Sorry to put such a downer on things with that death entry. (It still goes in my favorite entries that matter [TM] pile, however.) You know what with all the cheerful things that have been happening this week, I just got kind of down, I guess. Hey, it snowed and it is supposedly Spring.

Well to overcome that bit of melancholy, let's make fun of cars and the people who drive them.

Let's keep up that Catholic theme too: mea culpa.

Friend Jeff has a photoblog for his various camera phones.

When I was a kid we went to this museum where they had this life and death counter thing. Basically, it was a sort a device that looked kind of like an odometer and it had two dials that would tick over births and deaths. The odometer for births, of course, ticked over quickly--a birth every second, but the odometer for deaths was much slower--one every 20 seconds or so, I guess. I remember being obsessed with that gauge of humanity. Sure there were a lot more births than deaths, and that was the purpose of the display, but even then, as a little third-grader, I was fascinated by the death wheel. There every 20 seconds, like clockwork, was a personal tragedy. Tick. Dead. Tick. Tick. Dead. Tick. Tick. Tick. Dead.

Housemate Jeff purchased a extra-spiffy-deluxe cell phone/camera yesterday and with it came this handy/dandy thingamabob that lets you put in Sony Memory Stick media and easily upload contents to one's computation equipment. Since my previously mentioned handy-dandy device takes pictures as well as playing music and keeping me on time for appointments, I have a variety of pictures on it that occasionally get uploaded when I get the gumption to plug the USB cable into it and download. As this device just requires me to plug in said Memory Stick, I was able to clear off a slew of pictures that were on it. I like some of them. The device has a sort of noir feel to it, even if it is taking pictures in broad daylight.

Dr. Write's second versificating assignment has been really bugging me (well ok it hasn't been really bugging me, but it bugged me sufficiently enough when I started it that I thought exaggeration would help set the mood/tone for this post). She asked for a sestina with the words read, run, fly, dogs, moon boots, and sex. In general I have no problem at all with any of those words. As a matter of fact, I try to work the phrase "moon boots" into serious conversations and, indeed, some of my best friends are dogs, but when you are required to put all those words together as end words in a poem, it is quite maddening. Now I've told you about my problems with sestinas previously, and that last one I wrote definitely left me feeling raw and unhinged, but I did start this next Dr. Write assignment with the best intentions. Those intentions, however, soon ran me face-first into a mud fence:

When we were kids, we would run
In the open alfalfa fields trying to fly,
Arms out-stretched, panting like dogs
But no matter how fast we ran, our moon boots
Would never let us lift off, and having read
Books on astronauts didn't help, no matter out sex:

Boys were not strong enough to start to fly
Girls were never light enough even when pulled by dogs
Fast, too fast, in wagons, our moon boots
Cleared Earth by only two feet at most, and sex
Was never a factor, never made us run
To one another

Ok you can see right there that it is a broken concept and it is because of the word sex. Damn those kids in Dr. Write's class! I mean my hell a perfectly good first stanza ruined by sex! Ok, I can see my little joke about conservatives etc. is probably going to go nowhere at 5:00 am, so I'm going to stop trying to make it funny. (But it is kind of funny, however, that my poem is messed up by sex and the somewhat sexist first two lines of the second stanza.)

Moving on, where the hell am I supposed to go with the second stanza? What the hell are these insane children going to read? When will they finally stop running and pull off those stinking moon boots? What will the dogs do next? Surely not have..oh my.

Since I can't get the audioblogger crapster to work, in lieu of a message, I'll post some more San Francisco pictures she has been clamoring for.

My phone ran out of space for more pictures (which is a somewhat regularly occurrence) so rather than just discarding them to the fate in digital image heaven or hell, I decided to give them continued life by subjecting them on you, oh reader (as Jason P. or Charlotte Bronte or whoever else directs their narrative at you, oh reader.) They are a random assortment from January until now.