Alternative poetry - the Wordle way

Another way of looking at the final assignment for A215:



- not really enough repetition to give big variations in size - more a demonstration of a wide vocabulary but I think the themes out themselves quite nicely in blue.

'Witnesses say french fries helped calm bin Laden driver'

Surely one of the more eccentric headlines of the year - from Yahoo news today - reporting on the goings on at Guantamamo Bay. The story continues by confirming that the fries came from Macdonalds and the driver in question did not appreciate them when they were cold. Can we conclude from this that the US military had their own franchise on the base?? A headline that, frankly, begs more questions than it answers.

Violators will be slapped...

Found this again whilst trying to sort out pictures littered over hard drive, Flickr, pen drive, CDs etc. etc. - still puzzling over it two years after encountering it at a Canadian University... another of those "is it ME?" occassions. Ho hum.

My kind of bloke...

...has this kind of brain and this kind of timing, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/66 (Sir Ken Robinson posing the question 'Do schools kill creativity?' ). Thanks to Pete for having tracked it down.

Poetry

Spring cleaning took a little longer than planned because there was the small matter of the (fanfare of trumpets) Examinable Component! The joy of A215 has been poetry (yes, really) and the active encouragement to play about with words. For the EC this included playing about with jargon - Web 2.0 and the electronic gadgetry of daily life:

Status update – route recalculation

I’m not inter-net sex.
A Real-player
I’d rather have it untaxed
but not gross either.

You can come on over to my space
and Chatter
or, better, bebo-ld
‘coz twittering won’t un-Furl you
any-Ning del.icio.us.
You’ll need to Digg
until perchance there’s a Flickr and
Yahoo! you’ll have fOUndIt.

My Skype?
e-Bay it’s hard to say
presently I’m wireless.
O’Reilly? I hear you cry.
Indeed, no more on Craigslist
but what the Flock
he was just Flash, a Shockwave and
finally I AdSense enough to see
he was just a wiki-d mash-up
all mouth and trousers, very little UGC.

So for now I’m goin’ to surf on
browse around a little more
tag along a few folks and RSS.
Later, if the bandwidth’s there,
if I’ve really reddit Writely
might Joost see if I can’t
StumbleUpon a syndication
and Google myself a Second Life.


Hope the examiners have a sense of humour.

Displacement activity

Trying to write the last bit of poetry for the end of course assessment but LM sent me this!

Having a bit of a tidy up

...and a clean and sweep round - will be bringing the furniture back in soon too.

Hellooooooo, anyone home?

Rather an echo in here and jeez, there is SO much dust I can barely see through the windows! Looks like no-one was home for years! Got to get my Marigolds out and see what I can do about this mess. One saving grace - no longer any sign of Basil, even he must have had enough and shuffled off. Now, to find the Cilitbang or whatever that stuff is called...

And this old favourite was Jo's contribution so as we could at least see a funny side! Bless!

D***** rat! (aka moral dilemma)

Well, I gotta take my rat - sorry - hat off to him - he IS a smart rat. Any normal rat would have just upped sticks and ofted himself by now via whatever route he came in by. Between us (me, the young lady Methelette home for vacation, the electronic rat repeller, the trap and the smartest brains in the known universe-ity) we have the only other exit covered and we have deprived him of food and water. But, this is Basil, superat extraordinaire, the rat that knows no shame. He has quietened down - a lot. But quiet isn't gone. Yet. We seem to have two options left. The tried and tested (locally and under cover of darkness according to neighbourhood gossip) traditional stick and bag technique - courtesy of a man in a suit that should never be allowed out except when covered by cloak of night. Or, the appealingly named (well, to an educational technologist anyway) "electronic solution" - only 39-95, comes in own brown wrapper, no need for embarassing white van outside during procedure "Uses 4 x "C" cell batteries that will kill approximately 12 rats..." with its own "flasing indicator to show rat has been killed"...

Even more EEEK!

Rat-ling my cage

Encouraged by friends at dinner assuring me that Basil was best dealt with by employing traditional measures so when I got home last night I decided to find the trap and lay it. I put peanut butter (as recommended on the box) and placed it by what I figured was the hole in the side of the kitchen cupboard which Basil must be using... Went to bed. Heard no rat like sounds during the night. This morning I woke up and came to see if there was a Basil-no-more. Alas, no rat. But, also - horrors - NO TRAP!!!!! Where is rat? where is trap? What to do next?

A couple of coffees for courage and I poke a broom handle into the hole to test the lie of the land - the trap is there! Cautiously drag it back into sight but the only thing that has been caught in it is a GIANT whisker... eeek!

Repair to Homebase for assistance. Am infomed that the best non-toxic, environmentally friendly solution (aka most expensive item on shelf) is electronic scare device which will make Basil and any nearby buddies leap from their underfloor beds and head screaming for the exit...

Return to house to devise plan which will avoid seeing me switching on device and simultaneously getting crushed in rodent stampede for the door...

Watch this space for further developments as they happen!

Finally,


...back online after several weeks away in the wilderness and a few adventures I'd rather forget followed by a laptop meltdown (possibly the long term effect of too much travelling) which left me voiceless for a couple of weeks until I managed to pick up this basic but operational desktop - now to begin the lengthy process of reloading programmes... sigh.

meantime, somewhere between the kitchen ceiling and the bathroom floorboards Basil the nocturnal rodent seems to have taken up residence - never a quiet moment in this house! More on this as soon as I manage to pin him down ;-)

Sophia Loren, Suez and pink flamingos...

Now, where did the last few weeks go? I didn't notice them leave so who took them? Names need to be named and I need them back......! Now! Being born on Sophia Loren's 22nd birthday I've always known I had some catching up to do (except, possibly, in the chest region) but it was only today that I realised the significance of time passing when it was confirmed that the flamingos that share my year of birth will shortly be extinct!! Even the gold ones are not safe but are, somewhat ironically, being traded frantically on e-Bay "before it is too late"! Is nothing sacred? So much yet to live up to, so little time... !

Suez? try this, historically it fits but I really just threw it in to make the title sound a little less twee!

Scarecrows and local customs!




Back when I was a kid (a while ago) scarecrows were found in fields. The idea was that they would keep birds away from eating what was intended for others. Round here though they seem to be a town phenomenon and Sunday afternoon was spent inspecting them. Sure enough they were all over, lurking in front windows, attached to lamposts, on the roof of a shop and in the park. The local supermarket even had its own black cat!

More fixing the planet...

...this time about making peace with the neighbours and moving on despite some terrible things having happened - in this case Ugandans appealing, in the interest of moving forward now, that old stories be forgotten and the horrors of the Lord's Resistence Army not be taken to the Court of Human Rights.

On a more parochial level The Mail on Sunday today has a story of a very experienced woman nursery worker being taken to court for chastising a small child in her care in the manner of TV's Supernanny. It records that the parents of the child felt that there was no case to answer and made no complaint but that the case was taken forward anyway as a matter of principle.

More about fixing the planet!

Seems like Big Al really is winning votes finally - having adopted the Ronald Reegan method - wow 'em with a movie. The story is compelling: a planet in jeapody, millions of lives at stake and a superhero (also, interestingly called Al) with the key to saving the lot! Even the critics are hailing it as worthy of a look. But, hark, just a moment, surely this can't be the same Big Al who not so many years ago came to visit our special corner of the planet in Southern Africa and insisted on flying in (on a separate cargo plane) his own limo - so that he would not have to use any of our 'unsafe' local vehicles to drive the 5 or so miles between the airport and the President's Palace where he was expected for a light lunch en route to who knows where?

Enough said.

Why am I not surprised?

Given what I have written below today I'm not at all surprised that a Senate committee has concluded that there was no connection between Iraq and Osama and his merry men. The full report can be accessed via this account.

I await with interest the next round of 'explanations' and 'justifications' offered for the Gulf War and its continuation.

And another thing the world doesn't need...

is a three 'flavour' airfreshner to plug into living rooms globally and rotate the aroma it delivers every 45 minutes...

Is it me? I hope not. Am I bothered? Yes. The planet needs fixing, manufacturing and releasing these things into the environment is destroying it. Why are we letting this happen? Because we shut ourselves away in our own little ghettos of supposed safety, interacting with no-one for fear of just about everything. These little small enclosed safety fantasies will not save the planet, however nicely they are scented - even on a rotating basis.

Everybody wants to be a hero - or why I'd ban all reality TV, and why the cult of celebrity is so dangerous.......

yes, muttering madly today - about the festivities (I use that word advisedly)around September 11. I quite agree with the view expressed by one woman saved from one of the towers that the nature of human existence is such that sooner or later such an event will happen again (Albert Camus's book La Peste - The Plague - is an excellent literary example of the principle whereby when the present outbreak is over and the disease seems to have vanished it is in fact returned to the ground and will lie dormant until conditions are right for it to re-emerge)but it worries me how the idea of vigilence gets practiced. This story about how one ex-policeman's over enthusiasm nearly ruined an innocent man's life is just the latest example of how the idea of being a superhero predominates over the option of keeping an open mind and getting to know those of other cultures and life experiences and not jumping to hasty conclusions.

New career

OK, so I've decided I'm going to give up on the academic life since it seems impossible to convince anyone to give "such an old person" even an interview - I'm heading for the open road and the wideopen spaces across the plains and far away as a new age trucker. No more 9-5 and scrabbling in the rush hour traffic of suburbia, Wyoming here I come!