Christmas Truce Poem

Not long after I finished The Christmas Mutiny, I met a woman writing poems "to order" at the Saturday Market. I commissioned a poem on the subject of the Christmas Truce, but then didn't see her for several months. I learned later she had been out of town most of the time.
Yesterday, she was at the market again, spotted me and delivered the poem. I like it a lot:


The Christmas Truce, by Cassie Ruud

We will not fight today.
We will not let you order us
into these pukish
mud-blood-soaked trenches
on this day.
You took us from our families,
from the arms of our wives and children
and thrown us against each other
for reasons
we do not understand.
So we will not fight today.
We will stand a tree,
sing our songs,
play soccer out in No-Man's-Land
almost far enough away
to hide from the trench stench
We will pretend our darlings
are close to us, show
each other pocketed lockets
full of pictures,
smoke our pipes in silence and stare numbly into the fire.


//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Peace on Earth."\\

The Magic Eight-Ball Says, "Here I Am!"

Kathe and I were just out, and when we returned there was a package on the porch.
A note read only, "As the Magic Eight-Ball rolls."
Inside was, sure enough, an eight ball. It appears to be just the usual pool table type of eight-ball, but I am going to watch it for any signs of magical properties.
In the meantime, we have an eight ball. How cool is that?

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Totally cool."\\

Philmfotos

I saw this on Facebook today:

http://philmfotos.tumblr.com/

Nifty.

Before there was such a thing as Google Street Views, I imagined it, and added bonus features like icons floating in the air: you could move your POV in front of the icon and "look through" it to see things like notes on the location, historical images of the same place, paintings of the same view and, yes, stills from movies which were filmed on the spot.

And then there are sites like

http://dearphotograph.com/

and one I really like

http://sergey-larenkov.livejournal.com/