The Dancy Dance

This is quite possibly Bob Folder’s finest poem

I in all my lucky days
Have never danced inside my pants
Have never danced a dancie-dance
Inside my little pantsie-pants.

I in all the spooky fruit
That spun so slowly in my sleep
Have never dared to lift the sheet
And take a little peekie-peek.

But every monstrous shake-n-bake
That launched a dump-truck in the lake
Baked a little cakie-cake
And popped a toad until it spake.

In all those lucky daisie-days
Of dancing in my pantsie-pants
And taking leave of common sense
I never danced a dancie-dance

Open Letter to the Administrators of Poetry Contests

This has been the worst year or two economically I have experienced since I was born. (And I was born some time ago.) But the administrative elements of the poetry industry have not, so far as I have noticed, reacted with the kind of empathy and concern that the rest of the world has. Some consider poetry to be above and beyond the petty concerns of the world. They are wrong. Poetry falters the farther away it strays from the reality and the blood of lived life. I would like to ask the administrators of poetry contests to address that.

Music for a New Thingy

Vice Admiral of Just Awfulness, Tim, has constructed a visual and musical horror: Global Hit: Music for a New Thingy. In addition to the Facebook page for Global Hit Must Be Stopped! you can visit this site for those moments when you want something just awful and The World is not broadcasting.

For background information on this grassroots movement, read my earlier blog post on this important topic.

Murdleladop.

Ozark Jimmy

During its heyday, global demand for Ozark Jimmy’s Japanese-style, mesquite-flavored toilet bacon was astronomical. In the wake of the collapse of junk bonds, the Internet and real estate, OZJ felt the decline as acutely as any of the other companies at the time. But the desire for toilet bacon never went completely away. In fact, it built and built until finally Kleiner Perkins sought out the company’s founder, who was working at the time as a men’s room attendant at the Manila Hilton, and funded his return to business. He was able to reassemble the ground-breaking team that had originally made Ozark Jimmy’s a household name.

After Haiti, Oregon

Although the amount of energy devoted to the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake is heartening, I sometimes wish that impulse were operational closer to home. I have always found it fascinating that Oregon’s rural poor, who are poor indeed, never seem to need any help as far as most of the same Oregonians are concerned who leapt so publicly to the help of Haiti, when it became a cause celebre. Perhaps if Oregon’s rural poor had the decency to be more picturesque we’d have plane-loads of doctors rushing in to help. Or perhaps the Haitians, also a conservative rural people, offend liberal sensibilities less because the beliefs they share with their Oregon brethren, but far less with their urban benefactors, are hidden behind a foreign language.

PIRATES! A Sitcom

P I L O T !

EXT. COLD OPEN – DECK OF A PIRATE SHIP

A dashing young man stands in the bow of a ship, impeccably dressed in a piratey version of the fashion of the latter half of the 17th century, including frilly shirt and enormous hat. He’s also wearing an eyepatch and an earring. He draws a cutlass and effortlessly puts to flight two villains attempting to attack him. He jumps onto a hawser and swings out across the deck, sweeping up an unrealistically buxom and unconvincingly innocent lass in his arms, depositing her on the bridge and swinging back, now unaccountably clenching a knife in his teeth. He drops onto the deck in the midst of a group of ugly pirates, slips, falls on his face and jumps back up, screaming, the knife now halfway to the back of his head.

My Op-Ed in the ODE

My op-ed on the debate about the hosting of the anti-Semitic Pacifica Forum by the University of Oregon has been published by the Oregon Daily Emerald.

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Update: I was shocked at the crudity and intellectual poverty of the comments. I felt naive when I read them. I shouldn’t have been surprised that public discourse at the UO shares the tenor of the screeching news programs and scurrilous reality shows that I had thought the exceptions but which are clearly the rule. But I was. Ick.

Websites I Have Known

Click the link above to view a presentation of six websites that I have worked on, or managed, and which I have materially improved. These include Ask.com, Committee to Protect Bloggers, InstantAction and more. Speaker’s notes are below.

Ask (InterActive)

Mostly I led the creation of natural-language, question-answering databases for corporate clients such as Compaq and Oxygen Media. But I also wrote the first ever corporate about copy and the marketing book for Series B funding visits.