rolled-up newspaper sculptures by Nick

"Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe": a call for poems?

Myanmar poet Saw Wai was arrested Tuesday for publishing what appears to be a very bad love poem with a hidden message: it's an acrostic, and read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe."

Than Shwe is the leader of the country's military junta. If I ran a well-trafficked online lit journal, I'd be calling for a quick "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe" acrostic issue (probably have to go with the first letter, not first word, of each line, unless you're writing in a language--like Saw Wai's Burmese--that can accomodate "Shwe" as a first word). As it is, I haven't been writing poetry for a while, and could use an assignment with constraints. I'll be working on a "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe" poem today.

UPDATE: Congrats to AJPL for making this chapbook happen.

I'm interested in flipping through David Levy's 2007 Love + Sex With Robots at some point--and cracking up over graphic novel writer Warren Ellis's Three Laws of Robotics, of which this is the second:

Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don’t have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they’re laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don’t get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.

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Richard Saja embroiders embellishments on toile sofas:





via Neatorama

On playing "Apples to Apples" with the children

9-year-old [reading card]: "'Martha Stewart'. Who's Martha Stewart?"
13-yr-old: "Wait, wait, I know…isn't she that woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus?"