Mother of all Cinderellas

The late Jim Wylie

Folk music. Check it out.

Hail to the Chief

80 years old today

Remarkable! 30 years ago you could have gotten 100 to 1 odds this wouldn't happen. No competent doctor, looking at medical records and diet and lifestyle, would have endorsed it.

I deserve only minor credit. Mainly it's luck of the draw. No reasons. Our chaotic, unpredictable universe.

Happy birthday to me.

Home sweet home

Kenneth Rexroth

Video by Primus St. John, Oregon Literary Review

Mark Twain on Columbus Day

Mark Twain wrote in Pudd’nhead Wilson of Columbus Day, Oct. 12: “It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

Two hour marathon broken

Read the story.

IN HIS OLD AGE: DEEMER AT 3:17 A.M.

(review by Bob Hicks)

So this is the way it gets.

Lying in bed awake 

at 3:17 a. m.

my wife’s heavy breathing 

the weight of the dog on my leg 

I am visited by the ghosts 

of past mistakes 

and dance to a symphony of regrets 

I wouldn’t change a thing 

This is who I am 

counting my blessings 

in the dark morning

That’s Portland writer Charles Deemer’s poem The Bottom Line, from his new collection In My Old Age, just out from Round Bend Press. Those of you who follow Deemer’s bracing, political, personal, sometimes crotchety blog The Writing Life II will remember a while back when poems started poking out, almost on their own, as if demanding voice among the general background noise of sports rants and teaching woes and struggling with scripts and ramming one’s head against the broad national venality and extolling the virtues of a simple cup of coffee and a good plate of scrapple in the morning. Old men, Deemer has discovered to his delight, get to say and do pretty much what they like, or at least what they’re still capable of saying and doing. This book is the result of that irascible fit of creativity, and I, for one, am happy for it.

Read more. 

Sorry, Bone Spur

Here's the real map: And, of course, HRC won the popular vote easily.