This is a good idea, and spurred me to make this post, which I've had in mind for ages. (And April was National Poetry Month; who knew?)

It's tough to pick just one poem by my favourite contemporary poet AE Stallings, so I'll go with the first of hers that I read, way back when it was featured on Poetry Daily:

The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees

Willows are messy trees. Hair in their eyes,
they weep like women after too much wine
and not enough love. They litter a lawn with leaves
Like the butts of regrets smoked down to the filter.

They are always out of kilter. Thirsty as drunks,
They'll sink into a sewer with their roots.
They have no pride. There's never enough sorrow.
A breeze threatens and they shake with sobs.

Willows are slobs, and must be cleaned up after.
They'll bust up pipes just looking for a drink.
Their fingers tremble, but make wicked switches.
They claim they are sorry, but they whisper it.

Ms Stallings' homepage gives links to another two dozen or so poems; I particularly liked this and this and this, but go and read them all, even if you think you don't like poetry. She has a wonderful, distinctive voice, erudite, whimsical and powerful all at once, and manages the delicate balance between profound and trite with enormous skill. There's an interview in the Cortland Review here, where you can hear Stallings reading a couple of her own poems (if you can put up with the wretched Real Audio format). The essay on formal verse mentioned in that interview is well worth reading and can be found here at the Alsop Review, which also hosts Stallings' excellent close reading of The Darkling Thrush. In addition, Stallings moderates a forum called Musing on Mastery at Able Muse's Eratosphere and so is one of the few working poets with whom you can actually "talk shop", in a sense. Finally, her first (and, sadly, so far only) book, Archaic Smile, is available from the publisher (U of Evansville Press), Amazon.com and all good book stores. I cannot recommend it too highly.

Update: below the fold, a list of blogs featuring poems for Poem On Your Blog Day. Not exhaustive by any means, just the ones I found tracking back to Ronn's entry or with a couple of quick searches on Google, Technorati or Bloglines. If I missed your entry and you want on the list, email me.

more...

Remember this story about worthless douchebag Scott J Bloch? As the newly appointed director of the Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers and other federal employees from retribution, this subhuman sack of satanic dingleballs removed references to sexual orientation from the anti-discrimination information provided by his department. Not long after that, he blithely announced that gay federal employees could be fired without recourse on the basis of their sexual orientation.

It seems that Shifty George and his Uptight White Christian Right Junta liked that idea just fine, so now they're doing the same thing to women's issues. The National Council for Research on Women has released a report (available here) detailing the multitude of ways in which Shrub's Morlocks are undermining the body of reliable public scientific and sociological information. From the report's Executive Summary:

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fact sheet that focused on the advantages of using condoms to prevent sexually transmitted disease was revised in December 2002 to cast doubt on the effectiveness of condoms, calling evidence on condom use and transmission of HIV and other STD’s “inconclusive.”

Contrary to broad medical consensus, information on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) website was changed in 2002 to state that studies about the link between abortion and breast cancer were inconsistent. After an outcry by members of Congress, the NCI posted the panel’s actual finding: abortion is not associated with an increased breast-cancer risk.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has charged that officials distorted the CDC’s science-based performance measures to test the effectiveness of sex education programs to prevent HIV and other STDs and used “measures designed to obscure the lack of efficacy of abstinence-only programs.” [That's not all the UCS has charged, either. --s]

A valuable Department of Labor publication on the rights of women workers once distributed by the Women’s Bureau, Don’t Work in the Dark—Know Your Rights, is no longer available.

A much-used Department of Labor Handbook on Women’s Workers is scheduled for re-release, but as of March 2004, no date was available for its publication.

The Census Bureau touts the ratio of women’s earnings as compared to men – 76 cents for every $1 – as “an all-time high.” In reality, the disparity in wages has remained nearly constant with less than 1% change in the ratio in recent years, and was characterized in 2000 as a lack of pay equity.

Only extraordinary public outcry prevented the appointment of Dr. W. David Hager to chair the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drug Advisory Committee. Hager is known for prescribing prayer as a treatment for premenstrual syndrome and refusing to prescribe birth control pills to unmarried women. He remains a member of the committee.

The Title X funding appropriation bill for fiscal year 2004 allows the Health and Human Services department to collect the names of health providers that offer abortion services with their non-Title X dollars

There's a lot more where that came from. Removal of reliable information from the public domain is a favourite tactic of repressive regimes everywhere, and it is now clear that the Bush II administration has adopted it wholeheartedly. My answer to nearly every problem is, at least in part, "more information!", so I find this slimy methodology particularly repugnant. (I'm trying to back off politics, since I started this blog to talk about science and my RSS blogroll (over on the right there) is a better source for political information than I will ever be, but this story really chafed my scrote.)

(Props to Jeanne of Body and Soul, who has been all over this issue.)

Got some comments spam last night; the weird part is, the spousal unit renamed all the cgi scripts after obscure comedians, so how did I get hit? Was it some dork sitting up all night spamming by hand? Anyway, add 80.132.74.114 to your blacklist.

I hope this will kill Diebold dead. The Oakland Trib has a better article:

the nation's second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that it supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.

Diebold Election Systems Inc. President Bob Urosevich admitted this and more, and apologized "for any embarrassment."

"We were caught. We apologize for that," Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots.

After the vile way in which the Bush junta siezed power in 2000, I have no doubt whatsoever that they will steal every vote that isn't nailed down. As this latest farce shows, using Diebold machines is just handing them opportunities. Bruce Schneier recently pointed out how cheap it would be to steal an election based on electronic voting, and Bev Harris has loads of info. This is one of the most important issues of the 2004 election, if not the most, and it gets more important with every upswing in Kerry's fortunes. BushCo™ has no intention of ever losing power; if The People™ are to thwart their designs, voting must -- must must must -- be transparent.

Die, you malignant corporate tumour on the tainture of America! Die!

(via Body and Soul)

Update: from For the Record, who have been all over this issue for some time, comes a related story from Florida, the spiritual home of election fraud, and a timely reminder that some of the best anti-disenfranchisement resources around can be had at Verified Voting.

Naze turns 40 today. I rarely read personal journal blogs any more, but days of naze was one of the first I ever picked up (I remember when he didn't even have his own domain) and it's lasted all this while because I just plain like him. Read a few of the stories in his archives and see if you don't, too.

So happy birthday, Chris, and many happy returns!

naze turning forty
gopher a thing of the past --
how'd I get so old?

never did sign up
for his email notices --
naze by RSS

(Did I mention that he likes to get haiku for his birthday? Go ahead, send him one. You don't have to be Basho.)

Something bad seems to have happened to my images, but since I have all the technical chops of Mr Computer I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it to get fixed. "Wait!" I hear the anguished voices cry, "doesn't your spousal unit make her living from that dire species of satanic voodoo known to decent, CPU-fearing folk as "computer stuff"?" Well, yes, but if I bother her with computer stuff too much, she kicks me in the nuts. It hurts, you know, but I figure I deserved it. Those of you who live with tax accountants or lawyers or doctors or any other useful professional, you'll understand. After all, it's not like the SU set me up this site just so that she could spend her precious minutes of free time hacking code (where I come from, a hacking code is subthig you see a dogtor for, but I just love to use jargon I barely understand) in response to my twittering. But Respectful of Otters is now in Rocket Scientists where it belongs, and I haven't forgotten about the teeny-tiny text in the comments boxes either (hi, P!). There are other things to fix, too: front-page links to my bio and copyrightanything notice, and a bunch of sites I don't read by RSS but to which I do want to offer linky props over there on the sidebar somewhere.

So I'll get to all of these things eventually, but please be patient. My nuts thank you.

I've been seeing this all over the place, most recently at Pharyngula, and meaning to play along:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.

"This produces lymphocytes, each bearing a distinct receptor, so that the total repertoire of receptors can recognize virtually any antigen."

The antecedent of "this" is recombination of variable receptor gene segments and clonal selection of lymphocytes; the sentence is from Janeway, Travers, Walport and Shlomchik, Immunobiology 5th edition 2001 (Garland ISBN 0-8153-3642-X). If you want a good introduction to immunology, you can't go past this book; it really is first class. Both text and figures present a clear, concise but comprehensive and superbly well organised overview of the field. Highly recommended. You can see for yourself here at the NCBI Bookshelf, although you'll need to come up with searches (base 'em on the chapter headings is the easiest way) because there's no way to browse.

Whenever I am tempted to sneer at religion and to think of it in terms of the Pat Robertsons and Fred Niles, it does me good to read something by or about ex-POTUS and tireless champion of the poor Jimmy Carter; but even he can piss me off sometimes:

I personally, in my Sunday-school lessons, don’t favor the religious endorsement of a gay marriage. But I do favor equal treatment under the law for people who differ from me in sexual orientation.

[...]

I have always been against abortion; it’s not possible for me in my own concept of Christ to believe that Jesus would favor abortion. But at the same time, I have supported the Supreme Court ruling of our country as the law of the land. And the present arrangement, whereby a woman is authorized to have an abortion in the first trimester of the pregnancy, or when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest -- these are the things that moderates who have beliefs like mine can accept as the present circumstances in our country.

Baal's bollocks, man! What part of "my body, my business" does your invisible friend not understand?

Of course, quotes with neither context nor further comment can be misleading; perhaps Mr Carter favours state-administered secular unions for all, with "marriage" reserved for religious institutions and the blessings they see fit to grant or withhold. I could go for that. I still don't like the sound of "accept as the present circumstances", but I can't see Mr Carter endorsing legislation that would take away a woman's control over her own body. Perhaps he would favour leaving abortion legal but providing strong advocacy for carrying to term even rape babies, together with state support for women who choose that option. Perhaps I could even cope with that.

(link-fu props to the spousal unit)

Jew. Jew jew jew jew jew jew jew jew .

Why.

Update: Ralf points out in comments that if you're going to googlebomb a pack of assholes, you might as well go nuclear (viz, wipe them off the page rather than just out of the top slot):

jew

jew

jew

jew

jew

jew

jew

jew

jew

From the EFF, an excellent Wired story about the dangers of electronic voting (and a link at the bottom to further coverage of the issue). This is perhaps the single most compelling issue in American politics right now, and I predict that it will spread to other countries. If this unmatched opportunity for subversion of the democratic process comes anywhere near you, fight it. If you vote in the US, do it by mail for the forseeable future, until e-voting is forced to add a paper trail at the very least.



From Neat New Stuff: freefulltext.com "provides direct links to over 7000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by ANYONE... for free". Marylaine points out that the site only has an alphabetical index, so it's mainly good as a reference link for when you already have your citation. (Also, I haven't checked but "some or all" may be problematic.)



Remember the dragon in a bottle that made the blog rounds a while ago? Turns out it was a promotional prank by this self-satisfied asshole. The report calls it a hoax, but it was just a grubby moneymaking stunt. Hoaxes should have a point, dammit; Ern Malley is turning in his grave. (via waxy.org links miniblog)



Lots of things from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools go straight into my "want" folder. Consider this gorgeous book on African rituals, or this collection of somewhat more Western ones.



US troops will soon be armed with a weapon that jwz aptly dubs the Bowel Disruptor: a stun gun that emits a baby's scream, played backwards, at between 110 and 145 decibels (the pain threshold is around 120, which is like standing next to a jet aircraft as it takes off).



They played every song as if their nuts were on fire, and shrieked out incomprehensible banshee babblings; this was music to kill dogs with a hammer by.



From Stavros: Charlie Brown is an existentialist, and a collection of truly remarkable pictures.



I might as well just pipe Graham's RSS feed straight in. All human communication fails, except by accident: Jukka Korpela has provided the world with a translation of, and some commentary on, Wiio's Laws. Wiio:communication::Murphy:everything, pretty much. It's funny 'cos it's true.



Noam Chomsky has a blog, which is where I found a link to The Nation Institute via one of their projects, TomDispatch. They've been around for a while, and look good at a glance:

Founded in 1966, The Nation Institute has a fundamental commitment to the values of free speech and open discourse. The Institute places particular importance on strengthening the independent press in the face of America's increasingly corporate-controlled flow of information, and through its programs the Institute promotes progressive values on a variety of media platforms.

They list their Trustees but don't give any details on where their money comes from.

You know I love me some Margaret Cho, right? Well, now she and "explorer, genius, conquerer, artist, muse, refugee, eternal beauty, sexual scientist" Ava Stander are selling clothes:

We are not a plus-sized clothing line. Nor do we make clothes for the super skinny. Right now, our styles fit sizes 10 - 18, which encompasses the majority of women. In success, we will add sizes. In the mean time, we would like to point the spotlight back in to the faces of the mainstream media that is creating impossible standards of thinness for women. These unrealistic yardsticks seemed to appear at the same time women were gaining unprecedented power in the work place; as if it was known that women consumed with dieting and glamour would be less likely to take jobs away from men. Very quickly women previously not considered overweight were considered fat and the ideal woman went from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy and Kate Moss. We would like to move the weight standards for women up a bit and bring back the styles of the 1940's that loved women and their curves instead of hiding and distorting them; back to the time when sexy was Lana Turner, Anita Eckberg, and Mae West, and Miss America weighed 150 pounds.

(via Kip)