Sherry Chandler

Shamash Says Steel and Air and a Mottled Presence on a footbridge in Minneapolis (with photos):

The Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis crosses sixteen noisy lanes of traffic. A walking bridge, it serves as the platform for a John Ashbery poem that stretches across its entire length in 4-inch letters on high, steel beams.

The experience of reading the poem while walking across a 16-lane expressway of speeding traffic is a total mind/body/spirit experience

Pocahontas County Fare shows us native bees working the field thistles in West Virginia:

The field thistles see plenty of traffic these days. Although honeybee visitors are scarce, there are plenty of native bees gathering pollen.

Emily Lloyd, of Poesy Galore, has been chosen for The Loft Mentoring Series:

Every year, the Loft Literary Center invites poets, fiction and creative nonfiction writers to apply to the Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose. This program offers advanced criticism and professional development opportunities to twelve writers: four each in the genres of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction.

At Poets for Peace, the Poetryman asks:

Before valor fades or a soldier’s honorably lain;
Before shrapnel and horrors stand forward;
Before the screech of missiles, snap of breath;
Before the water chokes, the marine howls;
Before the steady drum and bugle sound;
Before the sidewalks are washed of the event;
Before shivering flesh and darkness ignite;
Before food, clothing and shelter;
Before the whispered birth of wayward night;
Before all else; were we alive?

Helen, at Windows Toward the World, continues her work against the death penalty, especially as practiced by Alabama:

In Alabama, we execute:

“In 2005, Alabama sentenced more people to death than Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee, combined,” according to John Carroll, dean of the Cumberland School of Law.

Jim Tomlinson sends this:

Back in late March, I was featured author at Montgomery (MD) College’s Books & Ideas Series. I did an eight minute TV interview while there, and the college has just posted it on their website.

Jeff Hess posts a link to Stateris:

Statetris is an interesting game mixing aspects of the popular game ‘Tetris’ and geography. Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.

And by the way, the animated jigsaw puzzle that I posted about in 2005 is still there.

This fellow is a spider and what you see him on is the edge of a piece of paper tucked into the bookshelf beside my computer here. What I want to know is what is he?

The topknot pointing off to the left seems to be at the head end. You can see one of the legs stretched toward the top of the photo.

I first noticed a spider like this earlier this summer when my son and I were out walking on the farm and nearly walked through his single strand of web strung across the farm gate. He looked like a little dried-up fragment of leaf caught in the web and then, when our presence caused him to move along his high wire toward shelter, we thought he was a spider carrying prey.

On our second trip we realized that it the strange configuration was all spider.

I wanted to get a photo for the blog but by our next trip, the spider was gone.

Imagine my surprise when, yesterday morning, I glanced to my right to discover that exactly the same sort of spider had strung his line between my desk and my bookshelf. There he hung like a circus performer with my wastebasket acting as his net.

He didn’t much like all the activity, so he headed for the camouflaging trees, which in this case were the wonderfully contrasting papers you see here.

I don’t remember ever seeing such a spider before, though he’d be easy enough to miss. I can actually see him much better in these close-up photos than I can in the “flesh.” He is about a quarter of an inch long, and when hanging from his strand of web, seems to have practically no width. In the photos, he’s really quite striking.

I’d be grateful if the naturalists among you could give him a name.