Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Poem for Wednesday and Paul Gross

Ecclesiastes 11:1
By Richard Wilbur


We must cast our bread
Upon the waters
, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I'm typing this on my finally-repaired new computer, which was fixed by a Dell technician around noon today -- now it has a working memory card reader, so I can get images off the cards I use in my cameras! Yay! And I have established that it can burn CDs and read all my flash drives, so I assume the drives are not in conflict with one another. All I need to do now is figure out replacement programs for Nero and Retrospect, since I can't afford to replace either, having broken down and ordered the newest version of Photoshop Elements. Plus I have to decide what I'm going to do about a scanner since there are apparently no Windows 7 drivers compatible with mine and I can't figure out whether there's such a thing as a generic scanner driver considering that my computer believes mine to be a generic scanner (Acer stopped supporting its scanners before Vista). Any suggestions for cheap/free DVD authoring software or backup programs, and any idea where to find the cheapest decent flatbed scanners?

My day was excellent in other regards anyway, since Dementordelta came over and brought Paul Gross, whom we had with lunch. That is, she brought the DVDs of Men With Brooms and Wilby Wonderful, and after going out to Lebanese Taverna to pick up hummus and fatayer, we watched those, plus a couple of episodes of Due South because Paul didn't have scenes with Callum Keith Rennie in Wilby, which is a really delightful film -- I didn't know Ellen Page was in it, and I actually liked the mother-daughter storyline better than the gay scandal storyline which was more predictable. Men With Brooms felt like a Due South spinoff in a lot of ways -- ghosts talking, Canadian folk music, Leslie Nielsen, Paul Gross's Oedipal issues with dead mother...has anyone ever asked him in an interview whether he believes in ghosts, or whether he has half the issues with his own father that so many of his characters seem to have? Anyway, I enjoyed that a lot too, though I don't have a clue whether the curling is realistic!

Here are some more photos of animals at the National Aquarium on Saturday, including seahorses for Dementordelta. Happy St. Patrick's Day if you celebrate culturally or by proxy!















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