Poetry Year

Fine the strand of gossamer,

fine the sand that carries on the wind,

fine the reeds of grey green grass,

that arc in the breeze.

So fine your features are as you stare out across some future unknown

that I would, if I only could, share with you.

If only you would speak it.

Why is it locked behind your features impassive,

why do you set your face in stone for me,

when all I desire is with gentle kisses to loosen the knots

that threat that webbed around you do tangle up your fluid figure,

you fine face,

your forceful form.

Will you not turn your gaze, for some moment's sake

from the wash of deep blue infinity,

and set your sea touched eyes on mine.

I know I do not have the agate eyes you have,

I am dull and dark,

and like so many others.

But you have picked me out,

and I have become bright from your attention.

And only wish, if only I could,

that I could shine for you,

and with that glow of sweet affection,

carry your thoughts in pure connection,

from the deep thicket of your mind,

to the fine fingers on your hands.

And this flow would become a tide, and then a flood,

and change the world that now so vexes your thoughts.

Let me be your fine golden girl my love,

and ease the burden that you bear,

like Atlas who stares across the seas,

and holds the vault up above the world.

Poetry Year

It wishes for an age of fire,

of armies swelling, pikes upright,

black iron cauldrons upon the skulls of the living,

as they carry the skulls of the slain,

giving the birds the carrion of the slain.

All a buzzing and amarching,

like a legion of demons ripped from some illustration,

of Machiavelli's blackest tome.

Fie on thee, because it is not.

The blitzing blazing rhythms of despair come solid

into shards of heat that devour the flesh whole

and lick the skin off the bones.

It is illusion. For all the barricades and banners,

for all the missions and the manners,

for all the generals and the planners,

not one soul is saved, nor mind was changed.

Only that the screaming explosions have overwhelmed,

such sense as once resided in a mind.

Pulverizing the stuff of thoughts are spun,

as surely as the hollowed eyes of those,

whose life by phosphorus, was burned alive.

Oh yes

Is zero a square?

Answer, it is the first square among integers, because zero is an integer, and 0 * 0 = 0. The first geometric square is 1, since in geometry a square has to have sides with some length. So the side of a geometric square can not be 0 length.

Thanks to a math geek friend who explained that one carefully to me.

1 * 1 = 2, it is an ideology

One thing that @DonOfScience and his mob of mathematical, legal, and social illiterates have shown me is what the ideology of these times are.

1 * 1 = 2, or we will bury you.

If enough people, with the ability to raise a crowd say anything, it suddenly becomes serious. Like say the "birther" movement. Or the New York Times running columns about how single payor insurance doesn't control costs, when, in fact, it does. 1* 1 = 2.

But I don't feel good about this. At least ideologies like "the code is the law" are pragmatic. At a basic level, code, however twisted, has to work. The Code Is The Law might lead to very strange places, but changing it is open to anyone who can code. 1 * 1 = 2 isn't open to change, even getting your own crowd isn't enough.

I see over and over again how Twitter isn't just limited, it is limiting. How it creates people who are miniature bullies, counting on their crowd of followers to do the work. While a mini-blog news feed is really great, Twitter is really bad. I'm going to keep at it, because it is what it is, but there is an element of explosive strangeness, like living on a landscape that may one day explode.

Poetry Year Day 6

The Grand Illusion beckons and is begone,
as becoming is becalmed in these the middle months,
between the bright strands of hope that pierced the horizon,
after eight long years of glower and gloom.
Between then and the promised land of better days.

Withering pale fire of fear clouds and crowds us,
pressing down from big skies and sweeping the plains.
The poetry of cold is in the bones,
of governor's to fearful to govern,
and Senators who are now, so far, far to old.

In a dream, I wandered in among the blankened trunks,
stripped of green shoots and all life,
leafless in high summer, frozen in place,
even as the heat forbodes upon us.

I took a twig and snapped it in gloved hand,
in vain, in vain, to see the shred of water,
that is the course of the living.
I crumbled the husk in my fragile hand,
then to scan the bleak horizon for a man
who might lead me from history's mire.

But I was alone, and the dream occluded back to night.

Give us this day our daily dread,
forgiven, forgotten, and for what we have made,
a people nomadic, at the end of a modern age.
Is there in the distance a fife or a drum?
Is there in the distance a light we call home?
Is there in this, the distance we have travelled,
a distaff branch that grows amidst the deadened trees.

A blasted wilderness, and we cannot even call it peace.

@DonOfScience calls Prime Numbers Slander, and that 1 * 1 = 2

@DonOfScience is a shill account on Twitter for to pimp one of many proported educational games for Nintendo, the "Professor Layton" series. Sadly the people running it aren't just stupid, but vicious law breakers. That's kind of par for the course these days, banks, health insurance companies, wars in Iraq. It's the world we live in. But sometimes, stupidity and legal vicious gets funny. He accuses me of slander, then he complains, gasp that I proved my point. And, OMG, I took the time to explain it. How dare I post the facts. Slander!

Well a few lessons. One is that slander is spoken. What he means is libel. Another, in the US anyway, truth, which I have, is an absolute defense against general defamation. I don't think I'm getting sued by whoever is pimping the game any time soon. Last lesson is this, when you phrase a puzzle, you have to not only include the right answer, but exclude other answers. Sadly for whatever pimple popping teenage intern is running the account, because anyone over the mental age of about 18 would know to be careful about slander accusations, since reckless accusations of that sort are, in themselves, grounds for law suit, they didn't check to make sure there were no good logical answers. Their "explanation" is the logical fallacy of a "red herring" 15 * 15 = 225, but 1 * 1 is not equal to 2. And at that point any number could have been the "red herring." In fact, it isn't hard to come up with brain teasers that make any one number the "wrong" number. 2 being 4 works well, there are several.

In puzzler design, usually the setting words don't mean anything, unless there is no easy answer, the clever words come into play. Also sadly, there are no fish on Mars, so "red" herring isn't logically forced. Sadly for the bozos that run Professor Layton's shill account on twitter, there was a perfectly good easy answer, namely nth prime plus nth square. Sadly, this doesn't yield 15 = 225, which is the answer they wanted to be true. Close enough for corporate shills isn't math.

And if it is an educational game, then the people making it, in fact, are claiming to help people get great scores on say, SATs, MCATs, and LSATs. I did, and it is pretty clear from the apoplectic response from Professor Layton's shill account, that he didn't. Had they wanted to put the question correctly, then they could have said "why is 15 225 on Mars?" That would have made people run around in circles enough. What happened with their woefully incompetent question design is that many people got the right answer for the wrong reason. The point of a "red herring" answer on a test is to catch the people who have some common misconception about the material. After all, there is no particular reason to think herring. 2 actually was the "red flag" that showed that squares was the wrong answer.

Maybe he works for the Senate Finance Committee's health care drafting team. That is the kind of math error we just got from them turning down the public option.

This is pure incompetence of question design. It also is pure incompetence of marketing. It is also pure incompetence of their legal department. It is pure incompetence of social media, because now, sigh, I have to respond to corporate defamation from some large impersonal money making machine, when he should have realized that there was a hole in his question, laughed it off, and moved on.

And make no mistake whoever is selling the game that is now guilty of defamation, because their statements about me are reckless as regards to the truth, and with the intent to get some kind of gain. That is, there are damages. Of course, real world check here, large companies don't get sued over stupid things that their interns say on Twitter, because there's no motivation for a lawyer to take the case. But next time you hear about "Professor Layton" and his games, realize that they are run by, written by, and backed by people who lie, defame, and just plain teach your kid how to get a bad grade on the SAT or other college admission tests.

To make it Google Friendly: Nintendo's corporate shills want your children to believe that 1 * 1 = 2, or they will threaten to sue. This is the lesson their Professor Layton game teaches. 1 * 1 = 2, or Nintendo will threaten to sue. It's kinda got a beat and you can dance to it.

[I'm told that@DonofScience has no connection to Nintendo. However, he links to the website of the game as his personal website. If he isn't attached, then Nintendo should sue him for using their corporate trademarks in a manner to confuse. However, there's nothing I can find that says he's not astro turf, and good evidence that he is.

In any event, @DonOfScience is deliberately trying to piggy back on the game, and courts have repeatedly ruled that people can't do that unless they have permission. That's why not everyone can market say, a Narnia game, or as a recent court case determined, publish a sequel to Catcher in the Rye. If Nintendo doesn't want defaming idiots being associated with their trademarks, then they can use the DMCA to make it go away. If they don't it amounts to approval.

I've written Nintendo's legal department, telling them the obvious, that @DonOfScience is using their trademark without attribution, and asking whether he has permission. Either way there should be a response in some reasonable period of time. My guess is that if he does work for them his chain is about to be shortened, and if he does not, then he is going to need another twitter account.]

New Tron Movie Trailer

Apple has new trailer, including HD.

A Year of Poems Day 5

I fly without wings, and come to you in a vision.
A spiral lines that cross and grow ever outward
to mind's horizon infinity. How many follow the fast track
those highways of primality,
to answers of the human heart, and destinies of secrecy.

How many hours we have pondered the question,
of this, numbers atomicity.
That each is found to divide itself alone, and leave only one.

Stand with me then on the center point and stretch the gaze out towards the truth.
Ulam's endless plain.

However many there are, there will always be at least one more,
however far the desert spans, it will always end one day.
However long the road, it will halt no matter which compass taken,
however straight the edge, however clean the line.

These numbers, seeds of even perfection,
fond of a monk's obsession,
pondered by the net mind even in these days of digital dimension.

Prime is first, prime is last, and prime to our imaginations still.

DonofScience #fail #fail #fail

DonOfScience wins the bozo of the day award for #fail on his own question. He asked

Here's a puzzle! On Mars, 1 is 2, 2 is 4, 3 is 9 and 4 is 16. What is 15 on Mars?

And said the answer is 225, heh, just because. He's wrong and he wins the bozo of the day award. There are several right answers, math being what it is, there are lots of was to match a few numbers. These days you can put these numbers into mathematica and it will spit out several polynomial answers. However, 225 isn't any of the ones that work.

Here's the simplest one I found: the nth square plus the nth prime.

The first integer square of integers is 0, the first prime is 2. One is not prime, it has only one divisor, a prime has two divisors. So f(1) = 2
The second square is 1, the second prime is 3. So f(2) = 4
The third square is 4, the third prime is 5. So f(3) =9
The fourth square is 9, the fourth prime is 7. So f(4) = 16.

The table below runs this out to 15.

Earth #	Mars#	Prime	Square
1	2	2	0
2	4	3	1
3	9	5	4
4	16	7	9
5	27	11	16
6	38	13	25
7	53	17	36
8	68	19	49
9	87	23	64
10	110	29	81
11	131	31	100
12	158	37	121
13	185	41	144
14	212	43	169
15	243	47	196

By the way, his name is Don Paulo according to Twitter, and he is peddling an educational game. What is he teaching? That being a vicious jerk is right, because, well, he had an answer in mind, and it has to be right, no matter what the numbers say.

It's not a light hearted exercise in logic, it is just another corporate shill trying to take your money.

Buy something that is actually educational.

Doofus, Bozo, Yoyo. When will Epoch of idiocy end

I answered a question posed by a twitter puzzler. He gave the wrong answer.

That's right now, people with no intelligence pretending to be smart. It's true in government, it is true in writing, it is true in art, in punditry. I wish I knew why. South Park seems populated by people of great intellectual ability at this point, compared to what is making the rounds as intelligent.

Shatner reads Palin's resignation speech as a poem

Why a poetry year?

Why try and write a poem a day for a year?

Because is sort of a general all purpose reason. But it isn''t my reason. In writing poems, there are a few I have written which stand out, and many which are just there. And yet, getting back to the best, there was no particular itness to that day, no special rainbow that landed at me feet. There was just a buzzing in my hands and behind my eyes. This led me to wonder how many days where there was a finely crafted trap of words possible, but which did not become actual. And so to the experiment of just writing, regardless of all else.

It was easy in early heady days to be moved rapidly to writing, when my emotions were like a fever, one every heavy player of games knows. It was easy when there were people who danced in and out of my life. But one measure of why I feel Second Life is dying, is such people are fewer and fewer, and the ordinary more and more common. This may be bias of selection, it may be my fortune when I was new.

And it may mean something.

It also keeps me out of trouble. There is a great deal to say about what is wrong with the world. People are horrid, nasty, stupid, greedy, vicious; they celebrate writers who share those traits easily. But beyond the foam of the rabid moment, people are passionate, compassionate, and thoughtful. They want a more beautiful world, if only they could stop acting like monsters long enough to pursue it. Writing about the first curdles the hands. Writing about the second is both a lonely, and unrewarding, experience. People don't really want to know the truth of love, they want to slosh plaster over their wretchedness with an kitsch version of love that justifies all the squalid little things that they do.

It is true of me, it is true of you, it is true of all of us. That's why we have the public figures we do, because people want a distillation of their worst, so that they can worship it. The idols of dark powers are all around us, rent in gold. In Earthsea by LeGuin: "the powers she serves are not the powers I serve."

However, what they, we need, we all need, and thus what is hungered for, beyond the taste of any food, or any drink, is love. The kind which shocks like a crack in the granite of a collapsing cliff, that crumbles resistance like a falling building, which leaves the greedy little self behind. That's really how you can tell the transient writers of no account, they cannot write a single true sentence or stanza on the meaning of love. It is foreign to them as a peculiar preparation of goat, or tripe might be. Their readers want to substitute hurly burly, bombast, braggardtry, and bigotry for real emotion. In person they can only yell, disrupt, or sneer, because, like that white faced villain of the Dark Knight, it is the form their face is permanently contorted into by what horrific accent we do not really know.

So a year of poems is not enough time for a scalpel of words to cut through all the layers, but perhaps it might be, in time and time.

A Year of Poems Day 4

A stride the horse in white, a face,

a man, a figure, a form, a fury, a feeling.

A wave that has swept round the world,

so violently as to wash past all barriers,

so silently as to steal into every house and home.

It seizes every day as if it were the last,

and each victim as if she were the first.

It is a kiss of air, and then,

a sharpness in the chest.

A clutching terror of legion's brood,

more numerous than the buzzing of the flies.

From where it comes, we do not know,

like savannah fire it consumes and burns.

A slash across the face in ancient feud,

new mutiny born within the vessels of our other life.

The embrace that makes, and unmakes,

the raveling coils of the the helix twice

spun of sugar, and of cold fire,

are ripped and stolen by this knife,

that cuts short the thread,

of another life.

A Year of Poems Day 3

This night, I know no other moment,

has passed.

This tempest of words,

I have forgotten all the others,

has stirred a foam that came to your lips,

as to my face,

reddened by the flood of anger and the quiet coming of tears,

an ageless dance of anger unleashed at insignificance,

releasing torrent flood of salt within

that is it's own significance.

There in this quiet space between eternities,

you threaten that this time is our last,

that you cannot bear the with holding that binds

me thus to you and so in this to then.

I cannot forget the other times,

so easily as to deny,

that it is a bitter fruit that is torn by the teeth of conflict,

and the lips absorb in the taste of torment.

So I stand and whimper, my composure fallen in fallen apart,

while you glow with that flower of ripe rage,

your muscles tense not to strike,

but to refrain from it.

To each time there is a season,

for everything under heaven.

So often you have said so,

and I have focused upon the words you would live by,

and have me live by.

To each thing there is a time.

A time to weep is now come and come upon me.

And I am taken by it.

You catch me before I fall,

in this I am fallen,

a fallen woman,

the season of fall.

To fall for you at once and again,

into arms that now hold help not harm.

In them I am comforted,

melting into their embrace.

To each thing there is a time,

I am taken by it, and by you.

That glow of union coming with finally

a light so tender that it is so utterly thine own.

The tears, like stars, are scattered,

and now flicker out with the warming of the east.

Year of Poems Day 2

Strained the muscles tension taut beyond forgiveness,

and I am open like the gates of fallen city,

waiting to be sacked and razed.

Moments before there was chatter in my skull,

a myriad voices connecting each sensation with that,

judging in ornate detail each movement.

But before the triumphant armies come,

before their blare and horns arrive,

before the battering ram unleashes,

its plunging action depth undenied.

Before the terrible throngs that tear at tender skin.

There is quiet in the mind,

and all weight and pressure becomes undone,

leaving, left, and lorn,

a quiescence of acceptance.

"Take me."

Things you shouldn't talk about

Other people's affairs.

Lars von Trier films.

For roughly the same reason.

Infidelity blogging

And people wonder why I have business.

A year of poems. Day 1

My feet touch lightly on the grass,

still bathed with dew,

in these the sunlit lands.

My toes touch the soil and soak in the cool,

still fresh from snows,

in these the sunlight lands.

My face is washed by winds,

still lithe and young.

Young before they will be

burdened by salt,

heavy with rain.

For yes, I see it far out on the plains,

the gathering herd of darkness,

that stretches out, like an inverted land.

From which pours forth,

the heavy armies of the rain.

I stop and look,

and stand, my feet growing new roots,

as my gaze is raptured out

by what lies ahead for this day.

The streaming soaking,

the howling rage of hammered hail.

The birds will hide in their trees,

cower beneath the old barn eaves.

Out across the expanse,

a sea of grass to cliche a phrase,

ripple with waves though it does,

seethe with tides though it must,

crest in August before the harvest it will,

invisible hands smooth and stroke,

the surface of the stalks.

Poor reeds that are bent,

by the mass of twirling air.

There is now a fog of quiet,

save the weeping of the wind.

And before the sweep of this,

an act of nature, in the play of God,

I am small beyond small,

and feel myself shrunk like the sparrow

that so shortly sang a hymn to the dawn.

You brought me here to savor your native earth.

Playfully heedless I spun my steps across

in celebration of it's bright.

Though now my eyes are tender,

but the coming of this second night.

I turn to touch my eyes upon the old home,

porch washed white, roof baked black,

and instead my face is pressed into your chest,

my arms curled around your back.

There embrace carries me to safety's sake.

In these, the once, and future, sunlit lands.

Virtual Person As the Soul of the Car

Ford used a virtual person to design a car. Shades of The Automobile Avatar.

Officer forced woman to perform oral sex

Pleads guilty in court.

Will write more later

but projects, sl and rl, are right now overwhelming.

Nice Free Hair

A nice up do and perhaps one of the nicest free hairs I have ever seen; rush over to http://slurl.com/secondlife/tenjin%20fukuoka%20japan/20/35/25.

I don't post very often but when I do it's because I've found an absolute gem.


XingZ xx

Bittersweet the harvest comes

Naked light in naked night before naked sight

unseen.

Nude the skin that is brushed by air and then kissed by moisture

that is sweat like unto a dew,

and invisible as a dream in morning.

But felt a weight that bends our minds,

in arcs as the grass formed suspensions by spiders.

This morning meadow of my fancy,

I stare down between the long valleys of my body,

and at the tender curls of my thicket,

and at the hands now eased from all tension,

released by the quivering that remains

shaking in my spine and in my breath.

The eruption now subsided,

a lushness restored to netherlands,

and a richness to the scent that hangs about my bed.

Bittersweet thought the fruits may be,

and distant is the harvest,

it was brought by thoughts of you,

always you.

Only you.

The summer to seed

The cry of jays in an empty field screech and echo in my ears;

Turning soon the caw of crows, that pick the broken stalks,

and turn the stones to search for movement in the sand.

The summer morning teems with motion and with life,

in all the smallest places, and across the waves of the golden grass.

The spring is gone, the spring is gone, the day is burning fast.

To seed the clover is, to fruit the trees, to dust the once fattened ponds.

Stalks among the reeds a tall heron, who spears and pierces,

only to take great flight when even frogs have fled the sun.

Horace, I know that some how once you walked a way like this,

burnt your ship behind you, and in exile from the might shine,

of once then Rome.

Could you, if you could, guide my hand, and give me some advice,

to sooth the pains of those I know, who, having given,

now empty whispers receive?

The berries are still bitter, the plums and apples still green.

Not yet the richness of sweet harvest.

Perhaps not this, nor any year.

(The person this is for knows who he is. :P )