The Birds in Albany Park are Sloppy, Fat & Out of Control

There I said it. Now all you bird lovers can go ahead and persecute me. I don't care. The truth is that I have been feeding these ingrates for a month and all they do is shit on my porch. They're already so fat they can barely fly and they somehow managed to get the top off the bird feeder which was empty anyway, but they couldn't figure that out because they're also stupid.

I'm sticking with the squirrels from now on.

The Dictionary According to Rumsfeld

One would think that the man who never sits would have enough to occupy his time without inventing new phrases for things that don't quite go as planned. The man who reintroduced the word "slog" into our lexicon and who popularized the technique of self interrogation, had a brainstorm this past weekend, probably after feeling the effects of a turkey-fueled, tryptopane-induced stupor (Do I need more stuffing? No. Do I want more stuffing? Yes. Am I going to have more stuffing? Absolutely.)

Not satisfied with his failed attempt to transform the War on Terror into the absurdly long, "global struggle against violent extremism" (yeah, give Bush more words to misremember), Rummy would now prefer it if we would all please call the "insurgents" in Iraq, "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government" (gotta throw 'legitimate" in there because saying it makes it so. It also makes it clunkier, and more awkward thus guaranteeing that no one will use it).

Rumsfeld argues that calling these Iraqis (formerly known as insurgents), "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government" (whew) gives them "more legitimacy than they seem to merit." I guess the logic being that calling something by a different name will eliminate the problem and thus end the insurgency just like how Fox News ended "suicide bombings" by renaming them "homicide bombings."

Of course, this turning out of phrases means that we can't call it an insurgency anymore. Is it a beef? No, that's too East Coast/West Coast gangsta'. Is it a gripe? No, still sounds too legit. Shit. Well, whatever it was called it's called something else now. It's still a long, hard slog though.

Ideas for Soft Targets album titles

Will The Real Soft Targets Please Stand Up?
Soft Targets Get Bombed
There Are But One Soft Targets
Hardly Workin'

T-Day, amen.

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
by William S. Burroughs
For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts --

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison --

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger --

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot --

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes --

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through --

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces --

thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers --

thanks for laboratory AIDS --

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs --

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business --

thanks for a nation of finks -- yes,

thanks for all the memories... all right, let's see your arms... you always were a headache and you always were a bore --

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

The President of the United States of America

Ten last names of people I went to grade school withthat would be plausible Chicago 'post-rock' band names

1. Lyter
2. Camacho
3. Carlson
4. Kanofsky
5. Gorman
6. Beers
7. Syed
8. Rock
9. Leske
10. Seidlitz

Notes on Poetic Form: The Ode (A Comedy in Three Acts (for radio broadcast))

Strophe (Greek στροφή, turn, bend, twist, see also phrase) is a term in versification which properly means a turn, as from one foot to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other.

In its precise choral significance a strophe was a definite section in the structure of an ode, when, as in Milton's famous phrase in the preface to Samson Agonistes, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanzas framed only for the music."

In a more general sense, the strophe is a pair of stanzas of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based. In modern poetry the strophe usually becomes identical with the stanza, and it is the arrangement and the recurrence of the rhymes which give it its character. But the ancients called a combination of verse-periods a system, and gave the name strophe to such a system only when it was repeated once or more in unmodified form.

Antistrophe, the portion of an ode which is sung by the chorus in its returning movement from west to east, in response the strophe, which was sung from east to west.
It is of the nature of a reply, and balances the effect of the strophe. Thus, Gray's ode called "The Progress of Poesy," the strophe, which dwelt in triumphant accents on the beauty, power and ecstasy verse, is answered by the antistrophe, in a depressed and melancholy key:
"Man's feeble race what ills await,
Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain,
Disease and Sorrow's weeping Train,
And Death, sad refuge from the storms of Fate," etc.
When the sections of the chorus have ended their responses, they unite and close in the epode, thus exemplifying the triple m in which the ancient sacred hymns of Greece were coined, from the days of Stesichorus onwards. As Milton says, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed for the music then used with the chorus that sang."

Epode, in verse, the third part in an ode, which followed the strophe and the antistrophe, and completed the movement.

At a certain moment the choirs, which had chanted to right of the altar or stage and then to left of it, combined and sang in unison, or permitted the coryphaeus to sing for them all, standing in the centre. When, with the appearance of Stesichorus and the evolution of choral lyric, a learned and artificial kind of poetry began to be cultivated in Greece, a new form, the epode-song, came into existence. It consisted of a verse of trimeter iambic, followed by a dimeter iambic, and it is reported that, although the epode was carried to its highest perfection by Stesichorus, an earlier poet, Archilochus, was really the inventor of this form.
The epode soon took a firm place in choral poetry, which it lost when that branch of literature declined. But it extended beyond the ode, and in the early dramatists we find numerous examples of monologues and dialogues framed on the epodical system. In Latin poetry the epode was cultivated, in conscious archaism, both as a part of the ode and as an independent branch of poetry. Of the former class, the epithalamia of Catullus, founded on an imitation of Pindar, present us with examples of strophe, antistrophe and epode; and it has been observed that the celebrated ode of Horace, beginning Quem virum aut heroa lyra vet acri, possesses this triple character.

Ode To A Nugget (An Ode)

A classical Greek poem modeled on the choric ode and usually having a three-part stucture consisting of a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode.

strophe

crispy and golden

antistrophe

processed chicken meat

epode

a delicious snack

Ode To A Nugget (A Haiku Poem)

crispy and golden
processed chicken meat
a delicious snack

(I'm a poet and I am aware of it)