While waiting for an appointment at the County Animal Shelter on Friday, Feb 20 2009, I decided to use the time for some exercise. I walked on the sidewalk, North on Pangborn, then East on Washburn, then North again on Regentview. I then turned East on Downey Norwalk Road. About half way down the street I stepped on a fiberglass cover to an inset hole. The fiberglass cover had, from environmental forces, degraded to the point where my foot went straight through it and down into the hole. My leg was torn up, both in the front and back.
Lauren and several of her friends went out trick-or-treating last Friday, and they came up with some great costumes. First is a group shot, taken some hours after they’d been pounding the pavement in search of terror and/or candy:
From left to right: October, Angel, Lauren, Sierra, and Ashley
Raindog Armstrong is a poet, publisher, and pied piper for poetry. With his Lummox Press, he published the Lummox Journal as a monthly magazine, which showcased artists from around the country, and around the world. Publishing both poetry and in-depth interviews, the Journal has now moved onto the internet. This has freed him, at last, to publish the first of several volumes of his own work, the first of which is called Fire & Rain. It reaches back to some of his earliest work, and spans nearly 15 years of creativity.
Raindog joined me for a free wheeling, and wide ranging, conversation that includes three poetry recitations, discussions of 9/11, and his past and future musical efforts. It is 50 minutes of honest talk with one of our fair City’s creative icons.
If you can’t commit to listening to an hour-long conversation, you can hear all three of his poems:
On my recent trip to Washington I took some time to visit the Glass Museum. I’ve always loved glass, and it was thrilling to watch experts work with such a dyamic media. While there, I discovered that a very nice lady was doing a workshop where people were invited to carve images of their choosing into pieces of rubber which would be inked then pressed to paper, much like a woodcut. She suggested the theme of birds and bugs, and so desided to create a bird eating a bug.
I wrote to my friend, Rick Lewis, telling him about my blog, saying “Yes, I know its silly, as I have very little to say, but I have a blog. Why? Because I can.”
To which, he responded:
Blogs. Your comment last night got me to thinking about blogs, and what’s right and wrong with them. I can’t say I reached any profound conclusions; only mildly interesting observations. In the heyday of network television news, not so long ago, approximately three major anchors reached 50 million or so viewers or a regular basis. Blogging seems to have turned that equation on its head. I don’t know the numbers, but what if it’s now five million bloggers, each reaching a regular audience of 100 people? Clearly we are no longer describing the same model at all. Meanwhile, network television news as we knew it is vanishing before our eyes; just not fast enough.
