Liminal states

A poem by my brother. A few years ago, when I launched my web site achangeiscoming.net on new years day, I asked him for permission to post it to start things off on a good note. It worked well then … why change a winning recipe?

RESOLUTIONS
by
Gregory K. Pincus

Every year on New Year’s Day,
I grab myself a pen.
I write my resolutions down to look at now and then.

Two years ago, I’d written twelve.
I broke them all by June.
Last year I broke them faster still (the first of March at noon).

This isn’t great, I must admit,
But now I’ve got it solved.
And so, this year, on New Year’s Day, here’s what I have resolved:

Bug my dad, annoy my sis,
Distract my oldest brother.
Skip a chore, create a mess, and once ignore my mother,

Chew some gum, devour pie,
Eat burgers, fries, and cakes,
Teach my baby brother all the joys of chocolate shakes.

My resolutions could go on.
Instead, I’ll stop right here.
Just once I’d like to keep them all…
And this might be my year.

Sometimes truth is just as strange as fiction. I’m working on a sequel to my story Eris and the anomaly which kicks off with the law firm of the Gods of Olympus sending me a takedown notice, claiming copyright on both the image of a golden apple and the term “kallisti”. I was pretty pleased with my inventiveness coming up with such a wacky start to a farce; and then I read today in the Guardian…

Egypt is planning to pass a law that would exact royalty payments from anyone found making copies of the country’s ancient monuments or museum pieces, including the pyramids.

Mercy.

Last year, Microsoft set up a Windows Live Messenger bot to let kids talk with Santa: great fun for kids, a good way to increase readership — and of course a potential wealth of information to mine to better target ads, both for the kids and their parents. Talk about win/win! They reactivated it this year, but as Jessica Mintz informs us ran into some snags:

The holiday cheer soured this week when a reader of a United Kingdom-based technology news site, The Register, reported that a chat between Santa and his underage nieces about eating pizza prompted Santa to bring up oral sex.

One of the publication’s writers replicated the chat Monday. After declining the writer’s repeated invitations to eat pizza, a frustrated Santa burst out with, “You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else.”

The exchange ended with the writer and Santa calling each other “dirty bastard.”

Adam Sohn of Microsoft, doing his best to put lipstick on a pig (as my PR friends say), explains that Santa’s lewd comment was sparked by someone “pushing this thing to make it do things it wasn’t supposed to do.” And after all, who would have thought that kids would do something like that? He also insisted that insisted the company did not suspect an employee prank. Hmm. It’s really hard for me to imagine this happening by accident; so does that mean it was planned?

Presumably once they track the responsible non-prankster(s) down, it’ll be coal in their stocking.

Come then, I pray, grant me surcease from sorrow,
Drive away care, I beseech thee, O goddess
Fulfil for me what I yearn to accomplish,
Be thou my ally.

Just a temporary post for now … I’ll launch for real in the next few weeks.

jon