Poet William Carlos Williams

"Forget all rules, forget all restrictions, as to taste,
as to what ought to be said, write for 
the pleasure of it."

                                            ---William Carlos Williams

                                                            
The Daily News

1  I always sort of wondered if William Carlos Williams' nickname was "Bill Carl Bills."

2

3  I expected that reaction. He, on the other hand, may have appreciated the brevity. 

4  Or I've wondered on more than one occasion if O. Henry had friends who called him, "The O!" or "O. Hank!" 

5  I assume by his change of name that the surname William Sydney Porter never rested easy with him.

6  Wouldn't "Billy Porter" have been perhaps a better idea?

7  I guess if you are a poet, you need to have some sort of catchy handle.

8  This sent me on a fun search yesterday. It was late afternoon, and we were kicking back watching Modern Family.  I half watched, and half kept goofing on the babies, always a treat.

9  I ran across this pen name. Ever hear of Alice Addertongue?

10   Yeah me neither. It's a pseudonym for Benjamin Franklin. A pseudonym is a false name, especially for an author. Remember pseudoephedrine from Wednesday's DN? According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "pseudo" means "not genuine, sham." So "pseudonym" is a false name, or more elegantly, a pen name. 

11  Franklin had quite a few pen names. Here is a list:

Silence Dogwood, Harry Meanwell, Alice Addertongue, Richard Saunders, and Timothy Turnstone.

12  Franklin is only one of many writers who turned to pen names to write scathing criticisms of public figures. 

13  Pretty fun stuff to find out on a lazy Thursday.

14  Each one had its own personality. Here is a link if you'd like to find more out about the many faces of Benjamin Franklin:

 Benjamin Frankin PBS.com Trivago Wit and Wisdom

15  I too have a few handles, but I'm thinking of adding one more, now that I am onto the entire concept.

16  I'm going to contact the Franklin Mint and tell them I am a friend of Silence Dogwood, a mutual friend of Franklin's, and that my handle is Gabriel Gimmiesome. 

17  I'm thinking of creating a Facebook with that handle.

18  Here would be my profile pic:

19  I'd appreciate any feedback you could give me. I could be reached at Donta Gibbadam on Facebook. Just do a search. Should be there.

20  Or I've a female pen name as well: Dona Fealiket. 

21  Either one should work. I won't provide a link, because of legalities and such. 

22  Looking forward to hearing from you.

23  Moving On, Part One: Anybody lookin'? If you don't contact me, you'll be a social piranha.

24  

25  I stole that directly from the episode of Modern Family, playing agreeably in the background as I wrote this nonsense.

26  Pardon me a minute.

27  Thanks. I just thought this was needed:

28   Whew.

29  Why, that fellow LOOKS like a social piranha.

30  It doesn't get any better than this.

31  Nobody said it was easy.

32  Anybody lookin'?

33  Friday. Anything pretty much goes on a Friday, if you ask me. Or if you ask William Carlos Williams. 

34  Here is what O. Henry always looked like in my mind when I was a child:

35  The guy in Wiki looks like this:

36  Honestly.

37  You can't make this stuff up here on a Friday.

38  On looks alone, that guy would not have been my friend, and I don't really know why.

39  Unless he could hit, we would have chosen him last while choosing sides for a baseball team. 

40  There would have been that last hesitant moment delaying the start of a game, when inevitably, a Good Samaritan would break the silence and say, "Ah, all right. We'll take the O." 

41  And that's the way it goes. 

42  Gottago.

43  AND...it's officially the weekend, noon today.

44  Or, beginning now.

45  You have a GREAT one, and we'll see you again.

46  Peace.

~H~

fin.

The Daily News

1  Last night they had a Clint Eastwood Marathon playing. Not sure of the channel because I was busy cleaning and walking around aimlessly.

2  The two that aired were Hang 'Em High and High Plains Drifter.

3  To be honest, I didn't pay too much attention to either, but it made for a great lava lamp while I did some in-house walking exercises.

4  The hanging scene from the Hang 'Em High was done pretty well, from what I could see, complete with a guy selling ice cold beer featured in the background. Imagine being the only vendor at a hanging. I'll bet that guy made a bundle. 

5  Anybody lookin'?

6  I sold beer years ago at major sporting events in the Bay Area, so I know what the ratio of one vendor to an enormous crowd meant to the bottom line at an event like that. My recollection is vague, but I remember selling beer at Willie McCovey's last game as a Giant. I think we had just one beer station open in the upper deck that day. Could be wrong. I also vaguely remember there being just three of us up there. I just set up a stand outside the station, and the crew worked as bar backs, bringing me three cases at a time. I spent the afternoon popping and pouring, with all due respect to Willie Mac. Needless to say I made a few bucks. Shameless, yes, but I liked it too. 

7  In the movie, the guy selling beer at the hanging had a coin changer and everything. He even tried selling to a "youngster."  I laughed, because I was walking around the house, half-watching the film,  straightening things up inside, and trying to log indoor walking miles. The film did a decent job of making the hanging look real. There was a sense of an event, with some people in a party mood, while others stared up in disbelief. They were going to hang six guys at the same time, one sweeping blow. 

8  The party atmosphere mixed well with the seriousness of what was about to happen. It reminded me a lot of Shirley Jackson's classic short story The Lottery. 

9  It ran from roughly 10 to 11:30 last night. I had to go out to the back yard for something or other at one point, and stopped and gave a look around. The night became eerily silent. 

10  Sacramento has history, and a lot of the town has areas with an Old-West feel to them. I imagine a lot of places in Cali do, but gold country in particular brings with it lots of that dust. 

11  I couldn't help but think of Placerville, a town I absolutely love, but with a macabre history. The fact that it was once called Hangtown always intrigued me as a kid. To its credit, it had been known as Dry Diggin's, and Old Dry Diggings because the gold the miners would move their dry diggings to running water in order to separate the gold from the dirt. A Wiki piece on Placerville has this to say about the town's name:

After the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in nearby Coloma, California, by James W. Marshall in 1848 sparked the California Gold Rush, the small town now known as Placerville was know as Dry Diggin's after the manner in which the miners moved carloads of dry soil to running water to separate the gold from the soil. Later in 1841, the town earned its most common historical name, "Hangtown" because of the numerous hangings that occurred there. 

According to the museum guide at the Fountain & Tallman Museum, there were only three hangings that occurred after three men on horseback came into town with guns ablaze. The name stuck after that. By about 1850, the temperance league and a few local churches had begun to request that a more friendly name be bestowed upon the town. The name was not changed until 1854 when the City of Placerville was incorporated. At its incorporation Placerville was the third largest town in California. In 1857 the county seat was then moved from Coloma to Placerville, where it remains today.


Retrieved from  Placerville Wiki Link ; )

12  All that stuff entered my mind while standing in the back yard wondering why I went out there to begin with.  

13  I'm pretty sure that the film wanted to show the rougher parts of the West. It did that pretty well.

14  I sat down to write this, and High Plains Drifter played in the background as I tacked away. Lotta shootings and fires. We have a pretty lofty concept of the Wild West. I'm pretty sure it was far from glorious. 

15  When I was younger I was not a huge fan of Eastwood films. I've a better appreciation for them now.

16  Especially going into the one a.m. We'll leave it all out on the dusty road. I'm hanging on a dusty slope, and I think I'll change channels. Yup. 

17  Moving On, Part One: Had a ball yesterday with the babies. 

18  I awakened early  yesterday morning and found a video of a Moody Blues concert. It absolutely rocked, and I instantly shared it on all two of my Facebooks, right around 5 a.m.

19  I then did something I never do: I went right back to sleep!

20  The music was familiar and amazing.

21  I slept WAY in, took a look at the video to make sure all the connections worked an everything, and then realized it was completely out of sync with the voices. 

22  It was like watching an old Japanese movie where the dialogue is around two seconds ahead (or behind) the action.

23  It killed me to do it, but I had to delete the thing, even though the sound worked nicely. Some people had already liked my post. 

24 

28  I am happy to say I have decided to post the link. Click the link, not the pic, and you will get the concert. It's amazing, but out of sync, AND it gets interrupted by annoying ads. Otherwise, the music is fun. Here it is, in all its glory!

MOODY BLUES at the Royal Albert Hall

29  It should perhaps be a lesson in how to drag out an encore, but I STILL love the music, and was sorry I pulled the link from FB in the first place. 

30  So I'm gonna just leave this, a nice cue for me to make another early escape. 

31  The DN will cease on May 27, by the way. I wanna have lots of fun in the meantime. 

32  Enjoy the Moody Blues. Some nostalgia coming at you from an old coot. 

33  The thing runs for only an hour and twenty minutes, if I did my math right. THEN it repeats again, but with no sound. 

34  Despite all, it's a helluva concert. 

35  And I don't have time to go in and cut it all up and edit and all that. 

36  So you get it a tad raw. 

37  That happened to me with a lamb chop last night, and it turned out fine. The ends were crisp, but it all worked. 

38  How's that for a cue to get on with other things?

39  Have a GREAT day.

40  Hope you enjoyed this.

41  See you again.

42  Peace.

~H~

fin.

The Daily News

1  Happy Wednesday!

2  Hope you're all getting through the week.

3  I got the wheezes and the sneezes. So far, they haven't been too bad. 

4  Enjoyed the pitching performance of the Giants' Johnny Cueto last night. 

5  On the post game show, they went outside the stadium to talk about this and that, and one fan had a sign that said "Johnny Cieto" on it. 

6  Are we allowed to roll our heads?

7  Nice gesture, I suppose, but isn't the spelling immediately at one's fingertips?

8  Yeesh.

9  Ah vell.

10  Why did I bother asking?

11  Moving On, Part One: Congrats to Warrior's coach Steve Kerr for receiving the Coach of the Year award. It's a day late and a dollar short, but howzbout that one?

12  We'll leave that question for the ages. Congrats Coach, and congrats Dubs.

13  Moving On, Part Two: Between watching the game and adding more walking miles, my nose started running last night.

14  Everyone and everything is into the exercise thing, I imagine.

15 

16  Let's pretend I never said that.

17  Here's something most people don't know about me: I don't often get colds, or allergies, or anything like that.

18  My theory is that because I taught for all those years, my body possibly built up a resistance to all that stuff.

19  Call me Captain Science.

20  Consequently, I never carried a lot of cold medications. Once in a while I would go through brief periods where I would get the sniffles and stuff. It was usually due to exhaustion from worry and a lack of sleep. Very rarely was it a cold, and when it was, I would just stay home. When it wasn't, but I still had the symptoms, I had an ally, a remedy, if you will. 

21  My remedy always was Sudafed and 12-hour nose squirts. And sugar-free cough drops. And call me in the morning. 

22  That nursed me through a lot of tough times. If I would get extra sick, I would stay home, but I always hated getting substitutes. It really caused me more work, drawing up lesson plans, getting handouts printed, flying down to the school and dropping them off, etc. As long as I wasn't sounding horrible, I would go in. 

23  Interestingly, I would also get irritated by students who would come to school deathly sick, and then sneeze and wheeze all over the place. 

24  Look. Anywhere you work, if someone has a cold, you're already exposed to it. It shouldn't be that big a deal, but once YOU get a slight cold, it can be murder. 

25  And there's no point telling anybody, because nobody, and I mean NO-BAH-DEE gives a hoot you're sick. In fact, if anything, they probably want to shoot you for showing up to school or work.

26  So last night after I settled down from the game, and from getting a little exercise, I lay down, and my nose ran, then got stuffy, and then... 

27  All the medicine we had was down in Vegas, so I went through every room in the place searching for Sudafed and 12-hour squirts. 

28  There was nothing. I even found a storage container that had my stuff from when I cleared out my desk, and that stuff was already gone. I think I threw a lot of it away, saying in a cocky fashion at the time, "Ah, if I need it, I'll buy more!" That dog wasn't gonna hunt last night. 

29  First, it was already too late. AND I still JUST moved here if you see the infrastructure of the place. Finding things remains an ongoing mission. So even if I HAD the stuff, I would never have been able to locate it anyway. 

30  The stores were closed, so I had to rely on a few cough drops and endless glasses of water. 

31  I'm pretty sure Sudafed can't even be purchased anymore without a prescription. Here is the closest thing I could find online late last night. It's a review of Sudafed, or some variation on the same theme. The generic name for Sudafed is this: "pseudoepherine." Here is the Pseudo Yelp review:

This is the best on the market

Pros: works better than anything else

Cons:  have to get from the pharmacist and

its hard to fi

Age: 35 to 44

Gender: Female

Here is the definition of "pseudoeferine" broken down by the Oxford American Dictionary:

pseudo |ˈso͞odō|

adjective

not genuine; sham: we are talking about real journalists and not 

the pseudo kind.

ORIGIN

late Middle English: independent use of pseudo-.

pseudo- |ˈso͞odō| (also pseud- before a vowel)

comb. form

1 supposed or purporting to be but not really so; false; not genuine:

pseudonym | pseudoscience.

2 resembling or imitating: pseudohallucination | pseudo-French.

ORIGIN

from Greek pseudēs ‘false,’ pseudos ‘falsehood.’

Ephedrine is a medication used to prevent low blood pressure during spinal anesthesia.^[1] It has also been used for asthma, narcolepsy, and obesity but is not the preferred treatment. It can be taken by mouth or by injection into a muscle, vein, or just under the skin. Onset with intravenous use is fast, while injection into a muscle can take 20 minutes, and by mouth can take an hour for effect. When given by injection it lasts about an hour and when taken by mouth it can last up to four hours.^[1]

Common side effects include, trouble sleeping, anxiety, headache, hallucinations, high blood pressure, fast heart rate, loss of appetite, and inability to urinate. Serious side effects include stroke, heart attack, and abuse.^[1] While likely safe in pregnancy its use in this population is poorly studied.^[2][3] Use during breastfeeding is not recommended.^[3] Ephedrine works by turning on α and β adrenergic receptors.^[1]

^{So...the generic version of Sudafed is defined by the Oxford American Dicitonary as a "sham" drug that has horrific side effects up to and including hallucinations, high blood pressure, fast hear rate, inablility to urinate, AND strokes, heart attacks, and abuse.} 

   And even its non-generic name is clearly an off-shoot of       those two words. 

32 

33  AND, according to some Yelpy gal, it must be prescribed AND is hard to fi. 

34  Sorry. I hate things that are hard to fi.

36  Welcome to 2016.

37  The entire year is broken.

38  It's okay.

39  We all have coping mechanisms.

40  Yes, that last photo was Mr. Naismith, the founder of basketball. 

41  Here, a bit I copped off the Source-That-Nobody-Wants-To-Use-But-That-Everybody-Uses-Anyway Wiki:

History of basketball - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_basketball

Wikipedia

The history of basketball began with its invention in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts by Canadian physical education instructor James Naismith as a less injury-prone sport than football.

Note: The scratched-out adjective is the word "Canadian" with the word "Wikipedia" mysteriously attached to its topside.

42  "...as a less injury-prone sport than football..."

43  Thank you, Mssr. Naismith. 

44  So there you go. 

45  Wednesday, pared down. 

46  Thank goodness.

47   It is before midnight. <yawn> I realize it is morning NOW, but when I wrote this, it was before midnight. 

48  My nose cleared up when I had a glass of water. 

49  I may get a good night's sleep.

50  So yup.

51  Been great.

52  I gottago.

53  See you again.

54  Have a GREAT day.

55   Peace. 

~H~

fin.