Scary Spam

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Poem for today, Friday, May 1st, 2009

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit...

By T. S. Eliot.

Photo from TopLeftPixel.

You will catch it from sex with a pig...

...especially if the pig is wearing lipstick.

As we cower in terror as swine! 'flu! stalks the land, CNN has been at hand to help slather on the fear, good and thick, with an anchor today misconstruing a government official's attempts to point out that swine 'flu has nothing to do with eating pork, nor can it be caught by eating pork. It is always strange to see people sort of not quite almost get the point. One could imagine a thousand situations in which people seeing the same segment of CNN as I did, might come away with scores of slightly different sets of (incorrect) information: "But didn't he just say that farm workers in contact with pigs should not eat pork?"

Officially: "New York City now has 49 confirmed cases of swine flu, up from 44 on Tuesday."

Still and all, it's good to know that here in New York City nothing, repeat, nothing, can scare us.

We aren't scared of nothing... Oh my GAWD IS THAT A PLANE HOLY CRAAAAAAAAAP


This low-flying luxury 747, one of two used by President Obama, flew past buildings in, of all places in the world, Lower Manhattan, tailed by, what else, two fighter jets, causing a panic and angriness, and probably a lot of heavy drinking.

And finally, a thought on words and how we use them. A television news presenter is called an 'anchor,' suggesting cast-iron reliability. But within television studios, the ugly hard-working chain smoking technicians usually refer to the anchor as the 'fluff.'

One wonders if President Obama is looking anxiously out of the Oval Office window for a cloud of locusts. Senator Arlen Spector has defected from the Republican Party, which helps elongate that party's slow-motion unraveling: "Mr. Specter said he had concluded that his party had moved too far to the right (NYT)."

While bipartisanship has increased under Obama, he has also reversed many Bush administration policies and started to reach out to countries which the U.S. under Bush had either ignored or treated with icy contempt.

As I finish typing this, Marine One is landing at Andrews Airforce Base, it is one hundred days since Obama took office and presumably he is working up his script for tonight's news conference. "The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious..." And so, there are reasons to be hopeful, if not happy.

Goat Song

Chris looked at me skeptically.

Today I came across some books discarded on West 19th Street. I stopped for a glance at the covers, and could not resist picking up the fantastic(-ally obscure) "Goat Song," a novel whose back cover boasts:

"...an unusual novel, both in form and content. The author uses modified conventions of Greek tragedy to counterpoint the ordinary lives of streetwise lesbians - lives for which a tragic fall is a daily occurrence..."

As I said later to my friend Chris, Irish literature follows a similar set of themes: goats, gay women, daily occurrences. But there is often a sprinkling of police and law enforcement throughout. And I quoted from a well-known Irish novella:

"And by now, the police were pushing the goat through the hole in the floor..."

Strange to say, he looked at me skeptically...