harvestbird

I internalised authority fairly quickly and didn’t get in any serious trouble much beyond my early primary school years. However, in my first months of school I was continually told off for a variety of non-conforming offences: calling out, running, reading out loud too fast, sitting in the wrong place, standing in the wrong place, not understanding the rules of the game, failing to give way to older children.

Oh, and in fifth form I signed a petition protesting the suspension of two of my classmates and got chewed out with the rest of the signatories en masse.

Ask me anything

In all matters of southside upholstery, it is necessary to balance form (or aesthetics) and function (or, shall we say, structural integrity). This of course is difficult to do when you get up late, thrust your arm into the underwear draw unseen, and wear whatever emerges hanging off your wrist.

Ask me anything

• Hiring open source developers and the problem of women’s free time.
• TelstraClear is working with the google to solve your problem.
• An estimated inventory of global nuclear weapons.  How many do you need?
• Insane Clown Posse resists the Enlightenment.
• And finally, a contrastive exhibition from Art and My Life.

This is what happens when I have work to do that precludes downtime ‘pon the internet.

• WHERE IS THE LIGHTBULB?  All arrests of the silly young should involve at least one absurdist statement by which the alleged offenders are confused straight.
• “Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now.”  (This will shortly include harvestmother.)
• Shayne Carter’s mum makes an album of Elvis covers, which her son describes as “White person soul music straight out of Brockville”.
• “if your dad doesn’t have a beard … you’ve got two mums, … two beardless mums”.  (Word.)
  

Via Another Chance to See and Twitter.

What a marvellously open-ended question. I’m digging pretty deeply at work at the moment, so either some greater reserves of character or a more insouciant attitude would probably salve that challenge either way.

I’m also thinking I might need to make a regular massage appointment by way of offsetting the general weariness of my greater heftiness.

Ask me anything

I am having such a rest. This is in response to Easter being a holiday, rather than the major religious festival in the Christian calendar.

Ask me anything

This is literally as adorable as a thing or collection of things is allowed to be. 

It is The Law.

Click to see the image at full size.

Some of you may be aware of my regular poetry gig at Bat Bean Beam.  Recent, the redoutable Lyndon Hood was seen remark, enigmatically, ‘pon Twitter

http://werewolf.co.nz teaser (due tomorrow-ish): has me, effectively, playing @harvestbird to @gtiso’s http://bit.ly/9pEa1J

Today, the fruits of that labour appeared:

A Farewell to Welfare

“The dream is over.”
– Paula Bennet on welfare changes.

I had a dream,
If I might share,
Some time ago;
It was quite queer:

Where people thought
(And also voiced)
Those with no money
Weren’t so by choice.

Instead of to
Survive, they’d give
To needy folk
So they could live.

Enough for help
In all thoses messes
Making ladders
To successes.

(And in my dream
Those who’d climbed them
Didn’t pull them
Up behind them.)

They weren’t (“To show
How much we care”)
Forced into jobs
That were not there,

And work was found
Using this test:
Not first to hand
But suited best.

(The word for that
Now escapes me.
Oh wait, that’s right:
Productivity.)

The people there
Would not (the dolts!)
Let children starve
For parents’ faults.

I had a dream
Where poverty
Was thought a thing
That shouldn’t be.

And in that dream
(I was surprised!)
One could be poor
And not despised.

I had a dream –
As is the deal
With dreams (and hopes),
It wasn’t real.