Again

A static-sensitive chip has slipped
from a conductive plastic bag.
   On an arid autumn day like today
   it may be zapped by a static spark --
   in an instant just a high-tech tie tack.

From a high window I watch a satin flag,
the Stars and Stripes,
sagging in a listless wind.
   The white stripes are bright
   under the Indian-Summer sun,
   but the red bands remind me of Maryland sandstone.
This proud banner is ponderous,
a heavy fabric trimmed in golden fringe
like silver-gilt lamé.


Hang your head for shame,
for the red badge ignobly appropriated,
for the palm cursed with 13 pieces of silver.

Now stoop your shoulder to the yoke,
   and bend your back to the lash.
Know again the bitter taste of sweat and blood;

let your children know the sweetness of freedom,
   the fatness of pride;
let them learn in their turn
   not to take your toil in vain.

On your neck hangs the millstone of guilt:

for the lame dog you whipped
   as he limped back from war;
for the hand you withheld from the heroes
   huddled in a January rain.


Fifty white men gathered in an indigo field,
Witnesses to a solemn sentence.
   A white man stood stripped to the waist,
   Bound with shackles ankle and wrist.
The whispering wind bore testimony
With fifty men standing in silence:
   Seven strokes with the leather lash
   Leave seven stripes on the white man's back.

(1992)

After the Catastrophe

fingers are slipping
gripping
the spongy blackened wet-rot logs,
and deadwood shed from sad and naked trees

And sun sets

And head turns

As dark fibrous slime finds its way into my skin
where rarified tears despoil the fine nacreous filigrees
which evening had accreted there

Now moon and stars have come and gone
And new ones move to shape the next strange state
Tracing the loops of a lemniscate

(1985; incomplete)

January Rain

But fetid liquor                   A fetal spirit
    I rain on the earth,               I lie coiled in the ground
        dissipate                          expectant
    in the besotted earth.             in the wounded ground.
Woven tendrils,                    A spindled soul
    tangled tentacles                  mucilaginous;
        suck at my substance,              rewound on its spool,
    my cohesion a vain defense         a vine twice-spliced
Foiled by gravity.                 Entwines my entrail.
    clotted in the earth,              I recoil at the sound,
        desperate                          extracted
    in the veins of the earth:         and spilled in the soil
A fibrous liquid.                  insipid flux.

(1992)

Islets in the Stream

Two fragments of a thing I wrote in 1992 called "Islets in the Stream". I guess these would be two islets, then. Stream of consciousness, don't ya know...

A kiosk stands unattended; the public has passed it by.
Notices posted in the past now flutter vainly,
as if straining to escape the push-pin prison.
They've faded in the sun, are streaked and stained by rain.
Those which once were yellow now are white; what were white are yellow.
The smooth are now seer-suckered; the origami has gone lame.
No one notices the no-longer-news; no new leaves are left on the heap.
What is readable is not read; the fingers that once lifted layers
now leave the wrinkled shingles alone.

. . . .

The windows are not covered by the diaphanous veil;
the voyeur can discern within the phantom forms cavorting.
Nearby, the brandy decanter stands unstoppered,
but the glasses have crashed at the back of the hearth,
sending showers of shards that glitter like fleeting sleet,
while the spirits that spatter on the smouldering coals
spray sparks in a twinkling arc.

JDP's "Virginia Octoberfest Sausage"

I whipped this up last weekend for a picnic.  I wasn't expecting it to be awesome, but it was. :-)

Don't be fooled by the simplicity of the ingredients list. This is really about a magical transformation into a gustatory delight.

The essence of it is to broil some firm link sausage and then braise it further in sauerkraut with malty beer.  Here's how I do it:

• 24 oz. Kielbasa  (or other sausage of similar characteristics)
• 32 oz. Sauerkraut
• ½ cup Malty, not hoppy, beer, such as Porter
• 1 Tbsp Caraway Seeds  (may omit if you really loathe them)

The quantities are approximate.  Those listed above are as typically packaged.

You'll need a heavy baking dish, appropriate to the combined quantities above. I used a 9x13" baking dish, deeper than a cake pan.

Step 1: Heat the sauerkraut, with the caraway seeds added. I did this in a slow cooker, but the stovetop or microwave work as well. If you're using a quick method, i.e. microwave, you can put off this step until later when you need the hot sauerkraut.

Step 2: Cut the sausages into 1" chunks, and put them into the heavy baking dish.  Using your oven's "low" broiler setting, broil the sausages until good and brown, tossing and turning them from time to time, about 30-45 minutes.

Step 3: Transfer the hot sauerkraut into the baking dish, carefully.  Add the beer; and mix all thoroughly.  Set the oven to bake -- 375°F, and bake for about one hour, tossing and turning from time to time.  Let the sauerkraut get toasty on top, but not burned.

Serve at the table directly from the baking dish, using a large wooden spoon. :-)  This goes well with a crusty baguette and spicy German mustard.

How Yelp Does Friends

My good bud Tony asked how "friends" are done on Yelp. Here's my take on it.

First, it's important to remember that Yelp's raison d'etre is reviews. All else is secondary.

Yelp's friend-like features, of which there are two, are both oriented toward the discovery of new reviews. In some sense, posting a review on Yelp is analogous to posting a status update on other services.
You have a "stream" or "feed" of reviews recently posted by persons you follow. This is a good way of winnowing down the main feed of all reviews.

There are two ways to get someone's reviews in your feed: you can follow them, or you can be their friend. I'll explain the differences.

When you follow someone's reviews (the Yelp term for "follower" is "fan"), the relationship is private, known only to you. No one, including that other person, knows that you are following him/her. This is an asymmetric, Twitter-like relationship, except it's anonymous as well. Each Yelper knows the total number of his/her fans, but cannot know who those people are. Consequently, no approval is required to follow someone. Just go to their profile and click the "follow" button. He/she will get a notification that they got one new follower, but that's it.

Yelp's "friends" are, as with other services, mutual, symmetric, and public. You request to be friends with the other person and he/she has to accept (or decline). Your profile lists links to your friends; these connections are public.
But being friends with someone has no effect, other than to add that person's reviews to your feed. It does not confer any additional visibility into their profile, or anything like that; and you can't restrict the visibility of parts of your profile to just your friends. It does not enable any more intimate connection, such as private messaging, over and above what you already have.


On G+ I had said:

In my own view, I've come to disregard the number of friends someone has on Facebook, but I'm still quite aware of the friends number on Yelp. It's almost a class thing. Someone with 500 "friends" on Yelp is qualitatively different from someone with 5.

And Tony asked, "Why? What is it about Yelp friends that means you are more impressed by a large number of them?"

One point I want to make up front is that anything I'm about to say is a generalization and that there are certainly plenty of exceptions. But the overall patterns are more or less true.

First, Yelp is primarily a local phenomenon, whereas Facebook has no locality biases built in. Sure, most people's circle of real-life friends tend to be rather local, but that's a sociological phenomenon, toward which Facebook is agnostic. Yelp, on the other hand, is specifically local to the cities where it operates. Of course, people do travel or move to other cities, accumulating connections in each; but by and large, people select their friends -- which, remember, are only interesting for their reviews -- based on their reviews of local businesses. The locality factor is important because it necessarily constrains the number of people available to be your "friends". (And we must also not forget that Facebook has orders of magnitude more users than Yelp does.)

Secondly: On Yelp, you don't have a "wall". The only thing you can do is write reviews and talk in the public forum (Talk threads). Whenever you post in either place, your post is "signed" with your "avatar" (an iconified version of your current profile pic) and your friends and reviews numbers. Every time you see someone's face, you also see their friends and reviews numbers! In the Talk threads in particular, this is interesting because the threads are completely public; any yelper from any city can (potentially) post in any thread. So you tend to see a pretty wide range of people. Contrast that with Facebook, where (a) wall threads are limited to circles (to use G+ term) defined by the owner of the wall, and (b) each post is "signed" with the author's name and face, but not their friends count.

So, ultimately, I think it's just about becoming sensitized to the oft-repeated stimulus.

Hocus Pocus, Abra Cadabra

By now it's generally accepted that the magical phrase "Hocus pocus" is a corruption of the Latin liturgical phrase "Hoc est corpus meum" ("This is my body...") spoken by Catholic priests at the critical moment in the Mass.

Unfortunately, the magical phrase "Abracadabra" does not have a similarly well-established origin. Here is my hypothesis.

Through a mechanism of corruption like that which produced "Hocus pocus", "Abracadabra" has its origin in the Latin liturgical phrase "Ave verum cadaver" -- "Hail, the true cadaver", i.e. of the slain Christ.
(However, it is interesting to note that "Abracadabra" sounds more similar to the plural form, "Ave vera cadavera". What bodies this could have been referring to, I don't know...)