I'm not great at memorizing, and I have no desire to do bar pick-ups, with poetry or without. Nor does "Sex Advice from Poets" seem like a great idea for anyone. But I like the below sentiment from the Nerve series. Stressed, I read the first poem the other day, and it worked.

I have trouble speaking to women in bars. A simple "hello" always feels abrupt, and yet most "lines" are cheesy. Any advice for how to get things started?

Memorize Keats’s sonnet beginning with the line, “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” Practice reading it aloud until you can speak the lines naturally and have committed them to memory. Once you have successfully done this, move on to the same poet’s sonnet on first reading Chapman’s Homer, his odes on melancholy and on the Grecian urn, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and “To Autumn,” and, for variety and contrast, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and “Ode to the West Wind” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “Work Without Hope.” Once you have memorized these poems and can unfailingly produce them at a moment’s notice, you will be a better man, and questions about breaking the ice and avoiding cheesy lines will cease to bother your teeming brain.

I was told I would love Fredericksburg's Christmas Parade, and I did.

I loved it partially because of the man above and partially because of the scenes below, but I also loved it because here was a place and a town that should have had Christmas parades and most certainly did.

Everyone in town must have turned out. The sidewalks were packed. Restaurants had $1 hot cocoa sales. Children sat still on couches and cheered. Tweens feigned too-cool-ness but, safe in their packs, were still there. The grown-ups, we had cider from the coffee shop (decked in instructions for maybe the biggest night of the year), hot cider-and-rum in travel mugs, High Life in red Solo cups, fried raviolis, a popcorn machine, and a healthy sense of wanting to hold on to nice moments.

Lori's friends at Riverby Books welcomed us into their celebration, and we got a great street view of the festivities. As the staff-only back and stockrooms of bookstores have always held a place in my soul (thanks to the Cheshire Cat's bank vault of a basement in high school), I even liked beer and bathroom runs. That was how much I loved the parade.

Getting ready — Joe Cool in his Joe Cool t-shirt with his Joe Cools.

Balloon man, hustling, smoking, pushing, doing big balloon business.

We find at our parade spot with Lori's friends at Riverby Books. Yes:

Finally the sun goes down. The parade begins!

More in this post »

From Robert Krulwich's stellar commencement address at the Berkeley journalism school. (Inside the link, stay tuned for the ending too.)

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different.  Anderson Cooper, different still. When you grow up in different decades, you laugh at different jokes, hear different machines, (typewriters versus computers, pinball machines versus Mario Brothers), you hear different ads, jingles, songs, sounds.

When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it’s going to come out differently and it will speak in beats of their own generation.

The people in charge, of course, don’t want to change. They like the music they’ve got.  To the newcomers, they say, "Wait your turn."

But in a world like this… rampant with new technologies, and new ways to do things, the newcomers… that means you… you here today, you have to trust your music… It’s how you talk to people your age, your generation. This is how we change.

I like this sentiment, "trust your music." I like it so much I'm struggling with it right now, actually. In year two at work, we're trying some new things. Last year, we reset the baseline on what our storytelling tools and systems could do. Now our team is building on top of what we did, looking for different news-as-music sounds, moving from fundamentals to calculated risk and the potential for music's sophomore slumping. I would love to trust my music… but I want to finish the next record first.

It's somewhat comforting this morning to run across Paste's YouTube-laden list of the best live bands of 2011. The choices include a favorite, the Kopecky Family Band, but to the current concern, the diversity and presence of the sounds are what help me. These different people hear music, different music from each other, and have to take it somewhere.

They're not unlike the small man in the terrific Address Is Approximate video circulating this week. The desk toy climbs into another desk toy, a convertible model, and crosses the country and its vistas by means of Google Street View on the screen in front of him. He has a minimal audience and no users, no one else who needs to go on this journey too. Paste's bands, when they're doing live right, lose track of needs as well. They focus more on where they're going, and they believe if they know music well enough and people well enough, everyone else may want to come along. As Krulwich argues, this is how we change.

Someone has probably already used that title to headline a review of Synetic Theater's wordless production of Romeo and Juliet. But Google tells me no one has yet, so I'm going to strike while the iron is silent.

Lori and I saw the show yesterday night, the last of the theater's fall series reviving its award-winning Shakespeare work — Macbeth, Othello and now the greatest romance of them all. You should go. The revival runs until the 23rd. I really enjoyed it. Lori really enjoyed it. Friend and colleague Lauren and her husband Steve really enjoyed, and Lauren is a former dancer and arts manager. Don't buy my yokel view? Buy hers.

The performance is as wordless as they claim. You build the story from what you know already and the music, dance, set, and lights they use to assemble the plot and its themes. At the center? "… set within the gears of a giant clock, Romeo and Juliet highlights the exuberance and passion of youth in which time seems to both stop and accelerate," a director's note explains. While my first reaction was to see the gears as the machinations of fate, maybe such a connection still holds. You can feel the clock above you? Then your destiny isn't quite your own.

It's interesting afterward to hear the audience applaud but not cheer aloud much, having brought into a space without words. It's intriguing afterward to find yourself in dinner conversation that keeps returning to time and relationships and not realize as much until the next night.

If you're older than Juliet and Romeo and still find yourself pushing on these strictures, alone or with another, you're doing something right.

Started to make a list, but then the list gave away everything. What I realized was that I just wanted to show the YouTube video to people who hadn't seen it yet. So, yes, here we are, listless but spoiler-free.

The Grishams invited me to join them at the Kennedy Center on Friday, seeing George Benson sing Nat King Cole. We lucked into an amazing day outside, part of a good run of amazing days. After an introductory NSO Pops set from the very enthusiastic Steven Reineke (less than a minute into his conducting, Lori leaned over and whispered "G.O.B."), Benson explored Cole's catalog and won the crowd easily for the next hour. I heard the two songs I really wanted to hear — Walkin' My Baby Back Home, my first introduction to Cole, via an Ed Sullivan compilation, and Mona Lisa – and others for which I was glad to receive reminders.

What Benson did better than I could have imagined was hit Cole's big opening notes. Cole did not enter songs cautiously. In the first word or first line, he delivered the tone of the song in his own style, and there was no looking back at the time before the song began. Covering him, Benson jumped in, seemingly unafraid, and reached the ends of those starters unscathed. "If I had to chooose… just onne dayyy" and so on.

We walked around the Kennedy Center's upper balcony after, and the day felt similar. Winter did a summer cover and sang that big first note.

I've seen and loved a lot of '70s disaster movies, and there are many more I plan to see and love. But out of what I've seen so far, the best line has to come from 1974's Earthquake. My brother and I may have laughed aloud together when we first saw it. It's perfectly ridiculous.

Lorne Greene, whom you may know best as Bonzana's Ben Cartwright, plays executive Sam Royce. When the big one strikes, Royce and right-hand man Charlton Heston have to help others escape their high-rise.

Running out of answers, they find a chair they can lower using the fire hose. But how will they secure the injured to the chair? Royce turns to his secretary and barks, "Barbara, take off your pantyhose, dammit!"

Overnight Saturday into Sunday, while I was asleep, my computer had a hard crash and couldn't open Microsoft Outlook upon reboot. No new email! Years of old email hanging in the balance! Working through the recovery steps tonight, ultimately successful, I felt like Royce, dammit.

Somehow I ended up on the catalog list for Viva Terra, "inspired green giving." Inside the mailing this season, I found the "Living Ecosphere."

Surrounded on the page by silver ornaments and gold bracelets on the page, the Living Ecosphere was a glass, water-filled egg. It cost $89.

An entire self-sustaining ecosystem thrives within this attractive hand-blown glass sphere: Plants, live shrimp, algae, and micro-organisms. It requires only indirect light and moderate temperatures, and offers hours of fascinating viewing. Each EcoSphere comes with a handbook that explains how it works and how to care for it.

That's right, wealthy green people. You've paid $89 for sea monkeys.

Biggest yet, I think. Starting with cider, beer and cheese in the kitchen.

Cousin Greg pries open oysters. Minutes later, I discover I like oysters.

Lego turkey!

More in this post »

It's Thanksgiving, the day of the year I google my family's ancestor on the Mayflower. Francis Cooke may not have been the romantic rebel I once thought he was, but part of his bio stood out for me this morning.

When Cooke was passing age 70, Plymouth Governor William Bradford penned: "Francis Cooke is still living, a very olde man, and hath seene his childrens children have children; after his wife [Hester] came over (with other of his children), he hath 3 still living by her, all maried, and have 5 children; so their encrease is 8. And his sone John, which came over with him [on the Mayflower], is maried, and hath 4 children living."

Cooke lived to around 80.

To start a settlement in a free land, to live well past the life expectancy of your time, to have a great family, to have the governor write about your life, those are good reasons to be thankful. My takeaway from all this is that Francis Cooke saw getting to Plymouth Rock and that initial Thanksgiving as just steps in a life. Thank you to him for aiming long.