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Yu almost made it

Wasn’t there an unwritten rule that you don’t talk about a possible no-hitter in progress? Did nobody tell the press? ESPN had a no-hitter watch on their crawl. Sheesh.

8 2/3rds of a perfect game. Unfortunately, it’s like winning 4/5ths of the lottery. You have to close it out. You have to get them all. Still…

111 pitches and only one Yu Darvish probably wants back. I guess that’s why a pitcher that plays good defense is such a find. Has anybody found one?

Still, an amazing outing and a win. Wins count, no matter how many hits you give up.

Next time, for sure.

Inside Every Fat Person is a Skinny Person Trying to Get Out

I am not a skinny person.
I’ve been told I have one inside me.
This is a wee bit scary.

If I do, he is a very bad skinny person.
He is the voice inside my head.
The voice says, “That pie looks tasty.”
Evil, evil skinny person.
You should go to Weight Watchers, not me.

Never Look A Gift Horse in the Mouth

It took years of whining but Mom finally got me a pony.
It was my best birthday ever.
I named my new pony “Steve.”

I combed him and walked him.
I put feed out for him.
I said, “Let’s eat, Steve!”

Then, I tried to look in his mouth.
I had never seen a pony’s teeth.
Steve bit me. Ouch.
I hope Steve is not rabid.

Like Two Ships Passing in the Night

It was really dark in the bar that night.
There was a loud cover band.
They sucked.

I saw her from the corner of my eye.
She looked like a Princess.
She was doing 18 knots in heavy seas.

I was full of oil and she had a buffet on her Lido deck.
This was a doomed relationship from the start.

Cliches

I woke up this morning with “Two Ships Passing in the Night” in my head. It’s a very strange saying, when taken literally. I tend to take things literally before coffee. After that, the pieces wrote themselves. (This is my defense.) So, there are three poems today instead of one. At first, they were all one piece, with different sections, but they make more sense (such as it is) standing alone. So, I’m an overachiever today. This will probably be the last time that happens. I suppose I should save the extra ones for my writers’ block days.

It’s lucky poems are like Tweets, only longer. I can always come up with a Tweet. Mostly.

It’s Hard

It’s Hard
to write something meaningful
when you’ve been trained to think in bullet points.

Sometimes, bullet points aren’t enough.
There’s no emotion, for example.
Sometimes, there’s no meaning.
But those are the bad bullet points.

A poem in bullet points would be strange.

  • This would be the title. Probably in bold.
  • Each line would be indented.
  • And bulleted.
  • Even ee cummings would think it sucked.
  • ee cummings was a famous poet who didn’t like punctuation.

So, don’t do that.
And, stop thinking in bullet points.
It’s why nothing good comes out of meetings.

There’s a National Poetry Writing Month?

So, there’s a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoMo) which I knew about. I’ve actually been on the mailing list for years, but while I have the first paragraph of my novel done, I’ve never progressed beyond that. Sad. I restart every year. It’s a fictional biography based on my life. Apparently, I haven’t done enough interesting to get beyond the first paragraph.

Today, I found out April is National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo.) One poem a day for a month. That, perhaps, I can do. Especially since it doesn’t have to be a good poem.

A poem is either a song without music, or it’s prose that isn’t very prose-like. How hard can that be?

While some poems have rules (like sonnets and haiku), most don’t. In fact, you can call almost anything a poem, since there don’t appear to be any poem police anywhere.

So, follow Blind John Ellsworth this month and see if I can actually produce a poem a day. It should be interesting. One is done. How hard can the rest be?

 

 

Please Sign My Petition

I’m beginning to wonder if the ease with which people can share their cause du jour online doesn’t do more harm than good. In many cases, people are actually spamming your friends. Since “friends” is a relative term in the online universe (thank you, Facebook!), we all may just be annoying people we only tangentially know. We may also be inviting people to support causes they actually oppose. (If done on purpose, this is funny. If not, it’s really annoying.)

The main cause of angst in the Facebook world is Causes. Causes is a lovely application for non-profits to reach out to their donors and constituents to keep them updated on the activities of the organization. It’s also a way to fund-raise. As the president of two non-profits, I liked it. However, it’s a separate application, which can make it a pain to use. We’ve actually pretty much retired it, since we can do most of what it does from our own Facebook page, and then, we don’t have to update multiple sites.

As a casual user, I hate it. I am bombarded by requests to sign petitions and support causes, and most of the time, the requests come from people that won’t even send me a personal note. If I get a request from someone I know, someone that I interact with regularly, then I have some hope they actually sent me the request on purpose. Most of the time, Causes just helpfully sends a note to everyone in your address book if you don’t tell it not to do so. This is called a “spambot” when a program does it without the user knowing.

It gets even more dicey when you’re not really “friends” with someone – you’re a co-worker, or a distant relative (or worse, in-law), or friend of a friend, or met them at a conference. Causes doesn’t differentiate. It also assumes that if someone signs one petition, they will want to sign more.

Here’s my personal issue – I’m the President of Sparky’s Pals, which does humane education. It’s an outgrowth of the years my wife and I have spent in animal rescue. However, I am not a vegetarian. I think the “PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals” shirts are actually a bit funny. I’m still annoyed at HSUS for trying to make Michael Vick a poster child. Now, many people in rescue will think I’m a bad person. However, they’ll know why I’m not signing their petitions.

I’m also the President of a community radio station, KNON 89.3 – the Voice of the People. However, I am not a raging liberal Democrat. I didn’t vote Obama. Twice. The only useful thing Obama has done is create the petition system on the White House site, because it lets people annoy him. I do not believe he will ever take action on any of the petitions. However, I do sometimes think Texas should secede, and that petition made the limit for a White House response easily. Then, they raised the response quota. Well-played.

The difference between Causes and the White House petition swamp is that the White House owns their system. Somebody there actually reviews the ideas. For Causes, I’m not sure the targets ever find out there are people annoyed at them.

Here’s my request – the next time you sign an online petition, think “If I had to put a stamp on this, sign it, and mail it somewhere, would I still sign it?” Before you click to send it off to all your friends, think, “Does <whomever> think this way, too?” If you don’t know, uncheck the name. If you don’t know for the majority of your friends in the list, ask yourself if they should be your online friends at all.

If Facebook wanted to make life easy for people, it would force applications to use the groups people create. In my case, baseball players probably don’t care about animal rescue. Animal rescue people don’t care about gun rights, at least not the way I do. Very few people care about my thoughts on religion. I know this. I could just uncheck name after name when I’m signing a petition, or I can just not use the system. I’m thinking about just blocking the Causes application to end the madness.

For anyone still reading that wants to send me a petition, here are my rules:

  • If it’s something I don’t believe in, I don’t sign it. If you don’t know if I believe in it, why not ask me? If it seems really rude to ask me, are you really my friend? Maybe it’s best to just not send the petition.
  • If it’s not local to me (say Texas or closer), I don’t sign it. While I care deeply about the plight of the cockatoo in Namibia, I really don’t think anyone is going to help it. People are starving there – do you think they care about animals?
  • If it’s not written in clear, correct English, I don’t sign it. Take some time to edit, people! I don’t believe anyone in authority pays attention to something that is not well-written.

Feel free to use my guidelines.

I would start a petition about this, but the irony would be lost on most people.

Finally, could you like this post? My wife said if I can get one million people to like this post, I can buy a Mustang.

All Hallows’ Eve

I hate Halloween. It’s a stupid holiday. Technically, it’s not a holiday, because I had to go to work today. It is also a holiday of strife in my household, because my wife likes Halloween.

The difference may be that she was allowed to go trick or treating when she was growing up. I was not. My parents were convinced I would be poisoned by the same people whose houses I was in every other afternoon. It’s also possible they didn’t want to reciprocate. To add insult to injury, my mother discovered she was hypoglycemic in the midst of my candy-eating years, so I got carob instead. Carob looks like chocolate. So does dog poop. I think I would rather have dog-poop-covered raisins, because then I would know why they tasted bad. If my parents had just given out carob raisins, nobody would have bothered us the next year. Our house may have been papered or burned, however.

By the time I escaped my parents’ house, I was too old to beg for candy door-to-door, and people don’t like others begging for alcohol, unless you’re on a date.

There have been some years where children are being bused in from other neighborhoods to beg for candy. My wife does not mind, because she is a Democrat. Share the wealth. I am a Libertarian. Get your own damn candy, and I won’t stand in your way.

So, I do not enjoy Halloween. At least tomorrow we can celebrate dead people.

One thing after another

There is a cliche – the cure is worse than the disease. I’m getting that a lot lately.

I went to see my doctor because my ankles looked swollen and my feet were getting sore. So, he told me to lose weight (again) and gave me a diuretic. I really didn’t have to pee that much, but I guessed it was doing something.

However, as the days passed, my feet started to hurt. A lot. All over. I thought it was just putting weight on them, but I don’t walk that much, and there should be less weight with the diuretics, anyway.

So, back to the doctor. Poke, poke, poke. Nothing. So, the old Columbo stare off into space and then … “Have you ever had gout?”

I had gout years ago, probably directly linked to the amount of beer I was drinking at the time. So, yes, I’ve had gout.

Down for bloodwork. Apparently, the diuretic can raise uric acid levels in some people (“very few”), and I’m in the lucky number. So, I was drying out and re-aggravating my gout at the same time.

Also, this was “all joints on deck” gout – everything in both feet hurt. The beer gout was just in my left big toe, and it hurt like hell, but nothing like this.

The great thing about today’s medicine is that there are pain killers for everything. So, I got a really good pain killer for my gout. I missed the “take with food” instruction the first two days, so I also got magical journeys in my mind. And naps. Naps with dreams of ants crawling on me – but just one ant. (It’s possible it was Rocky the Chihuahua, come to think of it.)

On the bright side, when I went in for the follow-up that found the gout, I had lost 14 pounds in six days. So, the diuretic worked before it crippled me.

My doctor had also looked at my bloodwork and decided my good cholesterol was too low, so he put me on Niacin. Just like in cereal and Pop Tarts, but a huge dose. It’s an easy pill to take, and there are very few side effects. However, there is one – the Niacin flush. This is not flush, like a toilet, where everything comes out at once (thank God), this is flush like Southern ladies blushing (“Oh, my!”)

In fact, it’s a lot like blushing. As your blood vessels dilate from the drug, you feel flush. Actually, you feel like your head and arms are on fire. I woke up at 3am this morning, and my upper torso was on fire. Plus, I had to use the bathroom.

So, now, I’m limping (gout) to the bathroom (no problems yet), with my upper body on fire (Niacin.) It wasn’t until after the episode that I discovered the Niacin flush or I would have blamed it on hallucinations (pain killer.)

Modern medicine.