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Saturday, September 15, 2007

Why Wikis are Cool

I take a lot of walks. I live in a city. I find a lot of neat stuff as I walk (chairs, 1st edition rare books, antique typewriters--no lie). However, as cool as these are, they must have a use, otherwise I don't allow myself to take them back back to my small studio apartment. The following video is like that--like finding an beautiful Eames-esque lounge chair that I just can't take home because I don't have a use for it yet. Unlike that chair though, I can pass this wonderful thing to everybody else and can come back to it when I do need it. Common Craft, who made this video, is so cool! Now I actually want a group project just so I can create a wiki.


Friday, September 14, 2007

Back Room Live--Poetry!

Back Room Live ! Proudly Presents ! Eleanor Bayne Johnson ! Hillary
Gravendyk ! David Larsen ! Julie Choffel ! Trevor Calvert ! Saturday
Night ! September 29 ! Mc Nally's Irish Pub ! 7pm !

Like a lot of people, Julie Choffel lives in Oakland and writes poems.
Unlike a lot of people, she wishes she lived in Texas and wrote poems
on billboards. For now, she works in a shockingly pleasant office
making up tiny poems about data entry, which may combine into
something enormous and legible at 60 miles per hour.

Hillary Gravendyk lives in Oakland, where she pretends to work on her
dissertation. When she's not doing that, she pretends to write poems.
Occasionally, she actually does write poems; some of them will appear
or have appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills,
1913, The Eleventh Muse and other journals with names that include
numbers.

Originally from New York, Eleanor is now a Berkeley poet and scholar
of medieval literature at UC Berkeley. She studies Chaucerian
poetics, and practices metabolic poetry, eating the archive
morseliciously, and defending it from fetishists of period and
history.

Trevor Calvert is an aspiring librarian, sometimes book-seller, and
sporadic poet living not too far from here. His work can be found in
many places--some electronic and some text--but it's best heard in
groups. Incidentally, an image of an ominous black billy-goat,
printed by David Larsen, hangs over the entrance to his apartment.

David Larsen wrote The Thorn in Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose. Now he
lives in San Francisco, where he's still writing. He loves poetry
readings and will see you at the next one.

LIFE LONG PRESS !
OAKLAND ! SEPTEMBER ! 2007

So that's,
Saturday, September 29th at 7pm
McNally's Irish Pub
5352 College Ave
Oakland, CA 94618
(510) 654-9463
Minutes from the Rockrige BART Station
and on the 51 bus line


Next month look forward to prose writers Scott Thomas Cooney, Janett
Hardy and Ben Brashares!
Back Room Live is at Mc Nally's Irish Pub 7pm the Last Saturday of
Every Month barring major Holiday or sporting event.

Also next month Saint Mary's College Presents as a part of their
Graduate Students Reading Series; Robert Baker, Valyntina Grenier,
Victoria Hudson, Jean Pierre LaCrampe, and Julie Weinberg Wednesday,
October 10, 2007, 7:30 p.m. Soda Activity Center for more information
regarding SMC's Creative Writing Reading Series go to:

http://www.stmarys-ca.edu

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Ask Cerebra

Okay, I have always thought of myself as a comic book geek, but today, shamefully, I must admit that I realize I am only comic-book-geek-lite (not even "light," friends, but "lite"). Not only did my lack of going to my local comic book store on comic-book-day (the sacred day when our comic books hit the shelves) mean that I missed out on James Jean's latest, Process/Recess 2, but only today did I realize there is a comic-blog search engine: Ask Cerebra. My shame is only matched by the terrible happiness I have discovered in this search-engine.

Tetrapods, ecology, and Japan

Just saw this article on Tetrapods today in the JapanTimes. When I first went to a Japanese beach, I thought to myself, "what the hell are those?!" It looked like some sloppy, spoiled, and super-sized Japanese okachan had left his jacks casually littering the beach with his discarded gomi.

I could go on (and go off) about child-rearing in Japan, nature, control, and weird Japanese aesthetics for quite some time, but Alex Kerr does it so much better. I just want to quote one section from the bottom of the Japan Times article:


"Around the world, there are some spectacular examples of the damage caused by retreating shorelines. And there are equally spectacular examples of the expense to which some governments will go to hold their shorelines in place. More than 80 percent of the world's shorelines are eroding at rates varying from centimeters to meters per year," write Orrin Pilkey and Terry Hume in an article in a 2001 issue of Water & Atmosphere titled "The Shoreline Erosion Problem: Lessons from the Past."


This is wild--80%! I'll just leave it at that. Eighty percent.