Creativity with Thanksgiving leftovers

Whole wheat pasta with turkey, tomato, and avocado.

Astonished (Ammons)

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

A. R. Ammons, from "Easter Morning"

New WikiLeaks docs released!

Just kidding...it's nine new poems (and there's nothing magical about the number 9—it's just happened to work out that way the last three times).

On security (Keller)

Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Helen Keller

From yesterday

My first beer can roasted chicken, and winter's last rose.

The Ballad of Airport Security

Says the TSA:

Isn't flying fun today?
Worth every dollar that you pay!
We can almost guarantee no one will hijack
This plane with nail clippers or a tie tack...

Like nervous cattle you line up;
You've been warned not to disrupt
This flow of potential terrorists—
And if you do, we will be pissed!

You may believe a lot of rot about being free
Or preserving your self-respect and dignity,
But let me tell you, that won't fly with us—
And neither will you if you make a fuss!

You have no rights, once through that gate;
You've turned yourself over to your fate.
If we don't like the shirt you wear or book you read,
Then you'll stay home today, oh yes indeed!

No search is unwarranted or unfair
If you wear a beard or funny hair
Or seem a little fatter than you should
Or claim you walk upon a leg of wood.

If your breasts are good or your attitude is bad,
Or if you seem too happy or too sad,
Then you must hold still and shut your mouth
And let us grope you, north and south.

We take no joy in fondling you,
It's something that they make us do.
But don't even think of opting out—
That's not what this is all about!

Responds the passenger:

Fine! Assume my guilt until you see
Your scanner reveal the naked me!
Touch me on my underpants!
Ignore my pleas and angry rants!

Don't see me as a person in your power,
Just molest me for $11 an hour!
My forefathers fought to be free of tyranny,
But I'll be no trouble and go quietly.

The relative merit of sillies

Contrary to the opinion of some anthropologists and theologians, animism is a much more sophisticated metaphysical viewpoint than monotheism.

Powerful words

The most powerful words a person can utter are "I no longer think so."

More potato soup

This recipe, slightly modified.

Quarrels (Yeats)

Out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

William Butler Yeats

Like soylent green... (Adams)

God is made of people.

Scott Adams

In the name of (le Carré)

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done—dare I say it—in the name of God.

John le Carré

On money (Powys)

Money is strength, power, comfort, leisure, thought, philosophy, art, health, liberty, freedom, faith, hope, peace, rest. Money is sleep. Money is love. Money is ease from pain. Those who deny this are lower than men or higher than men. They are rogues or madmen. They are liars or madmen. They are fools or madmen. Money is the blood of life.

John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

Saturday dinner

Stuffed cabbage leaves

 and peanut butter and chocolate (flourless) cookies.

On love

Love is not important. What you do with it is.

Chicken curry with spinach and potatoes

Made from this recipe.

2 quotes (Grayling)

When the Bible was the only standardly available text, people not unsurprisingly thought it contained all truth; but when their reading widened, so did their horizons.

A. C. Grayling, The Mystery of Things

Anyone would be thought weird who liked to have on his walls depictions of hanged criminals or corpses sagging from an electric chair, even if the victim in question had done him a good turn; but Christianity being what it is, depictions of an executed man is one of the chief icons of its faith.

A. C. Grayling, The Mystery of Things

COSMOPOLITANISM > MULTICULTURALISM

Realization

I don't value people, I value ideas. If people hold and promote bad ideas, then what is the point of them?

On Republicans (Lovecraft)

As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

H. P. Lovecraft

New poems

I posted nine new poems.