Friday, September 23, 2016

Boku Bono Borno


Boko, Bono, Borno In the city, the villagers arrive. From the remote areas of the Borno State. Tented, they wait. The poorest people on the planet, some of them. Wait they do for food to arrive. They run from Boko Harmum. And Rape. Murder. Beheadings. Child suicide bombers. In New York, Bono canvasses the world leaders at the UN. They never have found those girls, have they?

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Sharon rose uncurling

Sharon rose uncurling

Sharon rose uncurling
cornstalk sprouting
Sunflower unveiling
All the grass disrobing
All around me
Falling on the ground n
Reaching for the
Sun
Summer going
But it ain't happened yet
When I live in the summer
I live with the growing things n
Praise to the Creator
That I can walk through the garden universe.

                      - Jack Vaughan, Sept 11, 2016

Friday, September 02, 2016

The poem that fell out of the sky


As a followup, about a week later...from the obit for Robotics pioneer Victor Sheinman - turns out that The Day The Earth Stood Still Really Freaked him out.... “My first contact with robots occurred when I went to see the movie ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ as a kid maybe about 8 years old or maybe 9 years old,” Mr. Scheinman recalled in an interview with the Robotics History Project of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “And I was terrified by the robot in that movie and had nightmares over it,” he continued. “In fact, one night I woke up and saw the robot standing in my room. I’m convinced it was there. So I hid under the covers after that for many weeks.” As therapy to allay his fears, his father persuaded him to build a wooden version of Gort, the 8-foot-high, laser-equipped robot from the movie, which was released in 1951 and starred Michael Rennie.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/technology/victor-scheinman-dead.html