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Thursday's Poem: "What We Might Be, What We Are" by X.J. Kennedy, from Exploding Gravy. Thursday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of X. J. Kennedy, born Joseph Charles Kennedy in 1929 in Dover, New Jersey. He spent four years in the Navy and then worked on his Ph.D. for six years but never completed it. He didn't like having the same name as the father of the famous Kennedy clan, so when he got his first poems accepted in The New Yorker, he added an "X" in front of his name, and he's been X.J. Kennedy ever since. His first book of poetry was Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), which was a success. So he kept writing poetry, but his main career was writing textbooks...

Tuesday's Poem: "Memorial Day" by Steve Kowit from The First Noble Truth. Tuesday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of the British author Samuel Richardson, born in 1689 in Mackworth, England. Richardson spent seven years as the apprentice in a printer's shop, where he was nicknamed "Serious" and "Gravity." His first publication was a manual to fellow apprentices urging them to be serious and stay away from evils like the theater and taverns. Then he wrote three novels encouraging moral reform, and all three were epistolary novels -- novels told only in letters. The public loved this form, and all his novels were very popular. His novels are Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753)...

Monday's Poem: "In Praise of Joe" by Marge Piercy from The Crooked Inheritance. Monday's Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1958 that Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was finally published in New York. In 1955, Nabokov couldn't find an American publisher willing to print his novel, so Lolita was published by Olympia Press in Paris. Olympia was best known for publishing erotica, which worried Nabokov; he wrote to the publisher: "You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such."..

Sunday's Poem: "August" by Elise Partridge from Fielder's Choice. Sunday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of novelist Jonathan Franzen, born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). His first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), got good reviews, but they did not sell well. He spent years working on his next novel, getting nowhere. After five years, he had written hundreds of pages, but he still didn't know what the book was about. He drew a giant diagram, graphing out the events, themes, and characters. He finally decided to throw everything away except for one chapter and started over. He wrote the rest of the book in less than a year...

Saturday's Poem: "Dislocation" by Marge Piercy from The Crooked Inheritance. Saturday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Charles Bukowski, born in Andernach, Germany (1920). His family moved to Los Angeles when he was just two years old. His father was so frustrated by the difficulty of earning a living in the United States that he became abusive. He once beat Bukowski with a two-by-four. The kids in the neighborhood picked on Bukowski because he came from Germany, and at the time Germans were still considered the enemy. When he was a teenager, he developed terrible acne and he decided that he hated his father, and he hated the America Dream. He got a steady job as a postal clerk, and he decided to become a writer. He published his first book of poems when he was 40 years old, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960)...

Friday's Poem: : "Mixed-Up School" by X. J. Kennedy from Exploding Gravy: Poems to Make You Laugh. Friday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Irish writer Benedict Kiely, born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland (1919). His novels include Honey Seems Bitter (1952), The Cards of the Gambler (1953), Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968), and Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985). When he was a baby, three young men were murdered on the street near his house, casualties of the political and religious conflicts of 20th-century Northern Ireland. He grew up in an area where the fear of sectarian violence was never far removed...

Thursday's Poem: "Turtle" by Kay Ryan, from Flamingo Watching. Thursday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Danielle Steel, born in New York City (1947). Her books have sold more than 570 million copies and are read in 28 languages. She spends her days writing in her bedroom on a 1948 metal-body Olympia manual typewriter, wearing her flannel nightgown. She often writes 18 hours a day. She said, "Once a book is really going, I can't get away from it. Sometimes I forget to comb my hair. And if I'm in the bathtub, I'll scrawl notes on the mirror or the wall. Writing is just an all-consuming passion." She says, "It drives everyone else crazy."..

Wednesday's Poem: "The Origin of Myth" by Ed Ochester from Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New. Wednesdsay's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, born in London (1899), the "Master of Suspense." He directed many films, including Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), and Psycho (1960). He was shy, quiet, and he spent a lot of his childhood alone, making up games. He tried to ride every bus line in the city at least once, and he often watched trials at the local courthouse. He was close to his mother. Every night, he had an evening confession. Before he went to sleep, he stood at the foot of his mother's bed and told her everything he had done that day. He did it every night, even when he was an adult and had his first job. His first big success was The Lodger (1926), a movie about Jack the Ripper...

Tuesday's Poem: "Late Afternoon, St. John" by Linda Pastan from Queen of a Rainy Country. Tuesday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Norris McWhirter, born in London (1925), who gave us the Guinness Book of World Records, in which we learn that the longest amount of time that someone has balanced on one foot is 76 hours and 40 minutes (at a stadium in Sri Lanka, May 22 25, 1997), and that the world's longest leg hair measured 5 inches (belonging to Wesley Pemberton of Tyler, Texas, on August 10, 2007). Other feats recorded in this book include the farthest distance someone has walked while continuously balancing a milk bottle on the head -- 80.96 miles, by Ashrita Furman of New York, which he did around a track field in Queens in April of 1998, over the course of 23 hours 35 minutes...

Monday's Poem: The Continuous Life by Mark Strand from New Selected Poems. Monday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of playwright Fernando Arrabal, born in Melilla, Spanish Morocco (1932). When he was a child, the brutal Spanish Civil War began, and his mother and father took opposing political sides. His mother sided with the Fascists of Franco's regime and even prevented her son from listening to "dangerously" democratic BBC radio programming, and his father -- once a military officer -- sided with the Republicans. His father was captured and sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to 30 years of imprisonment. He eventually escaped and was never seen by his family again. Arrabal's mother, furious at her husband's perceived betrayal and ignorance, told their children that he had been killed...

Saturday's Poem: "How to Play Night Baseball" by Jonathan Holden from Design for a House. Saturday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of P(amela) L(yndon) Travers, the penname of Helen Lyndon Goff, born in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia (1899). P.L. Travers, famous as the author of Mary Poppins. She grew up in Australia. In her 20s, she moved to Dublin and created the character for her own amusement, a prim, somewhat ill-humored, magical British nanny who appears at a household in a high wind and floats away when the wind changes. Mary Poppins came out in 1934. It was a big success in Britain and the U.S., and P.L. Travers wrote seven sequels...

Friday's Poem: : "Migration" by Tony Hoagland from What Narcissism Means To Me Friday's Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1974 that Richard M. Nixon resigned the office of the presidency, the first American president in history to do so. His policies as president had been rather liberal. He began arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. He eased relations with China. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, expanded Social Security and state welfare programs, and tried to create a national health insurance system. He won re-election in 1972 in a landslide, but in that same year, a group of men broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, and in that break-in were the seeds of his downfall...

Thursday's Poem: "Halley's Comet" by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through. Thursday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of writer and editor Anne Fadiman, born in New York City (1953). Her father was the critic and essayist Clifton Fadiman, and she grew up in a literary household, making castles out of the books in her father's library. She became an obsessive collector at an early age, keeping butterflies, beetles, snakeskins, seashells, and cicada shells. At some point she started collecting long rare words, which she continues to do today. One of her favorite long words is "sesquipedalian," which means "long word." She was working as a reporter when she got an assignment to write for The New Yorker about a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her parents' difficulty dealing with the American medical system. The New Yorker decided not to print the article, so Fadiman turned it into her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997). It took her eight years to finish the book...

Wednesday's Poem: "Andy Warhol for Familiar Quotations" by Peter Oresick from Warhol-O-Rama. Wednesdsay's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of the artist Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, in Pennsylvania (1928). His father was a Czechoslovakian immigrant and a coal miner. His mother was extremely protective, and she let him spend all his time as a child drawing copies of Maybelline advertisements. He got a job as an advertising illustrator in New York City in the 1950s, but he wanted to be a serious artist. One day, he got the idea to start painting pictures of advertisements, movie stars, and other popular images. He made silk-screened pictures of Campbell's soup cans and sculptures of Brillo boxes, and his style became known as Pop Art...

Tuesday's Poem: "The Latest Injury" by Sharon Olds from The Gold Cell . Tuesday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Guy de Maupassant, born in Normandy (1850), one of the great French short-story writers. He became an apprentice of Gustave Flaubert, who used to invite him to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose style, and correct his early work. Flaubert also introduced him to some of the leading writers of the time, like Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Flaubert said, "He's my disciple and I love him like a son." Maupassant began publishing his first stories a few weeks before Flaubert's death. In just 10 years, between 1880 and 1890, he wrote most of the work for which he is remembered, including 300 stories and five novels...

Monday's Poem: "Can You" by Christian Barter from The Singers I Prefer. Monday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Louis Armstrong, born in New Orleans (1901) in a poor section of town known as "The Battlefield." When he was six years old, he and three other boys formed a vocal quartet and sang on street corners for tips. A family of Russian Jewish immigrants, the Karnofskys, hired young Louis to work on their junk wagon, and he bought his first cornet with the money that the family loaned him. He was 12 years old when he was sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent, and that was where he learned to play the cornet...

Friday's Poem: : "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale from Collected Poems, Revised Edition. Friday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of the man who wrote "Call me Ishmael," one of the most famous first lines in literature: Herman Melville, born in New York City, in 1819. Melville's father was a successful import merchant who told his eight children adventure stories of sailing and distant places. But his father died when Melville was young, and from the age of 12, he worked to support himself as a clerk, farmhand, and teacher. When he was 20, he worked as a cabin boy on a ship that went to Liverpool and back, the first of his many voyages. In 1841, he joined the crew of the whaler Acushnet, which sailed around Cape Horn and through the South Pacific. He spent time as a clerk in Honolulu, and for a while he lived with the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands, a tribe of cannibals who treated Melville well. Inspired by his adventures at sea, Melville returned to his mother's house in New York and settled down to write about his travels. The result was his novel Typee (1946)...

Thursday's Poem: "Eating Together" by Kim Addonizio from What Is This Thing Called Love. Thursday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of children's fantasy writer J.K. Rowling, born Joanne Rowling in Yate, England, in 1965. She has written seven novels in the Harry Potter series, a series that has sold nearly 400 million copies. Rowling grew up in rural England. She says that the character of Hermione in her series is "a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." She studied French and Classics and went on to be a secretary for Amnesty International, but she didn't like secretarial work. One day on a cross-country train trip, the idea of Harry Potter "came fully formed" into her mind...

Wednesday's Poem: "Living in America" by Anne Stevenson, from Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems. Wednesdsay's Literary Notes: Today is the birthday of Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart, Wolfgang's older sister and his musical role model, born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1751. She and Wolfgang were the only two of their parents' seven children to survive, and their father, Leopold, encouraged both children's musical talent. Wolfgang was inspired to be a musician because he wanted to be like his sister...

Tuesday's Poem: "The Snowy Day" by Elizabeth Spires from The Wave-Maker: Poems. Tuesday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Edwin O'Connor, a journalist, novelist, and radio personality, born in 1918 in Providence, Rhode Island. He wrote about Irish-Americans in Boston, especially about politicians and priests. His novel The Last Hurrah (1956) is about a gentlemanly politician who quotes literature and is mildly corrupt, and who might be based loosely on Boston mayor James Michael Curley the way the ambitious family of Massachusetts politicians in his novel All in the Family (1966) have similarities to the Kennedys. O'Connor's novel The Edge of Sadness (1961) is about a middle-aged priest. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the first line of the book is "This story at no point becomes my own."..

Monday's Poem: "Riding The A" by May Swenson from Things Taking Place: New and Selected Poems. Monday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of the Pakistani poet and activist Fahmida Riaz (Meerut, India, 1946). She was born in India but grew up in Pakistan. Her whole family was literary, and she published her first poem when she was 15 years old. As a student at the university, she got involved in radical politics. Ever since, she has worked for international human rights, and in 1997, she was awarded the Hellman/Hammett award by Human Rights Watch...

This episode first aired May 5, 2008. ... Have you ever eaten a 'Benedictine sandwich'? Or savored a juicy 'pork steak'? What's a favorite dish you grew up with that may be mystifying to someone from another part of the country? Also, what does it mean to tell someone to 'put a snap on the grouch bag'? A rugby referee from Indiana calls to ask if his sport is the origin of the word 'touchdown' as it is used in American football. How do you pronounce the word 'patronize'? Is one pronunciation used if you say 'Don't patronize me!' and another one if you say 'We patronize local businesses'? Why do we say political campaigns that are in a 'dead heat'? Why 'dead' and why 'heat'? We play bingo on the air with Quiz Guy John Chaneski. His motives are not B9! A woman who went to school in New Orleans reports she was startled the first time she heard residents of the Crescent City talk about 'making groceries' rather than buying them. Grant explains the French origins of that expression. A listener who recently played in a Boggle tournament wants to know why we speak of 'seeding' such a competition. The German word 'uber' has found a place in American English. A New Jersey man says he and his colleagues find it to be more versatile than a Swiss Army knife, as in, 'He is uber in the middle of that situation,' 'That was an uber meeting,' and 'You guys are the language ubers.' An Indianapolis caller wants to know about curious expression she heard from her Aunt Harriet: 'put a snap on the grouch bag.' You would think it means 'Stop complaining!' but she says it refers to making sure your valuables are secure. What's the grudge? Martha and Grant discuss more regional food terms. If you order 'Albany beef' in upstate New York, for example, don't be surprised if you're served fish. This week's Slang This! contestant grapples with the slang terms 'squish' and 'optempo.' What's the trouble with using the expression 'drink the Kool-Aid' to connote blind, unquestioning obedience to a politician? A caller is bothered by the grisly origin of the phrase--a reference to the 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana--and thinks it's being used inaccurately, in any case. A caller is curious about the odd expression 'to who laid the rail,' which is used to mean, among other things, 'thoroughly, completely, excessively.' ... Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write 24 hours a day: (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or visit our web site and discussion forums at http://waywordradio.org/. Copyright 2008, Wayword LLC.

Sunday's Poem: : "Locked Doors" by Anne Sexton from Complete Poems. Sunday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Joseph Mitchell, born in Fairmont, North Carolina (1908). He was a writer for the New Yorker magazine for many years. His stories focused on people living on the fringe in New York City. They featured gypsies, alcoholics, the homeless, fishmongers, and a band of Mohawk Indians who worked as riveters on skyscrapers and bridges and had no fear of heights. Most of his journalism is featured in the book Up in the Old Hotel (1992). While at the New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell interviewed criminals, evangelists, politicians, and celebrities. He said that he was a good interviewer because he had lost the ability to detect insanity. He listened to everyone, even those who were crazy, as if they were sane. He said, "The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves."..

Saturday's Poem: "Mus e des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden from W H Auden: The Collected Poems. Saturday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Carl Jung, born in Kesswil, Switzerland (1875). He was the founder of analytic psychology. He noticed that the myths and fairytales from all different cultures contained certain similarities, which he called archetypes, and he believed that these archetypes came from a collective unconscious that is shared by all human beings. He said that if people could get in touch with these archetypes in their own lives, they will be happier and healthier...

Friday's Poem: : "From the Garden" by Anne Sexton from The Complete Poems. Friday's Literary Notes: It's the 30th birthday of the world's first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization, Louise Brown, born in Oldham, England (1978). Her parents had been trying to conceive for nine years. A doctor told Lesley Brown, the future mother of Louise, that she had a blocked fallopian tube and referred her to Dr. Patrick Steptoe, who had been conducting research on fertilization for many years. The Browns decided that they would have Dr. Steptoe harvest an egg from Lesley's ovary, which would then be fertilized with her husband's sperm in a laboratory. Dr. Edwards would perform this fertilization in vitro (from Latin, literally "in glass" coined in reference to the test tube in which experiments were performed). A few days later, Dr. Steptoe would transfer the newly formed embryo back into the uterus of Lesley Brown...

The second half of the Comic, Basically, as you can see...it moves too slow for an "episode" so I canned it. But it was a valiant effort nonetheless. Hope I can do more, even if they are just animatics.

I used to draw these comics back in jr high and high school. Must've had more episodes than any cartoon on tv back then, it was kinda my dream to get them animated one day. Anyways, I had a chance to work with Eric Hedlund on the voices for this.... sadly, this is an unfinished work, but at least you can see where I'm going with these guys. When I will get there? Not sure yet.

I was painting Icons for a while, Bobs Big Boy, Ronald McDonald, Twinkie the Kid, Tony the Tiger, and I discovered that cereal characters would be a good idea. I have yet to paint more of these but here is a version of Count Chocula. With music by http://sxezskoz.com

Thursday's Poem: "The Good Nights" by Joseph Mills from Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers: Wine Poems. Thursday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Robert Graves, born in Wimbledon, England (1895). He fought in World War I. Graves spent much of the war in the trenches, amid mud, mustard gas, and corpses. In one battle he was wounded badly and the London Newspapers reported that he was dead. Someone showed him a copy of his own obituary, and Graves decided that he had been spared from death in order to write poetry. In just five years, between 1920 and 1925, he wrote three books of criticism, a ballad opera, a novel, a satire on contemporary poets, and half-dozen volumes of poetry, and also his memoir Goodbye to All That (1929), about his childhood and his experiences in the war. It turned out to be a huge best seller, and he was able to live off his writing for the rest of his life...

Wednesday's Poem: "Moment Vanishing" by Elizabeth Spires, from The Wave-Maker: Poems. Wednesdsay's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Elspeth Huxley, born in London (1907). She wrote more than 30 books and is best known for The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), which chronicled fictionally her childhood among British settlers on her dad's coffee farm in Kenya. It was a huge best seller when it came out, and 20 years later was made into a television series in England and then shown on American public television. When she was five years old, her family left England for Kenya in order to run a 500-acre coffee farm that her father had impetuously bought while sitting in a bar in Nairobi. She recalled that her father had a lot of failed business ideas, and said he was a "gentle, humorous, dreamy person whose dreams never came true."..