Readers and writers blog

The purpose of our new singalong songbook, Sing along with ease, is to make music, well, easier. And a lot cheaper.

A comparison is in order:

At right are two samples of the song ‘Amazing Grace.’ The top one, subtitled ‘Them,’ really is a sample — the first five bars is all they show you on the Internet because they want you to buy the whole thing. The bottom one, ‘Us,’ is the entire song from our book, complete with four verses.

• To begin with, their song is written for the piano in the key of G, which brings the range on a guitar to an uncomfortably low level for most singers (please see note below). Our song is in the key of C, all of it in a comfortable singing range.

• Their song, because it is written for piano, shows all the chord notes a pianist would play. That requires two staffs — the upper or treble clef and the lower or bass clef — and makes the music more complicated than singers need. Singers require only the top note in the upper staff, which is the simple melody line that our song shows. And our song, rather than show all the chord notes, simply shows the chord notation above the melody. Even a basic guitarist knows those chords by their notation — C, C7, F, Am, G, G7 — or, if not, we explain on the first page of the songbook where to find them. Same for pianists.

• Because their song requires two staffs to show all the chord notes, it also spills over onto two pages — and that’s for ‘Amazing Grace,’ which, as you can see, is not a long song. Truly long songs would require three, four or more pages of sheet music. Our song is complete on one page — as are each of the 313 songs in the book.

• Finally, for their sheet music, they want $4.95. Our song — less than 13 cents.

After 17 years of doing it ourselves, we want to make singing along as easy and inexpensive as possible for those people who just might want to volunteer to lead singalongs in nursing homes or senior residences — perfect audiences for the oldtime favorite songs that our book offers — or for those people who might want to do a little family singing at home. What a perfect way for the over-50s to introduce some of these classics to the under-50s.

Call any of it a cultural exchange.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

A guitar plays sheet music an octave lower than does a piano. A guitar has a narrower range than a piano, and bringing the pitch down an octave brings all the singable notes from the bass and treble clefs into a guitar’s range on a single upper staff.

Our little family band has been using a slick new version of the songbook we use for singalongs we lead three times a week at local nursing homes and senior residences.

The songbook, entitled Sing along with ease, is now in production, and we are, to put it bluntly, plugging the hell out of it. In fact, I’m thinking of changing the name of this weblog to reflect that it has become, while still a library of written works, basically a promotion for this songbook.

Because I think the book is a great idea — specifically, a great help to volunteers or staff members who would like to have singalongs at their nursing homes or senior residences but don’t feel equipped to do it. This book would take them a long way to doing it.

Our band — we call it the Hat Band because we all wear hats — are not professional singers or musicians, but then again, neither are our audience members. We’re all the same — all folks along in years who enjoy sharing those good oldtime songs.

The photo at top shows our songbook in action at a singalong just yesterday. Well, the book is sort of upper-left-center on the music stand in front of the glamorous lady in the blue sweater and wide-brimmed hat — my mother-in-law, Virginia Sunderman, looking across at the very relaxed banjo player, Glenn Sunderman, her husband and my father-in-law. My wife, Bonnie, their daughter, plays with us on weekends. I am represented in the photo by my guitar sitting upright in my chair while I am taking the picture.

The songbook is a great help to amateurs like us who enjoy getting together and singing along. It shows lyrics, simple one-note melody lines and chord progressions that can be played — or learned — by the most basic guitarists or pianists.

And there are more than 300 oldtime favorites, all songs we’ve collected over the years. Here’s a sample of the titles:

America the Beautiful, Ain’t We Got Fun, April Showers, Auld Lang Syne, The Band Played On, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Carolina in the Morning, Danny Boy, Frankie and Johnny, Freight Train, Hava Nagila, Home on the Range, In the Garden, I Love You Truly, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, Jingle Bells, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, Memories, Missouri Waltz, My Melancholy Baby, Paper Doll, Pretty Baby, Red River Valley, Santa Lucia, Silent Night, Silver Threads, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, The Yellow Rose of Texas.

And that’s just a tenth of the listings.

We produce the songbooks, and we’ll be glad to answer questions about them. They’re $39.95 plus $3.16 for shipping anywhere in the United States. That’s less than 13 cents a song — World War I prices for sheet music. So far, the best sheet-music songbook I’ve found on the Internet offers only 53 titles and sells for $79.95.

Even if you don’t want to run around your town annoying senior citizens with your music, it’s a great songbook for family gatherings or just playing by yourself on the old upright piano or that old guitar you haven’t touched since the 1960s.

– Sid Leavitt

Yes, I’ve been away — exactly a year, I see by the date of our last entry — but now I’m back. And here’s what I’ve been doing:

Singalong songbooks. I’m now producing and selling them. Cheap.

What’s that, you say? Who needs a singalong songbook? Well, about 17 years ago, I could have used one.

That’s when I showed up for my second session as a backup guitarist for a singalong at a local nursing home and found I was on my own. I guess the activities director who had led the first session a week earlier figured I should do it myself, being a volunteer and all. She was right, of course, but I had only six song sheets left over from that first session, and I sang and played those six songs for a solid hour.

Well, it’s now 17 years later and my repertoire has grown — by about 300 songs I’ve collected over those years. I should say we’ve collected, because for most of those years, I’ve been part of a family band that includes my wife, Bonnie, and her parents, Glenn and Virginia. We still play three times a week at local nursing homes and senior residences.

Our singalong book now contains 313 songs. It’s a collection of oldtime favorites that most everyone over 50 knows — and most everyone under 50 ought to know. Over the past year, I’ve committed those songs to a computer program called PrintMusic that prints them out, one to a page, in simple musical notation that any music enthusiast — from the most basic singer or instrumentalist to the most accomplished vocalist or accompanist — can follow.

Believe it or not, a good singalong book is hard to find. First, you need all the good old songs that have survived the years. Second, you need the words and music — and by music, I don’t mean simply guitar or piano chords over the words, which is what most singalong books offer. No, you need the melody lines as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve known the first few bars or the refrain of a song but didn’t have a clue about the rest of it. However, the problem with most sheet music showing melodies is that it’s too complicated.

Our songbook is simple — single-note melody lines with chords shown above and lyrics below, all in ‘easy’ keys — mostly C and G — that we’ve found most guitarists and pianists can play and, more important, most people can sing comfortably. That’s why we’ve titled the book Sing along with ease.

The book is bound in a three-hole loose-leaf binder. So you can take pages out or put new ones in, make fresh copies of sheets that have been torn or make copies for audiences.

We’re selling our book for $39.95 plus $3.16 for shipping anywhere in the continental U.S. Searching the Internet, the only comparable sheet-music songbook I’ve found — that is, a book of old songs showing melodies as well as words and chords — offers only 53 songs and sells for $79.95. Our book contains 260 more songs and sells for 40 bucks less.

This book is perfect for volunteers or staff members who lead singalongs at nursing homes or senior residences. It’s also great for family or community get-togethers.

You don’t have to be an accomplished musician to accompany these songs. For hobby guitarists, the chords are simple. For hobby pianists, just play the chords on the left hand, the single-note melodies on the right. In fact, the book tells you where to find basic guitar and piano chords.

So tell your friends. For the price of a couple DVDs, they can sing along with the old standards, more than 300 of them. And do it with ease.

– Sid Leavitt

Thank you, Jerry Waxler, for your comment. I have posted it in the comments section for this entry, not for our previous entry, ‘Riddled by spam,’ which was where you sent it.

I have brought it forward because after reading hundreds of spam comments since our last post Dec. 7 — actually, about 7,500 spam comments, most of them unintelligible — I was delighted to receive yours and wanted to bring attention to it since it raises several issues worth discussing.

Thank you for your recommendation about a spam trapper, but I must confess that as I get better at scanning these conglomerations of self-promoting links and nutty messages, I’m getting somewhat fond of reading spam.

As a reporter, I always enjoyed the weirder side of society, and believe me, there’s nothing stranger than some of this electronic stuff.

Anyway, you have no doubt noticed that I did not file an entry for Dec. 14, 21, 28 or Jan. 4, despite our intention stated in the lefthand column here that we would try to post a new blog entry each Sunday.

The reason I haven’t filed since Dec. 7 is that, like some writers I know, I’m in one of those periods where I haven’t had anything to communicate. This wasn’t a problem in the years I wrote for newspapers as a reporter and editor because I was always responding as a reporter to some news or feature story or as an editor to some reporter’s story. But I did go into those periods of noncommunication when I wrote a book — Adrift in America, which is reprinted in our nonfiction section.

I started writing the book in late 1985 after I met a guy named Steve Lutes in Colorado during a cross-country trip, one of many I’d make in the next five years. During those years, I was living in a truck — actually, a micro-motor home with the barest of necessities — that allowed me to follow a minimalist lifestyle in which I could spend hours, days, sometimes weeks by myself in some remote part of this country, sometimes just thinking, sometimes just looking at the sky. At other times, I would write, sometimes furiously. And then I’d go back to thinking and skywatching. I finished the book in late 1992.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I don’t mind being by myself, cut off from the world, doing nothing, saying nothing. And I guess I’m still more or less in the dawdling mode.

But you, Jerry — I’m glad you’re not the same.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

The image above is the cover art for Incommunicado, a book by Margot Heller and Tom McCarthy, published by Hayward Publishing, available through the Cornerhouse website.

Jerry Waxler is author of the weblog Memory Writers Network, a site that discusses memoirs and how to write them.

I’ve been playing a lot more music these days and not paying as much attention to this website as I probably should. Spammers, on the other hand, have been increasingly attentive to R&W Blog.

We’re getting buried by spam postings in our comments section — hundreds of them a day.

We have a good library of offerings in our Works section — nonfiction, fiction and poetry — and we plan to leave this website up on the Internet for anyone who’d like to read them. Of course, for a website to remain healthy, it must stay active.

During my recent weeks of relative inactivity, R&W Blog’s general health has been slipping — from a Technorati authority of 27 and rank of 305,000th in March to an authority of 9 and rank of 632,000th this month.

That’s still not horrible. Considering that Technorati tracks more than 5 million blogs, a rank of 632,000 still puts us in the top 13 percent.

I’d like to think R&W Blog still has some shine as it sits in this vast cybersphere, much of it wasteland. But like anything that glitters in the desert, not really abandoned but not often visited, it invites vandals.

We’re like a shiny tin can that attracts bullet holes.

Well, I’m getting pretty good at dealing with these spam comments by the hundreds. I do have to scroll through them — I wouldn’t want to miss a legitimate comment from a reader. But I have quickly learned that any comment containing multiple links — they show up on my machine in blue — is spam.

And some of these spam comments are so strange, they’re almost amusing. For example, bad translation into English gives us this offering from newsesystem.com:

Hello! Our company plans creation of essentially new search system! We spend interrogations 3 months. It is important to us to know what search system from existing now on the Internet most to you it is pleasant — google or msn or yahoo. And also that it is pleasant to you and that is not pleasant in these search systems.

(Notice how the words ‘that it’ and ‘that’ in the last sentence are a mistranslation of the word ‘what’?)

Another spammer offers a free loophole to get a gold membership at Adult Friend Finder, a site for “sex without commitment.” I wonder what the silver membership promises — sex with less commitment?

And really, spammers, if you’re going to claim to represent a legitimate business, try spelling it right — got that, Conney Island Pizza New York? And it’s hard to buy into any school that claims to be in western Pannsylvania, although this did purport to be a cooking school.

Another spam comment drew my attention to a ‘raw cooking school.’ What the hell is that?

Anyway, apart from stopping now and then at the loopy ones, I’ve developed a reasonably good speed at scrolling through all these spam comments. And our comments section has two buttons — ‘mark all as spam’ and ‘bulk moderate comments’ — that makes them quickly flushable.

So take your best shot, spammers. We like a little riddle now and then.

– Sid Leavitt

Steve Karmazenuk, the first author to entrust an entire book to R&W Blog, is looking for readers to check out his latest science fiction novel, The Darkness and the Stars.

Karmazenuk is appealing for ‘beta-readers,’ a computer-literate construct based on the term for the exploratory stage of software in which feedback is not only expected but welcomed.

And by the way, readers, however many of you are still out there, have you read the latest short story in our fiction section, ‘To Remember and To Forget’ by Luke Darbyshire?

Karmazenuk’s latest work, although it stands on its own, is an extension of the story line in the sci-fi novel he allowed us to serialize earlier this year, The Unearthing, also in our fiction section. Both novels originally were conceived under a seven-part outline, but that was a dozen years ago when he was planning a five-year television story arc that he later decided would work better as novels.

Anyway, he says, “I have been working on (The Darkness and the Stars) for five years, counting various abortive starts, revisions, reviews and rewrites . . .. I’ve finally completed what I feel is the ‘ready’ draft of the story. I am looking for people to read it — preferably people who have read Unearthing first — so that I can collect a little reader feedback before declaring it ‘complete’ and shipping it off to the publisher.”

If you can handle some beta-reading, email Karmazenuk at kspace@videotron.ca. And while you’re at it, check out his weblog, Kspace, where he discusses writing, life, politics and other subjects. A resident of Montreal, he also is author of the novel Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind (excerpts available through www.phyte.ca) and is a music journalist for Confront Magazine (http://www.confrontmagazine.com/).

And now, the Darbyshire short story. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing what one perceptive reviewer (me) described as “like James Joyce meets Raymond Chandler meets A Clockwork Orange.”

How can you pass that up?

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is an archival photo taken from the website of Frontier College, a Toronto-based organization that runs a variety of literacy programs across Canada. It seemed a fitting image for a blog entry about our Canadian writer friend Steve Karmazenuk.

What a pleasure it can be to read good writing, a pleasure I’ve received a number of times from works contributed to R&W Blog and one I’m glad to share from our latest contributor, a young Englishman named Luke Darbyshire.

It’s like James Joyce meets Raymond Chandler meets A Clockwork Orange.

Really, that’s how Darbyshire’s short story, ‘To Remember and To Forget,’ struck me. His tale of Bobby, a rather idiosyncratic young man, and how he deals with his father’s death, his mother’s toiletries, his friend Jim and their mutual love, Anna, has qualities of the dark poetry of Joyce, the mystery of Chandler and even that dystopian craziness found in the best-known work of Anthony Burgess.

In fact, a game Bobby plays while riding a double-decker bus reminds me of the ‘clockwork’ youth, Alex, in Burgess’ tale.

And consider Bobby’s observations of mourners after his father’s funeral:

He could hear (his mother’s) relatives in the kitchen, attendant at the makeshift counter bar: ‘Yes, I’ll take ice, and he’ll have a Guinness.’ Plastic cups. Paper plates. Sandwich quarters.

‘Never too early, never too late — that’s what I say!’ a rotund red-faced man said, guffawing crumbs and tuna mayonnaise down his black shirt as he struggled with a tumbler of cheap whisky and a plate of sausage rolls and warm quiche that, sat on cold porcelain at 3 a.m. the following morning, even redder in the face from burst blood vessels, spewing a red/brown mixture similar in consistency to poorly made risotto from a torn sphincter, he would dearly regret. ‘You hear that, eh?’

‘Hey, at least maintain we’re here out of respect,’ the red-faced man’s friend responded in a murmur. He glanced back at the bar, eyeing her sister who was stood beside it in determined resolve, focusing her entire essence into emptying each can into its glass and serving each slab of ice with subtlety sufficient to prevent the liquid from rising forth in response and, achieving height greater than that of the sides of the glass it had been placed in, forming alcoholic puddles across the counter. He hesitated for a second, studying her eyes, and continued, ‘Darling, could you give me a top up on this; it’s all head.’ She opened another black-and-white can — choking down a sob, all too noticeably — and tilted her head to inspect her work as she poured. She scanned the room self-aware from under her fringe before handing the glass back. ‘Thanks, dear. We were all so sorry to hear; you must be doing terrible,’ he dissimulated, tilting his head, narrowing his eyes and arching their brows in kind pity, noting who noticed in his peripheral vision. She nodded, and the corners of her mouth crept up her face, but the main stretch of pink tissue held flat, firm against her teeth, ‘Yes,’ and continued to gaze through the strands of her hair cast across her forehead.

Darbyshire currently is on a writing sabbatical after leaving the world of corporate finance and heading for studies at university, probably toward a career as an English teacher.

Finally today, as promised, another new short story from Hugh Yonn entitled ‘Me and the Good Ol’ IRS.’ If you’ve read Yonn’s first two contributions to us, you’ll guess there’s a certain amount of irony in his latest work.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image above is the Knight Bus, a fantasy triple-decker from the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I’m close to surrendering to this blog. I try to escape it, but writers keep sending us their work. And I can’t resist reading it. Now the problem is to format it so that you can read it.

So I’m busy formatting the two latest contributions, both short stories, one by an Englishman named Luke Darbyshire and the other by our old friend Hugh Yonn. Each is intended as the first installment of a longer work.

I should have both up by next Sunday.

‘Short’ is a bit of an understatement for Darbyshire’s story, “To Remember and To Forget,” which runs about 11,000 words. But it’s full of similes and alliteration that I find reminiscent of classic detective stories, and so I’m now deep into it. Darbyshire tells us it’s intended as the first of a five-part collection he’s writing under the working title Short Stories to Read and Repeat.

Yonn’s latest tale, “Me and the Good Ol’ IRS,” involves run-ins with two ‘Mr. Somebodys’ at a local bank and a regional IRS office, none of which goes well. You may remember Yonn as a Florida entrepreneur who at one time was a bigtime marijuana dealer, then a federal prisoner. This latest story is to be continued with an installment called “And That’s How I Got in the Pot Bidness,” or, as Yonn adds, “something like that.”

Although his stories are drawn from personal experience, Yonn tells us they’re fictionalized, and so we’ve switched his first two contributions to us — ‘Going for the Gold’ and ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank’ — from our nonfiction to our fiction section, which is where the latest also will go.

Meanwhile, as I click through these latest works, forging them into our page style — and ignoring the guitar and music stand that are sitting next to this computer and that I really should get to — I take breaks to ponder the following:

• Why are we getting so much spam lately in our comments section — hundreds per day? Could it be that Jeff Paul — you know, the infomercial guy who sets you up each month with 10 Internet sites that make you money around the clock, even though you barely know how to use email — is suckering in more people now that their personal economy has crashed along with the big one?

Let me tell you, folks, the Internet doesn’t work that way. But your spam is making it more difficult for me to find legitimate comments to our site. No, I’m not interested in nursing jobs in Alabama, medical degree programs in California or porn sites in Russian, especially the latter: Anyone familiar with the Greek alphabet can decipher the first two words in “порно фото: баба ебет мужика.” Yes, “porn photo.” The rest says, “grandma has sex with a guy.” Gimme a break.

• Why are so many Bush supporters angry — no, make that livid — that Barack Obama got elected? He won by eight million votes. An incumbent George W. Bush won in 2004 by only three million — and really only by 120,000 in Ohio, which was the deciding state — and in 2000 actually lost the popular vote by 543,000 before the U.S. Supreme Court in a party-line 5-4 vote made him the winner.

Sure, we moaned and groaned for eight years, and he and his screwups gave us plenty of reason for it. In fact, he’s a major reason Obama got elected. I think most of us just wanted somebody smarter than us to run the country. But none of us rushed to buy guns or make threats against the president’s life, both of which apparently are happening in record numbers now that Obama is our president-elect.

What a country. Not only do we have to worry about the fundamentalists overseas, but they’re threatening to run amok here, too.

Talk to you next week, I guess.

– Sid Leavitt

I might as well call this site the Brokeback Blog because, as much as I try to veer away to other activities, I don’t know how to quit it.¹ We keep getting contributors — the latest, a Texas musician who has a different sense of gospel and a Florida man who got an associate degree in federal prison.

The works by Joel Melton and Hugh Yonn aren’t long ones, which is good because we’re not taking on any new books for a while. And we found their contributions interesting.

Melton, a first-timer at R&W Blog, submitted three essays in OpenOffice text files that each began with the word ‘gospel.’ I usually associate ‘gospel’ with fundamentalist Christians, but reading Melton’s essays reminded me that its Old English root comes from not from ‘God’ but from ‘good,’ as in ‘good news’ or ‘good story.’

Melton’s essays — subtitled ‘Beauty,’ ‘A Lesson’ and ‘Son and Father’ — are drawn from his life growing up in Oklahoma on a farm with a strict mother and a story-telling father. Melton now lives in Austin, Texas, where he’s produced his fifth studio album of songs he’s composed and performed. You can listen to those and other songs at his home page, Joel Melton: Kick Ass Texas Music. He also is a filmmaker.

Yonn, an entrepreneur with various business interests in Florida, is a second-time contributor to R&W Blog. His initial short story, ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank,’ was based on his experiences some years ago as a big-time marijuana dealer and later a federal prisoner for five years. His latest, ‘Going for the Gold,’ tells of a friend whose attempt at minor glory is literally a flop.

And now I’ve just got to get to all those extra singalongs I’m planning to schedule at area nursing homes and senior residences. We’re still doing the Sunday sessions at the home just around the corner, but I want to add three during the week at other places, several that I’ve played before in the past dozen or so years.

But no, I still haven’t made the phone calls (although the numbers are right here in my notebook). I did make a little progress this week. I transcribed the theme song for the TV cartoon show SpongeBob SquarePants. There’s a kid who comes to our Sunday sessions to visit his grandfather and likes the song, especially the part about “drop on the deck and flop like a fish.”

No, we’re not dealing with Mozart here. But it’s fun.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. For those readers who didn’t see the movie Brokeback Mountain, it’s about two ranch hands who fall in love while herding sheep on a mountain. The exact quote spoken by Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) to Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Actually, I didn’t see the movie, either. I looked up the quote on Google.

2. The image above is a fractal from the image gallery of the website Creativity Software Inc.

Since I last posted a week ago, I haven’t done a goddamned thing. This election is driving me crazy.

Well, I have done one thing — new poetry from Joel Phipps, our songwriting, guitar-playing, kilt-wearing bard in southwestern Ohio.

But other than getting that new poetry formatted and posted for today, I’ve spent the past week glued to TV and Internet polls, watching the latest predictions from Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, even North Carolina and Indiana, from early morning until late at night.

Because I can’t spend another four years like I’ve spent the last eight.

After long days of poll-tending and short nights of fitful sleep, I’m up early to check on the stock market futures. Because they make a difference, too. That’s right. The worse the economy, the better for Democrats. And so I shamefully admit that I hope the stock market stays in the tank — but just for two more days.

I worried about the World Series because Wednesday night’s broadcast of Game 6 would have to be delayed eight minutes by Barack Obama’s half-hour political ad on that network. Would that cost him the votes of some baseball fans? To avoid that, I wanted the series to end at Game 5, long before Wednesday night, no matter who won, Philadelphia or Tampa Bay. And so I was rooting for the Phillies, who were ahead 3-1 in games, when Game 5 began. Turns out, it was delayed two nights by rain and ended up on Wednesday night, anyway.

I mean, these are the things that have possessed me this week. Really, I was supposed to be calling area nursing homes and senior residences to set up the first of three weekday singalongs I’d like to lead as a volunteer each week. I got the phone numbers written down in a notebook. That’s it. And I’m supposed to be practicing the guitar that’s sitting beside this computer. Still sitting there.

Because the polls, the polls are calling.

The George W. Bush years have been worse than even the Richard Nixon years. At least Nixon managed some foreign policy successes with China and the Soviet Union before his creepy domestic activities caught up with him. I liked the elder Bush, George H.W., who I thought was a capable, honorable man. But Junior — lazy, incurious and, frankly, just plain snotty — has made me and a lot of other Americans ashamed of our country.

I’m not much more impressed with the latest Republican ticket, not so much because of John McCain, whom I consider an American hero but, unfortunately, way out of date. I was in the Army during the Vietnam War — I served in the Middle East, which had its own dangers even then, but certainly not like Vietnam — and I think it’s time we get over that war. Hell, I think it’s time we get over the Civil War.

But Sarah Palin. Jesus. Some people thought TV anchorman Charles Gibson was unfair to ask her about the Bush Doctrine. Granted, I may be the only one on my block who understood what he was talking about, but someone who seeks to be our backup president should know he was talking about the U.S. waging preemptive war. And anyone seeking to be vice president should know the constitutional duties of the office, which do not include “running the Senate.”

By the way, when she promised special needs families she’d be their “advocate in the White House,” I wonder what she was thinking. I know, the vice president has an office in the White House, but I wonder if she was under the impression she’d be living there, too. I wonder if she knows the vice president lives at the Naval Observatory.

Choosing her as his running mate was not the act of a steady statesman but that of a risky pilot. And I don’t want to be in his plane.

So let’s vote, already. Let’s get it over. I can’t take this much longer.

This week’s new offerings in Poetry:

• Four poems by Joel Phipps — ‘The Convenience Store,’ ‘Public Service Announcement,’ ‘Writersville, U.S.A.’ and ‘December Rains.’

– Sid Leavitt

p.s. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to be taking a break from blogging, I still seem to be blogging. Go figure.