Five top blog posts

I'm always interested in stats, though that doesn't mean I always use them well, or understand their finer points. 

Blogger obligingly provides stats on a number of things related to my posts, and, out of curiosity today I checked the top blog posts of 'all time' from my blog. They're a real mixed bag, and there seems no rhyme nor reason as to why any of them should have been viewed so often. 

But for the record (because possibly they'll change at some point) here are the top five posts as of the 16th August, 2017. 

Top of the list is the Commonplace post which dates back to 2011, and is a bit of a riff on the word insurance, and the sorts of things that came up when I searched that word on my Evernote. A more random post you'd hardly imagine. Perhaps people search for the word insurance a lot! It's had twice as many views as number two on the list. 

Curiously enough, I hadn't checked this post for a while. I'd thought it related to an entirely different subject... 

Number two is Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus which goes back to 2010. This was a positive review of a small circus that was touring New Zealand at the time, and in fact has been back again at least twice since then. You'd think small circuses wouldn't be very impressive, but in fact they often include considerable talents (and these people really work for their money), and are very enjoyable. But then, I'm a circus fan from way back. Though I must say I miss the performing animals, even if that isn't a very PC thing to say anymore. 

Third on the list is Skinny ties, also from 2011, which seems a most unlikely subject to be viewed Twilight series, Robert Pattinson. It's been amongst the top five since it first appeared, pretty much. I wonder if it has to do with the photo that accompanies it, which may possibly be the actor from the Twilight movie, Robert Pattinson. 

Fourth on the list is Debating Compost, which dates way back to 2007. It's a brief piece arguing that cooked foods go just as well in composts as uncooked. Though someone's concern about this was that it encouraged rats. That's possible. We used to have a cat who dealt successfully with any rats and mice around the place, but when my daughter moved out, she took the cat with her - it did belong to her after all. During the course of the move the cat walked out the door of the new house and vanished for a couple of months. The daft thing was living at the park just down the road and was being occasionally fed by some kind person who eventually took it to the Vet. The cat had been microchipped, so the Vet was able to identify my daughter as the owner. 

And fifth is Fat amplification, the most recent of the bunch, from 2016. It's merely a bit of chat about the joys and woes of amplification of musical instruments, particularly in a church setting. Maybe the problem is widespread!

Popular post

I have a bit of a thing about stats. I'm not trained as a statistician, but I've done quite a bit of reading in the subject, and also worked in a job late in my working life that involved some stats. But apart from the work angle I've always enjoyed finding out what the stats are about all manner of subjects - and checking the original stats have been correctly interpreted.

That's the wider view: just now I was having a look at the stats on this blog, and in particular which post has had the most visits since it first appeared. It turns out to be one that was written on 13th February, 2011, called Commonplace Post. It's fairly random, taking as its topic insurance and riffing on about the topic by using a few paragraphs I'd found in my Evernote file.

The interesting thing is that this post has had more than three times as many visits as the next most popular post. At this point that's 9923 to 3295. Nearly ten thousand visits to that post alone. That seems extraordinary for something as random as this. Check it out, you'll see what I mean.

Fendering

As everyone knows, I'm sure, a fender bender is a colloquialism for a minor traffic accident, although when you put that phrase into Google Images you come up with a great number of shots of accidents that to me would hardly be classed as minor [see the image included here]. Considering how much excess there is to pay on any motor vehicle claim these days, and what it costs merely to replace a fender, some of these accidents must have cost around a $1000.

I put fender into Evernote to see what things would come up.  Interestingly enough there was a more than usually random set, though the number was small: just four. One of them was a photo of my grandparents' marriage certificate in which the name Charles, written in very 1901 handwriting, was mistaken for fender.  That was a bit of a surprise.

Two more photos had the same misreading problem, though not because of handwriting.  In one of them Evernote mistook the name Jenner for fender (admittedly the print is a little rounded on the page) and in the other the printed word render was picked up. Evernote does a very good job of picking up text from photos, but in these cases just didn't quite get there.

The last search response actually got the word fender, in the middle of this wonderful list from a delightful poem by Barbara Hamby called Ode to Hardware Stores: 

(garnet, production, wet or dry), hinges, wire nails, caulk, nuts,
     lag screws, pulleys, vise grips, hexbolts, fender washers
all in a primordial stew of laconic talk about football, baseball...

I'm not sure what a fender washer is, (nor a hexbolt, if it comes to that), but it's the only clipping I've got that actually contains the right word.

All of this by way of mentioning the Fender amplifier, made by the company, Fender, naturally. Fender are currently advertising an amplifier called the Vaporizer. I'm not sure if that means that if you sit in front of it you'll be vaporized, but it does sound a little ominous, even though the model in the picture looks innocuous enough.

We have an almost-vaporizing problem at our church: two sets of amps are seated on either side of the stage and though they face slightly inwards, if you sit at the right or left of the auditorium you get a full blast. One of the sound people said the best place to sit is right in the middle of the auditorium, in front of the sound desk. I might try it, but I suspect that if this is the best place to have the most moderate experience, then the sound people aren't actually hearing what most people in the place are hearing.  No wonder they don't take everyone else's complaints on board!


The fender bender photo courtesy of San Francisco Citizen

Changing poems

I've been reading the poems that the Writer's Almanac sends through daily since some time in 2009, and recently have increasingly found that the quality of them has become less poetic and less vital.  When I first started getting them, I used to keep them in a folder each day, for 'future reference.'  Well, yes, enough said about that.  And then I kept them in Evernote, but only if they appealed to me.  At least in Evernote there was more of a likelihood that I'd see them more than once.

Increasingly, they haven't appealed. I think firstly that the choices of poems now seem to lean more and more to the easy. Occasionally there's one with a bit of bite, but far too many of them are surface, descriptive, and fail to have something that says, Have at you!  Occasionally there's one from a poet whose name you recognise, and often those poems have more punch, but they're few and far between.

Furthermore the poems are often slack in construction (even though many of them have been published); there's little rhythm, little sense of internal rhyme, often little shape. I don't expect poems to rhyme, but I do expect them to have something for the ear to hear and enjoy.  I don't think they have to have a particular metre, but it does help if they've got rhythm.  Many of the recent ones have lacked this.  Shape is a matter of taste, perhaps, but it seems as though many of these poets have never read anything that came in stanzas or verses or thought that the way the poem was architectured made a point as well.

So yesterday I decided to unsubscribe from the Writer's Almanac (sorry, Garrison Keillor), and try something different. In fact, I wound up getting a daily tweet from Verse Daily, a site that looks a bit more amateurish than Writer's Almanac, but, if their poems are anything to go by, may have something better in their store.  I've been chewing over today's offering Self Portrait: Swimming in Monkeys, by Michael Teig on and off all morning. It's an odd poem, one that I presume is trying to pin down what goes to make up a personality by using all sorts of seemingly random metaphors. Some of them click (with me) some don't...so far. But the thing is I've enjoyed coming back to it and trying to get my teeth into it.  This hasn't happened much lately with the WA offerings.

I also signed up to get daily emails from The Poetry Foundation, a very professional-looking site that's long-established, and has a huge archive of poems. Their offerings have also been more mind-catching.  Today's piece, Flounder, by Natasha Tretheway, is a more conventionally laid-out poem, four lines to a verse, and is the 'conversation' between an old Negro lady and her grandchild/great-niece (?) about fishing - but much more, of course. It's an easy poem to pick up, and yet it has hidden depths, and a wonderful last verse. I like poems where the last lines suddenly switch things around, or take you off into a corner you didn't expect.  This one certainly does.

I've also just finished a review this morning of a book I began back in August: Poems of Devotion.  The review will probably go online at some point.  The editor of the book is Luke Hankins, and he's done a wonderful job of bringing together poems that have a religious element in common, but are devotional in the sense of Hallmark cards or little pretty gift books kind of devotional. These poems are tough, gritty, bite you in the neck kind of poems - although there are also ones that lift you out of the earth and into the air. It's taken me a long time to do the reviewing because the poems needed reading and re-reading. And there's a lengthy introduction to the book as well. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys good poetry.  It's a feast, though, watch out, there's quite a bit of pepper and curry and chilli in it.

Toes poems

Hopefully it's getting a bit late in the year to be worrying about having cozy toes - more likely the sandals and jandals will be coming out of hiding, if they haven't already. The last week or so has had some lovely days, and hopefully there'll be more, though as always, the weather people are forecasting something drastic for us.

Thinking about toes, I thought I'd check out my Evernote clippings to see what came up on that subject.  Surprisingly enough, while there were a few references to that common expression - kept me on my toes - most of the notes referred me back to poems I'd collected, including a link to one of my own. I can quote this one, since I own the copyright. Here's the bit about toes - it comes from a poem called Lying on my side:

Toes keep pace with the quietly shifting space:

those toes (unlike the ankles) soft and less defined,

grubs of differing heights set as extremities,

shift around each other, nuzzling in amongst each other,

comfort spaces betwixt between, sensuous with each other,

revelling in their sockless, shoeless freedom.

There's a nice bit about toes in a poem called Night Rains, San Diego, 2012.  The poem is by Tim Pfau: 

We sailed together, so clever and deft,

occasionally dipping our toes in

hurt, seasoning brightness and space with salt.

You can read the full poem on the Canopic Jar website.

Don Walls has his own website, and there are samples of his poems scattered over several pages. Aspects of my toes is a delightful short poem which you can read in full on the page that has some poems from his book Down the Lane. Just scroll down the page a little, until you find this poem.

Toes only get the briefest of mentions in John Updike's Seven Stanzas at Easter, but the poem is so good, I advise you to read it in full. He looks at the realness of the body Jesus rose in (the same hinged thumbs and toes...)

Finally, Dorianne Laux, in a poem called Antilamentation, also notes briefly a point about toes - and the way the person addressed in the poem has shoes that crimped her toes. It's a poem that suggests we should regret nothing, though I leave it up to you to discover whether that's good or bad advice from the poet.

This photo comes from a post on the KCBakes website, and discusses teal toes. Apparently teal is the official colour of ovarian cancer. There are a couple of other toe pictures there too.

Musicians, poets, scientists and atheists

I wrote about Evernote in my last post.  And I'm going to mention it here again: it's a great place to go looking for something to connect up with an idea or phrase that you're using in a post, a phrase such as the following: affordable Behringer mixers at Musician's Friend.

To many readers that will read a bit like a statement in a foreign language, or a dense poem. By the way, talking of poems, I'm reading an anthology called Poems of Devotion at the moment.  It's edited by the poet, Luke Hankins, who's served as Associate Editor of Asheville Poetry Review since 2006.  It's a collection of wonderful poems by modern poets, some more accessible than others, but all worth reading.  The focus in the book is on devotion to God, but there are some poems that have snuck under the radar a little too. 

But that's a side path. Back to the original phrase.  I did a search on a couple of the words in it: Behringer produced no results, mixers only a couple of not very interesting ones. Musicians - without the apostrophe - produced plenty, and the first was one from a book I read recently called God's Undertaker, by the scientist, John Lennox.  It's a book in which he tries to bring some sanity to the science/atheist vs Christian/creationist debate.  The following quote has only a small amount to do with musicians, but it's worth reading all the same.

"...the fact that there are scientists who appear to be at war with God is not quite the same thing as science itself being at war with God. For example, some musicians are militant atheists. But does that mean music itself is at war with God? Hardly. The point here may be expressed as follows: Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science. Nor, we might add, are such statements necessarily true; although the prestige of science is such that they are often taken to be so. For example, the assertions by [Peter] Atkins and Dawkins, with which we began, fall into that category. They are not statements of science but rather expressions of personal belief, indeed, of faith – fundamentally no different from (though noticeably less tolerant than) much expression of the kind of faith Dawkins expressly wishes to eradicate. Of course, the fact that Dawkins’ and Atkins’ cited pronouncements are statements of faith does not of itself mean that those statements are false; but it does mean that they must not be treated as if they were authoritative science. What needs to be investigated is the category into which they fit, and, most important of all, whether or not they are true."

This kind of straightforward thinking does wonder for the brain, especially if it's been assailed by Dawkins-type thinking. 

Evernote

Having some fun with Evernote in the last couple of days.  Nothing serious, and this isn't a complaint about Evernote, which for the most part I really love. (I don't like the way you can't change the font or the font size as easily as on Word, but that's a small issue. Although I did discover recently that highlighting the whole note and using Ctl + increases the font size, which is good.)

Anyway, the first of the 'issues' was that when I went to use ClippingsConverter, the website that takes the highlighted notes off your Kindle and exports them to wherever you want to export them to (Word or Excel are options) I couldn't export to Evernote.  It kept telling me ClippingsConverter wasn't authorized to do so, and I'd need to authorize it.  Well, I'd already authorized it some time back, and didn't actually need to do so again.  But I couldn't get past this point.  I unauthorized and re-authorized, but to no avail. Evernote wasn't able to help, saying it was an issue with CC - admittedly the latter has recently updated their website, so maybe there's a change that's causing the problem.  I went back to my friend, Jim, at CC, and he's doing his best to sort it out.  But so far we haven't got anywhere. (Jim, incidentally, is a great guy, and very willing to sort out problems as soon as he can.)

And then today, I wanted to export files from Zotero into Evernote.  I'd never done this before, but it turned out to be a piece of cake, except that the files consisted of individual book titles, and every single one of them was turned into a separate note in Evernote, increasing my notes from some 3,000 to well over 4,000.  Not so hot.  I deleted them all again, but it would be good to be able to export into a single note, which is what I wanted to do. Can't have everything.

I see that Evernote is upgrading to version 5 soon, and promising new things. Hopefully there won't be things missing that are currently of value.  It doesn't seem as if that's the case, but sometimes developers like changing things for the sake of changing them....don't they, Microsoft?

By the way, I'm using Evernote on my smartphone too, these days.  It works really well on there - better than on the iPad, in fact. 

Kan-Do

As with many other areas of my life, I tend to work in an intuitive way: whatever comes most to mind at any given point is what gets attention.  It's not an ideal way, and there's another side to my character which likes to be very organised and make lists and cross off the items as I go.  This side usually comes to the fore when the intuitive wakes up in the morning - or worse, in the middle of the night - with its brain buzzing and unable to sleep because there seem to be so many things that have to be done...right now!  If I continue not to be able to sleep, the more organised me gets up sometimes, makes a list, and sends the intuitive (and itself) back to a blissful sleep.  

Leaving work matters to the intuitive is only of value once you've started work.  Getting the intuitive to get moving is more of an issue.  Intuitives tend to get overwhelmed by too many projects being on the plate at once. 

 

In Evernote I came across a simple model for putting projects into perspective. It was devised by Toyota in Japan (get your genuine Toyota parts here!), and is called Kanban. 

With Kanban you have a whiteboard with three columns named Backlog, Doing and Done.  I wouldn't have thought a column for work that was Done would be necessary, but on second thoughts, it's valuable to have that sense of completion written down in front of you.

If you don't want to go to the trouble of writing and rewriting on the whiteboard, just use sticky notes.  While it's certainly easier to move them from one column to the next, there's perhaps some value in having to rub out and rewrite (in a new column) the various project items.  Just shifting bits of paper around can become exactly that: shifting bits of paper around...

Some people use different colours for different kinds of projects.  But don't get stuck on a colour scheme at the cost of getting started.

The first step with Kanban, is obviously to write down everything you need to do. This will probably show you that you've taken on too much but write the things down anyway.  This may be a time to ditch some projects, pass them on to someone who can do them better, or rethink their value.

 

Next, select five things you're committed to getting on with straight away. It's useful to make a mix of urgent and important items.

The next step requires discipline, but that's what the system is all about.  Get to work!  Move through the tasks and complete them.  Say No to suggestions of yet more things to do until your workload has been reduced.  Congratulate yourself on completing tasks.  

 

I haven't used this system - as yet - but I can see its merits.  I've listed out my projects, however, and they turn up regularly on Google Calendar, but there isn't quite the sense of progress there that I'd like to see.  I know that no system will actually make a person work when their inclination is to avoid the work, but all systems are worth a look if you think that there's hope of moving forward.  I need to move forward on at least three projects, probably more.  Maybe Mr Kanban can help....!  And can also help me see whether I'm overloaded and need to put some things on the back burner, or decide to forget about them altogether. 

 

An odd pleasure

This is my first attempt to write a post directly on the iPad without having written a draft first somewhere else.  I've been using the iPad for some time, especially when we've been away from home, but it has some limitations that I've not quite got over yet.  However, most limitations prove to be sort-outable, given time, and a knowledgeable wife.  I'm finding, however, that typing directly into Blogger seems quite a sticky process.  For some reason I'll be typing away happily only to discover that a great deal of what I've been typing hasn't appeared on the screen.  And the iPad's spellchecking program, while it is wonderfully at second-guessing you much of the time, can sometimes make very odd choices about what it thinks you meant when you mistyped, and in the process turn prose that's wondrous into prose that's woeful. 

So sticky is the sticking process that I'm beginning to think it would be quicker to type the post out in Evernote, where at least things keep moving, than to keep on typing it in here, where I can read two or three paragraphs of something else while I'm waiting.   However, having started with this, I'll finish it, even though its rather annoying.

I guess there's a certain odd pleasure in typing something that doesn't appear on the screen until thirty seconds later and then discovering that you've actually managed to make no mistakes at all.  But the pleasure is odd, rather than really pleasurable, and at this point I think it's time to try an alternative!

What do you notice about the following extract?

What do you notice about the following extract?  ...except for some trimming here and there and the shifting of the gold deeds of the Black Knight to the shoulders of Ivanhoe.

It comes from a review of the movie, Ivanhoe, by Bosley Crowther, which I copied to Evernote recently after I'd read the book by Walter Scott.   It seems to me in this sentence from the review that Bosley has mixed up his good with his gold.  Perhaps it's because Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is also mentioned in the review a couple of times.   

It's interesting how often the word gold is used more as part of a metaphorical expression than in terms of itself as a precious metal.  Gold and gold bullion has been around so long in human history that we tend to equate it with its value rather than its actual physical self.  (If 'self' is the word I want.)

Looking through my famous clippings (again, on Evernote - not that I'm trying to promote Evernote today, particularly) it's intriguing how rarely the word turns up just as plain old ordinary gold.  Much more often it's within an expression: he turned his company to gold; such and such is the gold standard of the business, or the mission, or the something else.  

In our minds, gold is much more than itself.  I'm sure there are other words like this, though I'm not sure that silver has got quite the same clout, though diamonds comes close.   Although what do you make of this sentence?  We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.  (It comes from an article on Ronald Dworkin written in The Guardian.

Wings almost clipped

When it comes to service we tend to remember the times we've had cause to complain about something far more than the times we've been well-treated.  So by way of amending that approach, I want to tell you about ClippingsConverter.com and Jim, who's the man behind it (he's a Brit working in the US).  I'm not entirely sure of Jim's role, but I suspect he may be Clippings Converter.

Anyway, those of you who use Amazon Kindles will know that you can make notes as you're reading, or highlight passages, or do various other things.  The  'My Clippings' file includes some other things which I don't use much, so I can't remember what they are offhand.   I don't tend to use the features when I'm reading a novel, although occasionally a phrase or word will catch my eye, but when I'm reading non-fiction, I use the clippings feature a lot.  It's the equivalent of scribbling in the margins or underlining in a 'real' book.

Bird with clipped wings by iglazer

I came across ClippingsConverter.com because I'd been trying to sync the clippings for a particular book (Hannah's Child, by Stanley Hauerwas) and for some reason - and this is the only time it's happened - the notes wouldn't sync to my computer, however much I tried.  You can read the notes and highlights online at Amazon's Kindle pages, but normally I would read them in relation to my 'copy' of the book on my computer.

ClippingsConverter.com offers to upload your My Clippings file (once you've transferred it to your computer (in the My Kindle Content folder, a folder that arises automatically once you've got Kindle on your computer) and turn it into an Excel file or a Word file or even to send it to Evernote.  (Since, for the first time ever, I've used up vast quantities of my monthly allowance on Evernote, I thought I'd forgo that option this time round.)

I went to ClippingsConverter, got the file, uploaded, and then found I had to register.  No problem, except that from then on I couldn't get back into the system with my username and password.  I asked for a resetting of the password and got the most horrendous and unmemorable password you've ever seen (certainly one that's hacker-fullproof, I'd think) but this wouldn't let me log in either.

I emailed the feedback section and Jim emailed me back, saying he was puzzled about why the password wouldn't work, as it worked at his end.  Finally he offered to check out remotely what was happening on my computer when I tried to log on.   Which meant he had to set up a 'meeting' online and ring me on my ordinary phone.   At his expense.

The problem was very quickly solved: somewhere between my original registering and my subsequent attempts to log on, the username had been changed from what I'd put in to my email address - the username is similar.  I don't think the system did it; I suspect in the confusion of going back and forth I may have gone for the email address instead of the username proper.   And according to Jim, that should be acceptable.   The system should take both.

He was grateful that working through my problem meant he'd found something that wasn't quite working according to Hoyle.  So that was pleasing all round, as I guess he may have had other people with the same issue who've given up on the site.   But what was most pleasing was that someone would take their time to deal personally with a problem. even if it meant a call from New York to Dunedin, New Zealand.

Good on yer, mate!

Shifting to Chrome

Well, the shift to Google Chrome as my default browser seems to be going okay.   Of course some things went missing with the change - not my bookmarks, which were happily imported from Firefox - though truth to tell, I hardly ever use the bookmarks now, as typing into the URL line usually brings up anything I want.

I did lose the add-ons I had - Chrome calls them extensions - and had to go and re-sort them: Evernote's clipper, for one, and RoboForm (which oddly turns up at the bottom of the screen rather than the top; some curious feature of Chrome, apparently).   Zotero also went missing - it's part of Firefox's add-ons, but not Chrome's as far as I can tell.  You can get Zotero as a stand-alone programme now, but I haven't yet figured out how to get stuff into the right folder in the stand-alone version: when you click on the little blue box that records the book item you're interested in, it just pops it in wherever it feels like it, and because of Zotero's set-up, you can't find which folder it's in, although of course you can actually find the item through their search box.

And just now I realised I didn't have the add-on that copied URLs to Twitter (or other social media).   Chrome has an extension for this, so that wasn't too much of a problem.

The main reason I shifted was because Facebook was becoming very sticky on Firefox.   (My geek son reckons Firefox has overloaded itself with all its upgrades).   Anyway, on Chrome, Facebook is behaving itself very well, so that's a plus.  Another plus is that there's no separate box for doing a Google search: the URL box and the search box are one and the same (this being Google's browser, naturally) so that's actually a gain.  This was starting to happen on Firefox, but not quite so effectively.

So, at present, all good.

PS 20.12.2011 Only realised this morning that Evernote is not working in quite the same way it used to.  Instead of clipping whatever it is that you want clipped directly to the Evernote database on your computer, it clips it now to your Evernote database online.  It's only when you sync the two that the computer version updates.  Before it was the other way round.  Odd.  On the plus side, the new look Evernote clipper is an improvement over the old one.  And doesn't require as much fiddling around with each time.

And another thing: everything is being spellchecked all over again (like the word, spellchecked, for instance).  Obviously Chrome doesn't import all the words I've collected over the last few years of Firefox usage.

Poems on the Net

I've been collecting poems for some time, initially writing them out by hand in the old days before computers, then typing them up and printing them out and putting them in a folder, and, most recently, copying them holus-bolus off the Net into a file on Evernote.  

There are two issues I haven't entirely sorted out in my head with regard to copying poems. If it's for your own personal use, then you're not affecting the poet's livelihood anymore than you would if you read the poem on the Net, or in a library book. At least as far as I can see (with a poem it's difficult to copy only the ten percent allowed from books, for instance). 

Gunter Eich

One of the issues is that if you copy a poem onto a blog like this one, there's officially a difficulty with copyright, because the poet doesn't gain anything financially from his or her work (though show me a poet who makes a living out of the craft and I'll be pleased to meet them). The other issue, however, is like the boot on the other foot. A huge number of poets barely have an audience of any sort, even in these days of the wide dissemination of all sorts of written material. To have your poem acknowledged by another writer (even if it is only a blog writer like me) is at least a way of getting a little more traction on your poem. There are so many billions of poems in the world (everyone in the world could have at least a dozen or more to call their own if we distributed them evenly), and for a poem to be seen beyond its tiny print run in a book, or its appearance on a poetry site such as The Writer's Almanac (which is a great place to come across interesting poems  - and some that seem to me to be barely poems...but that's another issue) is an advantage to the poet rather than a disadvantage.  

So with that second argument in mind, rather than the first, I'm including the following poem by Günter Eich in the blog. It was published this translation in Angina Days: Selected Poems (the translator was Michael Hofmann - you can find out more about his translating here). 

I originally picked up this poem because I was looking for something that had the word trophies in it.  This served the purpose admirably.   The poem is called First of January. 

Only a calendar would start the day by talking about a new year,
the walls know damn well this isn’t the start of anything new.
Outside, as ever, the clouds blow past, light as hair,
and the wind rattles the windows with the same hands.

March and April will come, and eventually
a day will fill you with its endless hours;
along with the sky and the blown clouds
it will fall into your hands and your house.

Sometimes you catch your face at night in a mirror
obscurely filled with aging—
a faded envelope with unbroken seal,
stuffed always with the same script.

Every day is new and a jubilee,
but pain is a long way off ,
and of the celestial trophies
the only one in your possession is the evening star.

Chocolate Cuttings

Before the Internet came on the scene, I used to collect all sorts of cuttings from newspapers and magazines for use as idea starters for articles.  I still collect these, but of course now they're collected digitally, (even when I first come across them in print), and I use Evernote for this a great deal.  The advantage of digital collection compared to the old print approach is that the items can be searched.

For instance, I was trying to find some items related to chocolate, because I intended writing something about the gifts that available only at Shari's, where berries are covered in wonderful concoctions of white and dark chocolate (with one swizzled on the other) and almonds - see the example on the right.

One of the items that came up in my search under chocolate was this daft statement from a Facebook friend of mine (he used to live here in Dunedin with his family, and go to our church): French is just English spoken with a mouth full of chocolate.   It's the sort of statement he's prone to at times, but this particular one stuck out as saying something surreal and poetic.

Another item was about the artist, Viz Muniz, who hails from Sao Paulo, in Brazil.  In the home page statement about him we're told that he has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history.  A slightly different approach to using chocolate, one might think.   You can see his work on his website, but the reason I originally kept the information was that he was involved in the making of a documentary called Waste Land, which was filmed on the world's largest rubbish dump where an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials - live.  Muniz collaborated with these inspiring people as they recreated photographic images of themselves out of garbage. The documentary reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. 

A further item was a series of quotes on the addiction to acquiring money.  John Cleese was quoted as saying: If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got sixteen warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. Unfortunately I have no idea where this quote came from.  

Finally there is an interesting blog post by Richard Beck, a sometimes provocative blogger I read all the time for a while, but haven't caught up with lately (mostly because he doesn't use Twitter!).  In this post he discusses the Chocolate Jesus, an anatomically accurate depiction of Jesus hanging as though from the cross, but made entirely out of chocolate.  It's a work by Cosimo Cavallaro.  When originally exhibited, it upset a number of people, but Beck asks the question: why chocolate?   His answers are worth checking out.  Cavallaro is a Canadian-born artist, not a little given to provocation himself.  You can see the Chocolate Jesus on his website (the link is under his name above) along with a number of his other works.

Commonplace post

One of the fun things about Google desktop, and also about Evernote, the programme that allows you to store virtually everything you like via Cloud, is that if you put a particular word in you can come up with all sorts of things: things you've forgotten, or things you didn't know you had.

For instance in relation to the word, 'insurance' which I checked out because I wanted to put in a link for rv insurance quotes, I came across three items, all unrelated, and all of interest. Firstly there was this footnote to one of Jason Goroncy's recent blog posts - in this case on the subject of holiness. The original quote comes from William Stringfellow.

‘Can a Homosexual be a Christian. One might as well ask, can an insurance man be a Christian? Can a lawyer be a Christian? Can an ecclesiastical bureaucrat be a Christian? Can a rich man be a Christian? Can an infant be a Christian? Or one who is sick, or insane, or indolent or one possessed of power or status or respectability? Can anybody be a Christian? Can a human being be a Christian? All such questions are theologically absurd. To be a Christian does not have anything essentially to do with conduct or station or repute. To be a Christian does not have anything to do with the common pietisms of ritual, dogma or morals in and of themselves. To be a Christian has, rather, to do with that peculiar state of being bestowed upon men by God … Can a homosexual be a Christian? Yes: if his sexuality is not an idol’.

And with that succinct piece of theology we move to quote number two, this time from Seth Godin. It comes from a post he wrote in Feb 2010 called Phoning it in and he began with some concern about a minister of religion who told him that some days she just works...

I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.
In fact, I don't think there's a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there's a relationship between who you are and how important you think the work is.

The third reference to 'insurance' (I'm sure there are plenty more, as Google desktop came up with several pages worth) comes from a draft of a blog post I'd written which doesn't appear to have been published....

I stood outside my house with two of my neighbours the other day discussing the tragedy of teens committing suicide. Apparently there was an Internet ‘pact’ made by about twenty local teenagers to commit suicide on Christmas Day. Horrific. Thank God it didn’t go ahead, for whatever reason, but one of my neighbours was going to a tangi for one teenager who did commit suicide at Christmas. And talked about another who’d killed herself because of text message bullying. The girl who’d done the most bullying had turned up at the tangi for that girl, which my neighbour thought was actually brave…but then had killed herself a few days later.

It’s unbelievable. The other neighbour and I felt it was that these kids don’t have a sense of the reality of death, that once you’re gone, you’re gone. I remember years ago a boy hanged himself because he’d had an argument with his father. Hanged himself! Why would you go and do that to spite someone? There’s some strange evil process at work in all this. I feel that it’s more than just kids deciding this is the thing to do. Behind it, I sense, there’s a supernatural factor that’s inciting this kind of unreasonable behaviour.

And then there are kids who kill themselves on the road. You can kind of understand this better: kids have far less judgement in cars than more experienced drivers. They have a sense of being bullet-proof, and time and again they’ve proved they're not. I noted that there was a site in the States where they have a number of tips for teenage drivers. Getting the teenagers to pay attention is, of course, the issue. The site was brought to my attention by a car insurance company who offer a cheap car insurance quote.

To go back to the original phrase that inspired this digging around in my computer: rv {recreational vehicles} insurance quotes. You hear a lot about rvs on the Internet, but they're not something that New Zealanders tend to have much to do with [though the photo on the right was taken in Rotorua, NZ]: we lean towards converting old buses into the equivalent of an rv, sometimes in a superb way.

Most of my experience with rvs comes from the movies - Sandra Bullock, desperate to go to the loo, boarding an rv owned by total strangers; or Jack Nicholson watching the stars while sitting on the roof of an enormous rv he and his wife had bought just before she unexpectedly dropped dead doing what she was passionate about: cleaning...and many more. The way rvs get treated in the movies, they'd need massive insurance, I'd think!