Almost forgot it was Friday!

The Friday Five

1. What is your favorite type of literature to read (magazine, newspaper, novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)?
I like newspapers--though I haven't read the kind that get newsprint on your hands for months now; I just don't have access to them and can figure out what's going on in the world with my internet connection anyway--but I mostly read novels for fun. Science fiction's my favorite.

2. What is your favorite novel?
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

3. Do you have a favorite poem? (Share it!)
I know this is somewhere else in my journal, but I can't resist sharing it anyway. Maybe just because I talked about it yesterday. I don't really have a single favorite poem, but this is close enough (it's by e.e. cummings, of course):

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh,leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis


4. What is one thing you've always wanted to read, or wish you had more time to read? the book I'm reading right now, actually, as somehow my ninth grade class didn't read it, even though the classes older and younger than us did.

5. What are you currently reading?
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

Kannst du jetzt mich hören?

Gut!

I just saw a commercial that I can tell is of the kind that gets old very quickly, but since this is the first time I've seen it, I found it amusing. It's a Verizon ad (thus the subject line; there's a connection I promise) about text messaging.

Someone gets a message that just says "Duck." I'm waiting for something to fly through the air over this person's head, but instead another person gets a message that also says "Duck." Then I got it. Sure enough, the third person's message says "Goose." She looks at the guy across the table from her (I think they're in a restaurant or something; they're at least around people who have no idea what's going on) and of course gets up and people run around and be silly as the functional part of the commercial takes over.

I don't care about cell phones or "text" used as a verb, but I did appreciate the idea of practicing such random acts of silliness.

Still, this made me think of the goose/grey duck controversy of my freshman year. It all started when my friend Seth and I realized that, close as we are, he's a goose and I'm a grey duck. We figured it was a regional thing--sure, we live in the same state, but he makes fun of Canada, I make fun of Iowa--but had to enlist the opinions of our friends.

But it's grey duck!

Oh yeah: the subject line means "Can you hear me now?" auf Deutsch and is something Matthew told me about. Apparently it had something to do with a contest to portray what the world would be like now if the Nazis had won, or something. Matthew thought it was really funny, and I do too.