The 13 Thursday Blur
1. Google’s search engine had a birthday cake graphic up on my birthday, which made me feel kind of creepy.
2. On my birthday I spell my name Colleeeeeeen and eat pie for dinner.
3. I took and processed a few hundred pictures over the weekend, covering a Lyme Disease Symposium, a powerful local theater production of the Laramie Project, and a couple of musical performances for the paper, but even though it was my birthday, the only picture I got with me in it is the above one of my raincoat and foot.
4. Why is Chronic Fatigue a syndrome and Lyme a disease?
5. Subject line seen in a recent email: More bad ideas than you can fit in a clown car.
6. My four-year-old grandson Liam: The sun likes me. I call it my sun because it follows me. Me: Doesn’t it follow me too? Liam: No, not too much.
7. It must have started on May Day / Maybe there was wine involved / with sun-warmed glasses clinking / bocci balls colliding / and the world driving by in cars / Probably there was poetry / read out loud like incantations / and buzzing bees landing on cheese … Read more from my latest poem, It Must Have Started in May HERE.
8. Speaking of bees, yesterday a friend asked this question on Facebook about today’s trend in plastic surgery: Why do people think that it’s attractive to look like a survivor of a car accident? My response was: And why to they think it looks good when their lips look like they were stung by bees?
9. If songwriters had to be grammatically correct, Bob Dylan’s Lay Lay Lady would be Lie Lady Lie and Eric Clapton’s Lay Down Sally would be Lie Down Sally. I had to look up the lay/lie rule while writing the above poem about Rip Van Winkle, who looked like Gulliver when he stretched out on the lawn after being tempted to lie down by a drifting pillowed cloud. It doesn’t help that “lie” also means to not tell the truth.
10. Basically, people lie down and they lay things down, but I don’t always remember the rule, and I broke it when I wrote a poem back in the early 90s about living with Chronic Fatigue. It started: I sit when others are standing / I lay when they sit / I walk when others are running / I stop when they keep going. More HERE.
11. According to THIS Lancet article, and others, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome just got a new name. It happened without any fanfare by the Institute of Medicine in the hopes that the new name will help it gain more respect and attention. It’s now called “Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease” (SEID). When I contracted it around 1976 there was no name for it. I called it “my low energy problem” before I learned what it was about ten years later. It’s also known as chronic fatigue immunodeficiency syndrome, and in Europe they call it myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome.
12. Struck by the design on some green bean seeds while planting, I realize that growing food is no less magical than a beanstalk that leads to a golden egg laying goose, than a cow that jumps over the moon. More HERE.
13. THIS is my kind of toy. I’m too lazy to make it. Just want to play with it HERE.
___________Thirteen Thursday
May 21st, 2015 2:39 am
2 I like this tradition
May 21st, 2015 9:26 am
A birthday cake gif on your b. day? I agree that is kinda creepy. Makes you wonder who’s watching you? Whoever is–is lucky. They get to enjoy your fine posts. 🙂
http://otherworlddiner.blogspot.com/2015/05/thirteen-zinger-questions.html
May 21st, 2015 10:48 am
Well of course you have diddly squat for pictures of yourself when it’s you holding the camera.
May 21st, 2015 11:11 am
I usually get in a shot or two when it’s my birthday, usually taken by someone else.
May 21st, 2015 11:30 am
I had the opposite feeling when my cake showed up on my birthday. In fact, I took a picture of it! The creepy thing to me is predators watching thru cameras like SKYPE and the teenage girls are unaware of the invasion.
Since I too am usually the one wielding the camera, few photos of me are taken at fun gatherings. The times someone else does take my pic, I’m unaware and the result is not always pleasing.
May 21st, 2015 12:20 pm
But how does google know it’s my birthday? So the cake was just for me. I don’t even list my birthday on Facebook.
May 21st, 2015 12:52 pm
I’m just discovering, and with a HUGE impact, that there is NO Privacy anymore. If you are on the Internet, anyone can see anything about you–including your entire address book.
I am not a happy camper!!!!!
A belated Happy Birthday, my dear Colleen….
Another shocker is how the English language is so damn confusing—How anyone learns it is a mystery to me—-So many words that are spelled the same have different meanings……OY VEY!!!
I always Love your poems, my dear…..!!!!
Another WONDERFUL T13…..And, I know the Sun shines on you!
May 21st, 2015 3:10 pm
Happy belated birthday. Lie/lay confuse most people, myself included. I always have to look them up. I generally don’t confuse affect/effect but that is another one that people mess up.
Love your TT as always.
May 21st, 2015 5:49 pm
I took over 300 photos last weekend, too, but I think my subject — the Arboretum — was far more interesting than yours. My T13: Curtis Prairie
May 21st, 2015 6:07 pm
My Thursdays would not be the same without you, CR. There’s more good reading here than you can fit in a clown car (just had to use that phrase).
Happy Belated Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirthday, CR!
May 22nd, 2015 6:36 am
Your purple picture above, and your #8, made my think of the purple plate that I put to my lip when I got stung there by a bee one summer. The swelling went down in minutes.
May 22nd, 2015 8:27 am
I still use my purple plate. I recently ordered another one so I could have two and was surprised they are still available. I still don’t know how it works. http://www.purpleplates.com/about-purple-plates-ezp-38.html?chapter=0
May 22nd, 2015 7:05 pm
The Google cake on my last birthday kind of creeped me out, too. And for that very reason I’m thinking of avoiding Google on my birthday next week.
May 29th, 2015 8:14 pm
I absolutely love #8!! A lot of times the people who have plastic surgery also look like burned victims…..sorry but true~