whatever happened to cheese Buggles?

Those conical corn chip things. The cheese flavor, not Original. Those were so good. And if you were a kid (which I was), you could stick them on your fingertips and pretend they were claws. You could do that with the original flavor ones now, I suppose, but cheese flavor tasted better.

so I went looking for Brokeback Mountain fic on the Pit of Voles

And I was not disappointed! 19 stories! Read this poem and weep for humanity! Can't you just picture Ennis sitting in his truck, writing that with a stubby pencil in a little secret notebook? And then closing the notebook, kissing it and tucking it away in a secret compartment under the seat so his wife doesn't find it? And then applying a new coat of nailpolish and whipping out his copy of "Tiger Beat" because he's somehow transformed into a twelve-year-old girl?


But seriously, this is a huge pet peeve of mine: in order to qualify as poetry, a piece of writing does not necessarily rhyme but must have some kind of rhythmic structure. Even if it's free verse poetry, the author pays attention to how the words sound. If it's a bunch of rhyming lines with no attention paid to rhythm then it's not poetry! Maybe it's rhyming prose, I don't know what to call it. Wait, yes, I do: "turdpile."

I'm big on the turd metaphors lately.

Speaking of which, the other thing a piece has to have to count as poetry is figurative language. Which the above-linked piece, I admit, has.

Googling oneself and other people

I tried googling some people I knew in high school. Googling myself comes up with two mentions of my name in the author lists of academic presentations and a whole lot of Harry Potter crap. Googling one friend comes up with articles he wrote for the Harvard International Review (it's the same guy, I know he went to Harvard) and a web site about Buddhism.

That sort of makes me question what I'm doing with my life...