Alert

If you see spots on your weasels
You might have your vet check for measles.

Genetic Revisionism

23andMe said I was a tiny percentage Sardinian, and a tiny percentage Ashkenazi. In both cases, it was under 3/10 of a percent.

Now, those percentages are mysteriously missing when I visit the site.

That's okay, because I never knew where they came from in the first place.

At least my tiny percentage of Native American is still showing. Maybe that's actually real.

Since they were less than one percent,
I don't much wonder where they went.
All in all, it's simply fairer
To say they fell in the margin of error.

Depressing

Watched security footage of 2 winter-coat robbers, who got out of a white Mercedes, and forced a 54 year old man to give up his pricey Canada Goose jacket.

Stealing the coat off your back.
They’ve got stuff, but it’s conscience they lack.

Treasure Planet

I'm reading Treasure Planet from the Man-Kzin War series. I did not realize that it was going to be a direct take-off on Stevenson's Treasure Island. But as I was reading along, the pacing of the book just felt... 19th century.

I've got nothing against Stevenson. Take-offs like this can be interesting. I read the Pournelle-Niven scifi take-off on Dante's Inferno and enjoyed it. But I like to know going in!

The most jarring thing is this talk-like-a-pirate thing on another planet, without any particular explanation offered for why the giant space tigers should sound like Long John Silver. Well, maybe the authors will present an explanation before they're done.

Of course, the name should have been a warning, if I'd really been thinking!

For now I think I'll keep reading
To see where things are leading.

If Dogs Have Dreams

If dogs have dreams,
And I think they do,
Are they just as chaotic
As those I view?

Mine aren’t just viewed,
They’re also felt.
And for dogs, I bet,
They’re always smelt!

As an afterword, I'm not the best recaller of dreams, but I know that I sometimes smell things in my dreams, because I have occasionally half-woken, seeming to smell something in the air - usually something burning. I lie there, half-awake, trying to figure out if the smell is real. As a rule, it is not.

Moonshot Memories

I saw a moonshot launch when I was young,
One of the last, of course, for then they stopped
Our trips to that great ball of rock that’s hung
Above our planet like lighted lure.

The cylinder was lifted on a column
Of blazing fire. We knew that it was topped
By men who risked their lives, so something solemn
Caught in our throats as they began their tour.

I’d say that we are bound to go again.
I’d say our sister rock is out there still
Awaiting visitation from our kind.

The tech improves, the prices drop, and then -
Though many claimed we’d simply lost the will -
The thirst to sail rehaunts the human mind.

Asp in Her Grasp

Went to an art museum in California that I’d never heard of: the Norton Simon Museum. People I went with asked what my favorite piece was and I said Cleopatra about to kill herself. They said they hadn’t seen it, but when I showed them the picture they had in fact seen it, but hadn’t read the caption, and hadn’t noticed that off to the side she had her hand on a dark serpent.

It’s easy to make a mistake
If you don’t see the snake.

At the Train Station

In case you just love pics
Of bricks.

Transmission

I don’t like when people cough
Behind me on the train.
Of course it’s the season for colds, but I...
Would just as soon abstain.

Whispering Safer Than Texting

It is rude that a man should write passionate things and then learn
That his words have been plastered all over the net - what a burn.

Crystalline H2O

I’ve always read that birds require a lot of food each day to fly about.
So when the snow is on the ground, what do they eat or do they go without?

Real Life Laughs

Sometimes I search the news
For items that amuse.
I thank the world's reporters
For a steady stream of snorters!

They Arrive Unannounced

When, with little warning,
At one o’clock in the morning,
You get a great idea,
You should write it down, that’s clear,
But check it in the daylight
To see if it will play right.

Mortality

People say that life is short. Of course, compared to eternity, it's true. Our ability to comprehend time far outstrips our ability to occupy it. But, compared to most other animals, our lives are long.

The human mind can comprehend
Far more than it can occupy.
We take, we give, we love, we live,
Before we die.

And after,
I hope to be remembered, at times, with laughter.

My Father

RIP Jack Enright, 1927-2019

You might say he was not an easy man.
A prosecutor in his early days,
Something combative lurked within his ways,
Across his life, a long nine-decade span.

I don’t recall the day my life began,
But he was there, and in my memory’s haze,
I see him still, a giant in my gaze,
A loving father, head of our small clan.

His voice is in my head; his turns of thought
Are permanently burned into my brain
For better or for ill. His stories taught
That wits and guts should both be roundly brought
To bear when there is justice to attain.
Alas, I cannot shake his hand again.

Working on Sunday

After you've stared at numbers all day,
Watching them add and subtract,
You may feel just a little dismay
That most things aren't so exact.

A Sunny Thought

Behold the wild flower.
It grows on fusion power.

Parenthetically

A math rule we all hold in awe
Is called the commutative.
Some claim I’ve broken that law,
But those charges are putative.

Hoping Your New Year Is A Happy One

I prefer to plan ahead.
2019? Too near. Instead,
I'm forming resolutions for 2020.
Not finished yet, but trust me, I've got plenty.

Say Cheese

I came across an article claiming that cheese was as addictive as cocaine.

A very logical friend of mine pointed out that this would mean that cocaine was as addictive as cheese.

A scientifically-focused friend of mine pointed out that this was all about the dopamine - things we like tend to release dopamine in our nervous systems.

Here's something from me that's predictive:
Everything you enjoy is "addictive".

An example, just to be fair:
I'm super-addicted to air.

Vampires of the Creepy Kind

In reference
To bed bugs,
My preference
Is dead bugs.

Warmish

The artificial daylight of the street lamps in the city
Reflects across the puddles with a yellow-orange glow.
The trees are bare, the grass is pale, but somehow it’s all pretty,
And I’m just glad the rainfall wasn’t blankets full of snow.

Diplomacy Was Not

Diplomacy was not her strongest suit.
Her strongest suit was grasping the essential.
She’d lay the facts out with a sort of brute
Display of logic, taut and consequential.
And if you did not like it, you were free
To figure out a way to disagree
But sometimes you would find your dreams were haunted
By her conclusions, proven but unwanted.

Diplomacy is not the highest art.
It leaves the mind bedazzled but unsure
Exactly what was in the speaker’s heart.
Was it pure gold or was it just manure?
She told the truth she saw, from where she stood,
Believing that its power was for the good,
And while it sometimes meant she lost a friend
She lived for real, not having to pretend.

Aquaman

Monday night we saw Aquaman with one of my wife's brothers. I can't say I was crazy about it, but it wasn't bad. I'm just a bit jaded about giant CGI battle scenes. I like them, but in somewhat smaller doses, I guess, than the average movie-goer.

Aquaman is about an individual, scorned as an illegitimate half-breed, who becomes the ruler of Atlantis. I was thinking of telling people that it was a metaphor for Trump. But they might take me seriously. I suppose I could also argue that it was a metaphor for Obama. Butm again, someone might take me seriously.

But seriously, there's great appeal, at times, in putting an outsider in charge. I suppose that was actually going on with both Obama and Trump.

Under the sea
Or up on the land
The powers-that-be
Can get out of hand.

Ho ho ho

Plenty of empty seats on the train.
Where are my fellow workers?
Christmas Eve has struck again
And turned them into shirkers!

Semicolons

Semicolons have somehow dropped out of fashion;
They’re good at precision but poor at projecting passion.

Belated Welcome

I finally got an email from the Chicago Marathon indicating that I was selected for 2019. It wasn't a welcome exactly, it was an "update", but I'll take it. I was actually kind of worried about not getting an email from them - even though the website listed me as "selected".

I can list off the bad things about the Chicago Marathon.

1) it is slow to start, with 30,000 fast people in front of me. Really, it takes about an hour to get to the start line.
2) it is kind of crowded the whole way

I can list the good things too:

1) great crowd support
2) it is so darn flat
3) I don't have to drive far to get to it

I will tell you how it all works out in October 2019. Yeah, that's a downside too. You have to commit to the race way in advance.

Of course, you can run the same distance on your own
In your own neighborhood
But there are stoplights and no free Gatorade
So your time is never as good.

Gingerbead

I saw there's some silliness going on about the gingerbread man. Is he really a man? Should we refer to the cookie as a gingerbread person? Don't we have something more exciting to argue about? This seems so 2017. After all, we know from the famous nursery rhyme, that he identifies as a man. "Run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me - I'M THE GINGERBREAD MAN!" Capitalization added. So is it written. So shall it be.

The gingerbread man, he likes to claim
His fast pace can't be beaten.
But every year, about this time
He ends up caught and eaten.

Forms

I ran into this online, apparently attributed to Douglas J. Steele:

There was a young man
From Cork who got Limericks
And Haiku confused.

I thought that was pretty funny. It helps to know that County Limerick borders County Cork in Ireland.

A guru whose humor was blue,
Wrote what he claimed were haiku.
They ran on too long
And rhymed like a song
And ended like limericks, too.

Passed Over

Oh sure, you may laugh,
But I was hoping to be the chief of staff!

Delayed

Something must’ve gone wrong
With the Lyft driver’s locator.
I waited and waited too long.
Now I’m catching a train much later.

Vortex

I'm puzzled. I seem to have been selected in the drawing for the Chicago Marathon 2019. That's not puzzling, since the odds are about 53 to 47. What's puzzling is that they were supposed to notify me, and they have my email address in their system, but the did NOT notify me. I had to log into my participant account, where I could see that I was listed as "selected".

Very understated. And I had to go ask for it. Where's my hyped up, "Welcome runner!" email?

Maybe my electronic welcome got lost in the space-time vortex somewhere. I realize they have many to send out.

On a completely different topic, I gave blood tonight.

There's always a need
For this stuff that we bleed.

In Place of Dew

The grass is embossed
With silver-gray frost.

TGIF

Pity now the Ancient Greeks
Who didn’t mark their days by weeks
And as a result forgot to take
Their weekend break!

Sniffle

Why do anteaters rarely catch colds?
Is it from drinking hot toddies?
The answer’s so simple, you’ll gasp when you’re told:
They’re just full of antie-bodies!

Duck

Why does a duck have feathers?
To cover its butt quack, of course!
If I tell this joke to my wife,
I fear she’ll want a divorce.

Gnomic

Forget that elf on the shelf!
I’m getting a troll in a hole,
So instead of observing myself,
I’ll be mocked by an underground mole.

Gnite

Some say sleep is overrated
But I think that’s best debated
After a nice long snooze
To illustrate my views.

Protagonists

There's a simplified schema for storytelling, in which there is a single protagonist on a mission.

And there are a lot of great stories like that.

But they don't all have to be that way. Romances, for example, whether comic or tragic, are more often of the "takes two to tango" structure. This does not prevent them from having a very strong, rather archetypal, story structure.

The hero with a thousand faces
Entangles with a heroine with superior social graces
And then it takes while
For things to reconcile.

Divergent

I haven’t a clue
So please tell me how
It can be that thou
Doesn’t rhyme with you?

Damage

"In the late 1940s, the United States experienced a “lobotomy boom” where the use of the lobotomy expanded exponentially... We argue that government provision and funding for public mental hospitals and asylums expanded and prolonged the use of the lobotomy. We support this claim by noting the lobotomy had virtually disappeared from private mental hospitals and asylums before the boom and was less used beforehand."

Somehow the guy who developed it was given a Nobel for his efforts:

"In 1949, the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his development of the prefrontal lobotomy — a procedure in which the connection is cut to a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex in mentally ill, depressed or learning disabled people. As the procedure can send patients into a vegetative state, lobotomies are now believed to be wildly unethical."

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me
Than a frontal lobotomy.
But in the 40s, this form of doom
Enjoyed a boom.

Cryptic Critters

Wombats, for what it’s worth,
Are certainly not of this earth.
They are aliens of high IQ,
Disguised to spy on me and you.

Weatherwise

My phone says snow.
My eyes see rain.
So I don’t know
What to tell my brain.

Wachagudfer

Decades ago, someone gave me a story called Tanner, set in a struggling Western frontier village named Wachagudfer, which was a humorous reformatting of "What'cha good for". The idea was that the town had an ethos that you should only move to the town if you had something to contribute. The story was about a dwarf who was an expert tanner and leather worker, who is eventually welcomed into the town, not because of a desire for diversity, but strictly because of his talent and hard work. I'm a sucker for such stories, and found it quite heartwarming. I was the poetry editor for a little magazine named Nomos at the time, and expressed some interest in publishing the story. I was not in actual contact with the author. Someone had passed the story along to me. And they passed back the information to me that the author, one Alexander R. Smyth, didn't want to publish it quite yet.

It seems that Smyth died in a car accident in 1999. And in 2012 his widow, Linda L. Fraser, published The Wachagudfer Stories, Simply Told, Book 1.

There are 3 stories. The first one is Tanner, which is just 18 pages long, and which is just as heartwarming as I remember it. But the next 2 stories are quite a bit longer, since the book runs to 450 pages or so.

The odd thing is that there is no online record of this book. So I cannot link to it! It's amazing, since it has a nice distinctive title. I was able to find information about the author, but not about the book.

I am in shock, over this search engine fail.
For now I will proceed to the next tale.

Visit Complete

Let there be no doubt:
Childproof doorknobs work great at locking me out.

Now that the grandkids aren't in town anymore,
Who will help me get this thing off the door?

Time Distortion

Why on earth is it called a fast?
Slowly, slowly the hours go past.

CDC

Amid the scary hoopla
Of the dreaded Romaine purge,
I have ventured toward Arugula,
To satisfy my lettuce urge.

Mystery Most Fowl

This has happened twice to me: I encounter a cardboard box outdoors, in a public place, containing a big dead bird.

The first time was during the summer, and the situation was smelly. I saw the bird’s feathers were speckled, but I didn’t poke around to get a view of the head or feet. I thought it might be a pheasant.

The second time was yesterday. This time I took s better look, and it turns out the bird was a decapitated Guinea Fowl. Its feet were tied together with string.

I think it was the same kind of bird each time.

It is weird that someone would kill these birds, which are poultry, and leave them in cardboard boxes in public places.

There are some religions that kill birds of this variety. For example, voodoo. But I have the idea they usually eat the poultry they sacrifice.

This seems an offense
Against moral sense.

Thankful

May your travels
Not unravel,
May your dinner hosts
Serve up the most
Scrumptious food,
And may your mood
Be warm and mellow
With all your mealtime fellows.

While We're On The Subject Of Times To Avoid

If a time-traveler offers you a trip,
Be wary, and request an an itinerary
That's specific, not vague.
I've found it's best to skip
The Year of the Plague.

536

'Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." ... A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months.'

According the article, massive crop failures followed, resulting in a mass starvation of human beings. Some scientific researchers believe that the mystery fog was probably due to the eruption of an Icelandic volcano. This claim is based on some very high-tech ice-core studies.

When it comes to years, 536
Is apparently the roughest of picks.
I don’t remember it, but as you can probably intuit,
I did have ancestors who lived through it.

Chilly

Is it true cold showers
Give you superpowers?
Well, make no mistake,
They sure do jolt you awake.

Headquarters and Hindquarters

Alexa, will you,
Explain the HQ
Situation to me?
Of course I knew
You wanted two,
But say, can it be,
That you really need three?

Melville Cane

Speaking of dead poets suddenly coming to my attention, there's Melville Cane.

Apparently he was a lawyer as well as a poet, and was admired in both capacities by Ayn Rand, who I've spent a lot of time studying.

According to this article, "reliable speculation" has it that she was a big admirer of these lines by Cane:

She was not bound by mortal sight,
The stars were hers, at noon.
Against the malady of night
She stood, alone, immune.

It reminds me a bit of "Invictus" at first glance.

Mr. Cane, although published in his time, and award-winning in his time, seems to have zero poetry represented on the web for some reason. He died in 1980, so perhaps his estate is trying to protect his copyrights, or perhaps everything is on the New Yorker site, a step removed from easy viewing.

Meanwhile, I bet,
Few are beating down the paywall door
For a chance to explore
His poetry, just yet.

Kate Light

I was sorry to see that the poet, Kate Light, had died. I had never read much of her until recently, when I picked up a book of hers, "Open Slowly", at the local used book store. She died a couple of years ago, it turns out, at the age of 56.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book. My favorite poem was one I don't see anywhere on the net, so I'm going to type it in here. It seems to be part of a series of poems about a man she loved but who was emotionally distant.

Funny, As In a Man,

one man, for instance, trying
to express tenderness with no model to base
his take on it on. How this severe face
struggles to be concerned, to be clear; shying
just short of simply saying what
he wants to say (or does he not
know?) As in a poet explaining, Class,
if you know what you want to say, you
will be clear; and if you don't (sarcasm
here) nothing will help you get through,
not even a room full of anxious coaches.
Funny, as in this man, whom
it happens I feel quite tender towards,
stumbling on his attempts to put into words
kind words. Trying more direct approaches,
a drunken bull in a matador
shop, he's lurching at the spinning room;
searching, looking for a door,
to open into what - one can assume -
would be a wider field, a fuller range.
Look at him. It's kinda funny, I mean, strange.

I particularly liked the altered metaphor, the "drunken bull in a matador shop". That brought me up short. You see, you expect the bull indoors to be heedlessly wrecking things, but it turns out that the indoors location is actually dangerous for the bull.

It's not simply that the man cannot express his feelings, and so wounds his beloved by accident. It's that he believes that if he says the wrong thing he will open himself up to a skewering! I am certain that many men feel that way at times. Many women, too, I suppose!

One interesting aspect is that she seems to be a step removed from his efforts, observing him, as if she too is emotionally distant in her way. She sees him a funny and strange.

It's a bemused, ironic stance
toward her object of romance.

Urban Fauna

I was walking to the drugstore
On a busy downtown street
When I saw a furry creature
Just ahead of my own feet.

At first I thought, how darling,
What can that creature be?
But as I focused on him,
I realized I could see

A rat, a good-sized rat!
It dived right through a grate.
Nobody else had seen him
And now it was too late

To offer him a tidbit
Or maybe sage advice
About which local restaurants
Have food that's extra nice.

Armistice Day

One hundred years ago, the killing paused -
A pause too brief.
For soon enough the world faced the jaws
Of yet more grief.

Possums

Of all American mammals,
They’re our most distant cousin.
They take up less room than camels,
So I’m ordering a dozen.

Parker Solar Probe

Now that most of its travel is done,
It’s going to hang around the sun,
To catch some rays and collect a ton
Of data.

Draw One In The Dark

Finished reading Sarah Hoyt’s fantasy novel, Draw One In The Dark. The title turns out to be old fashioned diner lingo for black coffee. Years ago I knew some of this humorous lingo, although I heard it referred to as Hashhouse Greek.

Anyway, it was an interesting shapeshifter novel, pretty logical on its own brain-straining terms. There’s a softpedaled sweet romance.

Your dating options may seem atrocious and bitter
If you sometimes become a ferocious critter.

Typical Midterm Resultd

An energized electorate has selected...
Massive gridlock, just as projected.

Judgment Slips

Many "how could that happen?" puzzles are solved
Once you're informed that alcohol was involved.

By Their Nature

Children aspire
To bigger and higher.

Unskeletal

Traditionally by Halloween
Lots of trees are bare.
But this year, as is clearly seen,
The leaves don’t seem to care.
Some of them are even green...
Come on, drop down from there!

Bomber

I’m disappointed this is just some isolated loon.
I was hoping for a convoluted conspiracy - and soon!
So I’m starting a rumor that this guy was framed
By some very bad people, never to be named!

Routine But Ouch

My dog had an operation.
She seems to be healing.
Seeing her tail wag again
Brings a wonderful feeling.

Yawn

Took a class on yoga for restful sleep,
But had to wake up to drive home.
I hope my state of relaxation will keep
Ready while I finish this poem.

Did It Again

Once I sign up for a race
I feel bound to do it, just to save face,
But I don’t tell anyone of my plans,
So I wouldn’t be disappointing any fans,
Except the guy in the mirror, who I hope
Won’t think I’m a mope.

Effects

A life is like a a stone
Thrown in a pond.
It goes on rippling
When the stone is gone.

Java Juice

Am I drinking coffee enough?
It’s just one daily cup of the stuff.
But it’s a large, so is that in fact
Two cups stacked?

Rattling

A big supply of rattlesnakes
Really makes
Being trapped in a mine
Exquisitely fine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45893215

Excelling

A proper spreadsheet glories
In hierarchical categories.

Sessile

The lovely Sea Cucumber
Is rather prone to slumber.
Unlike the busy ant,
It gets mistook for a plant.

Product Idea

Someone needs to sell time-release safes for home snacks
To protect ourselves from late night craving attacks.

Tick

I hadn’t known the Tick
Was an Arachnid.
I'm sure some smart kid
Sitting in the back did.

Glad Hostage Is Free, But...

Why did we go from “minister”
To calling people “pastor”?
I’m sure it’s nothing sinister,
And not a big disaster,
But word-choice alteration
Always jars my brain.
Just when you know a language
It goes and changes again!

Staying On Track

From what I can figure, a train engineer
Doesn’t even have to steer.
They hit the gas, they hit the brakes,
And try to avoid catastrophic mistakes.

Dry

I talked to a Chicago police officer who had worked marathon support for the race here last Sunday. I asked about the weather and she said it rained a lot. So I suddenly felt I had stumbled into a bit of good fortune because it hadn’t rained that morning in Milwaukee, where I was running that other marathon.

I’m not quite sure that made up
For hours of extra travel,
But something about cold rain
Makes my brain unravel.

Milwaukee

After steady forecasts of rain this morning, and after a rainy early morning drive from Chicago to Milwaukee, the rain stopped for the actual marathon.

Went out way too fast
And had to slow down
But still had a blast
Seeing the town.

Driving Out Of My Way

I was downtown today, to do some work. The place was jammed with out-of-towners here to run or watch the Chicago Marathon. Forty-thousand runners, that's a lot.

Even more people would like to run it, if they could, but forty thousand is some kind of practical limit. So they put in a lottery to get in, for normal people, like me.

Tomorrow is the Chicago Marathon,
But I'm not going to run it, I'll be gone,
Off to Milwaukee to run a marathon there.
Such are the burdens that lottery losers must bear.

Pirate Pet Preference

Said the pirate with a parrot,
“Other pets are just absurd.
Neither dog, nor cat, nor ferret,
Can repeat your every word.
If your pocketbook can bear it,
Then you ought to buy a bird!”

Scholarly Advice

You want your homework
Eaten by a doggy?
Just add gravy -
Get it nice and soggy.

Street View Sighting

I saw the Google street view car.
Will I soon be a street view star?
Will I be shown for all to see
With blurred-out physiognomy?

Stella

Stella, our beloved cat,
Who always went tuxedo-clad,
After eleven lives, has passed,
Leaving us alone and sad.

We Had Them Laughing Last Night

The Matchmaker is your one and only chance,
To see me as the lead in a romance.
You’ll watch as I, an old and cranky miser,
Get ambushed by my social-life advisor.

Another Opening

Dress rehearsal’s done, it’s in the bag.
Now let’s hope we open without a snag.

The Matchmaker, by Thornton Wilder

Here’s a startling fact:
In this show I act.
I play a man named Horace,
A sort of tyrannosaurus,
Who endlessly rails about folly
But ends up outsmarted by Dolly.

Harvest Time

Most seasons have one name
And then there’s autumn/fall.
Can this be explained at all?
And who, pray tell, is to blame?

Tomorrow

I think the autumn equinox
Should be locked up in some dark box,
And summer needs to stick around
About six months, till spring is found.

The Root of the Problem

It’s my belief that “root canals” are dreary.
I much prefer the one that’s known as “Erie”.

Surge

Sometimes when acting a scene, I will feel a startling wave of emotion, emotion I didn’t plan on feeling, but that pertains to the character’s situation. The trigger is acting with another person, which has an amplifying effect. This is a hazardous moment for remembering my lines! Fortunately it’s mostly something that happens in rehearsal.

By the time we’re on stage
I know what to expect
And my concentration’s
Less likely to get wrecked.

Show Closing, Show Opening

Well, the 4-day Hale Park Theatre production of O'Brien & O'Brian is complete. I'm sad to wrap it up because it was so much fun while it lasted. We had nice big audiences every day, and on Saturday night we filled almost every seat. There was lots of laughter every night, and I heard from the cast that they had a lot of fun doing the show. It's the nature of live theater to be ephemeral, of course, but it's so intense while it's happening.

There is no rest for me, however, because I acting in a show - in the same festival at Hale - in about a week and a half. I'm playing Horace Vandergelder in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, which is the basis of the big hit musical, Hello Dolly. I'm playing the male lead, and of course at the end I am engaged to Dolly herself. It's a big part with lots of lines. I'm just about there on having all my lines by heart, which is good.

I've been pounding my lines
Into my brain
And it's holding up fine
Under the strain.

Hale Theatre’s O’Brien & O’Brien

Mike Murphy, who directed, has a sure sense of what’s funny, and he was working with a cast he knew, so I figured this’d would be s very funny production. I was right.

O’Brien & O’Brian opened to a great crowd at Hale.
I’m proud to say they laughed without fail.
We all had a blast.
Thank you, dear cast.

Worldwide

“There are members of the flat earth society
All around the globe.”
Boasts of that variety
Hurt my frontal lobe.

Disease Not Understood

A lot of money has poured into Alzheimer's research. So far, it looks like not much practical progress has been made. A few drugs have been tested, but not successfully.

So I thought this NPR story was interesting: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

There re some statistical reasons to think something infectious could be involved, but it's certainly just another hypothesis at this point. There's one line of thought that Alzheimer's is come kind of late-life reactivation of the roseola virus - a rash that most babies get. For some reason the roseola virus shows up a lot in the brain tissue of Alzheimer's victims.

Could the dreaded disease
Have a connection
With a childhood rash
Or some other infection?

But Do You Feel The Condition Is Real?

You might think that a fear of palindromes would be called palindrome-o-phobia. But someone came up with this: aibohphobia.

It seems distinctly unkind
That the phobia’s name is designed
To unsettle the sufferer’s mind!

Nike

It's interesting how a big publicly held company will decide to go all-in behind some controversial issue. On the one hand, they risk alienating people on the other side of the controversial issue. Hence the slogan, "Get woke, go broke." The additional danger is that your own partisans may turn on you, when it turns out that you're really just another profit-seeking company without a truly deep commitment to "sacrificing everything".

There's a theory that soon there will be liberal shoe brands and conservative shoe brands. Ditto with all consumer products.

Shoes do come in left and right,
But keep your politics out of sight!

Sat Pic

Plane flying over the local woods,
Cruising by my neighborhood.

This surprised me. I don't know why it should. My neighborhood is on the flight path to Midway Airport. Why shouldn't one of those Southwest 737's show up in a satellite view? And yet - I've never noticed a jetliner in the satellite views of my own neighborhood before.

This one popped up at the USA Track & Field website, where they have a "Map It" application that lets you draw your running routes on a map or satellite view. That's what I was in the middle of doing when I noticed that big plane. You can see the blue line I was drawing on Longwood Drive, parallel to the plane. There's something a little bit funny about the left wing of the plane - there's a dark splotch on it. I don't know if that's some kind of artifact of the photography process, or what it is.

I see them everyday, but from the ground.
Here my point of view is all turned round.

Memorizing a Part

Got in a visit to the beach.
Got in some swimming in the lake.
Lay in the sun and tried to teach
Myself my lines beyond mistake.

Richard Frisbie

I attended my godfather's funeral yesterday. Richard Frisbie, 91.

My sister Kathy and I went with my father, who was the best man at Richard Frisbie's wedding.

He made his living as a writer, which is no mean feat.

His son, Tom, gave a charming remembrance of him. One of the funnier lines was that his father was "Google search before there was Google." In other words, the man was a walking encyclopedia.

It was a sad but loving event
Celebrating a life well-spent.