Mostly they come out at night. Mostly.

I've been pretty quiet, blog-wise, but I figured I would make a quick hello post. There are a few things about Britain that I just don't understand, and I'd like someone else's opinion about whether I have a point or I'm just being weird.

The first thing - this sign.



I understand that it means there's a traffic camera, but why the old-timeyness? It looks like it's warning us that there's dangerous do-it-yourself macro photography ahead .... eek. That one might just be me.

But this one is legitimate. The bathrooms, at least the public ones, all across Britain, have floor tiles covered in little sparkles. I'm sure they looked pretty when they were being picked out, but mostly, when you see little reflective sparkles on a bathroom floor, you don't think "Pretty". You think "Huh. Somebody peed here ... and here ... oh my god ... there's pee EVERYWHERE." Seriously, I'm not a freaky urine-phobe or anything, and this isn't the sort of thing I usually devote a lot of mind time to, but I have to think that having half the public bathrooms in the nation look like they've been peed all over just can't be a good advertisement. I briefly considered that perhaps British people like to pee on the floor, and the sparkles alleviate their guilt by making all floors, peed on or not peed on, appear the same. But that's insulting to British people, and I tend to like British people, so I reject that outright. Instead, I blame the tiling manufacturers, and the builders of public washrooms. Someone should be fired.

That is all.

Ahh the football

I took in a football match (aka soccer game) at Pittodrie Stadium in Aberdeen today. Not a great result for the home side, as they lost 3-1 to Celtic, but a good fast-paced match with some good goals, and that's really all I wanted. Other than that, it's been a quiet day. Light rain in Aberdeen. Wow - most exciting blog ever, quoting you Scottish weather. Anyway, here's a picture from Pittodrie, showing the scene. It's so nice to be in a place where soccer's a top sport (aka to be anywhere but the States).



Respect to those few fans sitting in the uncovered corner seats. But confusion to the ones sitting at the top of that section. There were seats available all the way down ... if you're going to get rained on, may as well have a nice view as well.

Piku

Yeah, so I sort of get stuck on things. Ideas, mostly. My submission of a formal poem this morning got me all psyched up about structure and rhythm and stuff. Then I started looking back at things I'd written lately, especially some haiku I'd been working on. A lot of people seem to think haiku are easy and meaningless, but if you really study them, they're neither. There are rules to follow, though in English, we tend to be a little lax with them. I decided to make the haiku a little harder. What I came up with was the "Piku", a haiku where the number of letters in each word is set by Pi. 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, etc. Nerdy, I know, but it's actually hard as hell to make a sensible haiku with three lines, of five, seven and five syllables, while also following the Pi letter rule. This is maybe the best I've come up with so far, expressing my need to settle back in after I get back from the trip.

Now I want a night
abstinent in Oregon -
Quiet and sober.

Even this is cheating a little, since it doesn't have the "season word" that a haiku should have, but I'm letting it go because I've already put way too much effort into this today.

Formality

Well, as I am once again in more regular web contact, I'll be trying my best to post here more often. I submitted a poem today to Trellis Magazine, the first time I've sent anyone any formal poetry, and it got me thinking. Formal poetry gets a bad rap. So many poets I know look down on poetry with rules, and the stricter the form is, the more they seem to despise it. Why? Isn't some of the greatest poetry in history written in the confines of structure, meter and rhyme? I'm not saying that free verse doesn't have its place - it certainly does. I both read and write free verse. But, personally, I really like writing in the confines of structure sometimes, especially an invented structure like the one in this last poem. There's something appealing to my nerdier side in sitting down, coming up with a set of alphabetical, metrical and/or rhyming rules, and then taking an idea and making it fit within them. Maybe its my science background. Oh well. Anyway, the yes-letter from Coyote Wild yesterday got me off my kiester and back to sending stuff out, so that's good. I've been concentrating so much on writing it this summer that I've forgotten the part where other people read it.

In other news, Happy Birthday to the CD. It will likely be the last dominant physical form for commercial music before it becomes entirely digital, or at least the last that sells anywhere near 200 billion copies. That's enough CD's that if you stacked them up, they would circle the Earth over 6 times. I love useless facts. By the way, for those keeping score, you can't stack them all up because my ex-girlfriend once broke one of my CDs in half. So, if you were planning on trying, blame her. I like CDs - a huge improvement over tapes, anyway, and digital downloads lack the joy that is liner notes, a loss that cannot be overestimated.

I am sofa kingdom ... and so on

Interesting day. Hi, everybody. It's been a really long time since I've posted - the trip through England and Scotland has been fantastic, but quite busy. I have some good news ... well, good news for me, bad news for my mental state, I guess. I got my first short story accepted today! It's a flash fiction (1400 words or so) piece, one that I've mentioned in a previous post, "Further Study". I am thrilled to have it accepted by Coyote Wild, an online quarterly I enjoy a lot. The bad news is that I don't remember submitting it to Coyote Wild. Looking back at my email vault, it seems that I did so in the middle of the night one night, which would usually be fine. The problem arises in that the other journal to which I submitted the story does not accept simultaneous submissions. I've written to the other journal, who I've heard nothing from, but still, I feel bad. I try to keep good records of what's rejected, what's accepted, and what's in the mail, but this one got by me. Oh well. I'm sorry to the other journal for the wasted work - there is a special place in heaven for those that read unsolicited submissions - but I'm also just thrilled about the acceptance from Coyote Wild. Check them out.

So, the credit card got sorted, as you may have assumed given that I haven't yet starved to death. I've moved on from London, which is lovely but a big city and not really my style for a long stay.

Thanks to Camille for stopping by and commenting. Check out her blog, littlebird blue. Cool stuff.

The trip continues, now, buoyed a bit by the news of the acceptance from CW. I'll try to post more often. Worst. Blogger. Ever. Bye now.