Poem for Saturday

Fireflies
By Karl Kirchwey

Those nights the fireflies love best—
windless and a little humid—
when they are current in the pasture,
busy in their greeny traffic,
signaling beneath the stars
("Like a nightclub's marquee," she says,
remembering Fifty-Second Street),
then I think pleasure is like this,
accomplished in a perfect silence
undeceived by loneliness.

And in the morning on the lawn,
seedpods of Eastern cottonwood
lie scattered open, white and brilliant,
as if true to some child's account
of what pleasure becomes with daylight.

--------

I had a pretty quiet Friday. Hung out with my kids, organized Bar Mitzvah photos, fought with McAfee on my desktop for an absurdly long time, wrote a review of Next Gen's "Disaster". In the evening we watched Swing Vote, starring Kevin Costner as Homer Simpson, which was much, much better than I was expecting. I thought it would be about elections and the media, but it's really much more seriously about the working poor and Costner is so much more appealing as a drunken schmuck (in this as in The Upside of Anger) than he used to be playing the hero. Plus no one had told me Nana Visitor was in the movie, so I got the delightful surprise of her name in the credits followed by the delightful surprise of her slapping Dennis Hopper across the face!

Spoilers: You probably know the plot -- the presidential election comes down to the vote of a single man in a tiny district in New Mexico that will decide all the state's electoral votes, and thus the winner, where it was actually the guy's teenage daughter trying to vote for him but the machine got unplugged before the vote registered. The attorney general decides that he must vote again, but before he can do it in an official polling place, both candidates come calling. The guy says he's not opposed to two men living, and suddenly the Republican president is running ads supporting gay marriage. The guy says he's "pro-life" because he doesn't understand that this is a position on abortion, he thinks it's about enjoying life, and suddenly the Democrat is running ads equating abortion with shooting kids in playgrounds (hence Nana slapping Dennis, who's playing the Democratic candidate: "You are everything that the Republicans accused you of being: a spineless amateur! You used to stand for something!" Go Nana!). Ultimately the film is not about politics (we never even find out who wins) but about the process and the frustrations, and the performances are terrific.


Lots of families turned out at Silver Spring Swings' opening concert on Thursday night, Ocean Orchestra.


Fiddle player Cheryl Hurwitz, a Silver Spring native.


Lisa Moscatiello, formerly of The New St. George and the Space Dots.


The group early on in the set, before the light started to fade.


Rico Petruccelli, who played with Jennifer and Lisa in The New St. George.


Jennifer Cutting, the group's founder.


Jennifer, Cheryl, and Lisa.


The Green Man and Green Woman.

Fannish5: Name 5 characters who'd be most pleased if they ever got the opportunity to see what fandom is writing about them. And the 5 characters who'd be most shocked.
Pleased:
1. Denny Crane, Boston Legal. He would be delighted to know he was getting attention. Het, slash, crossovers...he'd love it all.
2. James T. Kirk, Star Trek. (The original one, the only one who exists for me.) For everything else I love about him, his ego and God's are too big to exist in the same universe in The Final Frontier. Like William Shatner, it would make total sense to him that people pair him with Spock, Uhura, et al.
3. Xena, Xena: Warrior Princess. She never expected perfect accuracy in the scrolls -- just to be remembered. And she'd love that her love for Gabrielle has been so well documented, whatever form it took.
4. Jack Harkness, Torchwood. He would eat this shit up.
5. Rodney McKay, Stargate: Atlantis. Personally, I don't think he deserves nearly any of it, but he'd eat it up.
Shocked:
1. Kira Nerys, Deep Space Nine. One look at the Kira/Dukat stuff and someone would get hurt.
2. The Doctor, Doctor Who. "No no no no, they did not write that!"
3. Fox Mulder, The X-Files. Whether it's with Scully or Krycek -- or the odious Fowley -- he's always a great lover and that's always more important to him than the truth that's out there.
4. Lex Luthor, Smallville. All that careful image control for nothing!
5. Severus Snape, Harry Potter. He just wishes he was getting half as much sex in "real life" as he gets in fic!