April
April 19, 2000 - Poetry in America
I didn't get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
- "Underwear" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
My first car, a VW bug, cost me $350. Its most holy mission was the time I was sent to the Peoria airport to fetch an important American poet. That poet was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of the wonderful poem quoted in part above.
April 20, 2000 - Who Makes the News?
Who makes the news?
Your first instinct might be: nobody. News is what happens. But the more I look at the world around me, the more I realize that there's a message in what shows up on TV, the radio, or the newspaper. And where there's a message, there's a messenger.
Stories don't just pop up out of nowhere. Somebody crafts them. Somebody makes judgments about what's important.
So what's been important the past decade?
April 26, 2000 - Dennis and Telecirc
The library has a new employee. His name is Dennis. We paid about $30,000 for him, which isn't cheap. But we only have to pay him the first year. After that, he works for free.
April 28, 1999 - Columbine
Last night over dinner, a friend noted an irony in the Columbine tragedy. "Everyone responded with a call to prayer. Yet the one place you couldn't pray was school."
Others put their faith in statistics. Nationwide (according to the Denver Post), roughly 250 people have died as a result of school-associated violence since 1992. Until Columbine, the most people to die in a single incident was 5, in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
