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Sunday, July 4 - 2010
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2100
Another day squandered, too tired to go out, the rain justifies my laziness.
A couple of feeble garage sales yesterday, not on a mission but stumbled across in the neighborhood, a pair of speakers and subwoofer for the computer, great, these should give me the ability to sell my stereo....sadly, despite reassurances from the seller they didn't work.
A trip to the dry cleaners, sign "On Vacation until July 12...", handy, all my clean clothes are imprisoned, I do laundry and pay the roommate to iron my shirts for me.
Then work, slow but time passes and there are now a mere 4 weeks left.
The owner, he shows me his copy of National Geographic, it just came in the mail, there's a picture of some Muslims eating in a communal area, he's amazed because he thinks that they're eating with the same hand they wipe their ass with and I explain that there's a very strict etiquette about that in Muslim countries, he's doubtful, and somewhere inside I'm amazed that he purchases it, it's more-or-less as a reference to endangered animals he hasn't yet had a chance to kill, a throwback to the days when seeing a tribeswoman without a shirt was a big thrill, hardly their target audience....
The urge to go out last night, quickly thwarted by the grim bus trip home, the thought of a shower and another change of clothes is sufficient deterrent to keep me in. I'm getting older than my years at this job.
Today, flea market, thrift shops, played some more with the speakers and subwoofer *(it really doesn't work), multiple naps, late coffee, and now it's time to work on outstanding projects. So time passes.
Hoards
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1952
A Hoard is simply another name for treasures generally hidden with a view to recover them later.
Fortunately for us, not all of them were recovered. Wikipedia has an excellent list of recovered hoards (principally in Britain), which should whet the appetite of even the most complacent of treasure hunters.
Work & More Work
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1933
I've stumbled into a gold mine, this poetry thing, and getting it out is only half the battle, the other is the forging, smithing of it into something half intelligible. And I've finished the book - "An Artist's Life" -finally! - a dozen books on my shelf now vie to be next but I'm taking something of a break...
On an unrelated note the website, this website, will be down from somewhere in mid July through to September. Too much to do, need to buy a car, find a job, summer vacation....there won't be time to maintain it, and I think it would be prudent that while I'm looking for work I keep a reasonably low profile. Not that there's anything here to hide (well...), but you understand. It'll probably look mostly like a professional resume, boring, but that's what they want....
Rhymes with ee
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2286
I'm cleaning out handfuls of old poetry. Some of it worthwhile, much of it drivel, I try to find and save, finish the worthwhile bits.
I've noticed that I'm bad for rhyming words that end in "ee". The hard e sound. And I wonder why, but it's obvious, there are an immense number of easy rhymes for words that end in the ee sound: "He, She, Me, We, See, Free", .... one syllable through many: "integrity, futility, celibacy, ingenuity, aristocracy".
And with the addition of suffixes (ly and y for example) you can make almost any word in the English language rhyme with e.
Look at the musical scale: A B C D E F G - 5 out of seven of the notes rhyme with e.
While it makes for easy, musical rhymes it's a bit lazy, (hard e sound), and combined with my tendency (hard e sound again) to overuse the rhyme-scheme abababab it's ruining my flow...
But poetry, (hard e sound), it's like a hydra, and as I sort through and try to finish old poems new ones spring forth:
Some Doggerel:
Her new suitor suits her better
He's what she asked for to the letter,
(Musical with red hair?)
She can't wait for him to bed her
Only question is is when she asks if he will let her...
Irrelevant, but I'm a fan of the light play and double-entendres, thought to polish and improve it, but it's not the sort to be polished and improved.
Then on the heels of that there comes another, Chalk Circle - "She's drawing a chalk circle, when she's done she salts the line, ..." and this one, this will be great, and there's an epiphany where I'm distracted and begin making notes, finding rhymes, building ideas...checking the online thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, it's a poor cheat, my imagination is better and there is no tool finer, there could be though....I need a rhyme for book, the rhymes online are poor, there's "hook, crook, took, cook", a few others, none to the purpose, the visual thesaurus is no help whatsoever either, what would help...reorganize the sentence, and here I pause, move on, then there flows again a torrent of ideas: "Library --> shelf --> book --> page --> word --> letter"; the scale of ideas, each one an order of magnitude above or below the other, and the thesaurus, it doesn't have this, and now I have 6 words I can find synonyms for - now more brainstorming, the maps, paper maps as there are no computer tools that come close, read - the verb of book, there are words like chapter, paragraph, sentence, and more synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, and the brainstorming continues.
And the original poem, the one I began restoring, it's so far up the page now that I've forgotten it's existence.
What is needed is an associative thesaurus, a flash program that generates associated ideas, maps them for you in different colored bubbles, to click on one will lead you to another, the link above does something similar but not at all, instead generates a list and doesn't order them in space...
Perhaps it's for the best, poetry isn't supposed to be easy. But it'd be nice to finish it all up and move on.
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