Poem for Wednesday

Preludes For Prepared Piano 9: Star-Crossed Lovers
By Estill Pollock

Giardino sotto il balcone di Giulietta, what light.

Sulky, lovesick Verona,
pretty costumes, the dynamic gestures, props
gritty, in your face, non-stop attention to detail,
fast track gangsta chic body count.

Light against darkness, moonbeams,
sunrise, sunset, candles and torches, crazed trumpet solo,
alto sax offset by quick coming clouds, night.

Pining, growing softly sibilant,
her favourite word in the local dialect
the one for the exterior of the Freud Museum.

She assumes the listening position.

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My new phone arrived this morning! And I spent a ridiculous amount of time stripping out the T-Mobile stuff that eats memory (MyFaves and My5), which I'd done on the old phone but then forgot how, so I had to look it all up again. And then I spent even more time importing my contacts, setting my preferences and all that. But now I have a new phone with a new battery, and I have nothing but nice things to say about Asurion's insurance. I also read up on various cameras, but I still don't know what I'm going to do about that -- I won't have any money till my birthday in a month anyway, so I have time to do research. Adam's new Bionicle arrived via UPS as well (bought with a combination of allowance and "yay, you got straight As" money) so he spent most of the evening building it, and Daniel got Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party with the last of his birthday money, so both kids were happy. And we got the first snow flurries of the season! In honor of that, some harvest festival photos:


Sheep at Jumbo's Pumpkins during the Frederick Festival of the Farm.


Piglets chasing each other.


A goat and a boy.


This calf wanted its bottle so badly that it was trying to nurse from someone's fingers.


The three billy goats gruff -- all right, four.


The piggies ate corn, and apples, and anything else they could convince people to give them.


Finally, the calf got her bottle!


There were plenty of varieties of squash, but we were there just before Halloween, so the pumpkins were going fast.

In the evening we watched Nova's "The Bible's Buried Secrets," which is about archaeological evidence for early Jewish history and events from the Torah, trying to dance around the political implications of the placement of what might be King David's palace or what might be the Holy of Holies. I was pleased that they included a discussion of Canaanite worship borrowed by the Israelites and Asherah's role in pre-monotheistic belief, though they didn't really discuss all the ways in which women were demonized in order to script a patriarchal religion. There were, at least, several awesome women archaeologists. After that we watched this week's Brotherhood, in which there was only one gratuitous murder and I confess: I laughed.

Spoilers: Because what set it off was a Yankees fan declaring, "Ted Williams was a fucking faggot!" and then Moe, the stupidest of the Red Sox fans, jumped up and shot him in the back of the head! I know I am supposed to hate Yankees fans more than Red Sox fans, but when you've had to live with Red Sox fans for long enough, you just can't tell the difference except by the cap color. And speaking of similarities, when Tommy's mom gave the "When the Irish came to America..." speech in an attempt to justify her anti-Hispanic bigotry, I was thinking, gee, I've heard this speech before, except the Jews were the protagonists. Once again it is looking like everything is going to end horribly for everyone, but hey, I thought they'd all be dead two years ago.