Month: February 2008

I just got the project that will eat the next year and change of my life nicknamed “Alicanto” – nobody in the room who approved it knew what it was, I think. I just said it was a mythical bird of fortune, which is true.

In reality, either we will find silver and gold, or die.

-when ordering popcorn, if they ask you if you want to upgrade to a large for 50cents, say no.
-Juno was a pretty good flik
–Dark Messiah is a lot of fun. It is a lot harder to do on the console when you can’t change your axis controls in the game, and you are locked into a specific class instead of a point-buy-skill system.
-you can change your axis controls on ANY XBOX360 game from your profile settings on your Live account
-you can use your 360 controller to turn on the XBOX (freakin sweet! a la peter griffin)
-under the proper circumstances, i actually can get 6 hours of restful sleep
-there is a gourmet garage in walking distance of my apartment, my bank account will suffer for it
-despite my general distain for source-controlled overprice products, i know more than i thought i did about apple crap, and am going to know a _lot_ more in the coming months
-the cave of swallows, the worlds deepest pit cave freefall drop, is deep enough to conceal the empire state building , and was only explored in depth in the 80’s!
-fresh rosemary makes a really big difference when making lamb
-red wine is really hard to get out of a tablecloth
-i really love starfruit

Posting it here because, hey, ya never know:

“Dear all,
My mom inlaw is in the hospital with a broken ankle and her cat, Lucky Pierre, needs a home for the next month.  Please let me know if you know anyone who might be able to provide a pied a terre for Pierre!

Mr. Pierre is about a year to 18 months old and knows all the house habits and manners.  A friendly little fellow.  He’s white with black spots.

Please let me know if there’s a place he can hang his cat hat for a spell.”

Any takers?


In a word, Beowulf.
I am a huge fan of literature, but I am more of a fan of storytelling. Beowulf is like a literary archaeopteryx. It offers just as much insight as mystery, and shows a truly transitive state between the oral and written traditions. Beowulf is written in a since-dead form of English, but one which can be read with a little work by anyone who undertsands the fundamentals of Russian/Latin/German, and the roots of many of the words we use every day. It is written without a division between history and mythology – many of the people, places, and things in Beowulf are real, and have been substantiated archologically. This creates a poem in which the underpinnings of the language and style mirror the content and its presentation.

How many of you out there hate history? It is an astoundingly fascinating subject, yet many people find it hopelessly dull. Many of you may have heard of Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed – these were “modern” inventions meant to re-create a Beowulf experience. Create a captivating story that people will enjoy re-telling, and you find a way to get at histry in an entertaining way. I imagine many of you have very little difficulty remembering the plot and order of your favorite movie(s) – this is because they are entertaining. At a detail level, however, they are probably more, if not equally complex as memorizng a bunch of major events and dates concerning a historical point on a timeline.

I can go on and on about Beowulf in regards to the historical signifigance, which is tied to its impressiveness as a piece of literature, but doesn’t fully emphasize its poety.

Beowulf, like most Old Eglish works, is heavly laden with kenning. To me, next to haiku, kenning are one of the most complex forms of poetic prose out there. The skalds who used kenning were wordsmiths, in the truest sense, not just Hallmark rhymers. They would create images that depended on the subtext of images, sometimes as far out as the seventh order! The idea that so much can be contained in so little, and that so much of the beauty is dependent on the eyes, and sometimes ears of the beholder/listener, is, to me, the root of poetry.

e.e. cummings still has a place in the sound of his poetry, but he doesn’t stand out the way he did in print. Demodocus , though probably unimaginably beautiful in oration, comes to us now only in print, as there are no recordings of his voice. Poets old and new try to strike the balance between thier ability to create image with word and sound, and Beowulf does both for me. Read aloud, it is beautiful sounding, even if you don’t understand what it means. If you do understand what it means, you are enmeshed in the meanings and kenning – the games of words within stories of poem.

(IX – 710-720)
Ða com of more under misthleoþum
Grendel gongan, godes yrre bær;
mynte se manscaða manna cynnes
sumne besyrwan in sele þam hean.
Wod under wolcnum to þæs þe he winreced,

goldsele gumena, gearwost wisse,
fættum fahne. Ne wæs þæt forma sið
þæt he Hroþgares ham gesohte;
næfre he on aldordagum ær ne siþðan
heardran hæle, healðegnas fand.

Monsters, kings, conflict, politics, and a hero, all mixed in with history and traditions, all over a thousand years old, and living today. Not living the way it once did, on the lips of skalds in darkened halls by crackling fire, but living in a way which none of those voices would have ever imagined.

if i were a parent, and i gave my kid xycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine, and then a beer, would I be arrested for accidental manslaughter/murder (assuming the kid died, which, hell, if you have brain 1, you should assume is going to happen)?
the media really pisses me off.