- I put no stock whatsoever in the Tarot (beyond what the individual being “read” reads into it), but Alexander Chee’s article on it is surprisingly interesting:
Fortunetelling is easy to ridicule, frequently misunderstood, and, for some people, extremely powerful. Unfortunately, what’s very tough to predict is what reading futures will do to the person with the cards. [via]
- Terry Gilliam on the making of Brazil. [via]
- Jack The Cat Found After Two Months In JFK Airport. There’s no way the film rights to this haven’t already been bought. [via]
- 13 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed. Unless, of course, you did. Or unless, like me, you think some of these are maybe more accurately referred to as typesetting marks. But, hey, a list!
- And finally, Google lately seems bound and determined to make their products more difficult to use, don’t they?
Month: November 2011
Tearing into Monday
I tore my trousers at work today, although thankfully just at the corner of the right pocket, and nothing too embarrassing.
And that’s about as exciting as today got.
Song of the day
“For the Price of a Cup of Tea” by Belle and Sebastian
Erased from memory
Over the summer, Geist held an “erasure poem” contest, in which you had to take an excerpt from Roughing In the Bush: Or, Forest Life in Canada and, just by erasing individual characters, come up with a poem. I wasn’t going to enter — I like Geist, but, having entered other of their contests in the past, I wasn’t exactly aching to send them more money, even with a subscription renewal thrown in. And I’m not exactly a world-class poet. But I thought it was an interesting challenge, and before I knew it I had something I rather liked.
I didn’t win. But that’s okay. Like I said, I like Geist. And I probably won’t be entering their Postcard Story Contest this year — I understand the whys of the new “make your own postcard” rule, but I can’t say it appeals — so they can have this entry fee instead.
Anyway, like I said, I liked what I wrote…or, rather, what was left after I erased. And since I didn’t make the short list, I’ve got no reason not to post my poem here:
a week passed
the dark stranger and my husband
the same horror
attracted their attention and
they were delightedI almost screamed
then followed intently
their dark eyes fixed upon the mapwhat strange hex of names
every lake and river on the paper
held hard my sorry eyesI was consumed by a curious word
which had been given — a strange gift
to a glade fenced on three-sidesa moving snake
or a hideous image of god
conceived by the most distorted imaginationclaws that formed hands
a face strange and awful
a wood of serpentine formmy name
I thought to demand an explanation
longed to fleein the east, far over the great lake
there were bad prayers made of wood
and this was one of themthey said
that hideous thing
they had made with their own hands
were highly amused
and passed the word from one to the other
in spite or contemptI was sorry to perceive this circus in their eyes
they regarded it with mysterious awe
for several days
then left vexed and annoyed
by the height of my curiosity
Monday various
- I don’t think I’m actually going to be using this, and not least of all because I almost never use Chrome or its extensions, but this is interesting: Jailbreak the Patriarchy, an extension that gender-swaps all the pronouns. [via]
- The YA Paranormal Drinking Game [via]
- “It has come to our attention that Ayn Rand was in fact a self-serving sociopath. We regret the error.” Copies of the Atlas Shrugged DVD pulled because they (very mistakenly) called it a “timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice” [via]
- Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home will be a musical. That’s…interesting.
- And finally, these Paranormal United States [via]
