Huh?

The other day, I was riding the subway when I looked up and found myself staring straight into the cover of a porn magazine. Except that the person reading it wasn't a guy..it was a woman. I know because I did a double take and on the second time around, it was still a woman. I think it had to be one of the strangest experiences of my life.
Go figure.

Noteworthy.

I had the worst tour of my (admitedly rather short) touring career some time ago. I went down and pickup up a group of Special Ed. kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who were in summer school from flags to take them on a tour of the Museum. One thing that I have to explain; there are two kinds of Special Ed. kids in the public school system: the first is the kind where they're perfectly good kids who just need a bit of help learning, and the second is the kind who are basically juvenile deliquants who can't be trusted to be in the same classroom as normal kids because they cause too much trouble. These kids were of the later kind. As I took them to the first exhibit--never let it be said that I didn't answer when duty called--two of them almost got into a fight. One of them accidently brushed up against another and before I had the chance to blink they were standing on their toes, chest to chest with their arms out to the side getting ready to duke it out right then and there (if you've seen it before, then you know what I'm talking about...otherwise you have to see it in person to get the idea), shouting "you wnna mess wi me? you wanna MESS?" Anyway, between myself and their teachers we managed to get them to calm down enough to not hit each other and kept moving into the whale room. Things in the whale room went pretty smoothly, but trouble struck again in the hall of biodiversity. One of the kids got distracted by one of the computers and started playing with it while I was talking when his teacher told him to stop and pay attention he turned to her and started yelling, "I'll kill you! I'll Kill you! I'll KILL you!" apparently this wasn't unusal because it didn't bother her much.
I'm just lucky that I went to Wagner for a while. At Wagner, they don't really bother sepparating these kids from the normal ones any more than they have to, so I learned how to deal with them...and it served me well here. My friend Noelle who got the other half of the tour group wasn't so lucky. She's an ivy league college girl who has never set foot in a public school in her life. She's also about five feet tall. The guys kept on hitting on her, draping their arms over her and saying stuff like, "you can take wherever you like, girl." Basically, she got eaten alive.

Whoa!

Hmmm...well, my mom just got back from Iceland (where she had a great trip) and apparently there are still some people there who worship the old nordic religion. You know, Odin and Thor and all that stuff. It's hard to immagine how such a religion could survive in today's modern world. But then again, Christianity and Islam are doign pretty well so I guess it isn't so strange after all.
All the same though, I was sure that it was wiped out when the people of Iceland converted to Christianity. I guess not.
Cool, huh.

Some Thoughts on Dragonflies

The dragonfly
cannot come to rest
on the blades of grass
--Basho


Dragonfly on a rock--
absorbed in
a daydream
--Santoka


The comming of autumn
determined
by a red dragonfly
--Shirao

Dragonflies
quiet their mad darting--
crescent moon
--Kikaku


The dragonfly
has dyed his body
autumn
--Bakusui

Dragonfly caught in
the rain. Come! There are insects
under my awning.
--Myself