Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Poem for Wednesday

The Thousand-Stringed Instrument
By Hafiz
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky


The heart is
The thousand-stringed instrument.

Our sadness and fear come from being
Out of tune with love.

All day long God coaxes my lips
To speak,

So that your tears will not stain
His green dress.

It is not that the Friend is vain,
It is just your life we care about.

Sometimes the Beloved
Takes my pen in hand,
For Hafiz is just a simple man.

The other day the Old One
Wrote on the Tavern wall:

"The heart is
The thousand-stringed instrument

That can only be tuned with
Love."

--------

I did chores in the morning -- still working on Bar Mitzvah souvenirs and stuff. Then I had a very nice afternoon -- lunch at Tara Thai with Vertigo, followed by what was supposed to be a quick stop at Target to return a shirt but ended up involving trying on spring clothes (which I did not buy), looking at sofa slipcovers (which were on sale, but I want to compare at a couple of other places first), and deciding that in honor of Barbie's 50th birthday and our trip last summer, I should buy SeaWorld Barbie (which was also on sale for under $10, less than the shirt I was returning, meaning it was obviously meant to come home with me).

After the kids got home, I had to finish folding laundry, which I did while watching Xena's "The Way", which like every other episode of Xena I reviewed seems so very much better on reviewing. I loved the series the first time through, but it was on at the same time as Deep Space Nine and early Voyager and The X-Files and La Femme Nikita and Relic Hunter, when there was no dearth of fantastic female genre characters and I could never have imagined I'd be putting up with Heroes and Battlestar Galactica because that's what would be available.

I don't have a Tuesday night show, so we watched How the Earth Was Made on the History Channel about New York being built on what's left over from the last ice age, followed by The Universe which was about stopping Armageddon (conclusion: Bruce Willis and Robert Duvall both did it wrong, space shuttles are a bad idea and nuclear bombs even worse, we need a big laser deflector array). Now I'm watching Jon Stewart rip apart Jim Cramer, again, which is one of many examples of why The Daily Show is so much better than the eleven o'clock news!


Here is another view of the 9/11 memorial at the Newseum. The film in this gallery focuses on how newsmakers in New York covered the crisis and dealt with what they were seeing and hearing while they were trying to provide information.


The ruined antenna was once the highest point in Manhattan, installed because the World Trade Center was blocking the signal from the antenna on the Empire State Building, which had previously been the highest point.


An exhibit of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette includes his drawing following the destruction of the Twin Towers.


Three successive editions of the Orlando Sentinel from a night I'm sure we all remember too well, displayed in the News Corp News History Gallery, which also has some of the television footage as anchors called, then un-called, Pennsylvania and Florida.


Global headlines from a much happier day in the history of the American presidency.


A glimpse inside the 4D theater from before the film began (at which point I was holding on to my chair because it was lurching, and put my camera away so it wouldn't get sprayed!).


A screen in the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery, which is adjacent to a gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs.


And one more look at the news chopper from inside the glass elevator.

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