Overnight to London

I am sitting in my hotel room in Sheffield, swaying at the desk--these long flights always leave me rocking (how long does it take when flying to get your sea-legs?). I sit here still swaying and rocking as if I were still on that 747.

Speaking of which--I haven't been on one in years. Seattle's finest! These 747s rock! After all this flying on 737s and Lockheeds, and our enemy AirBus, and even Bombardier prop planes, this seemed like a monstrously huge lumbering beast. When we took off, it seemed like forever to get airborne, but when we did it was a magnificent roaring beast. And you can walk around
, and even go upstairs! Even the food and drink was good.

I arrived in London about 4 AM Seattle time, and then took a limo out to Sheffield. Once you leave London, it is absolutely amazing how the countryside turns immediately to farms and sheep for the entire trip to Yorkshire in the North Country.

We passed through dozens of towns I've read about it like Derby, Chesterfield, Coventry, and Nottingham (where the driver convinced me NOT to stop...I wanted to see what sorts of Robin Hood swag and souvenirs that might have kicking around... /jack, heading to bed at 10 PM (2:00 west coast time
---o0o---

Off to the motherland!

I leave Seattle at 6:30 and arrive in England at around noon (UK time) tomorrow.
---o0o---

Barack: Thanks Rev.

click to enlarge
---o0o---

Index of Jack Brummet's Poems on All This Is That

This is a sporadically-appearing index to all the poems I've published here (and elsewhere) over the last few years. I also wrote 64 poems based on the Book of Changes a/k/a the I Ching that are indexed here.

Poems published since the last index (October, 2007) are colored red. Click on the poem to read it...

Poem: How He Lived

Poem: The Broken Chord

Poem: Stackabones (for Claire)

Poem: In California, I write down the names of every great tree name I can remember
Poem: When the devil comes knocking
Poem: Into the wind
Poem: The Outlet
Poem: The riptide beneath my feet
Poem: The sounds on Puget Sound
Poem: Stages
Poem: But you can't
Poem: [with your back to the wall]
Poem: [The surging sea]
Poem: Are they on the way or is it "just my 'magination (once again)?"
Poem: The telepath
Poem: Catch 23
Poem: Narcissism
Poem: Midnight Madness
Grey USA
On seeing the photo of a long lost friend
Imaginary Friends
Alkyvision
[The streetlight's blue shadows...]
There's A Civil War In His Head[
Jesus Walks On Water
On The Plain: just a song of Gomorrah
Why I won't run for President
The story of a long long journey
Dawdling
Landing, or, Aviophobia, Part 26
The eyes have it
You Rehearse Dying
How the first baby in the world
The Big Boat
Babylon and the unfinished tower
Late Spring
Higher Ground Poem: The Icarus Factor).
Truism 1
The Grey Convoy Flies Over the UFO Crash Site
Dual Mortality
Ephemeral Communications
toast
3 A.M.
I'm agnostic about atheism
Snow Day In Kirkland, Washington
Squirrel poem
Going Mad Might Be Like A Bad Eight Track Tape Deck
Fall Haiku
Jericho & How Joshua Caused The Walls To Come Tumbling Down
The Orgy In The Pantry (starring Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, Pilsbury Dough Boy, Aunt Jemima, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and more
With Or Without The Words
Hello. . .My poem is. . .
You Gather Your Friends
The Way We Were
Scarred for life
The White Flag
The Cover-up
The Good German
Dream Of The Grey
Torches & Pitchforks
The Red Flag
Don't look back
The Tenth Planet (Or An Incredible Facsimile?)
Anger management is a slippery slope
the vault
The Moon's In Tune
Another politician resigns in disrace
Rub-a-dub
Tendrils
The Candidate
Reds
Making Room
The revolt in heaven
Found Poem: The Richmond Hill Oracle
The Robot Wars
Ten ways of looking at lies
The Broken Chord
With our heads in the sand during the transit and eclipse
the sun plays its red song
Litany
Poem: The Developers
A raindrop's life
The mystery of the first amendment to the Ten Commandments
The Bay Of Delusion
Mad Song
Reasons To Keep On
Conspiracy Theory
The Moon Race
Mr. Flue's Grave In Hillcrest Cemetary, Kent, Wash.
The World Seems Especially Calming And Verisimilitudinous Today
Kent, Washington
Rollover
[It's the Lee Harvey Oswald smile]
Zombie Breakdown
Heaven
The Variations
Sonnet For Hari
Defensive Daydreaming
The Dream
Dogpaddling
The Prostethic Head & The Absence Of Blood
Tetuan - "No Paranoia, My Friend"
The Grey Ambassador
The Bad Movie
The Bucket
The Man In The Mirror
Liftoff
Optimism
Perspective
A Flight Of Swallows
Audioblog - The Prevaricator
Weather Report
Your Wooden Leg
The Revelations Sermon At The First Church Of The Mojo Apocalypse
Dosvidaniya, Ivan Ivanovitch
The Late Excavation
Poem: Jack Kerouac, Meet John Barleycorn
The Gideon Bible In My Nightstand
At The Acropolis
When Aliens Land, Or, The Return Of The King
The sous-chef is a sociopath
James Wright
Falling
[Life Is Not A Hardy Novel]
Seven
Coyote Comes Home Like A Salmon
Shorts For Jerry Melin ca. about 1988
Bird
Monism
The Golden Rule
The Countdown
AT HILLCREST CEMETARY IN KENT, WASHINGTON, I WALK BY THE GRAVE OF SAM THE GRASSEATER
Notes On Flying
Daybreak
Explosions
Not Past Tense Yet
the glass is not half-full
It's Getting Crowded Here
Li Po In Disgrace
The Clock
A Love Song
Bad Timing
The Killer
The Absence of Footprints
Growing Up
Gone Fishing
The M.D.s
Acrylic
The Marriage
Driving Home To Seattle, We Watch Deer Drinking from the Skookumchuck River

---o0o---

On this day, 63 years ago, Adolph Hitler committed suicide

It is nearly sixty-three years since Adolph Hitler resigned as Der Fuhrer by putting a gun in his mouth. Unfortunately, he resigned just about six years too late.

Before he began his assault on Europe, Hitler promised his followers the Third Reich would last 1,000 years. Twelve years later, in January 1945, as Montgomery and Patton's forces closed in on Berlin, Hitler retreated into a bunker beneath the Chancellery to live out his final days. Located 55 feet down, the shelter contained 18 rooms and was self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. As he grew increasingly deranged, Hitler continued to meet with close subordinates like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler and Josef Goebbels (who would join him, along with his entire family, in suicide).

One day after marrying his mistress, Eva Braun, Hitler and his new bride killed themselves by swallowing cyanide (Hitler also shot himself). The invading Russian soldiers found their charred remains in a bomb crater a couple of days later.
---o0o---

Video: The Beach Boys' demo of "Walk On By"

If only the Beach Boys had finished this fab Hal David-Burt Bacharach tune! The one minute demo is tantalizing. This song was made for them. But alas, they never came back to it, although Brian had clearly spent time orchestrating the vocal parts. Would it be blasphemy for me to say I like it better than Dionne Warwick's completed version/hit?



---o0o---

Poem: The Broken Chord (rewritten & reheated)

The rain falls
As you practice arpeggios

Running out shimmering notes
In an ever-shifting

Pattern of music sifting
Through the caesuras between the notes

Forming a counterpoint
With the drumming of the rain

Thousand of patterns and polyrhythms
Weave around and through other patterns

The rain chicanes in the wind
Breaking up and merging again

Billions of drops in midair

Bump together in a choreographed ballet

We can never reproduce
But that's nature for you

We sing paint and write the same story
Over and over and over again

And nature trumps us
With her singular snowflake.
---o0o---

Video: The Beach Boys' Friends

This is one of my favorite songs by the Beach Boys, one that was never particularly popular,and one you may have never heard.


---o0o---

Poem: How He Lived

If he steps back
The whole machine

Wheels past in a blur.
Some nights he jettisons

What is left of his soul
Out into the void

And it dogpaddles back.
He's been it for too many turns.
---000---

Face scans at airports are coming to the U.K.; it will happen here

A face recognition system will scan faces to match them against the biometric

chips on passports in England. Photograph: Image Source/Getty

In the United Kingdom, a new level of scrutiny is about to be added to the other indignities air travellers suffer from. I have been on roughly 80 different airplanes in the last 16 months, and have written here fairly extensively about the airlines and airport security, and the indignities to which we are subjected as we try to get from one place to the other[1]:

According to the U.K. Guardian:

"Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

"From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.
Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

"But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

"They may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks. "

[1]

Aviophobia: Pilot's gun discharges on US Airways flight
Blown by the TSA again/Aviophobia once again
Aviophobia, Part 26
Airport Screeners Miss Fake Bombs 75% Of The Time
Aviophobia, Part 22
Poem: Landing, or, Aviophobia, Part 26
Aviophobia Update
Hello Austin! Goodbye Fear of Flying!
A confession: How I slipped through the NSA metal detectors. . .with some heavy metal!
Fear Of Flying, Fear of Dying
Poem: Falling
Poem: Notes On Flying
One More Reason Why I Am Scared Sh**less To Fly: Video Of Fixing A Jet's Wing With Duct Tape
Airline passenger restrictions, hip replacements, and why the Executive Branch goes unmolested, while I am scanned, probed, poked and patted down
---o0o---

The Nazis and "Degenerate Art"

click poster to enlarge

In Munchen, in 1937, the Nazis staged a huge exhibit of "degenerate art," from which this poster is taken. Unfortunately for the Nazis, this show it drew more visitors than a concurrent exhibit of state-sanctioned art. This poster announces the exhibition.

Stephanie Barron wrote a monograph called "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany" (published by LACMA [a favorite museum of mine], or, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991).

---o0o---

The Mighty B

A couple of friends of mine in L.A. have a cartoon starting on TV this weekend, on Nickelodeon. "The Mighty B!" premieres Saturday morning, April 26th, at 10:30 a.m. Two other new episodes will appear on Sunday morning. There is an article on Wikipedia with more details than I can possibly provide.

Cynthia True (who wrote for Fairly Odd Parents and does lot of print work, not to mention her great (if somewhat handcuffed by overly-protective copyright holders) biography of Bill Hicks) and her husband, Erik Wiese (who wrote and storyboarded Sponge Bob and other cartoons), co-created the show with Amy Poehler of Saturday Night Live. It's been over three years in the making and it is finally hitting the air. It's a very charming show and I probably can't tell you how I know that, but we all--or a subset of us--will know tomorrow.

The cartoon is hand-drawn 2D, which doesn't happen much anymore [1]. Is that cool, or what?

According to my friend Daryle Conners, it is also the first Nick show "(and one of the only cartoons I can think of) that features a little girl in the lead, let alone a little girl who is goofy, crazy, ambitious and a little homely - typically the girls in children's animation normally act as reflectors for the male characters or play "the straight-man" role. "

Amy Poehler voice acts the lead Bessie Higgenbottom, and Andy Richter plays her little brother, Ben. Tune in and give Cindy and Eric a Nielson bump!
___________________________________________

[1] I remember when Disney sold all their animation tables a few years ago...it was kind of a big deal in the videogame and movie industries. We threw in the towel and it wasn't long before those who couldn't or wouldn't make the leap to 3D were left behind--tossed off the side of the prairie schooner to bolster the surviviors' chances.
---o0o---