WASHINGTON—The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation’s aesthetic-industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

“America’s metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation’s verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart,” said the project’s head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. “We need to make sure America’s poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world.”

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I’ll explain the name in a later post.

and though
she will probably
have moths
for breakfast

Believe me
she makes a venom
stronger
than she needs

Lego sculptures worthy of note typically attest—if they attest to anything at all—to the sculptor’s hypermeticulous struggle against the jagged resolution of the bricks, as though realism were the aim and the medium an inconvenience. Not so for Mark Stimpson, who has recreated more than twenty famous photographs using scarcely more than a handful of bricks for each.

    ~/dev/mozilla-central % diffstat < .hg/patches/bug-448564
    src/nsHTMLContentSink.cpp |  131 ++++++++++++----------------------------------
    test/Makefile.in          |    1 
    test/test_bug448564.html  |   24 ++++++++
    3 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 96 deletions(-)

By naïve standards of programming productivity, I ought to be fired.

My parents went out of their way to let me sleep. They quietly unpacked my suitcase and washed my clothes. Then they put my clean clothes back in my suitcase and packed their own suitcases. By the time I stirred the following afternoon, the family minivan was ready to leave. “We’re going to Auburn,” my mother said. “We thought you might not be able to sleep if we told you last night.”

Because I had mentioned the programming contest to my parents, they had already contacted a friend of theirs who was willing to lend me a laptop. That laptop was a luxury in several ways: it kept me distracted during the four-hour drive to my Grandparents’ house, letting me smear my freshman enthusiasm for computer science across a series of events I was not ready to comprehend, and it also gave me a means of recording, of shaping and reshaping, my impressions of those events. After more than a few hard drive migrations and reformattings, the eulogy I wrote for my grandfather on the way home is still, somehow, thankfully, intact.

According to Ellison’s latest biographer, Stanford professor Arnold Rampersad (by way of the Times), my curiosity gave Ellison too much credit:

Tantalizing bits and pieces of the work in progress appeared from time to time, but Ellison was stuck. At parties he drank too much. He became a ponderous bore. He began telling inquiring reporters and friends that he had lost 365 pages of his manuscript in a house fire in Connecticut, a claim that Mr. Rampersad debunks.

It is this which frightens me: who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, Rampersad speaks for me?

Word from the Pacific Coast

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I encourage you to follow my travels via twitter, if schadenfreude possesses you so. See right for the latest updates.

Additionally, if you call any time between 9AM and 6PM PST, June 26th through July 15th, you’ll almost certainly catch me on the road, a mere buttonpress away from answering your call, all too eager for human conversation(, adjective clause promising gratitude)*.