Tag: digest

First things first:

Your Bloguero is still here.  So apparently are you.  You might have wished that you and/or your Bloguero would disappear or be somewhere more celestial today, but, alas, there’s bad news, here’s that old keyboard, and the screen, and the chair, and the rest of it.  (Warning of coming cliché). Same thing, different day.  And that pesky weekly Digest.  (Warning of coming cliché). It’s déjà vu all over again.

Lest you think your Bloguero thought there was any chance at all that he would not be here, you’d be sorely mistaken.  How, your Bloguero wants to know, could the world end in May, 2011, when the Mayan Calendar extends into 2012?  And (Warning of coming insult) how could anybody think that even the end of that venerable calendar would mean the actual end of the world?   Your Bloguero has it on good authority that there is an actual, physical day after the “last date” in the calendar  (Warning of coming insulting cliché).  You can take this to the bank.  Nobody, your Bloguero is beginning again to fulminate, is leaving  Earth until its inhabitants, and that would include your Bloguero and you, dear reader, clean up their extensive, unremitting, toxic mess.

The idea that there is escape makes your Bloguero (Warning of coming unusual word) “splenetic”.  Your Bloguero’s friends at Merriam Webster put it this way:

marked by bad temper, malevolence, or spite

(Warning of coming colloquialism) That would be your Bloguero to a T.  And why, you might inquire, is your Bloguero in such pique?  Your Bloguero will make believe you didn’t ask that particular question.  You, he is sure, do not want to read the 900-page list of what might be called humankind’s “toxic messes” that need immediate, focused attention, rather than this (Warning of coming cliché) “dog ate my homework” scenario where it’s ok just to (Warning of coming cliché) close the door, turn out the lights, and go home (as if this weren’t your planetary home).  Your Bloguero wishes to point out that the planet deserves more.  A lot more.

The Dream Antilles was relatively quiet this week.  Nothing was posted after Sunday.  Your Bloguero found himself enmeshed in terrestrial and extraterrestrial concerns.  No, he is not going to discuss them here.

Visualizing That Tightrope is so much fun.  Your Bloguero put a photo of Philippe Petit crossing a wire between the tops of the World Trade Towers in1974 with the greatest video of “Tightrope” by Janelle Monae.  This is just a wonderful music video, and Janelle Monae is a Goddess.  Your Bloguero hopes you will check it out.

Your Bloguero broke his usual silence about local, legal issues to post two pieces.  The November Judicial Race In Columbia County focuses on the fact that the electorate has no clue what goes on in the Columbia County Courthouse in Hudson, New York, and your Bloguero’s view that this ignorance is a huge problem.  And Enough. A Plea To Abolish New York’s Town Courts” looks at the enormous waste and duplication statewide in local, Justice of the Peace courts that really in your Bloguero’s opinion should be closed down.  It’s a topic that has emerged time and time again for four decades.  Oddly, those who are concerned about deficits and taxes find this multi-million dollar boondoggle invisible.  (Irony Warning: maybe they see it and just ignore it? (Warning of coming cliche)  Ya think?).

And finally, por que estamas hasta la madre, Demonstrations Called for June  10 in Ciudad Juarez announces that Javier Sicilia and the movement will be marching and demonstrating in Juarez on June 10.  (Warning of coming cliché).  Be there or be square.

Finally, your Bloguero notes that this Digest was once a weekly feature.  Last week’s was supposedly the last of that series of Digests.  But just like the end of the world, some things continue regardless of what anyone may predict about them.  Or wish for.  Your Bloguero, though, needs encouragement.  You don’t need to send him money (though you could click the the Donation Box at the Dream Antilles).  He’d be happy if after you read this Digest you just clicked the “tip jar” in the comments.  That way he’d know that you visited.  Hasta pronto.

Well, that’s it.  Your Bloguero has finally decided that he’s had enough of writing weekly digests that probably don’t get read widely, so he’s going to take this weekly digest to the last roundup.   Unless unforeseen events require otherwise, this is the very last one.  It’s just like Gene Autry sang in 1933 but without the yodeling:

Be sure to wave your sombrero as your Bloguero rides off with his comic sidekick into a cactus filled digest sunset.   He’s riding that old paint to The Dream Antilles, his home sweet home on the range.  (Ironic Note to Reader: Where the antelopes play? Wiki says no antelopes are native to North America.)

(Further Note to Reader: A brief but probably necessary disclaimer.  Your Bloguero does not necessarily support the raising and/or slaughter and/or eating of cattle.  Your Bloguero, however, reserves his right to choose appropriate metaphors that might involve non-native species and/or cows and/or an excess of sentimentality.  No violence was done to any animals to produce these metaphors.)

Your Bloguero has been fulminating about the death penalty for decades.  This week, when it looked like Connecticut was finally going to join the rest of the civilized world by abolishing the death penalty, the forces of reaction won an important battle.  Connecticut Clings To Death Penalty  Barely.  skewers the tortured nonsense relied upon by two state legislators to change their promised vote for life to an ignominious vote for death.  The battle continues, one step forward, two steps back.  (Note to Reader: Your Bloguero apologizes for this cliché.  Like all clichés it fit like a glove.  Sorry.)

Estamos hasta la madre means “We’re fed up!” and is the rallying cry of the people’s democracy movement in Mexico to end the drug violence.   One of its leaders is the poet and teacher, Javier Sicilia, whose son was killed.  Sicilia’s dramatic story is in the essay.  And his incredibly important speech to the march this past Sunday in the Zocalo (Mexico City’s Central Park) is required reading.   Your Bloguero compares this movement to the democracy movements in Tunisia and Egypt.  Unfortunately, the traditional media seem unwilling or unable to make that connection, and apparently prefer to continue to report the lurid, horrific violence in the border states and to ignore the efforts of Mexicans to end the violence.

Sunday Evening Inspiration is a wonderful music video produced by Amnesty International.  Your Bloguero counsels you to turn this up, get back from the keyboard, get out of the chair, and shake it.  Your Bloguero is with Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolucion.”

An important writer you’ve probably never heard of is Horacio Castellanos Moya.  Born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador, he is now living and writing in Pittsburgh.  “Senselessness” (Insensatez) is a short, scorching, scary novel, and one that your Bloguero highly recommends.   Sometimes The Dream Antilles actually resumes its focus as a “lit blog.”  And when it does, your Bloguero likes to inform about the Latin American writers your Bloguero enjoys so much.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest was a weekly feature.  This is the last of that series of Digests.  Your Bloguero tried to post these Digests on Saturday morning early.  He almost never succeeded in that.  And so, the series goes out as it began, posted at the wrong time.  Hasta pronto.

OMG!  OMG!! Has a week already elapsed?  Is today almost  Saturday?  Again? Is it time for that weekly digest?  Inquiring minds, including your Bloguero’s, want to know whether there was anything posted this week at the Dream Antilles for which your Bloguero is willing to take public responsibility.  

It was a complicated week, one beyond facile description.  Perhaps beyond comprehension.  And the writing?  What writing?  The writing at The Dream Antilles? That is best described by this rising and then descending sound: “Harrrrrrrrrrgh.”  Yes, your Bloguero confirms, as you may already have guessed, that to his dismay, your Bloguero’s muse apparently went fishing.  Again. This time for brown trout.  Her present whereabouts are undetermined.  And your Bloguero hasn’t heard from her.  She was last seen wading thigh deep in a rushing stream during a rain storm.  She was wearing a hat that looked like Indiana Jones’s and rain was dripping off the brim.  Your Bloguero briefly contemplated putting an ad up for her return (with a generous reward) on Craigslist, rejected that idea and then more characteristically began to sulk.  And mope.  Whining will probably be next.  These unattractive behaviors threaten to abound.  Until she returns.  And your Bloguero elects now to veil these unattractive behaviors from your view with an imaginary curtain.  There.  On with the task at hand.

The Elephant. (Parenthetical Note to reader: Quite a transition wasn’t that? (Parenthetical Note to reader to the previous Parenthetical Note: Your Bloguero misses the writing of David Foster Wallace.))  A short piece inspired in some fashion by writing by Macedonio in Museo de la Novela de Eterna, and with a must see video of a swimming elephant.  One reader (perhaps, in candor, this should read, “the reader”) inquired if the elephant was happy when, after swimming, she returned to land.  Your Bloguero noted with great comfort that the guy in the red hat in the video is Jacques Cousteau, and that, therefore, no animals’ feelings were hurt in any way in the making of this video.  (Parenthetical Note to reader: This is a professional elephant.  Do not try this at home with amateur elephants.  Or faux oceans.)

Death Of A Mass Murderer notes the killing of OBL and your Bloguero’s disappointment at the chanting, the partying, the cheering, the celebration of death.  Your Bloguero quotes extensively from a piece written by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that captures your Bloguero’s feelings.  The Bible, your Bloguero notes, is really useful here because among other things it is a repository for the Mythic.  The rejoicing of the Israelites at the death of their Pharaoh seemed to fit this event.

One other comment about the death of OBL.  Your Bloguero is alarmed at the repeated euphemistic use of the verb “got” to describe this event.  As in “we got him.”  This is not “got milk?”  This is not, as GWB uttered about Sadam H, “We got him,” meaning that he had been captured by troops and imprisoned.  This is a different “got.”  It’s now apparently a euphemistic synonym for killed.  It resembles in some ways that age old junior high school taunt, “I’m going to get you for that!”  Other verbs for the salient part of the event, which are probably more descriptive and at least as accurate as “got,” might be “shot” or “killed” or “executed” or even “murdered.”  If killing OBL was such a wonderful event, and evidently it is claimed to have been one, doesn’t it deserve to be called by its real name?  Not just by Obama, but also by the Trad Media?  Or is the use of “got” as the operable verb in this case chosen because it most resembles what imaginary TV cowboys might say and prolongs one’s feelings of justifiable revenge?

Finally, your Bloguero notes the passing of Ernesto Sabato a giant of Argentinian writing.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature.  Your Bloguero tries to post this Digest on Saturday morning early.  He almost never succeeds in that.  But this week, to his utter amazement, he almost did.  Your bloguero will be back next week, hopefully on Saturday morning early if his Muse returns.

A week of sighs.  And gratitude.  Spring finally arrived in the formerly frozen tundra in which your Bloguero has been confined since the Fall.  There are now daffodils and tulips.  The shagbark is in flower, and the leaves have finally started to unfold.  Among the sounds your Bloguero hears is his own sigh of relief after a very long, very hard winter.  The next sounds will probably include lawn mowers.  And the hatching of the starling chicks in the nest these uninvited birds have built for the fourth year running in your Bloguero’s bathroom vent.  For now, it is enough again to put duct tape on the switch for the fan, and sit idly in the sun and feel its warmth.  Gracias, gracias, gracias, gracias for your Bloguero’s long journey from Winter to Spring.

Others have been far less fortunate.  The Storms in Alabama and other parts of the South have killed hundreds and devastated communities.  And in Ecuador Tungurahua has erupted.  The radiation in Japan continues, though it has slipped off the front pages.  It was a week in which Pachamama again undermined belief in the planet’s immutability and demonstrated her capacity for constant change, ever evolving impermanence.  She is clearly unhappy.  Humankind, however, apparently doesn’t pay attention.  Or seek supplication.  It is far happier with the facile, the grotesque spectacle of an imperial wedding and the Republican sociopathy when confronted with the President’s birth certificate.  It’s no wonder that Pachamama is so unhappy.

Phoebe Snow passed on.  For many, many years she devoted her life to caring for her child.  She and her flutelike voice, sometimes almost a yodel, will be sorely missed.  Thank goodness for Youtube.

A Dangerous Idea transformed your Bloguero’s expressed giddiness at the idea of his metaphorically becoming a human cannonball into dour sobriety.  An English human cannonball was killed when his safety net “failed to engage.”  A sad story.

A Victory Cigar announced your bloguero’s completion of the manuscript for his second novel, Tulum.  What’s it all about?

The book, set in Tulum in Mexico’s Yucatan and in Cuba, is at once a travelogue, a love story, and the story of the unlikely friendship of a Mayan Curandero and a middle aged, gringo expat with a shady past, who ultimately embarks, as an apprentice, on the path of becoming a Shaman. There will be no spoiler here. The book, drawn from the deep cenote of Magical Realism, adopts Carlos Fuentes’s guidance:

A writer should never know the whole story. He imagines one part and asks the reader to finish it. A book should never close. The reader should continue it.

Put another way, your Bloguero’s not telling much.  Not yet.  He’s turning it over to you, the reader.  He’s telling just enough to whet your materialist streak, the part of your internal dialogue that whispers, “You know, I really should buy a copy of that and read it.  Did he say it was his second book?  What was the first one like?”

And your Bloguero noted Shakespeare’s birthday with his favorite quote from the Tempest.  You know the one.  After all, your Bloguero believes, we are all such stuff as dreams are made on.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature.  Your Bloguero usually posts this Digest on Saturday morning early.  He hopes that you will (again) forgive his putting it up a trifle early.  Your bloguero will be back next week, hopefully on Saturday morning early.

At long last, your Bloguero’s Muse returned from her long vacation, all tanned, relaxed, full of stories of exotic places, and most important, offering encouragement for completion your Bloguero’s novel.  As far as the novel goes, it’s much easier to deal with the Muse than with her partner in creativity, the Crone.  If the Muse is air; the Crone, fire.  Suffice it to say that the novel moves steadily toward completion, at all times gingerly keeping a step or two ahead of the flames.  The Muse was sweet.  And poignant.  “How were things while I was away?” she asked.  I lied.  I said they were ok, fine, going well, moving right along.  “Now, now, now” she replied in a whisper, shaking hear head.  “I’ve read what you’ve been writing.  Let’s try to be accurate with each other, shall we?”   At least she didn’t suck her teeth.  Or call me a prevaricator.  This is a conversation that I don’t ever want to have with her fierce partner.

Thursday was a huge milestone,  The One Thousandth Post On The Dream Antilles.  Your Bloguero is astonished to have reached this point.  He can hear some people muttering, “Well, so that’s what you’ve been doing with your time instead of….”  The long string of objects after that “instead of” is the catalog of things that evidently were less important to your Bloguero than sitting at the keyboard.  Your Bloguero is not proud of the list.   Only time will tell whether these choices made any real sense.  The cliché has not yet been written about whether people on their death beds say they wished they spent more time writing for their blogs.

Step Right Up And Meet The Mets notes that the Mets are simply awful and are losing at a rate guaranteed to make them lose more than 100 games this season. It’s just April, but based on what your Bloguero has seen so far, their season is over.  They are toast.  Why is this important?  Because the Mets are a distraction your Bloguero enjoys.  And this year, to be blunt, because they stink they are not adequately distracting him.

Your Bloguero celebrated and noted in passing 420 Day.  The War on Drugs, so named by Richard M. Nixon, has been raging for more than forty years.  As wars go, it is among the most expensive, stupid and unproductive.  Your Bloguero joins with Peter Tosh and Bob Marley to say, “Legalize it!”  And he encourages you to make a donation to NORML.  Four decades of stupidity is quite enough.  Your donations might turn the tide.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest was a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance.  It appears for reasons that your Bloguero is extremely hardpressed to describe, that the PWA is no longer.  It has disappeared.  Regardless, your Bloguero presses on.  He usually posts this Digest on Saturday morning early.  He hopes that because of the holiday weekend, you will forgive his putting it up a trifle early.  Your bloguero will be back next week, hopefully on Saturday morning early.

Your bloguero’s muse seems to have gone on vacation.  Or at the very least has decided not to take his calls.  He dials, asking for inspiration, and what does he get?  He gets to leave his message after the beep.

His muse, however, isn’t the only one who has ostensibly cut your bloguero off.  That would be too simple.  No.  There are also 537 politicians in Washington who are unwilling to address your bloguero’s concerns.  More important, they also categorically refuse to demonstrate that they have souls.  Evidently proof of the capacity for compassion is far less important in the Nation’s Capital than spurious questions about documents showing live birth.  And what one does to the least of my brethren, the poor, the elderly, the sick, is apparently far less important than cozying up to plutocrats.  There’s nothing new about this.  Not really.  But your bloguero senses that among those who wish to speak truth to Power, exhaustion stalks their every step, and frustration, their every thought.  To no one’s surprise, the politicians curry favor with those fat cats who pay for their almost eternal tenure, not with those pajama wearing DFHs like your bloguero who chide them, heckle their bloviation, and insist on pointing out their stupidity.   They will show us: just you wait.

The Dream Machine is something your bloguero picked up at the Market of Dreams.  You can find in it the influence of Eduardo Galeano, whose trilogy, your bloguero has completed.  “Memory of Fire” is essential reading.  Your bloguero wonders why so few people have heard of Galeano and why so few in the US have read him.

Your bloguero’s muse delivered two very nice Haiku before leaving for Ibiza or Tulum or wherever muses frolic when they’re not working.

A Plague of Forgetting is a history lesson.  It begins with bananas and will change the way you your supermarket’s banana selection.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is now posted Saturday morning.   Your bloguero will see you next week, if his muse shows up for work.

Many years ago, there was a small railroad that ran on the docks in Brooklyn.  It was called the Brooklyn Dock Railway.   It wasn’t connected by track to other railroads.  Back then, they put railroad cars on barges and floated them to and from New Jersey across the New York City harbor.   When BDR went out of business about forty years ago, a friend of your bloguero picked up some artifacts from its offices.  And he gave your bloguero one, a small stamp that was used in making hourly entries in a lined log book.  The stamp says, “NOTHING TO REPORT.”

A perfect stamp to put on today’s digest.  At The Dream Antilles a week of bemusement. A week of distraction.  A week of dreams.  A week of memories.  A week of wondering.  A week of ennui.  A week of nothing to report.

The Newark Space Flight Center is fiction, but it has girders anchored in fact.  Your bloguero likes this piece.  A relative of your bloguero , on the other hand, wants your bloguero to know that he doesn’t recognize Pops as Luis, your bloguero’s actual grandfather.  “But, but, but,” your bloguero stammers, “It’s part fact and part fiction.  It’s faction.  It’s….”

At Last notes the arrival of the peepers on the pond.  The surest sign that Spring has begun.

April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is marked by In Memoriam,

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is now posted early Saturday morning.   Your bloguero will see you next week, planetary and his psycho-emotional condition permitting.  If you read this, please drop a note.  Your bloguero last week had a personal understanding of  Handel’s interpretation of Isaiah, “The voice of him that cryeth in the wilderness…”

A week of perplexity.  A week of indolence.  A (last?) week of winter.  A week of introspection.  A week of distraction.  You name it.  In other words, your bloguero has his moods (read: excuses) for a week of low productivity.

Sometimes it’s hard for your boguero to keep up.  Like everyone else riding this blue planet round the nearest star, your bloguero has concerns about survival.  His survival, the planet’s survival.  He doesn’t write a lot when he’s got worries about the state of the planet and its inhabitants.  And to confess, he is becoming slowly convinced that he’s silently and secretly being irradiated and mutated, as all of you are also, into a glowing, green,  cridaria.  One that doesn’t require any sea water.  One that is a giant, amoeba like, creeping, green ectoplasm.  In this progression, the end, and who knows how far away that might be, is looking like human silly putty.  Your bloguero has trouble typing when he’s worried that his fingers are being radiated into spongy tendrils.

On the other hand, if we’re all really hurtling like crash test dummies into a future as glowing silly putty, this week’s blog output is the least of your bloguero’s concerns.  Or yours.

On Thursday, in an effort to stave off life as Sponge Bob, your bloguero invited everyone to a Ceremony For Japan/Ceremonia Para Japon.  If as Dr. Emoto argues, water is responsive to prayer, your bloguero was in no mood to ignore the possibility of an energetic transformation of the ocean.  Alas, the news on Saturday suggests that this ceremony hasn’t prevented radiation from seeping into the Pacific Ocean.  The next thing your bloguero anticipates is the appearance of a particularly angry Rodan.

And then there’s your bloguero’s slowly turning The Dream Antilles back to its original conception as a Lit Blog in The Market Of Dreams and the the Haiku that inspired it, which was in turn inspired by Eduardo Galeano.  Your bloguero enjoyed these two pieces and considered them among his best.  They weren’t cross-posted anywhere because, well, there really isn’t another place they fit.  Your bloguero hopes you enjoy them.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is now posted early Saturday morning.   Your bloguero will see you next week, planetary and his psycho-emotional condition pe

Nothing like Internet interruption to get the priorities re-oriented.  Nothing like the Mac announcing that it’s “looking for networks” and the persistent message from Vonage that things are not well in VOIP land.  Friday brought high winds.  First, phones out.  An otherworldly, beeping, static laden dial tone.  And then, when the phones mysteriously returned all on their own, no Internet.  Red lights on the modem.  Whirling beach ball email symbols.

According to the consoling voice at the so-called “Internet Help Center,” they are very sorry, very sorry indeed, but your bloguero might be disconnected until, wait for it, Monday or Tuesday.  This news raises the specter of no Port Writers’ Alliance digest this week, or writing it on the crusty Blackberry, or scouting out a local Internet hotspot.  It also raises the fear of no Netflix on demand.  It only occurs to your bloguero after he realizes that no Internet might mean he has a legitimate excuse for no Digest this week and that maybe he will finish reading the first book of Eduardo Galeano’s masterful trilogy, that he first wonders how he will be able to do any work this weekend.  Exactly how good an excuse, your bloguero wonders, is no Internet?

These fertile introspections, of course, can’t last.  They can’t get played out.  No.  The phone rings on Saturday morning and the tech guy at the “Internet Help Center” says all is well and that your bloguero should now re-cycle the router.  Of course, he’s right.  It works.  Your bloguero’s growing reveries about being Robinson Crusoe on an island without WiFi  are shattered.

This week the Dream Antilles marked the passing of a lawyer hero, Leonard Weinglass.  He was held in contempt 14 times by Judge Julius Hoffman during the Chicago 8 7 trial, inspiring me and dozens of other lawyers with his fearlessness in defense of his clients.

Haiku about clouds.  These were inspired by a brief passage by Galeano.

Our Nominee For Understatement Of The Week is about the administration’s pathetic understanding of the US role in the centuries long oppression of Latin America.  Your bloguero thinks he should make a reading list for US officials and take them on a tour of Central and South America so that they can understand how dreadful and anti-democratic US policy has been in the region.

Cops of the World is about Simultaneous War III in Libya.  It was written on Wednesday.   The questions remain unanswered.  One might wonder why the US isn’t lobbing million dollar missiles at Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen this morning.  Meanwhile, Phil Ochs’s song of more than  40 years ago fits the situation.

And an obituary for Pinetop Perkins, a helluva blues piano player.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is now posted early Saturday morning.   See you next week if the creek don’t rise if there’s still Internet.

Have a wonderful weekend.

A week of bread and circuses.  Pan y toros.  The shiny object of March Madness on four networks  (CBS, TBS, TNT, TruTV) attempts to eclipse world shaking nuclear disaster in Japan and the initial steps toward US involvement in yet another war, this time in Libya.  Lost in the fray: a judge temporarily enjoined Wisconsin’s union buster law.  And the moon is closest to earth since 1992.  

This week your bloguero was distracted.  And he wasn’t prolific.  Or poetic.  As of Friday night, there wasn’t a single new Haiku on the site.  So your bloguero wrote an apologetic one just for this Digest:

At 4 am Saturday that helped your bloguero scrape enough rust off his iron manacles to escape at least temporarily from his ennui.

So the week ended early Saturday with a Haiku.   At 4 am the moon demanded nothing less.

War Du Jour, Part III notes that the US’s involvement in supposedly preventing violence to Libyan rebels with armed force is an engraved invitation to a quagmire in North Africa, and it’s potentially the start of a third, simultaneous US war with no end.  Apparently the PTB think that photos of Obama’s  Brazil visit will convince the world that the US isn’t really pulling the strings in Libya.  Believe that?  There’s a bridge…

A Beautiful Day To Die notes your bloguero’s despair and concern about the enormous nuclear disaster in Japan.  Your bloguero really does not want anyone to be irradiated.  Including particulartly himself.  He would like the planet to thrive.  That doesn’t seem possible in a world with earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear power plants.

The duck, Tricky Duck  (or maybe one of his grandchildren), has returned, El Pato Ha Vuelto.  The annual return of the traveler to the pond, a journey that began decades ago when the original  mallard who would be named Tricky Duck was mailed from an Iowa poultry farm to Blue Seal Seed and Feed in Chatham, NY, and came home with me.  An annual event, marking the start of Spring in earnest.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is supposed to be posted early Sunday morning.  Yes, he knows it’s again Saturday.  Your bloguero, it turns out, likes to post on Saturday.  See you next week if the creek don’t rise on Sunday Saturday early.

Have a wonderful weekend.