Poem for Monday

The Crocodile
By Lewis Carroll

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

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Another from Poet's Choice by Robert Pinsky in The Washington Post Book World yesterday, from Caroline Kennedy's anthology A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children. This parody, Pinsky says, "has outlived its original, moralistic target. Reading such poems next to more ambitious work by Blake and Dickinson illuminates both kinds by making clear the element of song in the great poems and the element of meaning in the nonsense."

Today after my kids got home from Hebrew school we went back to Homestead Farms to pick pumpkins. There was a big crowd for the hayrides out to the distant pumpkin patches, so instead of taking the long hayride, we walked through the barnyard animals, fed the goats, looked at the produce in the farm store and picked pumpkins from the nearer walking-distance patch. Since we were already out by Poolesville we also stopped at the various radio astronomy sites (the plaque for the discovery of Jupiter's magnetosphere and a controversial array set up by a private owner with several multi-story radio receivers). We also went to the Seneca Schoolhouse Museum, an 1865 one-room school built for 25 students, closed in 1910, converted into a home and reclaimed and restored in 1981.

Younger son had soccer in the afternoon and older son had a meltdown when we discovered that he had not done any work on his big social studies project, then required him to cancel a date to play video games with a friend so he could do the work. He moped noisily for over an hour but got a lot of work done and seemed to enjoy it (lots of web photo research) once he calmed himself down. We all watched The West Wing and oh, Toby, you had to know Bartlet and C.J. and everyone else was going to react just as they did -- I knew it, though watching C.J. trying to hold it together and Margaret thinking it was something she said and Leo being so obviously absent was so painful...really well done and reminded me so much of the old show, though this clinches that it will never be the old show again, doesn't it? Anyway, since change is inevitable and there's going to be a new president and everything, I thought this was really well handled.

Afterward we had intended to watch the World Series, but when we turned on the baseball game, Chicago was winning and within a few minutes they were losing, so we obeyed the superstition that requires that you keep doing whatever you were doing while your team was winning (eating, picking your nose, whatever) and we turned off the game! Instead, while folding laundry, I watched St. Ives which like so many things has a cast vastly better than the screenplay; there were many completely implausible twists and some really silly dialogue but also some bits that were completely hilarious, and with a cast including Jason Isaacs, Miranda Richardson, Anna Friel, Jean-Marc Barr and Michael Gough, how wrong can you go? The swordfight alone would make it worth seeing but my favorite moment, which is just so wrong, is Jason's character explaining to a prostitute that really she should pay him for the lessons he gave her. He's sleazy and evil and rrrowr!

And while we weren't looking, the White Sox pulled it out! YAY! asked me to write something about myself as a fan writer and Snape/Lupin for the newsletter, so here it is. And I wrote "Unshielded" for just because I could. So other than worrying about friends in the Keys and Miami, things are good -- please get out of town, folks, if you're in an area that's supposed to, okay? And they are warning us about possibly getting hit later in the week, and the storm bringing early snow to my sister's area. Oh, I need to come up with a game for my son's class for Halloween, something that doesn't cost much to set up and is not too juvenile for fourth graders -- anyone have any suggestions?


Philip DePalo juggles lit torches in the Maryland Science Center lobby in conjunction with the circus exhibit.


DePalo ate fire and breathed fireballs, too, and swallowed swords. Fortunately our kids did not get the jokes that went along with this portion of the act. *g*


And he had a demonstration of various clowning techniques including asking this married couple to help demonstrate firing darts. You can see the orange dart whizzing past the man's face as his wife shoots.