Korea's new generation of 'Web 2.0' protesters - International Herald Tribune - These people know how to protest,I think this is the way to change the world;)
cat saves railroad,what next polar bear ends global warming?
Canoe Built From Disposable Chopsticks : TreeHugger - http://www.pingmag.jp/2005/10/03/captain-rob-ice-cream-stick-ship/
Ship made from popcicle sticks - it’s raining and i am bored
Pissing on the Blarney Stone
Jan Becker
Leona sends me emails from Scotland.
Where she is the modern model of femininity
among the boys drinking whiskey in the bars.
Her emails say she is starting to embrace
the new culture
of life from a backpack
and youth hostels with dorm rooms
crowded with armpits and nose hairs,
falling asleep to a symphony of foreign snores.
She is a gypsy again
and she doesn’t mention Dave, the vegan rush fan
who is waiting just outside of Boston
growing thin in her absence.
She writes instead of the Scottish men
and Nepalese men who shower her with affection,
ask her to marry them in public Dublin
under the street lights.
Men dripping with diamond rings and promises.
Leona writes me from Limerick
that she couldn’t kiss the Blarney Stone,
because the Irish locals piss on it.
The only thing I asked her to do in Ireland was kiss that stone for me.
It is like when we went to Plymouth Rock, and the reproduction Mayflower,
And after wanting to see the rock for so long,
there it was, sitting in the Harbor painted with a red swastika.
and the tourists all took their pictures home to foreign countries
and faraway towns.
But my fingers would not press the shutter button,
and my photos were undeveloped.
I only took pictures of the Pilgrim graveyards
where the colonists buried their dead the first winter
in a place where the Indians could not count the Pilgrim dead.
Leona will come back from this trip,
having read the new theories that
Atlantis was actually Ireland that I mailed to her.
Her hips will swivel with experience
from the stares of British boys
with bad teeth
in air so thick with whiskey farts
that the oldest maid
suddenly appears to be a princess.
and the Blarney stone will shrink
from not having touched her lips
while she was alive and vibrant
and all the boys loved her.
And I know,
that if I ever make the trip to Plymouth or to Cork,
I will lick both rocks
with my tongue,
I swear,
if I ever travel to Plymouth, or to Cork,
I will soul kiss both stones,
and give them a tourist to remember.
Kimmy Is Crying
Jan Becker
I.
Kimmy is crying
Next to me in the
Passenger seat because
My eyes are tired and the
Wheels have strayed
Past the center line.
II.
I know I have opened something
Kept buried in her chest
Of treasures.
This memory, a dark violent pixie
Come to haunt us once again on the road
From a Dylan and Dead show
Where we lost one another in the crowd.
I find her bent over with a headache
By the van
III.
We give her some Goody’s Powders
And a nap under the Navajo blanket
in the backseat.
I looked so hard for you. She says.
I don’t tell her that I didn’t look for her.
Eight hours and a bottle of wine later
I’d been busy, so crowded on the hillside
Overlooking the Ferris wheel,
That I had lost my eyesight.
Eyes don’t matter when young dancing
Sweaty bodies trying to pass in the crowd
Mistake their bodies for mine.
In that case, I lose my outer eyes
And open inner ones
While the dead all around me skeleton dance
To the shining technicolor movie
In their skulls.
I had figured I would find her dancing and sweating
Passing by me in the crowd
And I would hug her
Until I could feel her pulse racing with mine.
My sister.
IV.
Instead I am now completely stone sober.
I swear it.
I could walk a straight line for a policeman.
Instead we are all sober
And she is crying because she
Thinks I am going to kill her.
V.
I’ve a feeling of the memory she has found.
We like to think we have erased them
But we wear them like new wrinkles
We are just discovering.
VI.
This one is a tumbleweed that rolls across a California
Desert highway.
I am eleven years old in
The backseat of the new silver Mazda
Danny, my brother,
Won’t stop touching me
And Kimmy is crying again
On Dad’s lap.
Mom is racing towards Iowa
Like she might reach it today
Even though we have only just left Los Angeles
And my first memory of smog.
VII.
If I could go back to the moment just after it happened
I would not remain silent again.
I would leap like a leopardess protecting her child
And gouge his eyes out with my talons.
I would kill him although he is dead now,
Because sometimes even the buried can
Never be dead enough.
VIII.
He has taken her gasping with sobs
And hung her out the window like a rag-doll
All her newborn eyes can see is heat-shimmering asphalt
Streaking beneath her at
One hundred miles per hour.
I was quiet then,
There is no sound that could contain the terror.
Of the California Desert wind
Ripping through her red hair.
IX..
It might be more than that.
At least that day he was sober.
An infrequent occurrence back then
There might be other roads she rode over
With him.
Where Jack Daniels was driving and
Dad was in the passenger seat of a car
Fueled by Tennessee Old No. 7.
Things My Mother Didn’t Tell Me
Jan Becker
Mom never really said much
about condoms.
She just handed me a case when I was about
sixteen and said,
“Here, make sure that you use them.”
They were ribbed and
lubricated. Danny,
my brother,
and I made giant water balloons
that we
dropped
like hand grenades
on our little sister’s friends.
We found that we could stretch the condoms as wide as our heads
and wore them as hats.
We thought we were
making a fashion statement
until we discovered,
that it was next to impossible
to get the lubricant
out of
our hair.