world of no pity

eyes of green, see, seas of ice
couldn't turn my frail boat
from seeking morning

and in your fathomless gaze
that princess ghost
still mooring

I wish the sun would stay in the sky forever...
I wish that love was strong
and stayed strong
grew strong and
ever stronger

for now that we have passed
what some might say is the last chance we'll get

I just want to hold you
I just want to hold you
to feel your heart near mine, to close our eyes together

and forget to feel the night come
my love, and be with you still tomorrow.

fly in my soup

In a lattice of light
we hang our heads
going out of our heads
trying to find ourselves in circles
truth or something we could hold
not to scorch us then leave us cold

Ah fate
you always hated what I was
there's nothing to stop you now
when the sweat pours down my body
in the middle of the night
but Love,
we could escape it all
if only we knew where to start
this world is much too simple for us

In a lattice of light
was my garden of delight
under skies so blue I saw my window
and skies so black I saw my ego
just something I could hold
not to make my cry or leave me old

Ah fate
you always hated what I was
there's no one to halt your progress now
the sweat's still pouring down my body
day and night
but Love,
we could rejoin the laughter
if only we knew when it would end
this world makes too much sense for us.

the irresistable force against a merely stubborn object

naked as i was born,
unadorned
pierced through by shafts of light
it's called grieving
i appear before you now
to receieve
and fake is one thing i'll never be
you know me by now
by the time my words make sense
i'll be lying on my teeth
pierced through by blades of grass
somewhere happy
unseen, undreaming.

"Tree Strokes" (2007)

STARS

Question.

How old is the earth, according to the latest research accepted by most geologists? It's ever so slightly different than what I learned most of my life, due to new breakthroughs in dating techniques. Needless to say, no cheating please. I'm ideally looking for an answer to two decimal places, expressed in billions of years (X.XX byo). American/international-scientific use of the term "billion" of course, not the uniquely British notion that a billion is a million million (an idea which is fading even in Britain). A billion is rightly a thousand million: 1,000,000,000.

The closest answer gets a small solid bar of 24k gold in virtuum!

The true age of the earth may always be debatable, because it formed from rubble that didn't make it into the sun and subsequent major bombardments, so when exactly is a planet considered to be "born"? Also, there is some inaccuracy still in dating methods, but the latest figures are taken from many different scientific disciplines and all converge quite nicely on the number I'm looking for. But don't be afraid to guess! Don't assume anyone will get it exactly right!

And anyone who says 6,000 years old will be immediately banned from this site =)

My secret path.

I can only say your name so often
Before the word becomes dissociated
And my elation turns to something fantastical
Rather than grounded in reality
But this reality is ugly
And you are fantastic;

I can only hope for better times in the years
And the decades ahead, to lead people everywhere
Out of their neuroses, their crises, their fear
And heed the trumpet of Jericho now for it blows
Not a fair wind at all, my dear lady,
No sound you should ever hear;

I can only give you my coat and comfort you
The best I know how, which is to care and to strive
When the wind-blown stars bow their heads in shame
For they could only turn the world, and stare
Not be there for us in comfort when our lives
Went down in flames;

I can only lead you to a secretive path
That I found once in my youth and have lost on and off
As the parade of black-armoured years solidered by
I can only ask you to come with me
I cannot tell you why.

Questions about aurum.

A) How many protons does the typical atom of gold have in its nucleus (thus, what is its atomic number)? B) Why do you think it has been used so often to make jewelry, coins, and other precious items by unrelated cultures from around the world and throughout history? C) Is it true gold is the best conductor of electricity of all the elements? D) Is gold the heaviest of all the metals?

Question.

How long will a typical class II (G) star (like our sun) stay on the main sequence before exhausting its fusionable fuel and imploding into a dwarf star, leaving an expanding ring of gas called a planetary nebula, or else going supernova, which will make the star shine for a few days or weeks as bright as the rest of its home galaxy combined, creating the heavier elements up to uranium in the process with which it will then seed dust clouds and pave the way for second and third generation stars, meanwhile leaving its own leftover core of matter in a very bad state, collapsing into either an 'ordinary' neutron star, denser varieties of neutron stars called pulsars or magnetars, or giving up completely and falling into a single point around which a black hole is said to have formed (defined by the Schwartzschild radius and not approachable any closer than its event horizon - which has a radius derived solely from the mass of the collapsed core)? And are there any tricks or assumptions in this question, beyond the main answer, which seem objectionable to you? Open floor, anyone.

Question.

What was Mandi Mártonffy's all-time favorite game as a kid, and still is?

Question.

The message to Leia's father's wife's son's mentor was sent by whom, in the 1977 movie Star Wars?

The always-pretentious 'wish list'

Okay, I'm no kid anymore and only a few people that read this blog are even relatives of mine. The rest of you I've likely never even met so I expect no gifts for Christmas or anything of the sort, though I do still want you as friends if that's all right with you. I'm putting this link out there for maybe 1 or 2 people, and also as a curiosity for those who love to spy on other people's wish lists. Notice I said lists as in the plural of a single list. This link should take you to the top list, something to do with Animals, and along the left you'll see going all the way down to at least 'W', lists with varied themes. I like lots of different things, you see.

The secret is, it's not really a place for me to list things I actually expect anyone to buy me. I got over that quite awhile ago anyways. It's become more or less my headquarters for keeping track of things that look cool, I would like to have, don't want to forget about, or I can just plain dream about for some of the really expensive items. So don't think I'm that pretentious. Anyways, have a look if you want to and if you don't want to, then don't. But thanks for reading this if you've gotten all the way down here. It means my self-effacing, colloquial tone has just made you read two whole paragraphs about a set of ridiculous (but well-organized, I must admit) lists that I don't even expect you to make use of! That's Real Ultimate Power.

Plus, maybe somebody will actually come through with a truckload of that stuff on Christ's and my birthday, which would totally rule.

Justin's Amazon Wishlist Portal...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/ref=sv_wl_4/103-4213158-1829442

The circularity of life.

If life seems repetitive and anticlimactic, just think of it this way: it is. I've noticed in my millennia upon this earth that nearly everything turns out to be cyclical except the bookends of birth and death, and we just don't know about those because we're inside that particular system with no outer vantage point. I can't tell you how old I feel sometimes and how old the past is, and that's just my own past, which as I've stated goes just back to the height of Rome and no further. But even if we consider, say, the last oh, 30 years of it, it still seems old enough to make dead grandparents cry in their graves. I remember thinking foggy ages ago that I'd seen it all, that the past then was practically precambrian. We repeat crushes, loves, heartbreaks, interviews, goodbye parties, seeing bands, seeing movies, seeing people cross the street. Eating. Taking your millionth shower. Driving to work on a cold morning hoping the heat begins to work soon, getting there without remembering the drive. Rinse, repeat. Repeat, recycle. Bicycles along a country lane, planes forever landing and Europeans clapping, not being able to crap, ending up drunk on someone's landing. Poems composed in confinement, comprised of refinements, disposed of by mistake. The endless process of makeovers we call upgrades to ourselves as we age. The dead, long past. It's always there and always growing. How can we move on?

Be a great poet! Or a good poet. Or a better poet than you are now.

There are volumes and volumes of information about how to learn to write poetry, from no-nonsense meter-and-verse specififics to whoa-man stuff about opening your senses and letting it flow freeform onto the page. There are even people to whom the shape of the poem itself as written conveys some meaning. Without rehashing any of this information, I want to add my two cents to the pile, but first let me warn you there are dozens of ways to write great poetry that don't all have much in common.

You could write "perfect" verse, like Roger Waters sometimes does, extremely economical with every word in its place, rhyming (often cleverly), and a crystal clear, beautiful meaning intact. This is a rare gift not everyone can achieve and I won't elaborate more on it here.

You could write "super sensory" verse like Sylvia Plath did, where "sensory" included the interpretation of her external senses and the effects they had upon her spirit. She could describe a simple scene like a bee's nest and use the most unexpected words and phrasing, yet in the end you had a very vivid, almost living sense of what she felt and experienced looking at that hive.

And so on. There are many forms of classic poetry, many which are quite beautiful and which seem simplistic but are quite challenging to adopt and say anything useful in. Some are archaic, mostly used for the telling of epic tales, and today have been mostly replaced by prose except in spots where they are meant to be archaic, like Tolkien's Elvish "lays." Mostly they're tedious though.

Anyway, my advice has nothing to do with the type of poem you want to write (perhaps it's easiest thought of in terms of free verse, but is surely not limited to it), but in the psychological way in which you set about writing the thing. Some poems are too wild, most are too tame. Of course you should avoid cliches, and read up on alliteration and all the other hallmarks of poetry, but if I could advise someone in two simple bullet point on how to write a good, original poem, given they know these basics, it would be these:

(1) Be as wild in your thinking as you can. To use a cliche, think outside the box. Use your senses in unique ways and experiment with words, word-order, jumbles of syntax, hidden meaning beneath obvious meanings, no 'meaning' at all, whatever. Just let your mind roam, and take notes. If this requires a pen and paper or a voice recorder, use those. Sitting in front of a computer isn't always an inspirational place to write. Go to the beach and take a voice recorder, and merely speak words, phrases, exclamations, questions when they occur to you. Make the process wild and the mechanism of recording it as inobtrusive as possible. Be as creative if you can.

(2) But, equally as important, you need a crap filter that is just as strong when it comes time to taking all that raw material and forging an actual poem out of it. I believe that poetry is a learned craft that very few if any come to already possessing mastery. That is why a poet must be part craftsman, and that usually involves pruning a lot and pulling weeds and killing even good ideas because you can't make them work. As much as you let your mind run wild before, now be the strictest censor when it comes to letting that stuff make it into your final poems. For every phrase of genius there may be ten that are useless. That's why it's called "raw" material. You need to refine this stuff to get maybe just a nugget or two from that vast heap. Then you can do it all over again. But the point is, just because something was written in an orgy of splendid sensory exuberance does not mean it automatically belongs in a poem, at least not a good poem.

I could go into more detail and give examples, but for now I won't. If there are people interested in watching a poem being wrought from start to finish I could probably do a blog entry on that. But the main points I wanted to make in this one is in the general: House two extreme, opposite personalities within your mind - and bring each out one after another. Go through a wild, unfettered, break-all-the-rules manic phase; then, crucially, go through a strict, tighten-it-up, toss out what is crap or even what is lovely but just doesn't work, chip and polish beautiful stone into a beautiful sculpture phase.

With just these two points in mind, I think you'll find the quality of your poetry will improve.

Goodreads or iRead?
I don't really want to maintain two different catalogs of my books (including my catalogs), so I was wondering which of you had a preference between Goodreads and iRead, or maybe something different altogether? They are both available as apps on Facebook and I have friends using both of them (not necessarily together). Goodreads also exists as an outside website for those not using Facebook; I'm not sure about iRead.

Both have huge selections of books, but Goodread's presentation might be a little cleaner (haven't used it enough to know), and they have a bookmarklet you add to your quicklink bar (if you use that; I do), for Amazon specifically, so when you are surfing Amazon, if you see a book you want to add to your Goodread "To-Read" shelf, you just click the bookmarklet and it's done. Pretty cool.

But I'd like to standardize on something. I have about 16 books on Goodreads and about 86 on iRead, but that's a trivial fraction of the books I actually own, so I don't cafe if I have to switch to one or the other. Any opinions for those even interested in this subject? It would be nice to get the booklovers among us in our own little named group on one of those sites, so we can make recommendations to one another and show each other what we've recently read and how much we enjoyed it, what we are reading now, and recommend books to others (or ask for recommendations for a certain genre, say, and have the group respond with helpful advice).

Post your opinion!

Suggestions.
Any suggestions while we're at it for the blog should go? It will remain a mix, but what types of entries do you each enjoy most? Jokes, funny pictures, polls, quizzes, opinion pieces, poems, poem explanations, photos and paintings from around the web, photos and painting of my own, favorite lyrics, movie/book/game reviews, start-a-discussion questions (to hopefully go round in the comments section for awhile and get everyone involved), nude women, interesting links summarized beforehand, explanatory pieces where I break down something about computers or science or sports or a famous person or whatever else I may know something interesting about, and teach you about it in a hopefully short-and-sweet manner, YouTubes or streaming music, random no-right-answer questions for you to ponder and answer, screens filled with the F word, eccentric pontifications á la most of what comes out of Rex's Bristolian mouth, tales of the strange and supernatural, bears, breakfast cereals, orangutans, churches, fruit bats, very small rocks? If you've got any ideas (or several) or just want to weigh in on types of entries you prefer versus the ones you don't care for, please do so! I want to involve as many people as possible in this, it's yours as much as mine.

QUIZ Results.

OK boys and girls (and Computer), we have a winnah. And that would be Disillusionist (aka Delusionist, Heath, My Brother, and any other noms de plume he may use). He won by a healthy margin over the second place contestant - the rest of you were pretty bunched up. You all did really well though except the one person who submitted all joking answers, and even he did well because he made me laugh.

I dunno how you want to handle this. I don't want to embarrass anyone (not that anyone of the rest of you did too much better or worse than any others), although I will say the girls beat the guys after Dis. Anyone want to see the complete rankings with name and scores, or just names, or just scores, or nothing more at all? It doesn't matter to me. Submit your most intimate desires (or just preference) in the comments section. And most of all,

~•~

Thank you ALL for playing!!! It felt like the old days again with even some recent irregulars coming out of the woodwork to play. Fun!

~•~

QUIZ

Here's a homemade-as-apple-pie quiz for you all. Start at the beginning, and when you get to the end, stop.

1. What has more carrying capacity, an African or a European swallow?
2. Who was the point guard and "face of the Lakers" in the 1980s?
3. Who is the protagonist of Anne of Green Gables (first and last name)?
4. What color did E.T. turn when he got sick?
5. Mozart's rival, played by F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus, was named what?
6. Who did the musical score for the movie Whale Rider?
7. How did singer/guitarist Jeff Buckley die in the 1990s?
8. What famous song of Leonard Cohen's did Jeff Buckley cover?
9. Róisín Murphy was formerly part of which British band?
10. 'Takk' means what in both Icelandic and Norwegian?

11. Who plays the protagonist in the film Emile Zola?
12. What sport may involve wrong 'uns, googlies, top-spinners, and flippers?
13. Name the four tennis Grand Slam events by location and type of playing surface.
14. What is Frodo' s relationship to Bilbo?
15. Who was the protagonist of the novel Pride and Prejudice? Full name preferred.
16. How many of the"big five" Academy Award categories did Silence of the Lambs win?
17. Wot's the sad sod called who scrubs dishes all day at a place at which he can't afford to eat?
18. What's worst - Boy Bands, Marching Bands, Mariachi Bands, or Speedmetal Bands?
19. What is the top speed recorded by radar that a baseball has ever been pitched?
20. Name as many actors who have played James Bond as you can.

21. What are the 3 top-selling albums of all-time? Bonus points for the right order.
22. What album stayed on the US Billboard 200 list a record-shattering 741 consecutive weeks?
23. Who is Norah Jones' famous father?
24. Dumbledore never married. Is he straight, bisexual, gay, or is his sexuality unknown?
25. Apple have just released a new version of their OS X operating system. What is its name?
26. Microsoft recently did the same with their Windows operating system. What is its name?
27. Most atoms are composed of three basic particles. What are they?
28. In turn, these "subatomic" particles (and others) are ALL composed of a basic building block. Which is what?
29. Many sports use the term "hat trick." What does this generally mean?
30. How many points is a basket shot from behind the half court line that goes in the bucket worth?

Send in your answers as emails to justin.sias@gmail.com (Thanks for thinking of this, Bill), your sick and your starving, your toddlers and old memories. I'll grade each question up to 5 points depending on "how correct and complete" the answer is, and some that are debatable I will award points based on the merit of the explanation for the answer. Honor system strongly enforced! Please no using the internet for answers to these questions. There are no penalties for guessing wrong; you'll probably score 0 as though you'd not answered the question at all. So it pays to guess, as long as you don't mind looking lame once in awhile.

I'll give this quiz until at least 3, and hopefully 4 or more, people answer it, then I will announce the answers, the winner (I will reveal your score to you privately if you are not the winner but wish to see how you did, so as not to embarrass anyone, unless Rex is last, in which case I'll proclaim that to everyone).

I'll also accept any suggestions for "themes" for future quizzes or ideas for new games - word games, perhaps? - that would be fun in an asynchronous blog format (what you are reading).

Game on!

What Monty Python Character are you?

Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look?

Take this quiz!

(Please click picture)

GUESS WHO'S BACK.

Surely life is richer with both ends present.
People who only want the acoustic ballad,
They get beauty poured upon them in spades.
But beauty unending soon grows expected,
Less inflected; less a foil for pain.

Surely the sweetest a rose can smell
Is after an experience with the stink of hell.
I don't understand those who just feel anger:
A constant stranger to comforts all deserve,
But nor is bliss reserved to serenity.

X

The devil child films we watched or thought
About the witching, the thrill more potent than the chill
The 13th generation since Benjamin Franklin rankling
Last onto the flag that said don't tread on me, dead feet
First ones to feel the firing of the Cold War's searing heat
The decade or so that was so special to us then
And so different from what came before or happened since
Was just another illusion. Every generation has their illusion.
Generation Y is so strange, everything is mixed together
I feel disoriented but not in any way that's clever
Maybe it's old bones shouting at the new ones with
Their breaks regrown; Maybe it is that simple, "Kiss
Me he said, then kill me," when it all felt wrong.
How can you blame him? His first romance was a song
A ballroom dance in a whirling throng, with mirrors
On the ceiling, what he was feeling then, and was it then, then?
In these days, subtleties don't belong. Get lost. You're one of
Hundreds of millions of bodies blogging, out jogging
Getting in shape for the raping and flogging of your talent
Thinking it amounts to something, counts as being strong.

1409

Who is aware of everything
That is out there
And believes their theory of the decade
Whatever decade they are in
To be true
To really be the truth?
I believe in not believing. There is no truth
That we could ever comprehend
We are not descended from angels
We are grown up from bacteria
And may be half way there
Half way still means a lot of fragile nights
Spent in motels without working lights
And bad decisions.
Love can be a great or a terrible
Decision. They all grabbed onto something
In my poem from April; three were there
All are still here, somehow
But they're like phantoms to me
I can only type and watch, but watching
Blind. I can only touch keys,
Cannot truly see them in motion
And and ocean or a great plane divides
So I think to myself, what
If I was right? In fourth grade when
I missed that bell. When I was so scared
Who in the hell can tell me where
I can find a contradiction? Will you share?
Because I'm not inclined to
Disregard experience. I'm not
In room 1408, I haven't a thing to my name
In all actually except what I am
Thinking.

Samhain

In the flood
In the mud
Children chasing soldiers
Dogs chasing children
Shells of towns
So carved out, skinny
Unempty, diseased helmets with...
What are we doing here anyway?
What were we thinking?
Tears don't make a difference in a place
That is crying all the time

For nothing did we race to the moon
Put troops on the ground too soon
Never finish the "job"
I want to wash my face and have
A cool rag now
Just thinking of the raw nerves
The broken down lives
Of hundreds of thousands
Wandering the streets
Abroad and at home
Now sincerely alone

I am sick of the luxury of peace
Upon our own soil
But I won't give it up, I know
And I cannot live at all
Unless I can do something real
About the other sad souls
That carpet the earth's most
Desolate hell holes
What were we there for anyway?
Can he tell me that?
Now the world's grown a bit colder
Unenlightened by democracy

Shoved down their throats
By an M-16
Animals on both sides
Fear leaking from pores
Of those on both sides
Who wants this?
No ones wants to be seen backing down
So I will. I back away from anger
As a solution to anything
I can't count the number of times I've cried
But tears don't mean a thing in a world
That is crying all the time.

Timeline of life on earth.

4 billion years ago. Microbial life begins near heat vents in a worldwide ocean. Not too exciting.

1 billion years ago. Multicellular life evolves and quickly diversifies and spreads into almost every environmental niche. All of it's still in the ocean though.

600 million years ago. Animals as a distinct kingdom of life evolve. Begin to colonize land in various ways.

475 million years ago. Land plants evolve, but not flowers or trees. Mostly ferns and mosses.

400 million years ago. Insects evolve and have been annoying ever since.

360 million years ago. Amphibians evolve and have been squishy and boring ever since.

300 million years ago. Reptiles evolve and get really big and take over the earth.

200 million years ago. Mammals evolve sort of unnoticed.

150 million years ago. Birds evolve. They fly around.

130 million years ago. Flowers finally evolve so dinosaur Romeos can gather them for their Juliets. Trees and fruit too but they aren't as popular with the ladies.

65 million years ago. A big extinction event kills almost all the dinosaurs and mammals shamelessly use this advantage to get big and take over the world.

2 millions years ago. Modern humans evolve in Africa and decide to take over the world. The flower trick works pretty well for them, too.

25 Dec 4. Jesus of Nazareth is born and people mistake him for God. This gets him killed.

25 Dec 1642. Isaac Newton is born and goes on to revolutionize our understanding of nature.

1776. The United States is sort-of born. This will be a good thing for quite awhile, then get bad when fast food chains and the Bible Belt are formed.

25 Dec 1972. Justin of California is born. Hilarity ensures. A few good poems are written.

2012. The Aztec Calendar predicts the end of the world. Nothing even close to that happens.

2029. A big asteroid tries to do us in but small rockets nudge it out of the way in time.

2032. World Peace is finally achieved at the nation level. Everyone seems pretty optimistic about the future of humanity.

2033. A Type II supernova occurred some time ago in our neck of the Milky Way just by pure chance, and the burst of gamma rays arrives at the same time as the pretty images on telescopes all over the earth, which is then utterly extinguished of all life in less than a day.

Nobody goes to Heaven or Hell, which turn out not to exist. No one is reincarnated as someone else, because life in the solar system is GONE. There wasn't enough time for humans to colonize anywhere but the moon and have some plans to maybe get something going on Mars soon.

The End.

This world is made by and run by extroverts. And they happily divide themselves into crowds, groups, cliques. People seem pretty sure who they are and fit into their small slice of the human pie and adopt its culture, while missing out on the rest of the ways it could feel like to live. My problem is the one of a person with too many choices who is afraid to commit to any one of them. I can see myself adopting almost any of these lifestyles, and for short periods, trying to find myself, I have. But I always backed out because I hated the exclusivity. While it does make you a part of something, and you get some truly close friends and find some comfort in having that niche role in the world that you're good at (like a character class that you level up in the more you play it), you increasingly get locked out of other lifestyles and the trails diverge. There are sure to be great, wise, loving, happy people on those trails too. But you can't play all the games or even really more than one or two, or people think you're fake or insecure. It's all so stupid. It's why I stay introverted, as a way of not dealing with the problem. Of being no part of it. But this is by far the loneliest road, the solitary one. I write my own story and no one has cleared the path for me. It's such hard work I don't even think I'm up to it anymore. I used to think I was, but I have gotten old in my head, and I can't jump when I say jump these days.

Words can't do it, only songs can. Only the emotive voice with instrumentation. Visual art can do it too, sometimes, though it's more something I "get" and then eagerly show others, but not something I've the skill yet (or maybe ever) to really express myself in as a creator. I can write though. And I could sing in a band, if only that weren't so cliche and so overwhelmingly stupid and hard to break into. I deeply despise the music *industry* but I love and am utterly enchanted with music.

Where are the people who appreciate nuances in singing voices? Who FEEL lyrics if they know the melody behind them? Where in sum are the people like me? Am I alone on this planet? Am I the only one whose heart rips from his chest when I hear a high note done just right, or the word I was just dying to hear tie off the perfect phrase in a chorus? And then go and try to use typography in some crude fashion to recreate this experience, this sound, the emotion for others, when it shall inevitably be lost on them?

I hate people so much I am surprised myself. I don't even feel like one.

The child is father to the man.

Some things just won't stay dead.