Poem: Turning

By Jack Brummet 

Turning

1
The host and tenant are locked

In benign equilibrium.

2
Each valley is followed by a slope.
Every going followed by a return.

3

There is no relief without an ache,
And no virus without a host.

4
The bricks tumble into the moat.
The king's body hangs naked from the flagpole.

5
For a fleeting moment,

The condition for change exists.
            ---o0o---

Faces No. 497 - Pablo Fanque

By Jack Brummet 

 ---o0o---

Painting: Map 22

By Jack Brummet 

 ---o0o---

Faces No. 496 - 20th high school reunion

By Jack Brummet

 ---o0o---

Poem: Resurrection

By Jack Brummet 

He was ready to live again
Even if living just meant running
To keep ahead of the ghosts.

---o0o---

Five Poems: The Golden Rule; The Glass Is Not Half-Full; It's Getting Crowded; Limits; Surviving

By Jack Brummet 

The Golden Rule

Listen to the songbirds
Trill
But keep an eye
On the buzzard section.
----o0o----

The glass is not half-full

I saw our dreams
Disappear
Like a white pony
Over
A low grassy hill. ---o0o---

It's Getting Crowded

We cover the earth
With Venn Diagrams

As our steps
Bisect old steps.
---o0o---

 Limits

We like to believe
We could endure anything for five minutes

But that theory, cooked up
In your hermetic study or bedroom,

Comes apart at the seams
When you imagine being on fire

Or having crows feast
Upon your eyes.
---o0o---

Surviving

Salvation lies
In remaining unblinded

To the treachery

Massing around you:

The enemy without,

Calculating your fall

And the traitor within,
Beating in your chest.

---o0o---

Book igloo by Colombian artist Miller Lagos.

---o0o---

Donald Baechler's faces mural at Caravaggio restaurant in NYC and Jack's Faces No. 111

By Jack Brummet 

We're working on more or less parallel paths.

click to enlarge

My earlier drawings (2007), Faces No. 111.

 ---o0o---

ATIT Reheated: Eat your own dog food!

By Jack Brummet, Games and Software Ed.

Actor Lorne Greene used to flack the dogfood Alpo on TV, saying "it's so good I feed it to my own dogs." It gained currency during the dot-com craze, and the phrase is still used most commonly in technology companies. I believe it is one of the central tenets of quality assurance (as opposed to QA's subdiscipline, testing).

"Eating your own dog food" means that you use the software you create, or play the games you make. In other businesses, you might actually eat the food you serve, watch the TV shows you make, or use the product you manufacture. This can be taken to extremes, of course, as in the Not Invented Here syndrome, where you not only eat your own dogfood, but you also won't touch anyone else's [1].




Ben Hamper, writing about life as a shoprat at General Motors in his book Rivethead, tells how anyone foolish enough to drive a foreign car into the employee parking lot would find their car keyed, tagged with spray paint, mirrors ripped off, and possibly rammed by a one-ton pickup. That is an extreme punishment for not eating your own dogfood.

Why should you eat your own dogfood? You actually get to know the product you are making. By knowing it, you may get some ideas about how to increase its goodness. In the case of games and software, problems, bugs and deficencies become apparent often only after extended use by a variety of people. Eating your own dogfood shows you believe in your own product. If you work at a brewery, a game company, or bakery, it probably works pretty well for you, if you manufacture cod liver oil, syrup of ipecac, chastity belts, or experimental aircraft. . .well, not so much.

[1] "Not Invented Here," describes a company that will use nothing developed by "outsiders." In many cases companies don't know a solution already exists. But even more often, the organization believes they can produce a superior product. Apple Computer, from System 1 through OS9 did not include many U.I. innovations (from, say, Windows) because they were not accounted for in Apple's human interface guidelines (a great document, by the way).


Apple rejected any change they did not invent...which, of course, ignores the fact that Apple cribbed most of this stuff from innovations at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the first place. In the open source world, at any time, there are several groups working on different projects that all do the same thing.


Large corporations like Microsoft reject all use of open source software...because they feel the source sharing requirements are too onerous. Therefore they must come up with all these tools in house, no matter how much it costs and no matter how poorly the tool emulates what is already available for free.

---o0o---

President Obama talks about "going Bulworth"

By Jack Brummet

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for passing this along. We can dream can't we? Bulworth refers to Warren Beatty's great movie about a Senator who goes completely off the rails. 

From the Politico playbook newsletter: "In private, [Obama] has talked longingly of 'going Bulworth ,' a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie ['Bulworth'] about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. While Mr. Beatty's character had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama's desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him. 'Probably every president says that from time to time,' said David Axelrod ... 'It's probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you're saying.' The cinematic allusion seems striking given Mr. Obama's rejection of Hollywood's version of the White House, what one former aide calls 'the Harry Potter theory of the presidency,' which suggests that he could wave a wand and make things happen."

A Bulworth rap from the film:

"Obscenity? The rich is getting richer and richer and richer
While the middle class is getting more poor
Making billions and billions and billions of bucks
Well my friend if you weren't already rich at the start
Well that situation just sucks
Cause the richest motherf****r in five of us
Is getting ninety f***in' eight percent of it
And every other motherf****r in the world is left to wonder
Where the f*** we went with it
Obscenity? I'm a Senator
I gotta raise $10,000 a day every day I'm in Washington
I ain't getting it in South Central
I'm gettin it in Beverly Hills
So I'm votin for them in the Senate the way they want me too
And-and-and I'm sending them my bills
But we got babies in South Central dying as young as they do in Peru
We got public schools that are nightmares
We got a Congress that ain't got a clue
We got kids with submachine guns
We got militias throwing bombs
We got Bill just gettin all weepy
We got Newt blaming teenage moms
We got factories closing down
Where the hell did all the good jobs go?
Well, I'll tell you where they went
My contributors make more profits makin, makin, makin,
Hirin' kids in Mexico
And a brother can work in fast food
If he can't invent computer games
But what we used to call America
That's going down the drains
How's a young man gonna meet his financial responsibilities
Workin for motherf****n' Burger King?
He ain't! And please don't even start with that school s**t
There aint no education going on up in that motherfucker
Obscenity? We got a million brothers in prison
I mean, the walls are really rockin'
But you can bet your ass they'd all be out
If they could pay for Johnny Cochran
The constitution is supposed to give them an equal chance
Well, that ain't gonna happen for sure
Ain't it time to take a little from the rich motherf****r
And give a little to the poor?
I mean, those boys over there on the monitor
They want a government smaller and weak
But they be speakin for the richest 20 percent
When they pretend they're defendin' the meek
Now, sh*t, f**k, c***sucker, that's the real obscenity
Black folks livin with every day
Trying to believe a mothe****in' word Democrats and Republicans say
Obscenity? I'm Jay Billington Bulworth And I've come to say
The Democratic party's got some s**t to pay."

---o0o---

Poem: Stackabones (for Claire)

By Jack Brummet 

This is a poem I wrote a couple of days before my daughter Claire was born.

Stackabones

for Claire

"What is it?," you'll ask, and I'll hedge.
Things with no title aren't,

So make a name. Our dreams have no lexicon.
We'll look at wildflowers

In the chaparral and fill the silence
Around the blossoms with a name.

Waiting on you to be,
I try to remember not to forget.

In a dusty corner of my head
I've opened files with Websters of words,

Waiting on you to be.
We'll cover the earth with Venn Diagrams

Of our steps bisecting the old steps.
We'll breach the barricades

And walk circles from here to here.
The wheel itself rolls flat

And you can't slow it down;
With each spin of the ball it grows flatter,

But still rolls up and down the hill.
The list of whom the bucket was kicked by

Grows longer every day
And that bucket fills with tears.

Our job is to stay off that roster.
Back to the story.

God, gets the fire going
As She spins us back into the sun

To warm us up in the morning.
The sun didn't rise today,

But the sun doesn't rise.
The last cricket falls asleep,

And the birds begin their rounds.
Earth rolls over like a dog,

And the light
Floods in.
---o0o---

Drawing: Faces No. 494 - four people at the pocket park

By Jack Brummet 

 ---o0o---