Tom Kim

To celebrate the waning days of summer, and the announcement that MTV has elected John Ashbery as its first poet laureate, I give you this poem:

Popular Songs
by John Ashbery

He continued to consult her for her beauty
(The host gone to a longing grave).
The story then resumed in day coaches
Both bravely eyed the finer dust on the blue. That summer
(”The worst ever”) she stayed in the car with the cur.
That was something between her legs.
Alton had been getting letters from his mother
About the payments — half the flood
Over and what about the net rest of the year?
Who cares? Anyway (you know how thirsty they were)
The extra worry began it — on the
Blue blue mountain — she never set foot
And then and there. Meanwhile the host
Mourned her quiet tenure. They all stayed chatting.
No one did much about eating.
The tears came and stopped, came and stopped, until
Becoming the guano-lightened summer night landscape,
All one glow, one mild laugh lasting ages.
Some precision, he fumed into his soup.

You laugh. There is no peace in the fountain.
The footmen smile and shift. The mountain
Rises nightly to disappointed stands
Dining in “The Gardens of the Moon.”
There is no way to prevent this
Or the expectation of disappointment.
All are aware, some carry a secret
Better, of hands emulating deeds
Of days untrustworthy. But these may decide.
The face extended its sorrowing light
Far out over them. And now silent as a group
The actors prepare their first decline.

Apparently Churchill was a staunch advocate of a prolonged nap between lunch and dinner. He even goes so far as to say that he couldn’t have gone through World War II without it.

Thank you very very much, Winston.

Another Metafilter thread collecting freely available vids, this time on classic funk — my personal favorite genre.

On the subject of punk, Metafilter has a thread collecting freely available Fugazi videos. Have not yet heard Ian Mackaye’s new band, The Evens. Anybody knows if it’s any good?

If you haven’t seen it already, check out this monologue by Craig Ferguson on his late night tv show. It’s refreshing to see someone show their honest decent humanity on screen.

More:
Official site for the Late Late Show
Craig Ferguson is also a writer, having written several screenplays and at least one novel, Between the Bridge and the River, which I saw in my school’s library.

My sister-in-law visited us last past weekend and left her Nintendo DS for me to play with. I’m hooked on Brain Age, a program that evaluates how “old” your brain is and then trains you with short puzzles and exercises to develop basic cognitive skills. It’s addictive. I was alarmed to find that I have a brain of a 50 year old, and now I feel guilty if I don’t do my “Daily Training.”

Leonard Lopate has a recent radio show that includes a segment on the deterioriation of the middle aged brain.

And here’s an interesting article on how the Nintendo DS is changing the gamer: Why Art Thou N00b?.

For those old-school hardcore gamers, you will wince as you witness the Hardest Mario Level Ever (with commentary).

My uncle Paul is obsessed with frogs. That’s because my aunt Kimmy told him a well-known Korean fable about an impish frog who always did the opposite of what his mother told him to do. At the end of the fable, the mother frog tells her son the opposite of her dying wish, know the way he is, but when she dies, he feels so guilty that he faithfully follows her instructions to the letter.

This is all by way of introduction to this intriguing article: “Why do men ignore nagging wives?” I myself have wondered just last night why I always go out of my annoy Dana, the way my dad annoyed my mom. And now my suspicions have been confirmed by science: men are, by nature, depraved and perverse.

I have a fascination with magic and illusion. No, I don’t know any tricks — I just love watching a good performance.

One of the more charming personalities on YouTube is Mad V, an amateur magician who posted up several short videos of his magic illusions which started building a cult-following. Enough of a cult-following to embolden him to retire his YouTube career and pursue a professional career in magic. Several others have tried to imitate his shtick, but none have captured the deftness of his body language and the smart pairing of music to his silent routines.

This post provides a bit more background and includes an embedded video that was Mad V’s farewell to his YouTube fans — a compilation of several tricks. You can see also see all of Mad V’s videos here.

Pop Matters has a pretty entertaining article anatomizing the “Hoots, Hollers, and Barbaric Yawps” found in pop music.

So entertaining, in fact, that Fuel for Friends has decided to post some songs featuring her favorite yelps.

A good showing at the WordPress/Blogger Meetup yesterday. It even seems Colin sent a proxy (cough cough).

Good conversation overall, but I managed to mine a few golden tips for my blog-implementation efforts at my school.

• Feedburner, by purchasing BlogBeat stats, has a blog statistics service that’s both robust and easy to use. A good choice for most over Google Analytics.
• Viddler is a new video upload and sharing site that allows bigger uploads and time frame commenting. It’s cleaner, it’s more open, and it’s gearing to be mash-able.
• Some of the most influential members of the WordPress community are starting over with a next-generation blog software project called Habari. I’m happy here with this blog at WordPress.com, but I can see how I’ll want to consider this to replace WordPress MU at my school. Can’t wait for the first formal release.