Saturday, October 04, 2008

Poem for Saturday

Election Year
By Donald Revell


A jet of mere phantom
Is a brook, as the land around
Turns rocky and hollow.
Those airplane sounds
Are the drowning of bicyclists.
Leaping, a bridesmaid leaps.
You asked for my autobiography.
Imagine the greeny clicking sound
Of hummingbirds in a dry wood,
And there you’d have it. Other birds
Pour over the walls now.
I'd never suspected: every day,
Although the nation is done for,
I find new flowers.

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I had a fairly quiet Friday. It was a gorgeous day, which necessitated taking a walk. I started doing the Sudoku in the paper, and then I refused to quit even though it took me half an hour. Then I started a review of "Menage a Troi", though I kept stalling because I don't like the episode very much, so I chatted with people about the debate and did lots of stupid things on Facebook (need karma, butterflies, penguins or Snapes, anyone?).

I had leftover pad see euw from Tara Thai yesterday, so lunch was good. And we had dinner with my parents, whom we will see again at a Bat Mitzvah on Saturday night. Here are the last of the photos of Huntley Meadows from last month, including dragonflies, beavers, wildflowers, and the first signs of autumn coming:

















The Friday Five: Kisses
1. Who was your first kiss?
The first one that I count, as it was neither a dare nor a game, was David the hot German guy from theater camp.
2. Who is the last person you kissed? My husband.
3. What is the story of your most romantic kiss? It was 1988, he took me to New York to see Phantom of the Opera and out to dinner. We also did some sightseeing -- we went to the World Trade Center.
4. What is the story of your worst kiss? A guy I dated on and off my freshman-sophomore year of college who didn't seem to realize that you win no prizes for keeping your tongue in constant motion.
5. Who do you want to kiss right now? Joe Biden.

Fannish 5: List the five most moving fictional funerals. Same rules as last week with weddings: no Great Literature allowed, this is purely fannish.
1. Izzi Creo, The Fountain. Almost disqualified because that movie is so good it should count as literature, but really peerless as a study of loss and grief.
2. Boromir, The Lord of the Rings. I think we should have gotten to hear Aragorn sing the dirge from the novel, but the scene where the boat goes over the falls while Aragorn straps on the vambraces is lovely.
3. Jonathan Kent, Smallville. Funerals of parents are always awful, and when there's guilt on the part of the child, it's even worse. See also Mitch Leery, Dawson's Creek.
4. Leo McGarry, The West Wing. Admittedly the impact is shaped by the fact that the character died because the actor who played him had died, yet he was an irreplaceable presence in the lives of nearly all the characters.
5. Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. At the time, we didn't know he was going to come back, so the scene was quite devastating.

We watched Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (Colbert hadn't yet seen the debate when he recorded the show but he announced that he was certain Palin had won, unless she hadn't). Then we watched Sanctuary, which I rather liked, though parts of it were predictable and parts were just silly...I like Amanda Tapping and I liked the girl playing her daughter, and it's nice to have a show where a woman's in charge and it isn't "OMG I must save my son so he can save the world." Spoilers: I was guessing that Druitt was Ashley's father from the moment Helen freaked out hearing that someone super-fast was back, and that she was a "monster," and really, couldn't they have done a better job with the prosthetic brain-sucker on Alexei if they expected us to swallow the Chernobyl explanation? But it was entertaining and I'm betting that Helen was much more involved in what happened to Will's mother than she admitted...and I'm always in favor of flashbacks to Victorian London.

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