Poem for Friday

My True Love Hath My Heart and I Have His
By Sir Phillip Sidney

My true love hath my heart and I have his,
By just exchange one for another given;
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven.
My true love has my heart and I have his.

His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his, because in me it bides.
My true love hath my heart and I have his.

--------

I'm having a quiet week, which is probably just as well. Spent the morning on the phone talking to people like Perky Paduan and Mama Dracula, with whom I was way behind in gossip; visited with my mother, who brought me back a turquoise necklace from Mexico; folded laundry and watched A Man For All Seasons, which is a good as I remembered, though I must admit that in the scenes where Robert Shaw's Henry VIII was onscreen with Paul Scofield, I couldn't take my eyes off Shaw. Someone very wisely cut the king almost entirely out of the second half of the movie in favor of Cromwell. Why didn't Shaw win an Oscar for this film? Anyway, seeing Hampton Court Palace put me in a good mood.


The elementary school on Wednesday morning, reduced to its frame...


...while chunks of the building were scooped away.


By Thursday afternoon, the trucks were burying under the rubble...


...and the building was gone, with large hoses wetting down the dust to keep it from blowing.

I burned the last four Torchwood episodes to disc so I could watch the most recent two so I am finally caught up with the UK! And, fine, I am finally completely over my residual dislike for Owen from the first season, even though I still like the women better. Spoilers:"A Day in the Death" I thought was a much better episode than "Dead Man Walking," which incorporates a lot of standard horror fare; I liked the scene with Owen and the kid with leukemia at the hospital, and I liked Gwen calling Rhys and sobbing, but I still feel like Tosh is being made to look far too pathetic far too much of the time and I'm really confused about Jack's motives for bringing Owen back in the first place (not buying either that he needed the code or that he was desperate not to give up on Owen's life yet without knowing who it would put at risk -- he almost killed Martha).

"A Day in the Death" had some fabulous dialogue with Owen comparing himself to both Jesus (though without the beard, since he can't ever grow a beard now) and the Doctor ("a bloody brilliant doctor") even though he's never met the Doctor -- that parallel was for us in the audience. I loved the conversation with the old man about how being trapped in the dark with medical machinery isn't really an improvement on death, and Owen cleaning out all the things he never expects to need from his house again, but I was really waiting for the deus ex machina. If he can produce enough air from his lungs to talk, can't he produce enough at least to try CPR, even if it's just recycled atmosphere? How is his body getting rid of waste material from whatever it's metabolizing to make his muscles work? Given all those questions and his Death Becomes Her condition I was expecting him to be brought fully back to life, which isn't particularly more scientifically absurd than dead-but-mobile. How long can the writers leave him in-between?

Must review Trek on Friday ("Shades of Gray," widely considered the worst TNG episode ever, though I don't hate it quite so much) and we are out of pita! Woe. Need to find a way to celebrate Leap Year!