Visiopoetics

Updated for late summer. Please enjoy my refreshed exhibit at the marvelous Millmont Grille, locally owned and operated behind the Barracks Road Shopping Centre.

The Christian Science Monitor kindly features a poem, “Where did I put the night?”

In the event the night is recovered, there will be a very high reward for information leading to its return.

Happy National Smile Week! Appropriately enough, it’s also finally the week of comprehensive exams in my graduate program, topping off the summer of studying for the comp, the whole comp, and nothing but the comp.

The Lupus Foundation of Virginia Charlottesville chapter’s regular monthly meeting will be NEXT Saturday, August 7 (the first Sat. of the month) at Cville Coffee at 12-noon. Spouses, friends, and family are welcome!

These are informal, open meetings where you can come for the creative ambiance of the only place in town with a climbable turtle and Galapagos Islands mural — and stay to discuss local/regional/larger rheumatology resources, problems, and solutions.

Autoimmunity affects more Americans than heart disease or cancer, and coordination of resources critical. That’s why these meetings are open to all people who suffer from or are otherwise affected by any autoimmune disorder. We are your community resource for information and support.

Breaking news, and the sound track for the moment.

From the marvelous mini-Annals of Improbable Research (”mini-AIR”), June edition:

2010-06-06 Dirty Word Usage Poet

The judges have chosen a winner in the Dirty Word Usage Limerick
Competition, which asked for a limerick to honor the study “Sex
Roles and Dirty Word Usage: A Review of the Literature and a
Reply to Haas,” Timothy B. Jay, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 88,
no. 3, November 1980, pp. 614-21. http://bit.ly/9BqtWU

The winner is INVESTIGATOR John Jermey who wrote:

I wrote a love letter to Brenda;
I phrased it in accents so tender.
But now I’m in jail
And they’ve just refused bail,
‘Cos profanity varies with gender.

Here’s the offering from LIMERICK LAUREATE MARTIN EIGER:

Which sex uses dirty words more?
Women? Men? Both the same? What’s the score?
She says same. He says men.
Who is right? Then again,
Were it men, he’d have called her a whore.

———————————————————-
2010-06-07 Active Nonsense-Mediated Competition

Now-old new insights into nonsense inspire this month’s limerick
competition. To enter, compose an original limerick that
illuminates the nature of this report:

“New Insights into the Formation of Active Nonsense-Mediated Decay
Complexes,” Guramrit Singh and Jens Lykke-Andersen, Trends in
Biochemical Sciences, vol. 28, no. 9, September 2003, pp. 464-6.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0968-0004(03)00176-2 The authors are at
the University of Colorado at Boulder.

RULES: Please make sure that: (1) your rhymes actually do; and
(2) your poem is in classic, trills-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive (if we manage to send it to the
correct address) a free, perhaps high-res PDF issue of the
Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one entry per entrant) to:

ACTIVE NONSENSE-MEDIATED LIMERICK COMPETITION
c/o marca AT improbable.com

The Lupus Foundation of Virginia Charlottesville chapter’s regular monthly meeting will be this Saturday, July 3 (the first Sat. of the month) at Cville Coffee at 12-noon. Spouses, friends, and family are welcome!

These are informal, open meetings where you can come for the creative ambiance of the only place in town with a climbable turtle and Galapagos Islands mural — and stay to discuss local/regional/larger rheumatology resources, problems, and solutions.

Autoimmunity affects more Americans than heart disease or cancer, and coordination of resources critical. That’s why these meetings are open to all people who suffer from or are otherwise affected by any autoimmune disorder. We are your community resource for information and support.

This week, in “Wait, when did I miss this?” — Monkeybicycle ran a lovely May batch of one-sentence stories including one of mine.

I think I was taking a very long, deep post-finals nap. And then it was June.

On Slate this week, Christopher Beam asked: “What if political scientists wrote the news?”

The tagline (lowconcept) says it’s a spoof, but I find it quite chilling. Mostly because I read the piece without laughing once — I kept thinking these are great empirical points and basic questions the media should be routinely making/asking. I know the best comedy is true, but… Isn’t the punchline here really the unasked question of why the hell mainstream media doesn’t ask this stuff? That was the premise to be mocked by highlighting what the actual foci are instead of this. It’s the aberrant distance between logical and actual, far larger than the necessary distance between our minds and hearts, that’s so terrible and thus potentially hilarious.

Or maybe I’m a political scientist. Technically, that is what they pay me for. (Suckers.)

In completely related news, my herb garden is flowering. The entire bed, all at once. Party in the lavender.

The Lupus Foundation of Virginia Charlottesville chapter’s regular monthly meeting will be this Saturday, June 5 (the first Sat. of the month) at Cville Coffee at 12-noon. Spouses, friends, and family are welcome!

These are informal, open meetings where you can come for the creative ambiance of the only place in town with a climbable turtle and Galapagos Islands mural — and stay to discuss local/regional/larger rheumatology resources, problems, and solutions.

Autoimmunity affects more Americans than heart disease or cancer, and coordination of resources critical. That’s why these meetings are open to all people who suffer from or are otherwise affected by any autoimmune disorder. We are your community resource for information and support.

Except if you want to climb the turtle, you’re basically on your own.