Palindromes

Today's date is 01022010 the same forwards and backwards!

My twitter username is a palindrome too.

imajjami

Get it? I'm a Jami. Or an imaj of jami if you prefer. Feel free to follow me. Or not.

Doesn't it seem odd to you that the word palindrome isn't a palindrome? Palindromemordinlap seems a bit much though.

Geek Humor Meets Greek Humor

Forgive Me, I'm in the Mood for Powerful Poetry

Ode On Melancholy by John Keats

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Because Won Can Never Overestimate the Use of Good Grammer

I guess it's time to post again since everybody has come and visited now. Except Ray and Elastic who are busy and stressed at the moment. They are excused.

Now, for the rest of you. I give you a visual to please your ever-pendantic minds.
By the way, the comments at Graphjam may amuse some of the Grammar Nazis among us. Certainly made me simile.

Our Carnelian Anniversary

My favorite number is seventeen. My birthday's on September 17th. Our anniversary is January 17th. And this anniversary is a big one! It's our seventeenth. Our Carnelian Anniversary. (Yes, I did have to look that up.) In honor of the day, here are seventeen tid-bits on the theme of meeting and loving my man.

1. My love is a gifted musician. Can't really say enough about the music thing, because his talent is so phenomenal and such an intricate part of him.


2. My man records books. For fun. He's taped Mormon Doctrine a few times. As a Man Thinketh by James Allen many, many times. He's currently moving though the works of Neal A. Maxwell. The dude listens to them while he's at work and in the car, then erases them.


3. My sweetie changes diapers.


4. He's a kid magnet. He doesn't do anything at all to attract the little monkeys but they love him.


5. He's a lifetime member of the John Birch society. Political arguments broke us up several times while we were dating. Politics continued to be a touchy subject for us for the first decade of our marriage, but we finally negotiated a peace treaty. The terms are very snuggly.


6. The man juggles.


7. We both grew up in Davis, California a couple blocks away from each other and attended the same schools. My first year in Davis was my third grade year. He's four years older than me, so he'd moved on to the Jr. High. When I got to Jr. High, he'd moved on to the High School. By the time I got to High School, he and his family had moved to Grass Valley. I might have run into him at church but I joined the church when I was a sophomore and his family had already moved.


8. When I was a kid I used to sing:
   
   

   I'm in love with a big blue frog,
   A big blue frog loves me.
   Its not as bad as it appears
   He wears glasses and he's six foot three.
   Well I'm not worried about our kids,
   I know they'll turn out neat.
   They'll be great lookin' 'cause they'll have my face,
   Great swimmers 'cause they'll have his feet!

   Destiny! Kismet! The man is 6'3", he wears glasses, and he has two webbed toes. (He's a normal pinky-beige, however.)


9. I met my husband after a church dance in the parking lot. His insane friend asked my hot friend to dance. In the parking lot. She answered that there was no music. My music man sang a song for them and they danced right there. I was charmed, so when everyone went out to eat after the parking lot solo, I borrowed his jacket. I was cold, but I had ulterior motives. I was trying to steal it, so I'd have an excuse to call him later. He caught me as we were leaving, so I sheepishly handed it over. Busted. So embarrassing.


10. When I moved into his ward about six months later, I carefully avoided him. I was dating someone else and my attraction to my future husband was a bit disconcerting.


11. After I stopped dating the other fellow, I attended a ward family home evening. "Sardines" was the activity that night and I was "it." I chose a nice niche in the shrubbery for my hiding place. As my prey walked by, I gave him a hint. "Psst! In here!" And in he came. Yes! Then he proceeded to pull in the next person that went by. And the next one. And the next one. Hm. There seemed to be a lack of communication going on here.


12. One day he stopped speaking to me, suddenly, inexplicably. I knew then that he knew The Secret. I liked him. He could tell and was appalled. I was heartbroken. Shortly thereafter, he came into Relief Society to make an announcement. As he turned bright red, tried to become invisible, and was barely able to squeeze out the message, I had a revelation: the man was shy! The man was shy and I'd been clueless. There's only one reason a shy guy stops talking to one of his gal pals. It was all I could do not to stand up, pump my fist into the air and yell "YES!"


13. Did you really think I was going to write a thirteenth? You know me better than that.


14. Our first date was a double date. The four of us had been hanging out as a group, but one Sunday, we played Trivial Pursuit, guys against girls. Losers to buy the winners dinner and a round of miniature golf. [BTW, they never stood a chance.] After miniature golf, we drove around in the foothills looking for some sort of astronomical phenomenon that was supposed to be happening. The only phenomenon I saw that night? My shy guy and I set our hands next to each other and our pinkies touched. After about ten minutes of that excitement, he HELD MY HAND!


15. He kissed me for the first time a few nights later. Then he looked at me and whispered, "Does this mean I get to keep you?"


16. He spontaneously proposed while I was studying for my Romantic Literature mid-term, abruptly halting my recital of Christibel. I flipped out. (Tend to do that. Perhaps you've noticed.) And made him withdrawal the offer. The next day, I didn't do so well on the exam due to my brain spinning like a top as I pondered my romantic life instead of delightfully morbid, supernatural poetry. A week later, I surprised him by inviting him to resubmit his offer.


17. We were married in the Oakland Temple on January 17, 1992. For this life and for eternity.


18. Those doubters who placed cash bets that we wouldn't make it a year lost. Big time.

Transcription the New Time-sucker

So...apparently I say um, uh and pause twenty seconds between words on a regular basis. The good news is that it only took fifteen minutes to deliver my talk. The bad news is that I'm only half finished with the transcription. The other bad news is that this gem of mine needs a little cutting and polishing before it will be fit for your discerning eyes.

I always turned my papers in late in college too. As it turns out one of my ancestral family mottos is "SERO SED SERIO" which (I've been told) means "Late but in earnest." It's a motto I live by.

So Many Books, So Little Time

I admit it—I'm a dabbler. A fickle bibliophile. I know should settle down and get serious, but it's just so fun playing the field that I haven't been able to talk myself into it. Here's a partial list of my current flings in no particular order.

• Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Bushman)
  
• Chicken Tractor: The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil (Lee, Forman)
  
• The Real Thomas Jefferson (Allison, et al)
  
• In Sacred Loneliness (Compton)
  
• Paradise (Morrison)
  
• Leadership Education: The Phases of Learning (DeMille/DeMille)
  
• Archimedes and the Door of Science (Bendick)
  
• A Disciple's Life (Hafen)
  
• Fascinating Womanhood and The Fascinating Girl (Andelin) [Man, in a really twisted way, these are two of the funniest books I've ever read.]
  
• The Measure of the Universe (Asimov)
  
• Eternal Man (Madsen)
  
• The Book of Mormon [Perpetually]
  
• The New Testament [Perpetually]
  
• Algebra 2 [Perpetually]
  
• A slew of magazines

Really I need to be reading, not writing, so off I go. I'd love to know what you are reading. Not that I would add it to my pile. No, no. I am totally on my way to being a monobibliofin. (Of course, it's a real word. Do you think I'd make something like that up?)

[P.S. It occurs to me that my fluffy books aren't on this list. That's because brain candy— romance, teen fiction, fun books, craft books, etc.—is generally polished off within a day or two and never hits the pile.]

Math? Who Knew?

I went to school with a guy who my sister and I called Perfect Steve. He could write, act, ballroom dance, play two musical instruments, sing, do advanced mathematics and science. He was wise, kind, funny, spiritual, and didn't look like a troll. I would have fallen in love with him except he was several years younger than I was. He graduated from high school early and headed off to college where he majored in math of all things.

I was chatting with him during his sophomore year and asked him how he could stand it. Why in the world had he chosen Math when he could have studied anything? What is there to even learn after calculus?

My questions sent Perfect Steve into an enthusiastic description of the joys of mathematics, the orderliness, the questions, the answers, all truth turned into neat little proofs. He began describing the sheer exhilaration of being able to mathematically turn a sphere inside out.

At least that is what I was able to gather. He lost me pretty quickly. I stopped him and told him I would just have to believe him. I knew that it would take me years of studying math (of all things) before I could understand anything he said. Sorry. Love ya, Steve. Still hated math.

So last week I promised to return with a report about my experience at my homeschool training last week. What in the name of all long-windedness does Perfect Steve's sphere have to do with my LEMI (Leadership Education Mentoring Institute) training? The LEMI trainers have finally given me the vision that Steve was trying to share.

Math is cool!

I want to know how to turn a sphere inside-out mathematically! I want to know enough that I'm willing to work hard for the knowledge. Years, if necessary. I want to thrill my kids and students with the sheer exhilaration that is to be found in asking questions, finding and analyzing patterns, in math. Of all things.

Thanks for trying, Steve. Thanks, LEMI: I needed that.

For the fun of it, here's a picture of a sphere turning inside-out.

[For you TJed/LEMI=a cult folks—I'm running the final blood tests now, but preliminary testing shows that no mind-altering drugs were administered to create a delusional epiphany. Other than chocolate, of course.]

My sister and I are morbid.

I could be wrong, but here's some strong anecdotal evidence.

One summer thirty years ago, my mother decided that she would have no summer brain atrophy among her children, so she handed us 100 Best Loved Poems and told us to pick one we liked and memorize it. We did. We can still recite both poems.

(Notice the common the common morbid theme in both poems. Pure coincidence.)

(Notice all of those stinkin' indentations and dashes. Did you know that you have to stinkin' use HTML code to make those happen? Can I get some stinkin' applause, please?)

(Go ahead read them out loud. They're kinda cool. Plus if you read them out loud, you'll feel the lovely cadence AND people will look at you funny.)

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
     In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
     By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
     Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
     In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
     I and my ANNABEL LEE;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
     Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
     In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
     My beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
So that her highborn kinsman came
     And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
     In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
     Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
     In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
     Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
     Of those who were older than we—
     Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
     Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
     Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
     Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
     Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
     In the sepulchre there by the sea,
     In her tomb by the sounding sea.

—Edgar Allan Poe



O Captain! My Captain!

                                            1

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
     But O heart! heart! heart!
          O the bleeding drops of red,
               Where on the deck my Captain lies,
                    Fallen cold and dead.

                                            2

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
     Here Captain! dear father!
          This arm beneath your head;
               It is some dream that on the deck,
                    You’ve fallen cold and dead.

                                            3

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
     Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
          But I, with mournful tread,
               Walk the deck my Captain lies,
                    Fallen cold and dead.

—Walt Whitman

Just say no.

This is a story of bad boundaries, bad manners and bad poetry. You may have noticed that I like poetry. Plenty of people have noticed. One of the consequences of people noticing that you like poetry is that they give you their poetry to read. (Do I do that to you? No. I have a deep understanding that amateur poetry causes hives in many people. I have mercy.) I find these requests to be far more painful than the "will you edit [write] my paper for me" requests. Bad prose is one thing, bad poetry is another. I don't like rhymes under the best of circumstances, but bad rhymes inflict migraines.

Once upon a time (while I was pregnant and whatever normally passes for Jami's commonsense had gone bye-bye) a human acquaintance (hereafter referred to as H.A.) begged me to go over this ream of poetry, to "correct the grammar and punctuation." I reluctantly accepted. Really the H.A. is super nice, and it would have been rude of me to decline.

Once I got home, I began to read. They were (God forgive me) crap. Trust me. So...did I hand them back? Did I try to convince the H.A. to take up knitting or golf? No, the H.A. is a nice person who had obviously invested a great deal of self in the poems. I did the only thing a cowardly former English major could do. I avoided confrontation.

Unfortunately, one can only duck into empty classrooms, claim non-existent stomach ills and headaches so many times. Eventually, the H.A. cornered me. Had I read them yet? What did I think? Were they ready? Which one did I like best? When would they be ready? I prevaricated. I'd been busy. I pretended to have had a bout of false labor. (I'm so ashamed.) This went on for months before the nagging finally got to me. I felt bad. I was holding the poems hostage. I needed to keep my commitment, give my opinion, and let them go home.

So I bit the bullet and began making comments. At first, I attempted to fix the poor mutilated words. Wasn't going to happen. I could rewrite them entirely, but that was a horror to which I was unwilling to subject myself. I gave up and plunged the knife in deeply: I told the truth.

After about ten poems, I was forced to write a short piece of marginalia on the fact that the ends of rhyming words are supposed to sound the same. (Action and magazine, while both ending in the "N" sound, do not rhyme. In fact, the more ending sounds that two words have in common the better they rhyme.) It was an insulting thing to tell someone, but I didn't see any evidence that the H.A. understood the principle.

I also informed the H.A. that the sentences in poetry should resemble English. It is unseemly to torque the words to get the rhyme. (The avoidance of orange to rhyme is not a reason to turn your words to slime-or-Orange to rhyme I must avoid, thus my syntax becomes hemorrhoid.)

I tossed in as much "that's a nice image" as I honestly could, just to soften the blow a little. Then under the cover of dark, I bravely doorbell-ditched the packet of doomed poems.

The friendly H.A. did not speak to me for a year. The spouse of the H. A. gave me dark looks. At the end of my year long silent treatment, H. A. cheerfully came up to inform me that one of the poems had won a contest and was being published in an anthology (available for purchase for just $39.99). Shortly thereafter, I was informed that a collection of H.A.'s poetry was being published by Publish America.

So what would you do? Tell your happy human acquaintance the truth? No way, dude. I tried that. It worked out poorly. So I smiled and offered congratulations.

Guess what I have sitting on my shelf right now? Yep. At least the rhyming has improved—be, me. rock, stock, cast, morass—some. Luckily, I visit an older lady who LOVES rhyming poems and have I got a book for her!

Admit It. You Need More Poetry In Your Life.

Birches
Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

The Results Are In

Fine, you pink haters, you! You win. You have overwhelmingly voted for me to de-pink-ify the blog. Fine. Barbie is turning over in her toy box. How about brown--boring enough for you?

By the way, does any one have any idea how to make a dash (the punctuation mark) in HTML? This double hyphen thing is getting me down.