....I am a grandpa.

Twins born Friday to my son and daughter-in-law. Both babies very healthy. Mom is fine.

Picures and more info to come....

 I'm a sucker for a zombie meme. Can't remember who I stole this one from...


MEME:

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have -

* one weapon. 
* one song blasting on the speakers.  
* one famous person (real or fictitious) to fight alongside you. 

MY ANSWER:

weapon:                       a Tactical Nuke
song:                            Stevie Ray Vaughan - The House Is Rockin' 
person assisting:     Wonder Woman -- so she can fly me out before the tactical nuke goes off. Yes, Superman could do the same thing, but if I'm getting flown around by a super hero, I prefer a lady.

I can see the final scene being filmed. Zombies gathering around the nuke, looking confused, human dismembered bodies scattered around them, including the remains of my plucky, but ill-fated best friend, Stevie Ray's "House is Rockin" swelling up in the background, wonder woman and I flying off in the invisible plane, and then everything goes white. Roll credits as Stevie's music rocks out. Gives me chills.

...just responding to market forces? .. .or both?

Bought a new car that will allow me to reduce miles on my 11mpg truck. It is a Chevy Aveo and should get between 24 and 34 mpg . 

I went to the Politifact web page , which lists Candidates public statements are studied and assigned their assesment of how much truth lies behind these statements. 

They rank using many categories, but I combined them into three basic categories for ease of analysis. While it appears that their analysis of 'amount of truth' is fair to all, and while it seems their intentions are to look at every candidate fairly,  I have no idea how they select which comments to study. Bias in the selection process could impact the percentages.

Nonetheless. I think that the results are interesting. By the way, I created some really good looking pie charts. If you'd like to see them, let me know. My ability to place images on my journal is temporarily broken.

McCain (all 42 recorded items evaluated)

Mostly True or True - 35.70% 

Half Truth or Barely True - 38.10% 

Mostly False or False - 26.20%*

Clinton (all 65 recorded items evaluated)

Mostly True or True -47.70% 

Half Truth or Barely True - 40% 

Mostly False or False - 12.30%*

Obama (all 52 recorded items evaluated)

Mostly True or True -50.90% 

Half Truth or Barely True - 26.40% 

Mostly False or False - 22.60%**

* both McCain and Clinton had two instances of what Politifact calls "on fire" falsehoods -- the patently bad lies. Obama had none.

 in the spirit of National Poetry Month, I remind you of a previous posting I made on the poetry of Anna Akhmatova

http://jborneman.livejournal.com/2008/01/08/

And I also post this poem she wrote for poets....


"You, Who Was Born..."
Anna Akhmatova - 1956

You, who was born for poetry’s creation,
Do not repeat the sayings of the ancients.
Though, maybe, our Poetry, itself,
Is just a single beautiful citation.

As other poets are doing this month, here is an introduction to a poet who may be new to you, writing in a form that may also be new to you. The poet is David Shumate (an Indiana boy), who writes prose poetry.

Here is a link to a bio that explains his thoughts on prose poetry.

Here is a link to one of his poems, "Plum".

I have a copy of his book, "High Water Mark" and just love the way he writes.

First, in the spirit of being 'fair and balanced' I taught seventh graders, not fifth graders as reported earlier.

So, yesterday I spent the day discussing poetry with seventh graders. There were six classes total, and about 20 students per class. Each class was about 40 minutes long. I gave basically the same talk to each class, but the personality of each class took my talk in sublty different directions. 

My objective was to review with these classes what a poem is, what makes a good poem, why do we need poems, and some tips on writing poetry. These classes all are going to have a poetry writing assignment, and I used this as an opportunity to give them some hints and tips. Plus, as the teacher said, 'having an outsider, and a man talk about poetry is means more to the students than having teacher do it." I hope that was true.

So all day I was greeted with, "Hey! Are you the Poet Dude?" Yep. That's me...Poet Dude.

We briefly covered meter and rhyme, why free verse isn't free, rhythm, ideas, word choice, and inspiration. I used various poems to illustrate these various topics. Some poems were my own, some were taken from the 'literary world' and a couple came  from my fellow spec fic poets (Bruce Boston's  "Heavy Weather" to illustrate imagery, and Tim Pratt's "Making Monsters" to illustrate an extended metaphor).  

We also did a couple class excercises. One was to fill in the missing word in a poem. The other was to describe things using non-traditional senses. "What color is the sound of a car horn?" "What color is your teacher's voice"  "How does a sunset sound?"  Fun stuff.

If you want to see any details of what I presented, let me know via email.

It was a great day, and the kids seemed to repsond well (better than the teacher feared, so that was good). Interestingly enough, the class the teacher desginated her 'Troublemakers' seemed to be more creative in their feedback and class excercises than the "Honors" class. Teacher wondered if the Honors students were more concerned with getting the correct answer and han more problems breaking out of that box. 

Sorry for rambling. I had fun.

In 1733 Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen --  which was fortunate since on this date in 1894 the first strip tease was performed in Paris, and the attendees needed to have oxygen administered after the climax of the performance.