“The shrine and grave of Sufi poet Rahman Baba, located outside the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, were bombed on Thursday, and according to local authorities, members of the Taliban are suspected of the attack. The early morning blast left the poet’s marble mausoleum badly damaged, but resulted in no injuries or casualties.” [Poets & Writers]

Words fail. But read on, McDuff. Read and learn why they blew it up.

I’m working on a post for you. It’s going to be good: A post about the purpose and duty of poetry as common denominator of universal human experience. Umm, boy. Good stuff.

In the mean time, here’s some information that you really need.

“They often get a bad rap for causing indigestion and flatulence, but the health benefits of beans (and other legumes, such as lentils and chickpeas) make them a stellar choice in a healthful diet.” [Link]

“Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless.”
-Lech Walesa

Power is the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do, or wouldn’t do otherwise. Getting people to see what they ought to do, and making them inclined to do it, is leadership.

This month, in The Atlantic, senior editor Andrew Sullivan expounds on blogging:

Why I Blog – The Atlantic (November 2008)

“For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.”

Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations.

– Edward Sapir

“It has been more than 70 years since the giant Hindenburg zeppelin exploded in a spectacular fireball over Lakehurst, N.J., killing 36 crew members and passengers, abruptly ending an earlier age of airships. But because of new materials and sophisticated means of propulsion, a diverse cast of entrepreneurs is taking another look at the behemoths of the air.”

at boing boing

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little.

-Sydney Smith, writer and clergyman (1771-1845)

wordsmith.org

Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on 16 June in Dublin and elsewhere to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce’s first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.

Sen. Kennedy has malignant brain tumor.

Of course, we should keep him in our thoughts.

Nobody gets out of here alive, but that family has just had so much grief.

“Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.”

-Roger Miller

Robert Pinsky – Big Think