Category: Pingo Lingo

The Night Aunt Dottie Caught Elvis’s Scarf When He Tossed It From The Stage Of The Rushmore Plaza Civic Center

This exercise is simple: write a poem about a family member meeting a famous person. All of us have such incidents embedded in family history or folklore: the day Dad shook hands with Ike in France; the time Mom spilled coffee on Elizabeth Taylor in a pizza parlour in San Mateo; the night Aunt Dottie caught Elvis’s scarf when he tossed it from the stage of The Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. In most cases, our loved ones’ encounters with the famous or powerful tend to be fleeting and bittersweet, however memorable they may later seem — and it’s this aspect of the encounter that helps us to envision our family members in contexts that avoid easy sentimental gestures. These are situations that, in a small way, the forces of public history and private history collide, and these meetings help us to see our loved ones as individuals, not as types.

Guidleines for the exercise:

  1. The encounter can be real or imaginary, but at least should be plausible — no meeting between Cousin Ed and Genghis Khan
  2. The family member, not the famous person, should of course be the protagonist of the poem and it is his or her consciousness that the poem should try to enter or understand.
  3. The writer of the poem should be an effaced presence, understanding the inner workings of the family member’s mind but seeing the family member as a character referred to in the third person (“my father” and not “Dad,” in other words).
  4. The famous person can be anyone in politcs, entertainment, or the arts; JFK to Mel Gibson, Emily Brontë to Madonna
  5. Since the exercise tends to demand a fairly complex profile or portrait of the family member in question, it is best suited to longer poems — at least 30 lines.
  6. Submit completed poems via trackback

To Make a Dadaist Poem

  1. Take a news article (from your RSS aggregator, for example)
  2. Take some scissors
  3. Print the article
  4. Get a small bag (pencil case, ziplock, lunch bag)
  5. Cut the article into bits, one word per bit.
  6. Put the bits into the bag
  7. Shake gently(the bag, duh!)
  8. Take out each bit one by one and copy conscientiously in the order each bit left the bag
  9. The poem will resemble you

And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

BTW: Dada, Dadaism, Dadaist

My Mother’s Kitchen

  1. Use pencil crayons to draw a picture of your mother’s kitchen.
  2. Put the oven in it, and also something green, and something dead.
  3. Write a poem about your mother’s kitchen.
  4. You are not in this poem, but some female relation – aunt, sister, close friend – must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.
  5. Completed poems, with a suitable image(72 dpi, png, lightbox), should appear in your blog and trackback here.

A lesson on single point perspective. Hint: Tiles need an extra diagonal, too.

“These are Aliens, Dad!”

Some have noticed that some otherwise regular discussions in class eventually turn to a discussion of, um…, ahh… well …, poop.

The inspiration of such mudtimes no doubt erupt from experience with my three growing boys aged 6, 4, and 2. Several days may pass without reference to “it.” But when the subject rears its ugly head, we usually are moved by good humour.

Today I added a “Spelling Bee” widget. My efforts were sincere, scholarly, and academic. Here’s what I saw for my first word:

fecies.png

I’m going to get a book and settle down to a good read.

Out.

1 Million Spams and counting

The best story today concerns the STJ email server. Good luck to those with email inboxes that have close to 4000 messages. My sympathy as you begin deleting over over 800 pages of messages, 20 per page. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes.

Every email account I have has a quota, a couple megs at yahoo, a hundred megs at mac.com, 15 megs at Telus. My Telus account gets full every time a pal of mine sends pictures of his kids, and then I get no more mail. I thought that was annoying of Telus. But today . . ..

I had no idea our email server had no quotas at all. Every account, and there are hundreds, must just be swelling with thousands and thousands of spams. Each account must just grow on forever till the crack of doom. Holy schmoly! Lets see, I’ll guess there are at least 250 idle accounts, if each had say 4000 messages that would be . . . ONE MILLION SPAMS!

1,000,000 spams, that’s 50,000 pages at 20 per page. It takes 10-15 seconds to delete one page. How long to delete 50,000 pages?
A) 10 years
B) 10 days
C) 10 hours
D) 10 minutes

Oh, and the idle accounts I saw today had only been idle for less than a year. What if an account created 5 years ago had remained idle all this time and swelled at the same rate? That’s 20,000 spams in one inbox.

I’m going to pass out now.

Looking for News

Try the following suggestions to increase your daily intake of news feeds.

  • Surf the latest headlines from all over the world. Results are based on google search rankings, the larger the font –> the more hits in google, I recall. Headlines link to an array of news organizations.
  • Aggregate a few headlines from, say, cbc.ca/rss in your own blog sidebar.
  • Create your own online newsreader at bloglines.com or google reader.

Add your own suggested news feeds or feed aggregators in a comment or trackback here.

In the News(CTS bloggers)

CBC RSS feeds. Browse the many RSS feed categories. Select at least one to be added to your blog’s sidebar.

  • Copy(right-click or control-click) a feed url from CBC RSS feeds.
  • Go to Dashboard–>Presentation–>Sidebar Widgets–>Add RSS widgets.
  • Drag RSS widget to your sidebar.
  • Paste the url into the RSS widget.
  • Save and view site.