Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry, Security

National Poetry Month

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Here’s to April showers and National Poetry Month. Scholastic has some fun links to help kick off the celebrations; “use these resources throughout the school year to practice language and literacy skills for all grade levels.”

Community Poems (PreK–2)
Creepy Crawlies (K–2)
The Farm Octopus (K–2)
Poems About Me (PreK–2)
Get Ready to Rhyme (K–5)
The Name Game (PreK–1)
Poems About Me (PreK–2)
Writing an Acrostic (3–8)
Noun Poems (K–5)
Small Poems (1–5)
Personification (K–5)
Chants and Street Rhymes (3–8)
Math Poetry Puzzles (K–4)

The chants and street rhymes are especially interesting to read and reflect on from a security perspective. Imagine using the following rhyme as your passphrase:

Bake a pudding, bake a pie,
Did you ever tell a lie

Or if you are restricted to using passwords, perhaps you could create this version of the same:

baPBa314Du

…if you know what I mean. Here’s another good one to play around with:

Ooo-ah, wanna piece of pie,
Pie too sweet, wanna piece of meat,
Meat too tough, wanna ride a bus,
Bus was full, wanna ride a bull,
Bull too fat, want your money back,
Money too green, wanna jelly bean,
Jelly bean not cooked, wanna read a book,
Book not read, wanna go to bed.
So close your eyes and count to ten,
And if you miss, start all over again.

Poetry

Poetry is like making Beer

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The Economist has an amusing review of the economic and social impact of blogging:

JOURNALISM is like making beer. Or so Glenn Reynolds says in his engaging new book. Without formal training and using cheap equipment, almost anyone can do it. The quality may be variable, but the best home-brews are tastier than the stuff you see advertised during the Super Bowl. This is because big brewers, particularly in America, have long aimed to reach the largest market by pushing bland brands that offend no one. The rise of home-brewing, however, has forced them to create “micro-brews� that actually taste of something. In the same way, argues Mr Reynolds, bloggers—individuals who publish their thoughts on the internet—have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).

Funny metaphysical questions. Can journalism be said to exist even if it is not printed in the New York Times? Does poetry exist outside literature? I say absolutely and thankfully, yes, as long as existence is a matter of good taste rather than income alone.

As the metaphysicists might say, we should be forbidden from mourning the loss of macro brews…

Holy Sonnet X
by John Donne

    Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
    Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
    For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
    Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
    From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
    Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
    And soonest our best men with thee do go,
    Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
    Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
    And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
    And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
    And better than thy stroke ; why swell’st thou then ?
    One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
    And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.
Poetry, Security

Meaningful papers

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Origami Warrior We struggle to make our words transform simple paper into something descriptive and meaningful. In fact we struggle to make the screen represent our thoughts through words alone (long live gopher!) and so we resort to posting images.

What if you were forbidden from using inks or dyes; banned from expressing yourself through words or from drawing/painting a picture on paper? Would you learn to transform the paper itself into a physical representation of your thoughts? This could be a whole new way to present complex information to the viewer, without need for anything other than the paper itself (no inks, etc.) …something like this.

Never underestimate the creative ability of the human mind.

History, Poetry, Security

When I have Fears that I may cease to be

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by John Keats

    WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
    Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
    Before high pil’d books, in charact’ry,
    Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
    When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
    Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
    And feel that I may never live to trace
    Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
    And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
    That I shall never look upon thee more,
    Never have relish in the faery power
    Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
    Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
    Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Apparently Keats died from tuberculosis (TB) in 1821. London suffered immensely from this disease in the past (killing up to 20% of the population) and there were many serious efforts to eliminate it entirely, so I find it surprising to see on the UK Coalition site that TB is spreading rapidly:

Tuberculosis is making a dramatic comeback in parts of the UK where levels of the disease are now higher than those in China and parts of India and Africa. The Tuberculosis rate has risen by 80% in London over 10 years, to reach 40 cases per 100,000. In 2001 were 7,300 cases in the whole of the UK, of which more than 3,000 were in London. Around 60% of the UK’s TB cases are people who were born abroad, and were infected it before they arrived. A study in 1995 showed that, among the homeless, levels of TB were 200 times higher than in the general population.

Perhaps even more alarming is that the disease is not being identified properly, which was also one of the problems that Keats’ faced:

A paper presented to a meeting of the British Thoracic Society showed that more than half the 121 cases of TB that arrived at an accident and emergency department in Newham were not recognised as TB, in spite of symptoms such as coughing up blood.