The Affluent Hobo

He goes from place to place jumps on airplanes on a whim. Money is no object so he's never learned how to think his way through decisions.

Smile

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
- Dr. Seuss

First

“Get the writing done first, then be the person I want to be in other ways after that.”
—John Edgar Wideman

Lazy Woman's Cake

https://www.amish365.com/lazy-womans-cake-hey-i-dont-come-up-with-these-names/

Peter Sis

This is one interview snipped into many short videos.
http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/sis

Sauerkraut Festival

Each October the small town of Waynesville, Ohio – about 35 miles northeast of Cincinnati – is home to one of the region’s largest outdoor festivals. The Ohio Sauerkraut Festival attracts a massive crowd who come to sample everything from sauerkraut pizza to fudge and sauerkraut ice cream. I have attended this festival before and, wow, it really is like stepping into a slow-moving river of people who flow from one end of the street fair to the next. Waynesville is a quaint place to visit when the Sauerkraut Festival is not going on, boasting an array of antique shops that has earned the town its moniker of the “Antiques Capital of the Midwest.” But during festival time the town becomes a sprawling metropolis for two days when over 350,000 people descend upon this village for a taste of kraut. The thing is when you bake sauerkraut into different items it really dries out and takes on the consistency of, say, shredded coconut. Kraut, washed well and baked into brownies or bread, is very different than the juice-soaked kraut you might pile onto your hot dog.
https://www.amish365.com/amish-sauerkraut-brownies/

Be Still

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot. D. H. LAWRENCE

George Bilgere

Waiting

by George Bilgere


When the guy in the dark suit
Asks me if I want to see my mother
As she lies in the back room, waiting,
I remember her, for some reason,
In a white swimsuit, on a yellow towel
On the sand at Crystal Lake,
Pregnant with my sister,
Waiting for me to finish examining
The sleek fuselage of a minnow,
The first dead thing I had ever seen,
Before we went back to the cottage for lunch.

I remember her waiting up for my father
To come home from God knows where
In a yellow cab at 2:00 AM
And waiting for me in the school parking lot
In our old blue station wagon
When whatever it was I was practicing for
Ran late. I remember her, shoulders thrown back,
Waiting in the unemployment line, waiting
For me to call, waiting for the sweet release
In the second glass of wine
After a long day working at the convalescent hospital
Where everyone was waiting to die.

And I remember her waiting for me
At the airport when I got back from Japan,
Waiting for everything to be all right,
Waiting for her biopsy results.
Waiting.

But when the guy in the dark suit
Asks if I would like to go back
And be with her in that room where she lies
Waiting to be cremated I say No
Thank you, and turn and walk out
Onto the sunny street to join the crowd
Hustling down the sidewalk
And I look up at the beautiful
White clouds suspended above the city,
Leaving her in that room to wait alone,
For which I will not be forgiven.


https://www.missourireview.com/article/poetry-feature-george-bilgere/

Ideas

“Where do you get your ideas?” When people ask me this, my usual response is, “Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.”
Patricia C. Wrede

Belong

“I stopped feeling as if I didn’t belong anywhere, and realized that I belonged anywhere I wanted to be.”
— Sophia Amoruso

Waiting

“I am so tired of waiting,
aren’t you,
for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?”
— Langston Hughes

Billy Collins Transcript

Collins Values Approachable Poetry, Not Pretension
30:19
https://www.npr.org/2011/04/06/135181560/collins-values-accessible-poetry-not-pretension


April 6, 2011 1:00 PM ET
Heard on Talk of the Nation
Cover of 'Horoscopes For The Dead'

Horoscopes For The Dead: Poems
By Billy Collins
Random House


Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, thinks too many poets show off — writing obscure verses that turn many readers off. In his latest collection, Horoscopes For The Dead, he strives to write poetry that all readers can appreciate. "The last thing I want to do/ Is risk losing your confidence/ By appearing to lay it on too thick," he writes in "Bread And Butter."

"I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible,'" he tells NPR's Neal Conan. That word has become "like nails on a blackboard" to him. But access is still essential to his craft. "It's a way of getting a reader into the poem," he says, but once they get there, he hopes to move them into worlds that are "a little more challenging, a little more hypothetical, and finally, a little more mysterious."

Collins has sold more than one million books of poetry. He says radio has been instrumental in building his audience. "Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction," he says.

But there's also the appeal of the unexpected — it's unusual to hear poetry on the radio. "Listeners are kind of ambushed ... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio," says Collins. "The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school — there's little time to resist the poem."

He also believes readers crave "a mixture of clarity and mysteriousness," which they find in his work. On one end of the spectrum, he thinks poems that are perfectly clear are "a little flat." But on the other end, too much mystery can render a poem inscrutable. "I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place," he says. "I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination."

Billy Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003.
Barbi Reed/

Collins says he is often asked why "no one" reads poetry anymore. He thinks part of the problem is that the audience for poetry is comprised largely of other poets. "Everyone at a baseball game isn't a baseball player," he points out, so everyone at a poetry reading needn't be a poet. Breaking that circle, he says, would help poets find larger followings.

He also thinks former students have "lingering anxieties" about poetry. Teaching of poetry, bound as it is to the teaching of critical analysis, is the culprit. In what he admits is a cynical interpretation, he believes that to some extent, teachers "teach difficult poetry because it ensures their usefulness as people standing between the reader and the poem" who help with interpretation.

In the classroom, "every time you hear a poem in a classroom, you know questions will follow," he says. "This sequence — hear a poem, then get interrogated over it," says Collins, can create an anxious relationship between readers and poetry.
Excerpt: 'Horoscopes For The Dead'

Billy Collins
Grave

What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents,

and what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond,

one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,

and the differences being so faint
that only a few special monks
were able to tell one from another.

They make you look very scholarly,
I heard my mother say
once I lay down on the ground

and pressed an ear into the soft grass.
Then I rolled over and pressed
my other ear to the ground,

the ear my father likes to speak into,
but he would say nothing,
and I could not find a silence

among the 100 Chinese silences
that would fit the one that he created
even though I was the one

who had just made up the business
of the 100 Chinese silences --
the Silence of the Night Boat,

and the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.
The Straightener

Even as a boy I was a straightener.
On a long table near my window
I kept a lantern, a spyglass, and my tomahawk.

Never tomahawk, lantern, and spyglass.
Always lantern, spyglass, tomahawk.

You could never tell when you would need them,
but that was the order you would need them in.

On my desk: pencils at attention in a cup,
foreign coins stacked by size,

a photograph of my parents,
and under the heavy green blotter,
a note from a girl I was fond of.

These days I like to stack in pyramids
the cans of soup in the pantry
and I keep the white candles in rows like logs of wax.

And if I can avoid doing my taxes
or phoning my talkative aunt
on her eighty-something birthday,

I will use a ruler to measure the space
between the comb and brush on the dresser,
the distance between shakers of salt and pepper.

Today, for example, I will devote my time
to lining up my shoes in the closet,
pair by pair in chronological order

and lining up my shirts on the rack by color
to put off having to tell you, dear,
what I really think and what I now am bound to do.
Horoscopes For The Dead

Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals,
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you should not miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.

I can't imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.

And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

A dramatic rise in income may be a reason
to treat yourself, but that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

But you will be relieved to learn
that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back seat
to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

And don't worry today or any day
about problems caused by your unwillingness
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more romance,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.
Poem On The Three Hundredth Anniversary Of The Trinity School

When a man asked me to look back three hundred years
Over the hilly landscape of America,
I must have picked up the wrong pen,
The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.

So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse
Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,
A sight we might have seen so many years ago —
Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace --

Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,
The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,
Which I climbed and then could see even more,
A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.

The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,
And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,
Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,
Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without bridges.

And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,
Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,
Three hundred of them, one for every school year
Walking single-file over the decades into the present.

I thought of the pages they had filled
With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,
The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,
The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.

And then I heard their singing, all those voices
Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years
Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,
History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.

Excerpted from Horoscopes For The Dead by Billy Collins

Walking in the Rain

My dog didn't like walking in the rain as much as I do but I promised him I'd towel off his fur and he'd be cozy. Now that we are home he is content.

Billy Collins ( short TED TALK)

https://www.ted.com/talks/billy_collins_everyday_moments_caught_in_time?language=en

Life Begins with Leftovers

https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes/easy_spaghetti_bolognese_93639

https://inspiredimperfection.com/recipes/parmesan-spaghetti-bolognese-waffles/

Weekend Waffles

Making buttermilk waffles using leftover brown rice and rye sourdough starter and whole wheat flour. Delicious.

Neurological Consequences

Richard E. Cytowic M.D.

The Fallible Mind
How Facial Botox Changes Your Brain—Literally
Unintended neurological consequences make the cosmetic procedure far from benign

[This column was revised on 3/5/19.] The Injection of Botox to reduce facial lines and wrinkles has long been assumed to be purely cosmetic in nature. Hollywood’s rush to it has normalized the procedure and even given it an air of frivolity.

Ongoing research, however, has revealed an unintentional and rather alarming consequence: Botox injections in the forehead and face rearrange the brain’s sensory map of the hands. What's concerning is that clients typically come back for regular injections, because the limited paralysis the toxin induces lasts only two to three months. The ongoing question is whether repeated treatments over a period of years result in permanent changes to one’s brain [1].

Botox is the brand name for botulinum toxin–a, one of the most lethal poisons known. The neurotoxin is produced by the bacterium Clostridium, a spore commonly found in plants, soil, water, and animals. The clinical syndrome of botulism, which is often lethal, typically occurs from either a wound infection or eating undercooked or improperly canned food. The toxin paralyzes muscles by blocking the release of acetylcholine, the principal neurotransmitter between nerve and muscle.

For a long time, we have known that the brain is plastic, meaning that its circuits and microscopic anatomy are malleable. They physically change in response to a number of external inputs. For example, in violinists the brain map devoted to the non-bowing fingers is much larger than the same finger region in non-violinists. In newly blind individuals learning braille, the cortical area devoted to the “reading finger” greatly expands into the newly unused visual cortex.

The brain maps of hand and face territories lie next to one another in the sensory cortex. After hand amputations, tactile inputs from the face routinely widen and shift into the territory newly deprived of sensory input from the hand. Likewise, patients with facial paralysis due to Bell’s palsy or stroke have enhanced metabolic activity in the hand region of the sensory cortex. The principle is well established that the cortical representation of one body part widens in response to injury affecting another body part.

Based on this knowledge one would expect hand maps to increase after a patient’s face is paralyzed by Botox injections. And yet exactly the opposite happens. This suggests that the cortical reorganization to Botox facial paralysis is intrinsically different from that observed after functional loss from amputations, facial nerve injury, or stroke. We must account for this within the established knowledge that during intentional imitation of facial expressions, facial feedback alters neural activity within central circuits underlying emotion [2].

The current explanation for this counterintuitive observation is that the limited paralysis caused by Botox deprives the brain of sensory inputs normally generated by forehead and facial movement. Even more unexpected is that both hands suffer a loss of cortical brain activity following a relatively small loss of facial movements. The changes in brain remapping are dose-dependent: the more you use, the bigger the effect. Initial studies did not investigate whether cortical remapping was limited only to the hands, or whether other body parts were also affected. Later studies showed more widespread effects and unintended consequences within the nervous system. It is an uncertainty that all who elect this "cosmetic" procedure should ponder. If this topic strikes a note, drop me a line.

References

[1] "Altered cortical activation from the hand after botulinum toxin treatment." Ann Clin Translational Neurol 2014, 1:64-68 by Arko Ghosh and colleagues was the earliest reference to this phenomenon. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acn3.21/pdf Subsequent work by Dr Ghosh and others can be found at google scholar or PubMed.

[2] Weise, D., Weise, C., & Naumann, M. (2019). Central Effects of Botulinum Neurotoxin—Evidence from Human Studies. Toxins, 11(1), 21.

An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.

source
1. George Washington

"Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company."

2. John Adams

“To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.”

3. Thomas Jefferson

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."

4. James Madison

“The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.”

5. James Monroe

"It is by a thorough knowledge of the whole subject that [people] are enabled to judge correctly of the past and to give a proper direction to the future."

6. John Quincy Adams

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader"

7. Andrew Jackson

“Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.”

8. Martin Van Buren

“It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn't.”

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9. William Henry Harrison

"Times change, and we change with them."

10. John Tyler

“I can never consent to being dictated to.”

11. James K. Polk

"The gratitude ... should be commensurate with the boundless blessings which we enjoy."

12. Zachary Taylor

"I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me."

13. Millard Fillmore

"An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory."

14. Franklin Pierce

"While men inhabiting different parts of this vast continent cannot be expected to hold the same opinions, they can unite in a common objective and sustain common principles."

15. James Buchanan
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“The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”

16. Abraham Lincoln

“I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

17. Andrew Johnson

“If you always support the correct principles then you will never get the wrong results!”

18. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant,

“In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.”

19. Rutherford B. Hayes

“Every expert was once a beginner.”

20. James A. Garfield

“Right reason is stronger than force.”

21. Chester A. Arthur

“Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.”

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22. Grover Cleveland

“It is better to be defeated standing for a high principle than to run by committing subterfuge.”

23. Benjamin Harrison

“Great lives never go out; they go on.”

24. Grover Cleveland

“Unswerving loyalty to duty, constant devotion to truth, and a clear conscience will overcome every discouragement and surely lead the way to usefulness and high achievement.”

25. William McKinley

“In the time of darkest defeat, victory may be nearest.”

26. Theodore Roosevelt

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”

27. William Howard Taft

“We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.”

28. Woodrow Wilson

“The object of love is to serve, not to win.”

29. Warren G. Harding

“There's good in everybody. Boost. Don't knock.”

30. Calvin Coolidge

“If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”

31. Herbert Hoover

“Be patient and calm; no one can catch a fish with anger.”

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”

33. Harry S. Truman

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

34. Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Pessimism never won any battle.”

35. John F. Kennedy

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

36. Lyndon B. Johnson

“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”

37. Richard M. Nixon

“Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

38. Gerald R. Ford

“Never be satisfied with less than your very best effort. If you strive for the top and miss, you'll still 'beat the pack.'”

39. Jimmy Carter

“You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can.”

40. Ronald Reagan

“Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just braver five minutes longer.”

41. George Bush

"No problem of human making is too great to be overcome by human ingenuity, human energy, and the untiring hope of the human spirit."

42. Bill Clinton

“If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you'll be a better person. It's how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit.”

43. George W. Bush

"A leadership is someone who brings people together."

44. Barack Obama

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

45. XXXXXX XXXXX

“Without passion you don't have energy, with out energy you have nothing.”

Outrageous

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/my-parents-didnt-tell-me-they-skipped-my-vaccines-then-i-got-sick/2019/04/25/2434feec-66a6-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html

Anything

“We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed