The Great Schlep

This is Sarah Silverman at her best. Jews of America, do your part to further progressive causes–take on The Great Schlep!


Kay Ryan, poet laureate

I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t have named America’s current poet laureate until today. Kay Ryan turned 63 today; I’ve been reading some of her work available online and quite enjoying it. Her work is often conversational like Billy Collins’s, but tends to be more spare, more focused, each poem trying to capture exactly one thing perfectly.

Great Thoughts

by Kay Ryan

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

It interests me that she teaches remedial English at college: I can scarcely imagine a more draining, discouraging field in education. Modern American poetry lives mostly in the academy, and in the upper reaches of MFA programs of top schools at that. Ryan’s poems are witty and musical, yet her other professional career involves people who struggle with basic written communication. To read more of her work, visit

Something needs to change

So tired. At first I was coping well with the job, but the long days are starting to wear on me. I’m away from home 11 hours a day minimum. The apartment is descending into chaos, I can’t focus to work on my friend Casey’s webpage, I don’t have the energy to exercise–I’m even having a hard time reading. Most of my days seem like a cycle of wake up, pour a little coffee down my throat, work (and I like the work fine), collapse in front of the computer and maybe watch a TV show, play some WoW or Civ4. That’s not enough of a life, and I want something to change–soon.

Pleaz to wir money

I got a letter today from this Secretary Paulson guy. He sounds really trustworthy–what do you think?

Dear American:






Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

(source unknown; making the rounds of the Internet today)

An unsung pioneer

We just watched Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip, one of Ken Burns’s shorter documentaries. It recounts the story of Horatio Nelson Jackson, a Burlington doctor who made America’s first cross-country trip by car. He didn’t do it for money or publicity; Jackson was a car enthusiast who, in 1903, made a bet among gentlemen in San Francisco that he could drive from San Francisco to New York in 90 days. Two professional teams set off shortly after Jackson and Crocker (a chauffeur/mechanic), but the amateurs made it first, in just 63 days.

I was touched by the presence of Bud, their animal companion. Jackson seems like a pretty impulsive guy; at some point during this grueling trip over dirt roads in an unreliable car, he decided to buy a bulldog. He named it Bud, and Bud accompanied Jackson back to Vermont where he lived a full doggy life. Think about how lucky this dog was. He was the first dog to go on a proper road trip–30 miles an hour, head over the side, tongue hanging out, ears flapping in the breeze, staring at cattle or trees or farmers or birds or just nothing at all. Why has this not been made into a road movie yet? It’s got plucky amateurs against the big money candidates, danger from storms, deserts, cliffs, and hunger, two friends and a cute dog, colorful locals–everything! Plus, Bud got to wear dog goggles. Where the heck did they find dog goggles, anyway?

Redneck wedding!

When Frank Serio first came to visit me in Vermont, I met him at a gas station in town because directions to our apartment were hard to describe. There was maybe ten minutes between his calling me to say that he’d arrived and my showing up to greet him. His first words after the usual “So great to see you,” big hug, etc. was “Boy, they’ve got rednecks everywhere, don’t they?”

Yes. Yes they do.

Come for the moose, stay for the raping!

So as mayor, Sarah Palin decided that the town of Wasilla should stop paying for rape kits, the equipment hospitals use with possible sexual assault victims to establish evidence for police and prosecutors. This doesn’t even make sense if you’re a penny-pinching sexist asshole; if more sexual assaults can be reported and investigated, the courts can take more violent assholes off the streets. In reading about this scandal, I was surprised to discover that Alaska has the highest number of rapes per capita in the U.S. To defend the state against accusations that there’s nothing else for the ice truckers, fishery workers, and oil rig hands to do during the long months, I repost this imaginary entry from WyzardWhately of RPGNet.

Journal Entry #27:
Snowed in for over a month now. Have exhausted the possibilities of MSTing the stack of talking-animal Disney movies. Nobody can find the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzles. The ennui is hellish, like a living thing that smothers our every attempt at pretending normalcy. People told us it was a risk out here, but I never expected the raping to set in so fast. Last night, Dwayne raped the couch. Melissa raped the refrigerator. Chris has claimed, truthfully or not, to have spent the night up in the attic, trying to rape the abstract concept of loneliness. If he would have just ran Nobilis for us like we asked him to, we might never have come to such a pass. Johnny and Cindy can’t stand the sight of each other anymore, broke up, and now rape each other every night. Nothing has changed, except now they’re louder.