Author Archives: Editor

A Little Poetry Contest: The Winner

by Editor

the-poor-poet

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Sascha Cooper is our Little Poetry Contest winner.  Her poem, A Blank Canvas, is a meditation on the power of creativity in normal surroundings.  We didn’t get many poems for the contest so it only makes sense to pick a single winner.  Perhaps more poets will want to enter the next Little Poetry Contest.  But this poem would stand out in any group of poems.  Actually, I was quite surprised to receive a poem this good during the very first contest.

You can listen to the winning poem with the player above while you read it here.

A Blank Canvas

Inspiration comes from all seeing eyes.
Let the imagination run wild
With all colours that light up at night.

Outside the window looms a palace
With domes that stretch up to the sky.
Stuck in time, yet current;

Transporting me back to a time of
Princes, kings and queens.
Arabian nights coax and tempt me.

Back in the land of reality,
The box is blaring, mum is cooking
And my best friend is next to me.

The computer is on a small table
That was a shelf – makeshift, but handy.
Drink and numerous papers at my side.

White walls, sleek lines;
Carpet that’s light and not right,
Sliding doors of black and silver.

All this in a box of glass
Ready to be personalised.
A blank canvas.

Does the Strunk & White Book Suck?

by Editor

25style480These folks are all in an uproar about The Elements of Style by Strunk and White which has been a mainstay for writers and students for many decades in many colleges and writers’ studios and lawyers’ offices and high schools and elementary schools where lots of people have made their first adventuresome forays into writing and take me for example who can never remember the definition of an adverb and can never understand a past participle or what the heck a conjunctive phrase is so you see I actually need a book like The Elements of Style very badly and cannot really understand why anyone would have such hard feelings about such a small book I mean after all it does contain some pretty useful little references about the english language that can be quite helpful when you are in a grammar jam and the authors of the little tome were perfectly willing to admit that sometimes rules can be broken or stretched or ignored altogether and even rejected out of hand I guess.

Is Apple Ready to Burn Amazon’s Kindle?

by Editor

apple_media_pad_mockupThis image is floating around the internet along with rumors that Apple is ready to unveil a much larger version of its iPod Touch that might be called MediaPad.  Apparently, it has a 6-inch HD touchscreen and will have cellular wireless connectivity.  So people are writing about this thing as a Kindle-killer.  Apple is also rumored to be preparing an ebook reader application that will allow book purchases through the iTunes store.

I think this has been coming for a while and I am almost certain that Steve Jobs will implement the first serious major competition for Amazon.

Remix: Lawrence Lessig’s Book for Free Download

by Editor | 2 Comments

remix_cover_lSome of the most interesting writing about copyright and remix culture comes from attorney Lawrence Lessig.  His latest book, Remix, is available as a Creative Commons licensed download.  In a world where kids can download everything for free, how do you make commerce thrive and how do you avoid criminalizing an entire generation?  These are the primary questions Lessig asks in this book.  If you make a baby video that happens to have Prince playing on the radio in the background and you upload it to YouTube, have you broken a copyright law?  Prince thinks you have.  But Prince is an idiot with a guitar.  I seriously doubt that the guy can even read.  Lessig is much smarter than Prince.  Read his book with Prince playing on the stereo in your room.  Film yourself.  Then upload to YouTube.  That will make Prince go insane.

I found this book via BoingBoing.

And by the way, you have our permission to film yourself with our audio playing on your stereo in the background.  We’re much smarter than Prince too!

Audio Poem: Ode to a Nightingale

by Editor

491px-john_keats_by_william_hilton

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For the last day of National Poetry Month 2009, here’s a reading of Ode to a Nightingale, by English poet John Keats.  It was written in 1819 after the poet had been listening to a nightingale in the yard of a friend one morning.

Here is the text of the poem:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Continue reading …

Manifestations: Gorgeous Student Animation

by Editor | 1 Comment

Wow!  Look at this.  Manifestations is a film by Giles Timms at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.  He made this with Flash, TVPaint, and After Effects.  The imagery is beautiful and layered.  I always like colorful fuzzy things with lots of darkness and transparency.  The film seems to be about a little non-human character who is in love with a human and goes across a world and through many battles both modern and ancient to find his love.