Touring the blog roll

Windows toward the World announces the Special Fall Poetry Issue of the Dead Mule:

featuring poetry by Dale Wisely, Carter Monroe, Jilly Dybka, Ross White, Leslie Joseph, Evie Shockley, and Tim Peeler and an interview (listed under �Essays�) with Evie Shockley

The cover photo, by Bill Losse, will bring a much-needed smile.

My family contains its fair share of linemen for the utilities companies, but none who climb poles the way Shamash’s “friendly telephone man” does:

The friendly telephone man (who I offer a monthly contribution of �tea money� for keeping my phone lines in order), climbed up, barefoot and without a single safety strap, to fix the phone line right outside my front gate. Not long before I snapped this photo, he was sitting on top of the pole. It�s amazing to watch these climbers navigate the high places.

Every once in a while I hire a climber to harvest the coconuts on my three trees in the garden so that they don’t fall on human heads,

Click through to see the photo. Also a nice one of her oh-so-elegant cat.

On the subject of neat photos, Heraclitean Fire offers a slide show of the ancient sweet chestnuts of Greenwich Park. Treebeards grandfathers, no doubt. They date from about the 18th century.

Alan MacKellar has added some new slide shows. The one of “alternative processes” includes this image of James Baker Hall.

Added: On the subject of remarkable photographs, I don’t know how I failed to draw your attention to this white-breasted nuthatch in mid-flight at Pocahontas County Fare. Rebecca’s fast lens caught the bird between “flaps” of his wings, so he looks perched in mid-air.

Lance Mannion offers an argument why Rudi Giuiliani is The Nastiest Candidate:

Rudy Giuliani does not play well on television.

He may look fine to Republican audiences watching their guys debate, but love is blind. Maybe Dennis Kucinich looks like Cary Grant to his supporters.

Come the general election though, when Rudy starts appearing on TV screens all across America, when he stands on the stage at the debates next to Hillary Clinton—note to Progressives. It’s going to be Hillary, folks. I’m sorry. That’s the way it’s going. Start getting your heads around it.—people are going to look at his long, narrow head, that high bony bald dome, the sunken eyes, the livid skin, and that toothy rictus of a grin and they’re going to say, “Whoa! Who let Death in the room?”

He will frighten children.

And that’s just the beginning!

Added: Building on Lance’s post, P3 riffs on rictus. He has illustrations, since photographs seem to be my theme here, of famous rictuses you will no doubt recognize, so be sure to click through for the whole post:

while I like the directness of rictus, I can’t deny that there’s always been something about the word that just plain creeps me out. Even Merriam-Webster can’t define it without using unpleasant g-words like “a gaping grin or grimace.”

Gag me. No one would ever use the word rictus to describe, say, Molly Ringwald’s adorable pout in “Sixteen Candles.”

We reserve the word for mouths like an unbleeding wound: lipless, ghastly, twisted–and barely concealing teeth like broken glass. Or a decrepit picket fence. Or tombstones.

The point is, when something gets called a rictus, it means we’ve already decided it’s not something we want to let the baby’s fingers anywhere near.

Have Coffee Will Write offers a powerful argument on why Torture and Terrorism Are Not Equivalents:

If only violence on the national scale could be settled using some form of the Marquess of Queensberry rules. If only armies could engage each other on sterile battlefields, far from productive farmland and civilian populations. If only the people who died in wars were adults who chose to take up arms and agreed that their life was more than an acceptable exchange for the liberty and freedom of those they fought to protect.

But that�s not the way we fight wars.

…

In war, the slaughter of children, women and other non-combatants at any time is morally wrong at every level I can conceive of.

But until we are prepared to recognize that a mother cradling her dead child does not care if the child died from a 500-pound bomb dropped by a B-52 or the detonation of 500 lbs of explosive in the trunk and back seat of a Mercedes, and universally condemn both acts as immoral, we will have no standing in the argument.

A must-read.

And to raise our spirits after these arguments about politics and war, Raven’s Shadow offers a poem, Adoni, that begins like this:

I searched for you when I was young
among yellow weeds and oil wells
beyond cliff edges and found you
buried beneath brown leaves
with mushrooms and black earth

Read the rest of this lovely offering.

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