women usa connect

Here is a poem I just discovered wasting away in a metal filing cabinet in my basement.  I wrote it more than ten years ago, but just put the finishing touches on it today. 1999 (For All Confirmands) The world is young and in her lover's hands. She's not the aged spinster some have said. Regeneration has released the bands Of Lucifer, who chained her in his bed. Another lover now caresses her, Who found her torn and bloody and in need. And lately he has compassed her with myrrh. And lately, too, has given her his seed. Another thousand years will soon be gone. Another thousand soon to hear his mirth. A new millennium can safely dawn With such a lover ravishing the earth. Come, drink, all you his holy confirmands. The world is young and in her lover's hands.

I don't really like safety.  There, I've said it. One of the great things about hot rods (other than that they are loud, fast, and cool looking) is that they are just a tad dangerous.  That is why they draw the attention of adrenaline junkies such as myself. I do understand both the feelings and the logic of those who are more risk-averse than myself.  I just can't seem to feel it the same way they do.  And they, in turn, do not understand the fact that I am drawn to situations in which there is an element of risk.  Yesterday some friends, who had been without heat in their house for four days, called me with an urgent request.  The man was coming to their Hamtramck house to turn on the gas, but they were delayed while helping a relative, and were trapped out of town.  They asked me to go over to the house and let the gas man in.  "But I have no key!" I objected.  Oh, you can just climb in the front window and let yourself in that way....

Here is another of those splendidly sparse songs.  The kind that works magic on your heart, but falls to pieces if you try to take it apart and see why it works.  Under analytical scrutiny, there doesn't seem to be any reason why this song should work so well.  But it does. Today, I Started Loving You Again Today I started loving you again I'm right back where I've really always been I got over you just long enough to let my heartache mend Then today, I started loving you again What a fool I was to think I could get by With only these few millions tears I cry I should have known the worst was yet to come And that crying time for me had just begun Cause today I started loving you again I'm right back where I've really always been I got over you just long enough to let my heartache mend Then today I started loving you again Well today I started loving you again I'm right back where I've really always been I got over you just long enough to let my heartache men...

Up until about 8 years ago, I fancied myself a songwriter.  Until that time, I was pretty happy about the songs I was writing.  They accomplished what I had intended for them to accomplish. But then I started running into a series of songs that I perceived to be infinitely better than mine.  They were, for one thing, more general than mine.  This allows the listener to imagine that the song is about him.  But it wasn't just that. As I began to dissect some of these songs, usually in order to learn to sing and play them, they seemed to fall apart in my hands.  When I wrote out the lyrics on a page, there seemed to be almost nothing there.  And yet, when sung, they gave me goose flesh.  They almost made my heart stand still.  I still don't really understand this type of songwriting magic very well. But I can give you instances of it.  This is Good To See You , from Neil Young.  (I'll feature another song some other day.) Good to see y...

In the first chapter of his landmark work Orthodoxy , G. K. Chesterton set forth a "double spiritual need" which is common among men and which, by his reckoning, only the orthodox Christian faith can adequately answer: I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.  I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.  I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion,...

It seems that my seven years of engineering school were not a total waste.  For they have given me ways to think about life's problems that might otherwise not have occured to me, such as the distinction between global and local optima.  ("Optima" is the plural of "optimum", which means "the best" place.) My contention (from looking at my own life and the lives of others) is that we humans often get stuck at a local optimum, and that we lack the faith or the initiative to seek for the global optimum.  There are reasons for this. In the accompanying plot, the vertical axis could be anything you seek in life (e.g., happiness), or anything you wish to eliminate from your life (e.g., fear).  I have drawn the curve so that the lower you are on the curve, the better things are for you.  The horizontal axis indicates things in your life over which you have direct or indirect control. Picture yourself at the point labelled "Local Optimum".  As far as...

See below for details of the theatrical release of Robinson in Ruins , Patrick Keiller’s much anticipated follow-up to London and Robinson in Space . BFI Southbank – NFT1 - 17.20 – 20 November 2010 – film & panel discussion Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Ruins , released on 19 November, is one of several outcomes of a three-year, AHRC-funded research collaboration between Keiller, Doreen Massey, Patrick Wright and Matthew Flintham. Following a screening of the film, the co-researchers will present their project as a political intervention. Through its study of a landscape, the project challenges commonly-held assumptions about the current economic and ecological crises: about market forces, commodification, and the terms of belonging in an age supposedly characterised by mobility and displacement. http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Sr0Y--ldI&feature=related