Poem for Thursday

From 'The Rubaiyat'
By Omar Khayyam

(1)
Translated by Shahriar Shahriari

This clay pot like a lover once in heat
A lock of hair his senses did defeat
The handle that has made the bottleneck its own seat
Was once the embrace of a lover that entreat.

(2)
Translated by Edward J. Fitzgerald

I think the Vessel, that with fugitive
Articulation answer'd, once did live,
And merry-make; and the cold Lip I kiss'd
How many Kisses might it take--and give.

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Rabbi Gershon (the Ecorebbe) passed along a press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority about the discovery of a 12th century jug in the Old City of Jerusalem, inscribed with the poem above in Persian. Omar Khayyam was probably the best-known Persian poet of the Middle Ages, translated into a dozen languages at least, yet this is the first time such a vessel has been found in Israel.

I spent all freakin' day fighting with my mobile phone calendar and contacts. Since I got the new phone, I've synced them both using Plaxo because Outlook had given me so much trouble previously, but apparently Plaxo didn't reset their clocks for Daylight Savings Time, because all my mobile calendar events have been an hour off since last weekend and they're off on the Plaxo site as well -- plus Plaxo knocked them off on Google, and I know it's Plaxo and not Google causing the error because I have another Google calendar that my whole family uses and that one adjusted fine. So I thought I'd try syncing directly with Google now that they have a beta mobile sync, which appeared to work fine...except the phone reversed everyone's first and last names in my contacts, and imported several duplicates, and when I tried to erase those and sync again it didn't work, so I had to start over, and...let's just say I have to try again some other way tomorrow. *growls*

Here, pretty flowers from the National Gallery of Art rotunda last weekend:













Otherwise, it was a gorgeous day here. When I drove Adam to Hebrew school for Bar Mitzvah tutoring in the afternoon, there were nearly 20 robins in the grass out front, plus a bluejay and a bunny (which I didn't see because I was driving but son pointed out). After that I dropped him off at home so he could do his homework and picked up Daniel, who was in urgent need of new sneakers...his shoe size is now bigger than Paul's. I worked a bit on organizing addresses for Bar Mitzvah invitations, watched the early Stewart/Colbert rerun so the kids could see Jon Stewart with Dora the Explorer, and ended my evening with Stephen Colbert making me howl discussing Ayn Rand's resurgence during the recession ("the titans of industry begin to disappear...and it's not because they've been indicted!").