What Obama Has Done In Two Years

Actually, a lot.

Motor City

Via a post at David Byrne's blog about Detroit.

Maps Of Europe

America's view:


And other perspectives via Strange Maps.

Short Film, Coachella

It's Election Time!

Clown News

Tiririca!

Photo

Poll

A poll you can trust.

Chart

Video (High Seas)

Rough seas.

Harlem Night Clubs 1932

Details at Big Think.

Photo c.1910

From an incredible series at The Big Picture of color photos taken in Russia a hundred years ago.

Good Tree Gone

Story here.

Poem

This poem, it seems to me, honors anyone ever lost at sea.

New Religion
by Bill Holm

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

"New Religion" by Bill Holm, from The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems. © Milkweed Editions, 2009.

Short Film

Photo

More photos by Johanna Heldebro.

Poem

As a fan of a good rack of ribs in summertime, I am compelled to post this poem by William Notter called "Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz".

She had a truck, red hair,
and freckled knees and took me all the way
to Memphis after work for barbecue.
We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs
and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers,
gnawing the hickory char, the slow
smoked meat peeling off the bones,
and finally the bones. We slurped
grease and dry-rub spice from our fingers,
then finished with blackberry cobbler
that stained her lips and tongue.

All the trees were throwing fireworks
of blossom, the air was thick
with pollen and the brand-new smell of leaves.
We drove back roads in the watermelon dusk,
then tangled around each other, delirious
as honeybees working wisteria.
I could blame it all on cinnamon hair,
or the sap rising, the overflow of spring,
but it was those ribs that started everything.

"Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz" by William Notter, from Holding Everything Down. © Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.

Quote

"He does most in God's great world who does his best in his own little world." - Thomas Jefferson

Photo

Quote

"We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are not the best informed as to the events of the last sixty centuries."- Will Durant