| Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins - R. S. Gwynn |
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| 04:13pm 07/01/2010 |
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Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins
Good Catholic girl, she didn't mind the cleaning.
All of her household chores, at first, were small
And hardly labors one could find demeaning.
One's duty was one's refuge, after all.
And if she had her doubts at certain moments
And once confessed the to the Father, she
Was instantly referred to texts in Romans
And Peter's First Epistle, chapter III.
Years passed. More sinful every day, the Seven
Breakfasted, grabbed their pitchforks, donned their horns,
And sped to contravene the hopes of heaven,
Sowing the neighbors' lawns with tares and thorns.
She set to work. Pride's wall of looking glasses
Ogled her dimly, smeared with prints of lips;
Lust's magazines lay strewn, bare tits and asses
Weighted by his "devices" - chains, cuffs, whips.
Gluttony's empties covered half the table,
Mingling with Avarice's cards and chips,
And she'd been told to sew a Bill Blass label
Inside the blazer Envy'd bought at Gyps.
She knelt to the cold master bathroom floor as
If a petitioner before the Pope,
Retrieving several pairs of Sloths's soiled drawers,
A sweat-sock and a cake of hairy soap.
Then, as she wiped the Windex from the mirror
She noticed, and the vision made her cry,
How much she'd grayed and paled, and how much clearer
Festered the bruise of Wrath beneath her eye.
"No poisoned apple needed for this Princess,"
She murmured making X's with her thumb.
A car door slammed, bringing her to her senses:
Ho-hum. Ho-hum. It's home from work we come.
And she was out the window in a second,
In time to see a Handsome Prince, of course,
Who, in spying her distressed condition, beckoned
For her to mount (What else?) his snow-white horse.
Impeccably he spoke. His smile was glowing.
So debonair! So charming! And so Male.
She took a step, reversed and without slowing
Beat it to St. Anne's where she took the veil.
R. S. Gwynn |
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| 'Two Caravans' by Marina Lewycka |
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| 11:58pm 07/01/2010 |
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Yola was in a foul mood. She had discovered that morning, don't ask how, that the Slovak women who shared their hotel room had no pubic hair. How could this be permitted? Presumably they were not born this way -- well, presumably they were, but acquired it in the natural course of things, and had taken unnatural steps to remove it. There are many bad things that can be said about communism, but one thing is certain, in communist times women did not abuse their pubic hair in this way -- a practice which is unnatural, unsightly, undignified and, without being too specific, potentially dangerous. |
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| In the Vicinity of Orion's Arm | Linda Nemec Foster |
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| 06:25pm 07/01/2010 |
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"like the star beaming outward past its death"
-Robert Wrigley
Every day we die
a little more.
My young son
doesn't believe me;
with the telescope
he got for Christmas
he points to the stars,
unfailing lights of the past,
as examples of how difficult
it is to kill anything.
Infinity has not yet
begun to trouble him.
As if Pascal's true
fear of the eternal
silence of the heavens
was all a hoax.
How can I tell him
he's wrong. That death
is one theory of celestial
movement. And there
is no other. That what
we see in the sky
are ghost images:
the moon a blank
mirror, the galaxy
an open wound,
the universe a thin
veil of dust hiding
the empty mind of God.
I only know what
I know. How the universe
looks the same in every
direction. Layered petals
of rose or bleeding
womb. I only know
this night in late
January, sub-zero
temperatures, his
father positioning
a telescope in the frozen
snow of the backyard.
As if he could count
the endless blur of stars.
Imagining the faces
of everyone he's ever
loved who has died.
--
I also have a question:
I've had the vague idea of a poem stuck in my head and I swear it's one I've read, not one I want to make up. It's about a man whose wife left him/died and it chronicles how he begins to be able to live without her. He always finds black hairs around his house but he knows they aren't his wife's, but rather his maids as it's been years, etc. but one day he is repotting an avocado plant and finds one long strand of hair tangled in the soil.
Anyone have an idea? |
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| Man dancing with a paper cup - Nick Flynn |
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| 03:17pm 07/01/2010 |
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You still send letters but I know
you are dead, I see you
wandering the streets when I go back home,
& I swear I am never going back. A glance
in the trash, a barrel on fire, my hands
pass right through you. You wrote
from prison but I couldn't remember
how you looked.
so the bars became cheekbone, shadow,
lash, pressed
tightly to your face. Maybe
the silence you move through
shaped me, the way
a church bell ringing resonates
long after the ear ceases to perceive it,
the way waves space themselves
until they stop. |
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| State of the Goat 2009 |
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| 01:10pm 07/01/2010 |
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It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.
Stuff you liked
- Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
- We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
- Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
- Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
- After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
- Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.
You got your fix
- We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
- In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
- At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.
Paid features you enjoyed
- In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
- This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
- When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
- How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted.
We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.
Mixed reviews
- The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
- This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
- We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
- We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.
Missing Inaction
- We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.
Stumbling points
- Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
- A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
- That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.
Full steam ahead!
As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history! |
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| the windhover; gerard manley hopkins |
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| 01:44pm 07/01/2010 |
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I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! |
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| A Kind of Loss by Ingeborg Bachmann |
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| 01:49pm 07/01/2010 |
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Shared: seasons, books, and music.
Keys, teacups, the breadbasket, linens and a bed.
A dowry of words, of gestures, carried along,
used up, spent.
House rules followed. Said. Done. And always
the extended hand.
In winter, in a Viennese septet, and in summer
I have been in love.
With maps, in a mountain hut, on a beach
and in a bed.
A cult made up of dates and irrevocable promises,
enraptured before something, reverent over nothing.
( -- to the folded newspaper, the cold ashes, the note
on a piece of paper)
fearless in religion, for the church was this bed.
From the sea view came my unstoppable painting.
From my balcony I greeted the people, my neighbors, below.
By the open fire, in safety, my hair took on its deepest color.
The doorbell’s ring was the alarm for my joy.
It is not you I have lost,
but the world. |
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| The Dark Chamber | Louis Untermeyer |
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| 01:02pm 07/01/2010 |
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The brain forgets, but the blood will remember.
There, when the play of sense is over,
The last, low spark in the darkest chamber
Will hold all there is of love and lover.
The war of words, the life-long quarrel
Of self against self will dissolve into nothing;
Less than the chain of berry-red coral
Crying against the dead black of her clothing.
What has the brain that it hopes to last longer?
The blood will take from forgotten violence,
The groping, the break of her voice in anger,
There will be left only color and silence.
These will remain, these will go searching
Your veins for life when the flame of life smolders:
The night that you two saw the mountains marching
Up against dawn with the stars on their shoulders--
The jetting poplars' arrested fountains
As you drew her under them, easing her pain--
The notes, not the words, of a half-finished sentence--
The music, the silence... These will remain. |
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| Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler |
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| 12:01pm 07/01/2010 |
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...The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution. |
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| happy post naman |
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| 08:55pm 07/01/2010 |
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mood:  cheerful music: Neon by John Mayer
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1. Yesterday (and today), I totally felt the love. So soundtrack for the moment: Feel The Love by Cut Copy (although the lyrics are not applicable)
2. This morning, my Kuya taught me how to change the fluids in the car engine. It was a brotherly bonding moment.
3. After class, I did errands with my Kuya. Many good things to report:
a. lunch at Sbarro
b. finally got my eyes checked at Asian Eye Institute where all the doctors are all Harvard graduates (AWESOME) and the tests are freakishly high tech (AWESOME TOO). Plus, Robin Padilla was there too. He's buff and tall and good looking pala. haha ;p I DON'T NEED GLASSES! Yay me!
c. finally got my eyebrows fixed.
d. Hearing John Mayer and Binocular at the appliance store while window shopping for TVs and refrigerators. Haha. Whoever picked the playlist is lovely.
d. Red Mango froyo. the best
4. Afternoon delights with Nikki at Red Kimono. Lots of catching up then we went back to the boarding house. She let me copy Community which she got from Antonette. Hi Nikki and Antonette. I love you!
5. PARACETAMOL.
6. Talking with my mom on the phone.
7. Having sarsyadong itlog with Kuya and Manong.
8. TOMORROW IS FRIDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
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| technology sucks |
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| 08:30pm 07/01/2010 |
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mood:  relieved music: Everything You Want by Vertical Horizon
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Waah! Temporary panic! Damn facebook.
Thank God for Antonette for relieving my panic. Hindi pala totoo. Imma stop cyberstalking people now.
On a completely unrelated note: Kung sino man ang nag-imbento ng genius playlists sa iTunes, mahal kita. Haha ;p |
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| Philip Lopate: We who are your closest friends |
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| 04:00am 07/01/2010 |
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We who are your closest friends
Philip Lopate
We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective. |
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| Natural selection in practice is always amusing to observe. |
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| 02:58am 07/01/2010 |
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♥ The Darwin Awards, named in honor of Charles Darwin, salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it - thereby ensuring that the next generation is descended from one less idiot. We applaud the heroic self-sacrifice of these noble men and women, who gave their all to improve the human race.
Of necessity, this Award is usually bestowed posthumously.
♥ In order to qualify for a Darwin Award a person must remove himself from the gene pool via an "astounding misapplication of judgement." Three liters of sherry up the butt can only be described as astounding.
♥ This is a true Darwin Award trifecta: two people die, while in the act of procreation, due to an astonishingly poor decision. Bottom line: If you put yourself in a precarious "position" at the edge of a pointy roof, you may well find yourself coming and going at the same time.
♥ The Darwin Awards provide ample evidence that huimans have no problem shuffling off this mortal coil as a result of plain old bad decisions. But adding mind-addling drugs to the decision-making process further impairs judgment and increases risk-taking behavior, setting the stage for some amusingly lethal acts of stupidity. From jumping into a bear cage while drunk (page 223) to partaking in alcohol enemas (page 4) acute inebriation has been the impetus behind many Darwin Awards.
♥ In a world full of wonders man invented boredom. So work time becomes playtime. If you work in an office, you reproduce your naughty bits on the copy machine. If you work for an arc welding company? A plastic bucket, welding materials, and a single spark can combine for a playdate with a bang.
♥ Any story that begins, "Well I was building a pipe bomb," can never end well.
♥ FAQ: How can I avoid a Darwin Award?
Take a few personal pledges:
"I will keep pointy metal objects away from electrical wires."
"I will not suck bees into a vacuum cleaner."
"I will not disable the safety."
"No rooftop romantic interludes for me!"
Beware of the following ideas:
"Instead of following standard procedure..."
"Attempting to impress the lady..."
"So he could save himself time..."
"They tested the ice by jumping up and down."
"A case of beer went into the planning."
"He is still convinced that the toadstool is harmless."
"He refused to let anyone call an ambulance."
"He thought he could outsmart the police."
"The diver had kissed hundreds of sharks."
"He deceived the radiation control supervisor."
"It's a nice snake. Nothing can happen."
Heed good advice:
"Never surf on a flooded street."
"We urge people not to drive with a burning grill in the vehicle."
"The stupidity of cutting through power cables should be obvious."
"Tossing random chemicals down the drain is not wise."
"Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage."
~~The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution, Chlorinating the Gene Pool by Wendy Northcutt. |
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| dream dust /langston hughes |
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| 02:38pm 07/01/2010 |
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Dream Dust
Gather out of star-dust,
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust,
Not for sale. - By Langston Hughes |
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| Knowing versus caring |
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| 09:29pm 06/01/2010 |
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In reference to a conversation I was just having:
"No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I've not read more than a half dozen. And in any case, it is not the reading that matters, but the rereading. Printing, which is now forbidden, was one of the worst evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying degree."
And in reference to pretty much my view of power:
"Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship--but no one on the planet paid any attention."
--Jorge Luis Borges, "A Weary Man's Utopia" |
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| 11:55am 07/01/2010 |
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“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”
“I hate them for it,” cried Hallward. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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| Good to know my enjoyment of Kurosawa's samurai flicks isn't just superficial |
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| 07:42pm 06/01/2010 |
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"A stranger enters a god-forsaken town locked in conflict between two factions, where both sides are equally bad and repugnant, and the audience welcomes the swathe of destruction that the hero creates as he exacts justice. There is something inherently appealing about this scenario. It speaks to a desire latent within all of us: that some agency will come and clean up the mess we have made of our society."
--Justin Howe, "Yojimbo", Directory of World Cinema: Japan
Free digital copy of this book available at http://worldcinemadirectory.org/ . It's decent, I'm disappointed to already know quite a bit about these movies from my own viewing of them and reading into Donald Richie and Tom Mes, but for anyone interested in Japanese cinema in general and not already familiar with it, it's a good place to start. |
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| A Model for the Priesthood | Tomás Q. Morín |
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| 06:31pm 06/01/2010 |
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In thigh-deep water we lashed the air with our rods
and re-examined the eternal questions: tongue, eye, nose—
which one has the shortest route to the brain, the heart:
which nails would you release first if it were given to you,
the feet or the hands: if Chickamauga meant river of the dead
then what were the implications for all bodies of water?
He filled the sink with the trout who hit our lines,
crossed himself once, twice, then renamed and cut each one
—their vague eyes rolling—while I made ready to gently knuckle
each flayed beloved with garlic and thyme, an American John
to his American Jesus, humming my crazy songs
over the black faces of the pans I baptized in butter.
“The dead will only suffer butter,” he liked to say,
as I dropped a shoulder and tumbled each head into a basket
for the tabby in the woods who never failed to pick up
the scent of resurrection in our mouths, who would chirp
and follow us even unto the shaky outhouses where we rocked
and returned the dead to the earth from where they came. |
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| no subject |
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| 06:31pm 06/01/2010 |
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My heart is weak and unreliable. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut, for example, or my lungs. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, “Who smells shit?”—small daily humiliations that are par for the course—these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take. When I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. All the times I have suddenly remembered that my parents are dead (even now it still surprises me to exist in the world while those who made me have ceased to exist): my knees. To everything a season; to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone is sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.
- The Last Words on Earth, Nicole Krauss
(ie the short story upon which The History of Love is based) |
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