Loose Leaf Notes

1. Some people are more worried about the imagined war on Christmas than they are about with a war with China or a merger with Russia.

2. Christmas Night Lights seen through a beer glass are HERE.

3. I’ve been doing a 13 list since the fall of 2005 and this is my 579th entry.  It’s been a long time experiment that has taught me a lot.  It’s given me structure and incentive and has acted as a weekly journal. The collection is stored HERE.

4. Over the years, I’ve referred to my Thirteen list as the sermon, the progress report, the page turner, the ticket, the weekly spin, the reality check, the desk job, the flight plan, the curve ball, the up date, the down hill ride, the blow by blow account, the whole shebang, the knock knock joke, news to muse, the Thursday menu and more.

5. Some of my Thirteen Thursday titles have included: Keeping up with 13, Thoughts A Lot, Get it Write, 13 Phone Home, The You’d Never Guess List, The 13 Album Cover, Smile You’re on 13 Thursday, Hello It’s Me, Say When, The 13 Town Crier, The 13 Thursday Speed Bump, the Good Times Drum Roll, From Blah to Ooh La La, the One Stop Blog Hop, 13 Needles in a Haystack, 13 Thursday Wallpaper, The 13 Driveby, Thirteen Lines Not for Fishing, I Can’t Believe I Wrote the Whole Thing and Just My Type.

5. My 6-year-old grandson Liam, whose science/art project is pictured above, wanted me to post his recipe for Pink Lady Fizz on my Facebook page, which I did. He dictated the instructions: 1. Cut up a pink lady apple.  2. Take some emergence-C fizz.  3. Put the emergence-C fizz on the apples.   4. Leave a comment or thumbs up.

6. Seriously though, THIS is the best thing I’ve read all week on “Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy: How Vladimir Putin is making the world safe for autocracy,” as in a system of government by one person with absolute power.

7. My Dharmacratic poet friend Will isn’t my only friend on Facebook  who’s been expressing views on a Trump presidency. “Our western culture has treated the earth like a cheap date. Now we have downgraded to prostitute, with Pimp Trump in charge.” – My singer/songwriter friend Bob G.

8. THIS photo series featuring quotes that President-elect Donald Trump has said about women reminds me of the one the Dixie Chicks did on the cover of Entertainment during the Iraq War.  The photographer, Aria Watson, an 18-year-old student from Oregon, said she created the series, titled “#SignedByTrump,” for her final project in her Introduction to Photography class. –note: it contains some graphic content.

9. I wanted to see you / and not look away / but you looked away first … read the rest of my poem “Reunion” HERE.

10. Writers are like scientists looking for answers without knowing the questions.  They start out not knowing exactly what they’re looking for.  Combustion?  A cure? Something that propels their learning forward?   They’re compelled to spend hours in the word lab exploring the math of letters because adjective + noun + verb = more than the sum of its parts.

11. Wordless poetry is another name for good photography.

12. Research shows that most people complain once a minute during a typical conversation. Complaining is tempting because it feels good, but like many other things that are enjoyable  — such as smoking or eating a pound of bacon for breakfast — complaining isn’t good for you. Your brain loves efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. When you repeat a behavior, such as complaining, your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future — so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it … Also, research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus — an area of the brain that’s critical to problem solving and intelligent thought. – More HERE.

13. Check out these dueling fire truck horns during our town’s Christmas Parade HERE.

___________Thirteen Thursday