Friday, September 22, 2006

Poem for Friday


Giant Fungus
By Charles Harper Webb


     40-acre growth found in Michigan.
      — The Los Angeles Times

The sky is full of ruddy ducks
and widgeons, mockingbirds,
bees, bats, swallowtails,
dragonflies, and great horned owls.

The land below teems with elands
and kit foxes, badgers, aardvarks,
juniper, banana slugs, larch,
cactus, heather, humankind.

Under them, a dome of dirt.
Under that, the World's
Largest Living Thing spreads
like a hemorrhage poised

to paralyze the earth—like a tumor
ready to cause 9.0 convulsions,
or a brain dreaming this world
of crickets and dung beetles,

sculpins, Beethoven, coots,
Caligula, St. Augustine grass, Mister
Lincoln roses, passion fruit, wildebeests,
orioles like sunspots shooting high,

then dropping back to the green
arms of trees, their roots
sunk deep in the power
of things sleeping and unknown.

--------


I didn't want to talk about possibly getting to do it until I had the interview in hand...but I have interviewed Alexander Siddig. *squees in most unprofessional, undignified fangirly manner* He said lovely things about playing an angel in The Nativity, being typecast because he's Muslim and working on 24, but I had been warned to ask about Star Trek as little as possible so I regret that there is no Q&A about Bashir/Garak or Bashir/O'Brien fan fiction. *g* And I should not talk about it too much until I get it written up for TrekToday -- probably Monday, I have to get through Rosh Hashanah this weekend -- but here is one of his more amusing responses:

     Me: I have to ask the inevitable: if J.J. Abrams called you about appearing in the upcoming Star Trek film, either as Bashir or as a new character, would you be interested?
     Sid: Next question please.

And that is my happy news for the day, which was otherwise quite low-key, involving exciting matters such as laundry and attempting to clean younger son's room (hahahahahaha). Trek news was a boring report on Star Trek: Online in which the producers actually said they were making progress -- which immediately triggered a pissed-off letter from a fan wanting to know why we have not covered every posted screencap from Star Trek: Legacy etc., and every interview in which the Mad Doc and Bethesda Softworks guys say the same exact thing nearly word-for-word to each publication. Then I also covered reviews of Shark with Jeri Ryan, which were generally so positive that after sitting through "Day of the Dove" to review Friday (concept intriguing if recycled, execution at times painful though hilarious), I decided to watch the pilot -- I'd been on the fence. I thought Woods was excellent, the girl playing his daughter was very good though she had incredibly hokey dialogue, Ryan was fine though her part was surprisingly small, the first case was a little Boston Legal-ish only more mean-spirited because Woods was prosecuting and they're always defending against obnoxious DAs, and all of the drama could use stronger writing. I will probably watch it next week.

In other entertaining outer space news, Yahoo! says that Mel Brooks is making a Spaceballs TV cartoon, which is an awesome idea though I wonder how dated it will seem, and AOL has a slide show of images from the Steve Irwin tribute. And speaking of AOL, which we have kept at the lowest possible rate so we can use it when we travel places without wireless -- I've used it in the UK and Canada with no problems as well as the middle of nowhere, Idaho -- is giving away Xdrive to members, so I said cool, it would be nice to have an online backup and tried to upload a few dozen MB of data. It crashed about 15 times. Is this typical of Xdrive, or does AOL have a really cheap version of it, or are new AOL users overloading the system, or does it just hate my writing?

Cinnamon is currently playing with the hackey sack that younger son left on the couch -- shoving it a few feet across the floor, pouncing on it, then racing away as if it had attacked her. This is quite amusing. Speaking of whom, it was pointed out to me by my son that I had posted photos of someone else's cat but had not posted photos of my cats recently, so here they are:


Cinnamon in a quilt.


Cinnamon in a laundry basket.


Rosie with one of younger son's stuffed cats.


Rosie smush-faced on a pillow.


Friday evening we are having Rosh Hashanah dinner with a big crowd at my mother's house. Hopefully the kids will not be too fried, as all they want to do is play the pirate stuff AdventureQuest put up this week in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Hope everyone has a lovely equinox, as I am not sure I will post again before it arrives!

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