Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Poetry Wednesday

Sonnet 101 from Fulke Greville's Caelica:

In night when colours all to black are cast,
    Distinction lost, or gone down with the light ;
The eye a watch to inward senses plac'd,
    Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,
Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
    Where fear stirr'd up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence
    Doth forge and raise impossibility ;
Such as in thick-depriving darkness
    Proper reflections of the error be ;
And images of self-confusedness,
    Which hurt imaginations only see,
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils ;
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Noted in passing

On election night, 2008, I signed up for Barack Obama's mailing list under the name Fred Mertz. I get a regular supply of spam from them, sent from Organizing for America and BarackObama.com. In the last week or so they've really stepped up the volume with abject pleas and imperious demands for more and more money. This desperate barrage of requests for money is getting really annoying - I've never seen anything like it from any other spammer.