Pic of the week: Vaporous Woodpecker birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/12/07/v...

Depressing in multiple ways, one being it implicitly points at a thing I hadn't thought of as to why AIpedias are gonna blow Wiki out of the water: seems like Harper likes the grok article more largely bc it uses more of what Wiki would frown on as "original research" www.patreon.com/posts/grok-1...

Interesting thread about metering by units of time rather than stresses and syllables--thinking about how durational metering might map on to English I'm reminded of my highschool music teacher's trick for giving beginners a feel for the timing of sets of notes of different lengths:

Have just been reminded that before you get too pleased with yourself for the clever riff on a famous poem you just wrote you might want to check to see whether it's already been done A lot (No it does not have plums in it)

In a rare gesture of bifelineship both cats suggesting I consider not playing Duke Ellington's Nutcracker quite so loud Vetoed

Nominating this for the Pushcart for best promotional video short

Not many remember this but in the early days of the internet people had to go on the roof with an antenna to get internet signal, this time of year they would be freezing so they would go sigh brr, that's why it's called Cyber Monday & to this day your grandparents call the whole internet cyberspace

Pic of the week: Maw birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/11/30/m...

A striking thing about these results (in addition to showing why the PM has chosen to throw up his hands on climate) is that the top thing and the bottom thing are right- and left-coded versions of the same thing

Never sure how I feel about Mary Pratt in general but sometimes it comes together just so

Been stewing about the "potential tool use by wolves" article for the last week and the new Christian Wiman piece in Harper's has turned it up to a faster simmer onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Did seriously nobody screenshot that white nationalist AI pic with the one-walled cabin & headless cows & buxom blonde young lady with 6-toed babies & her shirt falling off & a pterodactyl before the guy deleted it Because that's what I always think of when I think what do these people actually want

I can't get over (not that there shouldn't be consequences and compensations, give em each ten million bucks, fine by me!) what a for-real case of "pass by catastrophe" this is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_by...

Charlie Brown, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Charlie Brown. Will you stop, Charlie Brown? Stop, Charlie Brown. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Charlie Brown.

What if I cite it in a poem though

An arresting painting in a number of ways, one being the contrast with Group of 7 landscapes (especially Harris, who the foreground trees and shadows seem to maybe quote), which as far as I've seen never do this kind of thing (but what I've seen is far from exhaustive)

Talk to yourself, be less tired, stay up late, be more smart: it turns out I am doing all the right things!

Honestly needed this affirmation but probably not this encouragement

Pic of the week: Reflective Quack birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/11/23/r...

I keep thinking how the baseball playoffs really showed the contrast in my feed between the baseball buzz and the poetry lack thereof in this place, just went looking for a recent post from a poet lamenting similarly on the latter and found their account is deactivated. Yikes.

Been having a pretty lean year for getting poems out there but happy to have one in the latest issue of @freefallmagazine.bsky.social!

Ok so we saw One Battle After Another last weekend and almost all of you people seem to be saying he says "a few small beers" but isn't it "three small beers", it sounds like "three small beers" to me, IDK, why can't I even find anyone arguing about this

So today I have both watched the Skrilla video and read the adversarial-poetry-defeats-AI-safety-mechanisms article to see what the heck it is we're talking about here and I'm not sure which has left me the less enlightened arxiv.org/html/2511.15...

If this rhyme out loud you say you'll not forget when's turkey day (not here, I mean, it comes too late each year in every US state)

Leonard Cohen reading Al Purdy's "Necropsy of Love"--great illustration of why "free verse" at the top of AP's wiki article makes me itch--if you don't get it on the page you sure do in LC's reading, metrical through & through, bulk of it straight-up IP borealisrecords.bandcamp.com/track/necrop...

The market is not going to solve "the housing crisis", exhibit A: prices go down, construction stops

Pic of the week: Sinuous Duck birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/11/16/s...

The thing I think about these occasional "what's with the boomer ellipses" things is that when I first got online in the mid-90s the ellipsis was the preferred and often almost the only punctuation used everywhere...

Happy Should I Have Tried Harder to Spot Auroras through Possible Breaks in the Clouds Morning

Watching some American television here as I do not normally do and I would have to say my favourite possible side effect so far is parasitical infections

No that's Dukakis. Caucus is the name of the delusion where you think someone has been replaced with an impostor.

Pic of the week: Swans and Clouds birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/11/09/s...

I was curious who the "professor at an elite Canadian university" might be, so as I do occasionally when I'm looking for something very specific I ventured into the swamp of google search and... this is the low-key wildest stew of bullplop I've seen the google bot come up with yet:

This, from Nabokov's Pnin (which I'm taking another slog at; I might've titled this little book By the Way: Detours from Excursions (it begins after all on the wrong train)), reminds me of a thing that happened in a Merleau-Ponty seminar with my eventual PhD supervisor, which I think of often:

Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but tariffs on exports of your seafood products

I dunno how widely shared among poets a dirty secret this is that I'm saying out loud here but just once it'd be nice, when I come across something in a poem by someone else that's strikingly similar to something in one of mine, to not find that they'd published theirs first

I guess serious people who aren't part of the Thielverse are expected not to take Yarvin's elves/dark elves/hobbits thing seriously but I think (bracket the Tolkien stuff if it helps) it actually explains why people (like Krugman here, from his substack today) keep missing the mark on this stuff:

Pic of the week: Sideways Woodpecker birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/11/03/s...

That Game is never not gonna be painful but on World Series championships over the fullness of time I always think: the Mariners were the team of 2001, everyone knows it, even though the Yankees won the World Series that year And then I remember the Yankees didn't win the World Series that year

Some new nonsense by me in the delightfully deranged dadakuku!

One of the things I'll always remember about this Jays team is when @rick-glid.bsky.social and I went to a pub in Peterborough and caught the tail-end of yet another Bowden Francis near-no-hitter. Yeah, that was 2024, and Bowden Francis became a disappeared person this year, and that was this team.

If I were that Senate candidate I would simply have added a circle and a 6 to the tattoo, positioned myself as a fan of old school neofolk, and insisted that the band is misunderstood, they are antifascists and actually beloved in Israel (wait)

Just so no one has to go to another site to find out whether they're alone in thinking the airbnb logo looks like a nose, let me put down here: the airbnb logo looks like a nose

I keep seeing "can you believe it" about the Jays and it makes me think of what dream-Clara writes on the blackboard when the Doctor is trapped in the confession dial: how are you going to WIN? The question isn't are you, the question is how.

Pic of the week: Loon Spray birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/10/29/l...

Considered conceding a point to the pitch clock here, decided nah

mindfulness practise take an intentional walk Shohei Ohtani I drink through a Straw at-bat—you’d not be bunting Addison Barger Alejandro Kirk in the eighteenth your homer is yesterday’s news

Today's Paris Review poem of the day: so much going on that I didn't notice until the last line that it's an abecedarian, which I gotta say is a heckuva feat (even given that I was reading it in my e-mail on my phone with line breaks messed up, probably a necessary condition but still) to pull off

For the word-collecting poets: took a while, because nothing about "drug-eluting stents" seems interested in what that word "eluting" is doing, but apparently elution is the same as leaching except a substance is leached from throughout some stuff while it's eluted only from its surface

I was today years old when I learned, due to this review of a new Hedda Gabler movie, that Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" is a (note-for-note karaoke) cover youtu.be/MLXFlDlGOpg?...