Weekend Assignment #316: My Poetry Declamation Day

Weekend Assignment #316: National Poetry Month: As April wraps up, let's not let it get away without celebrating National Poetry Month. For this assignment, please share with us something about poetry. Tell us about your favorite poet, or quote us a few lines of your favorite poem, or if poetry doesn't happen to be something you enjoy, tell us why!

Extra Credit: Write a Haiku!

I had an very busy Saturday this week, starting with Eva's funeral and continuing with lunch with a friend followed by Doctor Who. But a certain Saturday in late March was even busier. March 20th started for me with a 7:30 AM meeting of the church's finance committee, followed by Morning Prayer, morning Mass, a Vestry meeting and then a funeral Mass for a former teacher and principal at St. Michael and All Angels Day School, Sheila Roberts. I didn't know her at all, but I served at the funeral mass anyway. Sheila was a close friend of another retired teacher at the school, well known organist and composer Alan Schultz. Many years ago, Alan instituted something called Declamation Day at the school, in which students memorize and recite short works of literature. Declamation Day is still a school tradition, and I think it's a pretty cool one.

The funeral was followed by a reception, and after that I dropped my friend Jan off at Barnes and Noble and went in myself. I only meant to check the magazine rack for the last Doctor Who Magazine issued before my subscription, but some people from a local poetry club had just set up a microphone in the magazine area, and were introducing an open mike poetry reading.  Well, I couldn't resist! Shortly after the reading started, I recited an E.E. Cummings poem from memory:

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
       who used to
       ride a watersmooth-silver
                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat

and so on.

Somebody else did a poem, and somebody else, and meanwhile I was scribbling bits of my poem Pilate's Answer (And All Ye Need To Know) on the back of a piece of paper from the Vestry meeting, so I could recite it without long pauses for recollection.

But I didn't stop there. Darned if I didn't jump in front of that microphone again and again. I recited, again from memory, a little-known companion poem to Ogden Nash's Adventures of Isabel, entitled The Sniffle:

In spite of her sniffle
Isabel's chiffle.

...which I see now I've been misquoting for over 45 years.

I was on firmer ground when I recited my favorite part of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss:

Look what we found
In the park,
In the dark.
We will take him home.
We will call him Clark.
He will live at our house.
He will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this?
We don't know.

Incidentally, I once wrote a Tolkien/Seuss mashup pastiche based on the above:

Look what I found
In a cave
Dark as a grave.
It's a magic ring.
It's a precious thing.
I put it on to vanish.
Its hold on my thoughts grows.
Should I pass it on now?
Gandalf knows.

I'm trying to remember what else I did, possibly another Ogden Nash piece, possibly A.A. Milne. I was astonished how many poems I wanted to share, really, and ultimately had to hold myself back from overstaying my welcome! Maybe I only did one Seuss, on Nash and no Milne at all. But I did introduce a poem I memorized off a bus placard from a Poetry in Public Places project in the mid-1970s:

If it's not one thing it's another
(Muffler I have to wear)
Woman
Don't you know I come from
A stronger breed of Vikings?
We ate you people for breakfast.
(sniffle)
--Author unknown

I've posted that poem before, for Weekend Assignment #105 in fact, hoping that someone could identify the author. So far, no luck.

You see which way my poetic interests lie, mostly with the light and humorous.  I don't think I have a favorite poet, but rather a handful of them.

Okay, extra credit haiku:

Incense to Heaven
Rises from tiny round grave
Praying for Eva

Karen

EMPS: Lamps of the Museum of the Weird, Revisited

I knew I'd done photo shoots before that involved the Museum of the Weird's collection of mostly midcentury modern lamps, so I did a search just now after editing my new photos for Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #87: Lamps. Guess what!  My previous lamp-centric entry was for John Scalzi's Monday Photo Shoot way back on January 30, 2007. For that entry, I was able to get some nice shots of most of the same lamps I photographed today. In fact they're superior, because back then, these lamps weren't dusty and inaccessible behind boxes in the front room.


From 2007: the most extreme of our vintage lamps.

Let's start with two of the 2007 photos. This is the most obviously vintage and busy-looking lamp we have. The pink and black ceramic base with gold leaf "crackle" is interesting enough on its own, but the two tier turquoise and brown patterned lampshade is the real star. The lamp and the shade clearly do not go with each other, but that's part of the lamp's charm.


from 2007: vintage rattan style lamps in the den

These two vintage hanging lamps looked so ugly when John brought them home sometime in the 1990s that I was highly dubious about the purchase. But once he cleaned and hung them and turned them on, he was vindicated. I love these now - and John is thinking about replacing them!


Our "rocket" lamp and a classic blue ceramic lamp, obscured by dust

Never mind the dust on the vintage blue lamp; have a look at the tall lamp beside it. This is a classic fifties design. I have no idea who the designer was or what this style of lamp is officially called, but I like to think of it is a "rocket" lamp because of the tall silo shape and the wooden supports at the base. Love it.


Our "Arizona" lamp

I've shown you this lamp a few times, I think, and I still don't know much about it. We got it at a yard or estate sale. It's very much a "rustic" Western style. I've never quite figured out what that wooden base is made out of.



And finally, here's the only lamp in the house, more or less, that is less than forty years old. John bought it in the late 1980s, I think. It's sort of a craft project, a clear, hollow lamp base, which one can fill with colored sand or art or seashells or, in our case, Happy Meal toys. The lampshade on this is uninteresting, so I won't bother to show you the whole lamp this time. But I did clean the lamp base just now so you can get a good look at the contents. The yellow tint here is caused by the light bulb shining above.

I could show you the salmon, turquoise and white pole lamp, or my sort-of-mod yellow lamp that shorted out several months ago, or my vintage desk lamp, but let's stop here. Don't want to be late this week with my post!  Nor can I really tell you which of these lamps is my favorite. Truth is, I'm very fond of all of them.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #315: My Mafia, the Doctor and Other Thieves of Time

Right after I posted Weekend Assignment #315: The Thief of Time over on our new Weekend Assignment blog, I got very busy with work and the Round Robin and the Weekend Assignment and some other things I'm less inclined to talk about, and also the stuff I'll be talking about in this entry. Appropriately, my WA entry about not having enough time to do stuff because other things get in the way was delayed because other things got in the way!

Weekend Assignment #315: It seems that we're all too busy these days to get around to everything we'd like to do, even if we had the money and means to do them. Is there a particular activity that takes up far too much of your time, and thus prevents you from getting around to other things?

Extra Credit: What is the #1 activity you wish you had more time for?

When I wrote the question above, I kind of had it in mind that I would be ranting about how much time I spend playing games on Facebook. It's a bit of a problem, because most of the games are designed to suck up as much of your time as possible. Look, for example, at the Mafia Wars screen that is open at this very moment on another tab of my Firefox browser. "PARIS: START TODAY BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE GETS THERE FIRST," it's screaming. Meanwhile the Weapons Depot wants to make sure I'm aware that it's time to manufacture a weapon. And while I'm doing that, wouldn't I like to like to alert all the Facebook friends in my mafia that I need them to send me more forges, buzzsaws, etc. so I can upgrade to manufacturing the next type of weapon? Of course I would. After all, I only have "PARTS OWNED: 3 of 50." I could also rob or fight other players until my 26 stamina points run out, check the other cities to see if the properties are ready to be collected from, bank my $250 in New York and other amounts in the other cities, send "mystery gift bags" or other gifts, send "respectful" gifts to others via the Safe House page, ask for or receive gifts via wish list, accept any Mafia Wars-related requests on my FB request page, help people with missions and send car parts on the main Facebook wall, exact "revenge" for one of my properties being robbed, as suggested in an email, and eventually do a mission of my own when my energy builds up again.

And that's just one game. Vampire Wars is every bit as demanding, if you allow it to be, and there are lots more games available. I'm far from the worst offender on this: I currently play six games and have stopped playing three others, whereas I sometimes see lists of 15 to 20 or more games for which some other gamer is soliciting allies. Judging from what I see, there must be people who spend all day every day attacking other characters and racking up kill counts, which to me is the least interesting and most annoying part of all of these games. I've almost completely given up the fighting part of each game, because I don't enjoy it and it wastes my time. I just wish a particular woman on School of Magic 2 would stop attacking my character 20 times a day.

But that isn't what I wanted to write about when I started this post.

The other thing that takes up a lot of my time, aside from blog-related stuff, church-related stuff etc., is Doctor Who, particularly when it's in season. Let me explain this. British television is different from American tv in that historically, American tv shows were on network tv more or less year-round, including reruns and minus the occasional preemption or hiatus. In the UK, they don't produce 22 episodes of the average drama or comedy. There might be six or seven this year, and the same number again next year. Doctor Who, which is the flagship family show of BBC One these days, gets 13 episodes and a Christmas special, except for 2009 which was a "gap year" of four specials (well, counting New Year's Day, that is). Doctor Who typically premieres right around Easter, airs weekly with perhaps one preemption for the Eurovision song contest, and after 13 episodes disappears again until Christmas. In the UK you can now watch the first run episode in regular or high definition, catch a rerun during the week and watch it online. Meanwhile, two weeks after each UK premiere of the episode, it airs on BBC America here. The first run of BBCA this year appears to be uncut, but for reruns a week later they squeeze in an extra commercial.

I typically acquire a copy of the new episode the day it airs in the UK, through Means That Must Not Be Mentioned, which I deliberately leave to someone else to accomplish rather than learning just how it's done. Each new episode is precious to me, and full of details that reward repeated viewing. So I watch the episode twice or more on that first day, and then I watch its companion "making of" show, Doctor Who Confidential, and then I watch the two-week-old one on BBC America, and then I go online.

Doctor Who fans are a social, opinionated, over-analytical bunch, so they tend to congregate on Doctor Who-related blogs, on sf tv websites and, most of all, on a forum called Galaxy Base, which replaced the Doctor Who Forum, previously called Outpost Gallifrey. (And now you know the inspiration for the name of this very blog.) The "Poll: Rate / Review "The Time of Angels" thread on Gallifrey Base, in which fans offer their opinions and then argue with each other about the episode that premiered just a few days ago, currently has 1209 replies and has been viewed 37,430 times. I've personally scanned (and in some cases actually read) nearly all of those replies, a few of which I wrote myself. I also frequent a select handful of the thousands of other discussion threads on GB, including the one about favorite quotes from the episode,  one for speculating about how many times to date the Doctor has met a character called River Song, and several photoshopped humor threads, which inspired me to make this:

This won't mean anything to you if you're not a Doctor Who fan, but it's a key scene from the most highly-regarded Doctor Who story ever (The Caves of Androzani, 1984). In this final scene of the story, the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) succumbs to spectrox poisoning after giving the last of the antidote to his new companion Peri, and regenerates to become the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker). Here I've strategically marred the image with a parody of a promo banner that ruined the cliffhanger at the end of this week's episode ("The Time of Angels," April 24, 2010). The incident featured a cartoon of flamboyant comedian Graham Norton, whose reality show about casting Dorothy for a new musical version of The Wizard of Oz appeared immediately after Doctor Who on Saturday. The cartoon Graham and his banner obscured part of Doctor Who star Matt Smith's face and distracted viewers as the Doctor gave an impassioned, angry speech to his enemy:

"There's one thing you never put in a trap if you're smart, if you value your continued existence, if you have any plans of seeing tomorrow, there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap...me."

So many people complained about the Graham Norton Over the Rainbow banner over the Doctor's face that the BBC was forced to issue an apology the next day.

My parody of this outrage is kind of a "what if" in which the next version of the Doctor appears in an inappropriate banner over his predecessor's head, obscuring his companion's, erm, torso. I'm sure it's all completely meaningless, obscure and not at all funny to most of you, and I've just wasted a lot of time over-explaining it. But this is just the sort of thing Doctor Who fans sometimes do for the amusement of themselves and their peers.

So yeah. Between watching Doctor Who, reading and writing stuff about Doctor Who online, reading Doctor Who magazine and making silly photoshopped pictures about Doctor Who, I was pretty busy this weekend, in addition to the Round Robin Photo Challenge (for which I owe comments to most of the Robins still), my EMPS entry, church, Coffee Hour and lunch with friends and a mini-crisis involving the friend whose financial affairs I manage.

I also had a discussion with John about taking on a "housewife" role at home now that my unemployment benefit is about to run out with no possible renewal, in exchange for John working a lot of overtime to make up for the loss of income. So I will need to cut back on the Who obsession, most likely, to get in more housekeeping stuff. After all, it's only fair!

And that's my extra credit, the thing I need more time for. Oh, and sleep. I need more sleep. Nothing new there, except that the sleep schedule is as skewed as it's ever been, and insomnia gets in the way or fixing it. But I'm working on it.

Karen

EMPS: Staring at Rare Stairs

This entry for Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #86: Stairs is sort of a sequel to my Round Robin: 3 x 3, Part Two: Wonders of Williams Center entry. Try as I might - and I even asked John - I could not think of any interesting staircases in Tucson, except for the one in the "missing-building-blocks" office building in my entry about Williams Center architecture.


An "FX" shot I did back in 2006, of stairs at the First Magnus HQ.

You see, Tucson doesn't have an abundance of stairs. Most of the housing is either single-level ranch homes, or apartments and condos. Occasionally you'll find two story apartment buildings, but I don't know anybody at the moment who lives in one of those, and that would be pretty darn boring anyway.

That leaves commercial buildings, and the vast majority of these are single story as well. One of the largest hospitals in town, Tucson Medical Center, is a sprawling maze of ground floor rooms and corridors and nothing else. Whoever endowed the land for the hospital, so the story goes, did so on the condition that they never build a second story, which might interfere with mountain views in that part of the city. I suspect that this is why Tucson in general tends to consist of one story buildings, with just the occasional exception. And when you do get an office tower, well, that's going to be mostly elevators, right?



But here is an exception. Inside the big gray twin tower Williams Centre office building that fronts on Broadway Blvd is that rather cool white staircase. Basically it runs between the ground floor and, well, the other ground floor. The way the building and parking lot are arranged, there's covered parking that comes out on the lower level, and a parking deck above that which comes out on the upper level. I always park on the upper deck.



I love the curves and angles of the thing, and the contrast between the white railings and the greenery below.



On the other hand, I almost never go up or down these stairs. I have no reason to do so.



The look of the interior staircase has a half-hearted echo outside. What's really cool about this shot isn't the white railing or the accompanying steps, but the reflection of the parking deck on the back wall of the building itself.

Next Time: my Weekend Assignment entry. But not right now!

Karen

Round Robin: 3 x 3, Part Three: Impressions of a Cat in Motion

For Part Three of my Round Robin entry, I'm using three failed photos of my friend's cat, Harvey. Having been abandoned and left for dead before his rescue and adoption, he's kind of a wild and crazy cat, and he certainly doesn't trust me yet. He did not stay in one place long enough for me to get even one good photo. So let's have fun with the bad ones!



This is the best of the shots. I didn't do anything here except crop and sharpen lightly.



For this one I turned the background negative and overdarkened Harvey's white fur for a pixillated, almost op art effect.



On this last one I used a solarization effect and a motion blur on the background, increased the saturation on the barely-visible eyes and did a lot of smudging at the edges of the cat's outline.

And that's it from Harvey and me. Be sure to visit the other Robins - here's the third and final batch of links!

Linking List, Part Three
as of 7:15 PM Saturday

Suzanne R - Posted!
SuzyQ421's Photo Blog
http://suzyq421sphotoblog.blogspot.com

Sherrie - Posted!
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com/

Ruth - Posted!
Scrabblequeen
http://www.scrabblequeen.wordpress.com

Dawn **Welcome, new member!*** - Posted!
Dawn Elliott Photography
http://dawnelliottphotography.blogspot.com

Kat **Welcome back!** - Posted!
In My Dreams I Can Fly...
http://inmydreamssfk.blogspot.com/

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

Manang Kim - Posted!
My Life's Journey in Focus
http://kissess4u.blogspot.com

Janice **Welcome, new member!*** - Posted!
jabblog
http://jabblog-jabblog.blogspot.com/

Karen

Round Robin: 3 x 3, Part Two: Wonders of Williams Center

Here comes Part Two of my three part response to Round Robin: Anything in Threes (for 4/24/10). This entry is devoted to the theme I actually planned for this Challenge, the Wonders of Williams Center.



Williams Center is a shopping center and financial and tech office park just off Broadway Blvd east of Rosemont in Tucson. What I like about it is the variety of innovative, sometimes wacky architecture of the office buildings, almost as if financial institutions and technology firms had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of style. At one end of the office park is Barnes and Noble, the parking lot of which provides a great view of this triangular office tower. I like the way the reflective north side of the building was almost invisible to the camera on this white and blustery day.



Back before the company collapsed, a large portion of First Magnus's corporate offices were in this building, which is almost two buildings. Before that, it was home to Citibank. Citibank sold its Tucson branches to Norwest which became First Interstate which became Wells Fargo, and that bank branch isn't even there now. But a bank that St. Michael's deals with is upstairs, and so is one of my recruiters, the one that placed me in most of my recent temp jobs. None of which has anything to do with the fact that I love the building's chunky, missing-building-blocks look.



Williams Center Drive starts between the chunky blocks building and the shopping center, and meanders south and east to Craycroft Road. A company that didn't hire me is on that drive, and AOL used to have several buildings full of tech support and "customer retention" people back there. But my favorite building by far is this one, with its giant red roof thingy that looks like a fairground ride. I had the impression that years ago I saw running water flowing over those red curves in an artificial waterfall, but I think now I was wrong. There's another building, The Springs at Williams Center, that absolutely for sure used to have a water feature. Given that Tucson is in the desert, and moreover has been in a drought for over a decade, the fountains at the Springs no longer flow.

And that's Part Two! Part Two of the Linking List is below. Part Three of my entry is coming up!

Linking List, Part Two
as of 7:15 PM MST

Sandy - Posted!
From the Heart of Texas
http://sandyfromtheheartoftexas.com

Nancy - Posted!
Nancy luvs Pics
http://nancyluvspix.blogspot.com/

Carolyn - Posted!
Ford Family Photos
http://carolyn1209.blogspot.com

Monica - Posted!
Shutterly Happy
http://monica-frameofmind.blogspot.com/

Wammy - Posted!
Beginners Luck Photography (New Blog)
http://beginnersluckphotography.blogspot.com/


Karen

Round Robin: 3 x 3, Part One: Oh, Hail!

Appropriately, this is going to be a three part response to Round Robin: Anything in Threes (for 4/24/10). This Challenge was suggested by Marie of the blog Photographs and Memories. The idea is to present one theme in three images. And look! I'm going to do this three times!

This first theme takes advantage of an accident of weather. Tucson had a huge temperature drop this week, and on Thursday afternoon I heard hail hitting the roof. Naturally, I had to try to photograph it.



This shot of hail on our painted concrete patio is cropped from a much larger image.



Hail hitting my car doesn't look all that different from rain on the car, but I like the visible "dripping" effect here. Those aren't drips - they're falling hailstones, picked up by my camera flash.



Hailstones hide in the grass in another cropped image.

And that's it for Part One! Here's Part One of the Linking List:

Linking List, Part One
as of 7:15 PM MST

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Linda - Posted!
Mommy's Treasures
http://mommystreasures.blogspot.com

Freda - Posted!
Day One.
http://fredamans.blogspot.com

Part Two will be up in a few minutes.

Karen