My feet weigh me down when I want to fly fly apply new mascara to my eyelashes they are curling around my waist I use them to hang on tight.
You look stupid, Syl said as I unwound a long eyelash from around my waist. I like to keep them curled but using the bathroom can be tricky.
The box said the stuff would compliment my style, but I want my style to compliment me and look I can't open my birdy eyes to save my life.
Since I've become an empty nester I want to jump ahoy and do community service, sad state of affairs when Syl's the only one I can talk to.
Where are my babies and their hungry mouths poking me in the face for a crumb from the floor? Have they arrived at the next Bay Laurel tree?
On paper, I'm a single bird. Pieces and parts shoved inside a hierarchy. Elastic rebars of my own tooling. All this writing has taken a toll
Now I've got it uncurl one of my mascara long lashes and use it to slide down the pole fireperson style to the wood bearing of my ancestors.
Another branch except that it's wider and I can wax it with my yellow feet go sliding it's no fun to sit around texting alone. Syl is there.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tweety Bird Sings
I am Tweety Bird with big fat yellow feet. I take orders from a Hummingbird at the red feeder. A cartoon? Please don’t sit and laugh at me.
Why do I have wings? Why do I have fat yellow feet? Guide my faith. Fly to the Basilica to kiss the Senator's lips. See both brothers there.
This morning Sylvester and I are in serious traffic. We want to go swimming, do laps, and then go hide out in the steam room with the steam.
Sylvester wouldn't swim in the pool he ran into the women's dressing room with his red bathing cap doesn't like water such a silly puddy tat
Container ships troll the water for promises as I drive my honey way out to the airport. How can I help but love a warm furry cat who sings?
Maybe not so good. Hummingbird is my spirit guide. She flits outside the door and tells me not to put chicken stock in such things off key.
Syl wants to be an action hero and autograph cars. How can I tell him he's just a cat? In spotty times as these, we all have to face inward.
Wild fires swipe me into submission. Gray water feathers down my back. The Statue of Librty is getting red highlights. So who does her hair?
Why do I have wings? Why do I have fat yellow feet? Guide my faith. Fly to the Basilica to kiss the Senator's lips. See both brothers there.
This morning Sylvester and I are in serious traffic. We want to go swimming, do laps, and then go hide out in the steam room with the steam.
Sylvester wouldn't swim in the pool he ran into the women's dressing room with his red bathing cap doesn't like water such a silly puddy tat
Container ships troll the water for promises as I drive my honey way out to the airport. How can I help but love a warm furry cat who sings?
Maybe not so good. Hummingbird is my spirit guide. She flits outside the door and tells me not to put chicken stock in such things off key.
Syl wants to be an action hero and autograph cars. How can I tell him he's just a cat? In spotty times as these, we all have to face inward.
Wild fires swipe me into submission. Gray water feathers down my back. The Statue of Librty is getting red highlights. So who does her hair?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
A Cautionary Tale
This is a cautionary tale about how for the want of a valid email address a museum serving the East Bay community for 35 years was lost.
The museum in question is the Hall of Health. Based in Berkeley, California, this is an interactive, hands-on health museum and science center for children and families sponsored by Children's Hospital which funds the project. The museum's doors closed on July 18. Up until this time, the Museum hosted any number of innovative programs, for example, Brain Awareness Week, and demonstrated the real effects of diet and drugs on the body.
So what happened? I spoke with Lucy Day, PhD, who has served as director of the museum since 1992. According to Day, what happened was a domino cascade with all the pieces "falling the wrong way."
The proposal from the Hall of Health was no exception. Day had submitted the proposal to the National Institutes of Health a week in advance of the actual deadline on May 18th. In past years, she explained, the NIH always returned grant proposals before the deadline with an email message calling attention to a correction or omission before acceptance.
Oddly enough, this time none came. Day assumed that with all her past practice, the proposal had sailed through. But after the deadline had passed, staff inquired as to the status of the proposal, and received alarming news. NIH had never received the file. Everyone at the museum started to panic. And backtrack fast.
Day explained that there are only two people at Children's Hospital who are authorized to submit these proposals. An assistant to one of these individuals recognized that the materials needed to be sent to a Web address for completion of a form and then for the final push of a "Submit" button.
The $200,000 proposal was to pay for staff and funding for a health and biomedical science program for diverse communities, and also disseminating a fourth and fifth grade curriculum on issues that affect everyone, but in particular, statistically impacting Blacks, Latinos, and American Indian populations.
But the actual web address got confused with entering a valid email address for the museum. When the grant proposal was finally sent out, the URL was accidentally entered as an email address.
Still, the NIH returned an error message to inform staff about the correction. But as fortune would have it, the NIH message came back without an "@" symbol and was relegated into the spam folder on the Children's Hospital side of things. It seems as though the IT staff had not completed a newly installed firewall that could more finely distinguish between real email and spam.
Bert Lubin, MD, president and now CEO of Children's Hospital, called the highest people he could reach at NIH to see if there was anything they could do, especially since the information had been submitted before the deadline. NIH demurred. They explained that proposals had already gone through the peer review process, but they would keep the hospital in mind if additional funding money came through the ARRA (American Reinvestment and Recovery Act) pipeline for education programs.
Too late for right now. Dr. Lubin requested four months of a half-time salary from NIH to allow Day to complete a lesson plan book and CD of the science curriculum to ensure that this part of the museum's work would not be lost. Traveling exhibits are still doing the rounds at a number of other museums, including the Global Health Odyssey at the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Challenger Learning Center in California's Central Valley. After three years, the Hall of Health can reclaim its exhibits if it is able to reopen.
Keep your fingers crossed.
The takeaway? Day said, "If you're sending an important email message, always get a confirmation."
The museum in question is the Hall of Health. Based in Berkeley, California, this is an interactive, hands-on health museum and science center for children and families sponsored by Children's Hospital which funds the project. The museum's doors closed on July 18. Up until this time, the Museum hosted any number of innovative programs, for example, Brain Awareness Week, and demonstrated the real effects of diet and drugs on the body.
So what happened? I spoke with Lucy Day, PhD, who has served as director of the museum since 1992. According to Day, what happened was a domino cascade with all the pieces "falling the wrong way."
The proposal from the Hall of Health was no exception. Day had submitted the proposal to the National Institutes of Health a week in advance of the actual deadline on May 18th. In past years, she explained, the NIH always returned grant proposals before the deadline with an email message calling attention to a correction or omission before acceptance.
Oddly enough, this time none came. Day assumed that with all her past practice, the proposal had sailed through. But after the deadline had passed, staff inquired as to the status of the proposal, and received alarming news. NIH had never received the file. Everyone at the museum started to panic. And backtrack fast.
Day explained that there are only two people at Children's Hospital who are authorized to submit these proposals. An assistant to one of these individuals recognized that the materials needed to be sent to a Web address for completion of a form and then for the final push of a "Submit" button.
The $200,000 proposal was to pay for staff and funding for a health and biomedical science program for diverse communities, and also disseminating a fourth and fifth grade curriculum on issues that affect everyone, but in particular, statistically impacting Blacks, Latinos, and American Indian populations.
But the actual web address got confused with entering a valid email address for the museum. When the grant proposal was finally sent out, the URL was accidentally entered as an email address.
Still, the NIH returned an error message to inform staff about the correction. But as fortune would have it, the NIH message came back without an "@" symbol and was relegated into the spam folder on the Children's Hospital side of things. It seems as though the IT staff had not completed a newly installed firewall that could more finely distinguish between real email and spam.
Bert Lubin, MD, president and now CEO of Children's Hospital, called the highest people he could reach at NIH to see if there was anything they could do, especially since the information had been submitted before the deadline. NIH demurred. They explained that proposals had already gone through the peer review process, but they would keep the hospital in mind if additional funding money came through the ARRA (American Reinvestment and Recovery Act) pipeline for education programs.
Too late for right now. Dr. Lubin requested four months of a half-time salary from NIH to allow Day to complete a lesson plan book and CD of the science curriculum to ensure that this part of the museum's work would not be lost. Traveling exhibits are still doing the rounds at a number of other museums, including the Global Health Odyssey at the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Challenger Learning Center in California's Central Valley. After three years, the Hall of Health can reclaim its exhibits if it is able to reopen.
Keep your fingers crossed.
The takeaway? Day said, "If you're sending an important email message, always get a confirmation."
Sunday, August 23, 2009
An Object of Desire
| Marketers study the way we talk together, listening in on conversations, trying to understand how people interact online. It's a new science, a hunt on for the new metric to evaluate marketing in the world of social networking. Page views, RSS, brand recognition, information moving us to the purchase of a product. And at what moment does the critical wallet pull happen and why? It seems as though the best marketers agree (at least they did at the 8/19 San Mateo forum) -- while they're all interested in their sworn company's' bottom line, in the long run it's the one-to-one relationship with a customer that counts (I've always been at on the outskirts of being a party girl myself), and the biggest mistake is to abandon a relationship once you've established it. The trust factor vaporizes into smoked candy. So what's does a social network of patients suffering from dementia sound like? Honey. How are you? Today? Go. Stay. All bright.Lenore Weiss http://www.lenoreweiss.com |
Friday, August 21, 2009
Power to the People
Jermiah Owyang, esteemed social web analyst for Forrester Research, outlines a new social history that consists of five eras: 1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system 3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social 4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content 5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services Much of the discussion surrounding paid social network research is about big brand names wanting to understand how to adjust their marketing strategy. But wait a sec. Can someone please stop defining me as a consumer? What was a particularly interesting to me the evening of the Social Media forum had to do with a conversation before the panel with my two seat mates, who were also gobbling wonderful pastries. The two user interface designers and I commiserated about our mutual Facebook accounts and being consistently approached by people we didn't know who wanted to join our network. But is it just a numbers game? A kind of "my network is bigger than your network" thing? From my end of the sidewalk, it's about why we connect to people that asks for more definition. More later. |
Friday, August 14, 2009
Summer: Highway 80 to Davis, California
An oak tree nestles in the flank of a hill
where there’s a facing hill with an oak tree and a hill beyond.
Spit shine on the roof of new automobiles,
crushed clunkers in netting on flatbed trucks,
acres of sunflowers sold for seeds,
shopping malls checkered with need and desire and plastic cups,
telephone poles vibrating in the whine of windmills,
an oleander traffic divider
shouldering red and white exhaust.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Jew Girl
Why must youth be sacrificed on a bloody scaffold...?
--from Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary
You traced letters in the air with an index finger
balancing on a table on a bed on a chair
broadcasting morning news
to your prison cell mates
closing out each segment with a Star of David
Other tricks
You covered an empty talcum powder tin
with silver foil
attached buds of white tissue paper
blades of straw from your mattress
threaded through each foxhole
A bouquet of roses
Biedermeir dolls Rococo dolls ballet dancer dolls
Carmens Madame Butterfly Tosca’s
Palestine boy and girl kibbutzniks
with pick and shovel in the olive groves of Caesarea
passed between the bars of Conti Street Prison
At 23 a match
consumed in its own kindling
lighting the way to Eretz Israel
where you could not escape
the bitch of history wanting
the flame to burn inside your heart
always Jewish
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