iThing devices come —
your products set the rule

your iTunes came in pods,
you redefined for all the music biz —
your talks: worshiped like gods

iPhone sure made the screen
a graceful thing of Magic gesturing —
so simple and so lean

the once elusive pad:
you conquered what naysayers said would fail
but now wish that they had

your evil China shops:
if Chinese youth used your iThings to kill
would be a mean flip-flop

and now you are at rest,
your planted Apple tree will grow I know —
to that I can attest

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
appadvice.com/appnn/2011/05/apples-ithing-nomenclature-relates-today
businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070314_109157.htm

nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html

nytimes.com/2011/10/06/business/steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html

Three cable news on Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-04T05:49:00.007-05:00

Three cable news on "Occupy Wall Street":

FOX News - It's all Obama class war speak!
They haven't read von Mises through and through!
Just like MoveOn, they haven't got a clue!

Then CNN - There's nothing much to treat.
Blocked traffic, plastic handcuffs, funny masks.
They have no goals nor clearly stated tasks.

MSNBC - Seeds of springtime wheat
are being sown down in Zuccotti Park!
It's more than just a flightless autumn lark!

Three cable news, three ways to show the world
as tweeters' tweets and bloggers' blogs are swirled.

Casting for The Beverly Hillbillies

2011-10-02T05:23:00.014-05:00

Casting Director Notepad

The Beverly Hillbillies

Granny (Daisy May Moses)
Rick Perry - The laughable Confederate Rebel still "fightin' the Yankees."

Jethro Bodine
Herman Cain - The homespun, poetic oaf who comes up with all kinds of crazy, cheesy ideas.

Elly May Clampett
Jon Huntsman - The most feminine member of the cast. Lover of "critters" and the outdoors.

J.D. "Jed" Clampett
Joe Scarborough - Generally clueless, but still tries to bridge the gap between the hillbillies and the normal world. (It is noted that no Republican presidential candidate can be cast for this role.)

Mr. Drysdale (Milburn)
Mitt Romney - "Corporations are People!"

Mrs. Drysdale (Margaret)
Peggy Noonan - "Keep those hillbillies away from me, Milburn!"

Jane Hathaway
Rachel Maddow - Who else?

Additional casting notes: In the original series there is an episode titled The Flying Saucer. Ron and Rand Paul would be perfect for two of the 'Martians'. (They are clearly not of this world.) Michele Bachmann is a consideration for the third Martian for her scary eyes. Duke, the Clampetts' hound dog: Chris Christie. Jethrine Bodine, Jethro's twin sister: Sarah Palin.

OccuPied (The Pie Party is born)

2011-10-01T04:44:00.020-05:00

Did you know that the father of the Koch brothers was a founder of the John Birch Society?

The Tea Party - the ghost of John Birch - a tool of corporate interests redux - fed on anxiety.

But then The Pie Party is born. Some come in pleats. Some come with a beat. Then, they begin to tweet.

They have Occu'Pie'd financial districts. They have thrown a 'Pie' into the face of Wall Street.

They have occupied the growing income-inequality gap. They have occupied stolen futures.

They have occupied hopelessness. They have occupied police pens. They have gotten sutures.

They have occupied the space briefly filled with hope and change. They have occupied the vast ignored.

They have occupied the hundreds of billions a year spent on wars. They have occupied corporatists' hoards.

They have occupied the places ignored by politicians. They have occupied the gaps in the lies of corporatist liars.

They have occupied a show the corporate media did not know. They have occupied a new economy. They are the Occu'Pie'rs.

Andy Borowitz: It's weird seeing Wall Street filled with people who still have their souls.
Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Together are planning multi-city events during October.

photo (Ian Murphy's cell phone): click to read article

2011/10/03: placed in the imaginary garden with real toads

Live TV trials

2011-09-29T16:17:00.002-05:00

What is it about live TV trials?
My interest would be low
but for the art of precision that the judge
maintains between the lawyers' mano a mano —
Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution
notwithstanding.

On why the Bible is a B-rate script

2011-09-25T07:58:00.024-05:00

The Bible is full of stories of a vicious, genocidal God, of heroes venerated for killing other tribes' women and children, and of people who have different beliefs being condemned.

But it also has some poetry and poignant verse.

I think even Nietzsche might have liked Ecclesiastes.

And it has some really captivating, fascinating stories that can be turned into some A-rate movies:

Moses leads the Hebrew tribe out of captivity in Egypt, and after wandering the desert for forty years, leaves it for them to invade another country, Canaan, and kill its inhabitants.

Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, is bullied by a bunch of crazy, orthodox Jews into executing Jesus, a reform Jew.

The Sermon on the Mount's not bad.

I don't get liberal Christians who try to "rescue" the Bible from conservatives by reinterpreting it to fit the way they think it should be read. They leave their brains at the door.

Leave bad enough alone.

Added after first post:
The Bible should be read literally and it is fantasy to read it otherwise. The writers actually believed in what they wrote when they were writing narrative. They believed God told Moses and Joshua to commit genocide and that the miracles actually occurred. Overall, the Bible is a pretty vicious, horrid book.

Some liberal Bible re-interpreters like to say that the Sodom story (Genesis 19) is about God punishing it for 'inhospitality'. They ignore Jude writing it was because "Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion."* Or ignore that Paul wrote "men who have sex with men ... will [not] inherit the kingdom of God." (And that includes both bottoms and tops.)

The point is: Liberal spinners trying to protect the "Holy" book will make up all sorts of things. Don't leave your brain at the door. Leave it edgy and spicy like it is!

* Although it's from a Christian apologist site (str.org), the article What was the Sin of Sodom and Gomorrah? is accurate in its textual analysis.

The teaching of 'maths' should be banned!

2011-09-24T09:27:00.007-05:00

It's "I studied math in college,"

NOT "I studied maths in college."

'Mathematics' is used with a singular verb.

'Mathematics' is a mass noun.

"The mathematics of quantum physics is complicated" is CORRECT.

"The mathematics of quantum physics are complicated" is INCORRECT.

"Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields" is from Wikipedia.

You can substitute 'math' for 'mathematics' in each sentence in American English. Try that with 'maths'.

Math is fun.
Maths is fun?
That's hard to say. :)

'Maths' should be taken with a grain of 'salt' — another mass noun!

Stage fright

2011-09-22T04:44:00.003-05:00

The stage: fretting and strutting
people, distracting from the text that wants to float
upon the screen in my imagination,
like in the silents before all they opened their big mouths.
But I close my eyes and I see what they say:
the words alone.

Hello, I'm Google Plus. And I'm Facebook.

2011-09-21T03:52:00.017-05:00

Cast

GP Google Plus (Google+)

FB Facebook

GP: Hello, I'm Google Plus.

FB: And I'm Facebook.

GP: I see you've got a lot of users there, but all the cool people are moving over to me.

FB: But everyone already has their friends and grandmas here with me who would never move over to you.

GP: Yeah, but with me, you get to interact with thinkers and trend-setters. How are you ever a "Friend" with some writer or artist you don't know anyway. That's not the way it is in the real world. You might have someone in your Favorite Authors circle. They might have you in their Faithful Fans.

FB: Hey, I'm based on the quaint idea of college facebooks. Didn't you see the movie? You have to give me a break.

GP: Or you get to interact with people based on a common interest or subject. That's what circles do.

And with me, you can edit your posts after you post them. Heck, you can even edit the comments you make on other people's posts.

FB: I'm working on all that. It's just on the long list of other things I'm working on to catch up to what people can do with you.

GP: And check out my video Hangouts. You can share all sorts of things with people there since they're all in my cloud.

FB: I haven't gotten this cloud thing pinned down yet like you have. But I'm working on it.

GP: I can run circles around you.

The soldier butterfly is out and proud

2011-09-20T10:04:00.017-05:00

caterpillar

Once on his belly crawling trenches, hidden low
beneath the dying fallen leaves of old,
he perseveres with hardened resolution so
the secret life inside he can withhold.

chrysalis

And then, a time of dormancy, a time of wait,
upon a branch of close proximity,
until what gods above there be decide his fate,
he lies, too long, in anonymity.

butterfly

The final day has come, the ugly casing splits.
The once forbidden wings are now allowed.
When on patrol or joining comrades in a blitz:
The soldier butterfly is out and proud.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ended today.
A once hidden soldier comes out: youtube.com/watch?v=DVAgz6iyK6A
photo: Brown Soldier Butterfly by Tom Newman

placed in Poets United Poetry Pantry #68

Hitchcock's trains of thought

2011-09-18T06:21:00.005-05:00

Clickety-clack goes Hitchcock's brain.
Is the vanished lady found?
Should those strangers on a train
beyond a shadow of a doubt be bound
north by northwest?
The train is filled with See men
chase unlucky protagonist ...
"Won't you come into my cabin?"
What's the locomotion of the shot?
Get the story all-aboard.
Get the hero in a real tight spot.
Get the music Herrmann-scored.
A tunnel fast approaches, train on track
to enter in. Clickety-clack.

Alfred Hitchcock is the director of such classics as The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest.

placed in the dVerse ~ Poets Pub: Poetics—Trai_n_n_n_n_n_n_n_n_s

Lexadecimal poems

2011-09-17T09:13:00.014-05:00

Ba1b0a 1a5505 5a1ad5,
1e5b05 f01ded f1eece.

10ca15 c0bb1e ce1105,
fab1ed ba11ad cea5ed.

What is that?

Balboa lassos salads,
Lesbos folded fleece.
Locals cobble cellos,
fabled ballad ceased.

A lexadecimal poem is one made from lexadecimals. If you take a hexadecimal color code that has only a, b, c, d, e, f, 0, 1, or 5 in each of its six positions (e.g. #bada55), and turn 0 into o, 1 into l, and 5 into s, and if that's a word, it's a lexadecimal^*.

Great way to make a colorful poem.

The two background colors are #ca55e1 #5ab1e5 (chosen to make the others readable), or "Cassel sables".

^*Lexadecimal was created by Jonny Richards, Peter MacRobert, David Somers & Amanda Dredge, with a nod to Ben Griffiths for the original concept.

placed in Poets United Poetry Pantry #69

Sigh of a house made of glass

2011-09-16T05:48:00.004-05:00

I wish they hadn't
freaking made me of glass with
all those rocks around

placed in Poets United Thursday Think Tank #66 (Glass Houses)

To: Miss Emily Dickinson

2011-09-15T08:25:00.005-05:00

To: Miss Emily Dickinson
From: Philip Thrift, Esquire

My poetry has just begun.
I would like to inquire

if you could help me with my poems —
and be a bard like you.
You mastered words right from your home —
your travels were but few.

Still I feel kinship to your keen
analysis of all
things cosmologically seen —
It's here that you stand tall.

I think that you could mentor me —
through transcendental doors.
The poems I write will always be —

Very sincerely yours.

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads (Epistle Poem)

They would crucify him

2011-09-14T08:21:00.003-05:00

Oh, they would crucify a Jesus, man,
when he says feed the poor before tax cuts,
when he says "What that old script says, I pan,"
what right-wing preachers preach he just rebuts.

Oh, they would crucify a Jesus, dude.
"A communist and secret Muslim, he,"
the Tea Party would say as they collude
with FOX News-manufactured 'Liberty'.

Oh, they would crucify a Jesus, yo,
Republicans who like to say his name,
while bashing gays and raking in the dough
from Corporate Polluters Hall of Fame.

Oh, they would crucify a Jesus, dawgs.
They'd nail him up on some of Lincoln's logs!

placed in dVerse Poets Pub: Poetics ~ Say It Again, Sam

Compromise

2011-09-13T05:09:00.009-05:00

'To compromise' holds promise to
communal benefit.
That is a dictum that's held true,
almost like holy writ

in politics of Reps and Dems:
A bargain must be struck,
while singing strained concordant hymns
before they're all lame duck.

But can the snake and mouse agree,
or will the snake just eat
the mouse for lunch just after he
serves tea to him faux-sweet?

placed in dVerse ~ Poets Pub

9/11+10

2011-09-11T06:10:00.033-05:00

a poemmentary

People say it was "the day we'll never forget."
Others say it was "the day America changed forever."
Many remember their family members and friends
(sometimes in the dozens)
who were killed in the falling towers.
Or just seeing it firsthand on those New York streets.
Or the heroes who saved lives,
or went selflessly in only to die,
who did not know the towers would fall.
Those memories must be burned-in to them all.

But for the rest of us:
there is the memory of the first post-9/11 decade,
with wartime-Bush 2001 (and all that entailed thereafter)
and of a later president who managed to head off
a complete financial collapse
but did not bring the shrink-wrapped change from heaven
people wanted, or were not sure they wanted,
and that many became worse off
(though the rich have lower taxes)
and that we are now poised to enter the second decade,
with a Congress more conservative even
than then,
and are even contemplating a next president
who would be more like business-Bush 2000.

With all those memories:
what is it we are really supposed to remember again?
While change in some overseas lands may have come to pass,
I don't think America has changed all that much
(are we about to repeat in 2012 what we did in 2000?)
even though everyone today on TV says it has.

placed in dVerse ~ Poets Pub: Poetics — In Memoriam
and in Poets United Poetry Pantry #66
and in the imaginary garden with real toads

They say there's no really bad limerick

2011-09-10T06:30:00.007-05:00

They say there's no really bad limerick
unless there's a Pope on a pogo stick:
The nuns he would shun
but went right for the buns
of the young priests he chased 'round oh-so-quick.

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads: Bad Poetry

The window is a bitch

2011-09-09T06:25:00.014-05:00

The wind owes me^* an apology.
Stop trying to blow through me!

The hail, it tries to crack me up.
Think I'm a some sorta chump?

Hey light, think you can go through me
without paying some sort of penalty?

The dirt just wants to cling.
It's such a filthy thing.

Where's that rag that wipes me clean?
Inattention makes me mean.

Loud noises, think you leave me rattled?
Pecking birds ... Skedaddle!

The rain just makes be blue.
The wind—oh, did I mention you?

* Sometimes I can be a pane.

placed in Poets United Think Tank #65: What do you think of when you imagine a window?

impressions

2011-09-08T05:08:00.013-05:00

in evening light, the crickets turn

my clause
into claws

my sentence
into sin tents

my punctuation
into punt to ā shin

my paragraphs
into pear of grafts

my metaphors
into mutt of whores

. . .

my poems
into pomes

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads, where the question was asked: Can a poem be like an Impressionist painting?

old man alone

2011-09-05T16:44:00.010-05:00

old man alone rests by a pool
young man arrives to clean —
hot college boy away from school
takes off his torn blue jeans

young man takes hold a long stiff pole
its basket stirs the blue
eyes of old man that young man stole
beneath the pool bamboo

old man's fat pecker springs to life
points up towards the sky
young man's own eagerness is rife
he straddles old man's thighs

the pool lounge creaks like grackle birds
young man rides old man 'til
he shoots a steam of milky curd
and grackle birds are still

old man eyes open wide and look
nowhere young man is found
a pool-side dream old man mistook
... as grackles make a sound

appeared at dVerse Poets Pub

That touch of zinc

2011-09-04T12:23:00.010-05:00

Opportunity
knocks at red-stained Martian soil,
feels that touch of zinc.

Giddiness and excitement swept over NASA scientists Thursday after a small rover discovered a rock on Mars that could suggest life on the red planet ... Opportunity, NASA's small exploratory rover, treaded over Mars' 13.6 mile wide crater called Endeavor in early August ... Mission scientists have described the rock as "full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would be suggestive of geology formed with heat and water" ... HuffPost Tech

placed in the Poets United Poetry Pantry #65

Afterlife

2011-09-03T20:25:00.014-05:00

The Poets light but Lamps—
Themselves—go out—
The Wicks they stimulate—
If vital Light
Inhere as do the Suns—
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference—
Emily Dickinson

What atoms of Democritus—who left
few fragments, it is said,
averting fires of Plato's ponderous heft—
within my cells embed?

The ancient dust of dwarfs or giants might
thrive in the food I eat,
and when I die my orphaned atoms slight
the death I could not cheat.

But what I'll leave is particles that dance
between electric planes:
the supercharged electrophor—by chance—
is what of me remains.

Forgotten texts go in—then out—of print,
but mine I will enshroud
in particles—though not to Heaven sent—
forever in the Cloud.

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads

Interview

2011-09-01T17:05:00.003-05:00

[ The following interview of me by writer and poet Shen Hart appeared today in the imaginary garden with real toads. ]

You say in your preface that you studied mathematics, do you see the world from a mathematics standpoint or has poetry changed your outlook somewhat?

I think I see things pretty much the same way. I was a mathematician in my school years, and then I was a software scientist for over twenty years. Writing a poem is in some ways like a writing a proof in mathematics or a program in software — in fact, the way a poem looks on a screen often looks like a computer program. There's a certain "correctness" and "completeness" that is involved in writing all of these, and, depending on one's point of view, "aesthetic". And the feeling of satisfaction on completing each of these is very similar. Writing poetry though has indeed increased my interest in language usage — especially figurative language and metaphor — and in words themselves, and how effective they can be in doing things that are both useful and entertaining. Of course, poems are used to express one's feelings and passion and stuff like that, so that's indeed a difference. Still, if I pick a book of prose to read, it is likely to be a book on string theory or something like that.

How did you feel in that space of time where you made the transition to writing poetry?

At that point (in early 2008), I saw a talk by Robert Pinsky that was re-played on C-SPAN where he talked about the structure and sound of poetry, and something really clicked. I was looking for a creative outlet, and poetry looked like a form of writing (that wasn't proofs or programs) that would suit my makeup, so I thought I would try it out. I found I liked it.

You have quite the range within your poetry! Do you feel this reflects something of your personality?

Having been writing poems for just three years, I feel like an experimenter and explorer again. (Some would just say dabbler.) That's in terms of experimenting with various poetic forms. In terms of subjects that are in the poem, I am drawn to things I'm interested in.

Is there anything in particular which you find your mind wandering to within your poetry? For example, the nature of the human psyche, nature.

I'm definitely drawn to figuring out how to explore and exploit in a poem my interests: the latest scientific findings; the latest tech trends — especially in the Internet; politics and pop culture; the homoerotic.

You have quite the knack for forms within poetry, is there a particular form you favour? Why?

I don't think I have a favorite, though writing a sonnet (of whatever scheme) has a feeling of completeness to it. I am drawn several times to the "ballad stanza", a form Emily Dickinson used quite a bit. (If I had to pick one, I would say she is my favorite poet — her poems are known for incorporating science and philosophical themes.)

I think writing free verse is harder than writing formal verse, since with free verse you really need to make your own internal structure within your poems, and that is hard to creatively do well. Free verse though is a dominant form now, so of course I would like to do more of that. I would also like to do a long-format story (narrative) poem. I did something of that in "The Geek Poets Tale" (a poem on my blog).

What is the purpose of your poetry and the reason you write poetry?

The primary purpose is to entertain myself, and I hope that some of my poems can be entertaining to others. (I like the idea of poetry being approached as entertainment as well as a form of literary art.) The other purpose is to be able say things succinctly in a way that one can't say as effectively in a philosophical or political column of prose.

How would you describe the non-poet side to your persona?

Droll.

Would you be so kind as to share with us, your favourite memory to date?

The day I graduated kindergarten. I hated fingerpainting.

Not all polemen are firemen

2011-08-31T13:20:00.009-05:00

Steve Retchless swirled
like Rocket J. Squirrel,
while Piers Morgan hurled
from a homophobic world.

Sharon was cool.
Howie, so high school,
could not break the rule:
Don't dude-look and drool.

His body was curled
as he whirled and twirled
in a polarized world —
like Rocket J. Squirrel.

Steven Retchless, Semi-Finals ~ America's Got Talent 2011:
nbc.com/americas-got-talent/video/steven-retchless-performs/1350978/
(Piers Morgan: "There are lots of men in Vegas sliding down poles; they're called firemen, and that's where it should stay. ... It's not what guys should do.")

We skipped the light

2011-08-30T18:03:00.007-05:00

We skipped the light.
Fandango turned cartwheels. Meanwhile,
we skipped the light
and turned a paler shade of white.
The ceiling blew away a mile.
We hummed, and with a drunken smile,
we skipped the light.

a rondelet imagined and rearranged from the lyrics to "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (which have always fascinated me), and placed in the imaginary garden with real toads

The Third Eye

2011-08-28T07:27:00.013-05:00

A freak-out chill would cover me like ice.
The diner cook took off his paper hat.
He turned and winked at me, not once but twice —
a third eye kept upon me where I sat.

"What do you do with that third eye, oh sir?
What can you see that humans cannot see?"
"For you, mere human, life is but a blur.
You think too much what is, not what could be.

You look around and see what you deplore.
What you could do if you could see that all
your species has is just itself, no more."
"What lets a diner cook to make this call,

and why pick me to show your E.T. face?"
"Was on my way back to my native star.
I saw your orb and so I fell from space
beside this road-side diner fountain bar.

I thought I'd spend a while to get a fix
on Earthly ways. I saw the sign, Wanted -
a diner cook to work from 10 to 6.
To roam the galaxy and to imbed

is what I do, and tell my race what I
have learned. In others' lives, we don't involve
ourselves. I'm just content to be a spy.
But just for once, I need some help to solve

why your own race cannot break free of your
own pointless prisons made up for no good."
Without the third eye then I was demure
to answer him, but would have if I could.

I left the diner with a bit of blues
to think that humans cling to stupid creeds.
If only we could see like that space muse.
Imagining that third eye's what we need.

placed in the dVerse ~ Poets Pub: Poetics – Third Eye Open
and in the Poets United Poetry Pantry #64
(photo is of actor Barney Phillips in The Twilight Zone episode
"Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?")

My past is left behind in old film stock

2011-08-26T17:18:00.017-05:00

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
- Ts’ui Pên, "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges

My past is left behind in old film stock
whose frames were worn and scratched — the reels were thrown
away to decompose. The instant now
is all that I possess, as quantum paths
are summed and futures hold my next rote lines.
With Schrödinger's lab cat asleep, I split
into all possibilities. But when
I dare to look — I know not when — I think,
Would it be me or other-me that writes
the next blank verse that futures will record?

placed in the imaginary garden with real toads, for a Jorge Luis Borges birthday prompt

So-net etiquette sonnet

2011-08-23T08:05:00.005-05:00

You only have to make an avatar
of you: your iconography to show
within your network time slots when you star
on so-cial-nets, whichever one you you sow.

Your top-bill name, cannot be made-up though
(unless you're famous like celebrities):
The so-net management may de-bill "Doe"
of "John" or "Jane"—your real name if you please.

Now finding audience is not a breeze—
make Circles right for you. And be polite
with your comments and hit the right + keys.
With these in mind your future looks quite bright,

and soon your star will rise with every byte
you send to where nobody has stage fright.

placed in imaginary garden with real toads

Mole in a hole

2011-08-21T17:06:00.008-05:00

Holed up in his hole
a mole is far from the fold
unfolding his goal

The sounds of silence

2011-08-20T13:41:00.006-05:00

The sound of puffs of dandelion seeds.
The sound that follows Shush, all people please!
The sound of space between the far-flung stars.
The sound of empty kitchen cookie jars.

The sound a cat makes stalking barnyard mice.
The sound of mammoths buried in the ice.
The sound amoebas make when eating death.
The sound before you take another breath.

The sound of strings in Hawking's Grand Design.
The sound of mourners at a hero's shrine.
The sound between two lovers as they age.
The sound of poverty's deep-hidden rage.

The sounds of silence play the silent roles
as nature's docudrama tale unfolds.

prompted by a Sylvia Plath verse on "silence"
and placed in imaginary garden with real toads

A pretzel in the park

2011-08-19T02:41:00.021-05:00

Steven Retchless, pole fitness champion*

Four nimble limbs of gold go bold-
ly round a naked pole,
defy earth's gravity's own hold,
delight a hungry soul.

To be that pole that twist of fate
would grab and hold to me.
Enticing daydreams that creates
beneath the hardwood tree.

A winding pretzel on a stick,
sprinkled with salty sweat:
a sexy topologic pick,
the treat I won't forget.

* Steven Retchless is a contestant on America's Got Talent
placed in the Poets United Poetry Pantry #63
and sneaked into dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night Week 6

Good thing my first name is longer than two letters

2011-08-18T08:09:00.001-05:00

To a Poets United prompt for a poem based on the third letter of your first name, this poem reprised from 2009:

A letter from 'I' to the other letters

I think only when space aliens threaten us

2011-08-17T17:32:00.009-05:00

I think only when space aliens threaten us
will there be
sleek bullet trains and green-grid volts,
science-trained brains and high-speed nets,
great public spaces of pleasure and arts,
a people-first sense of a future day.

We need space aliens to threaten US
to do what we could have done anyway
—without all the stifling, moronic fuss.

Note: more alien invasion stuff in the news
placed in Poets United Poetry Pantry #63

'80s Hippie Hollow Splash Days

2011-08-15T15:05:00.013-05:00

The Hippie Hollow boys on rocks
fill Speedos full of fun,
and passing boats of muscle jocks
are ripening in the sun.

With Duran Duran in the air,
at men on winding trails,
the boys of Hippie Hollow glare
while rating on a scale.

From boats the showy boys give show,
the divers go headfirst.
Meanwhile, into the woods some go —
Who knows what was conversed?

Above the Hollow boats and rocks
the boys are busy bees,
and woods at dusk are filled with cocks
that milky way the trees.

placed in imaginary garden with real toads

e-inking

2011-08-14T05:15:00.013-05:00

electrostatic grains of black-
stained globules rising in the creme
more intimately dance for me
than all the printed words I've seen

no garish backlight strains the eye —
you liven pages in the bright —
and lightly you are held by me
with all the books that I have liked

placed in Poets United Poetry Pantry #62

Theory Of Everything

2011-08-13T06:27:00.008-05:00

Supersymmetry's breaking thread:
Philosophy is dead.
Astrophysics instead.
Cosmologists joyed.
Evangelists annoyed.
-
Truth is dialectic.
I sing the boson electric.
M-theory: 'M' is for Mother
Ekes out another
Space-time brother.

Feebly, we leave our Terran home

2011-08-11T08:16:00.004-05:00

Feebly, we leave our Terran home
controlled by space-time's laws
in fragile boats that buck the waves
of nature's callous cause.

Small islands that are close to home
are far as we can see
to go — for now we are but slaves
of Relativity.

The day may come when we need roam
beyond our nearby shores,
when Earth becomes but our own graves
and nature shuts the doors.

to a prompt "man’s eternal fight for survival against the forces of nature" in imaginary garden with real toads

Signs of Teabageddon

2011-08-10T06:29:00.006-05:00

"Regret being in the 21st century."
"Build no bullet trains or great public places."
"Old times there: misrepresent them."
"Milk the people for moneyed kings."
"Be hostages of men in colonial drag."
"Secession redux: Remember confederacy."
"Dream the past. Kill the future. Cure the gay."
"Shrink Government down to the size of Barack Obama's balls."
"Ignore the poor for Jesus' sake."

see A Tea Party Caucus Fracas (The D.C. Douglas Blog)