Re: a comment on weather poem part 8: stating the obvious by nypoet22	15-Sep-06/2:58 PM
No, I'm afraid not. You might just save 'thermostat' for another poem. Or find a way to make it more sensible and evocative.
Re: a comment on weather poem part 8: stating the obvious by nypoet22	15-Sep-06/5:48 AM
I see now that she meant something totally different. C'est la vie. I'll stop meddling.
Re: a comment on weather poem part 8: stating the obvious by nypoet22	15-Sep-06/5:46 AM
You don't know Dovina. It could very well be. She could have meant that 'rise' is an awkward verb to use for something that people 'raise.' Anyway, "when the thermostat rises" is not a very useful or evocative expression. It takes me out of the flow of the poem, while I think, "while the thermostat rises? What the hey?" I would just consider saying temperature, mercury, or something else that rises.
Re: a comment on weather poem part 8: stating the obvious by nypoet22	14-Sep-06/4:38 PM
For one thing, don't you mean the temperature or the thermometer rises? The thermostat is that thing you turn up to turn on the furnace, right?
Re: End of day poem by ecargo	8-Sep-06/10:03 AM
Nice. Like richa, with rhythm.
Re: a comment on Covet by creepshow	3-Sep-06/12:43 PM
Heh.
Re: a comment on Valentine by zodiac	2-Sep-06/10:09 AM
I don't want to promise that I'm back or anything.
Re: a comment on Valentine by zodiac	1-Sep-06/8:04 AM
Do you suffer short-term memory loss? You've already trashed this poem, owing to the fact that I trashed 'Navy Pier', owing to the fact that you'd already posted it under another name.
Re: An Ode To My Dead Husband Bert by Edna Sweetlove	29-Aug-06/2:34 PM
Millay would have made it rhyme. Check it out. Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It may well be. I do not think I would.
Re: Quatrain by ALChemy	28-Aug-06/3:29 PM
Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas.
Re: a comment on A Poem For George Bush by Edna Sweetlove	27-Aug-06/7:09 AM
You are insane. You have no idea what you're talking about. Incidentally, by no transliteration system in the world is it correct to write Ali Baba with hyphens. Especially not with two hyphens, as the word "Ali" in Arabic means 'big' or 'high' and the word 'Baba' means 'daddy'. But hey, way to speak for an entire people you have no real idea about! Nice!
Re: a comment on I Sleep by Sunny	25-Apr-06/6:41 PM
Christ, I come back for one second and my eyeballs are smacked with this. Why don't you try explaining the difference between the words "sever" and "dissever"? Oh, I know why. Because I won't be here to care.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	12-Apr-06/12:12 AM
Whatever. This is insane. It's insane to still be reading this. To anyone who has been "converted" to atheism by anything I've said here: I'm horrified, and truly sorry. To AlChemy: Whatever. If you're reduced to calling opposing viewpoints "unprovoked attacks" you've only got yourself to answer to now. Hey, and here's another "attack": -=Dark_Angel=- had you pegged from day one. Your problem isn't that you believe in God (who in his right mind could care whether you did or not?) It's that you believe in something you couldn't pick out of a lineup. You cannot name one identifying, particular characteristic of the God you believe in. Does someone want to call that my 'nonbeliever's idiotic need for definitions'? Fine. I won't be here to hear it.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/9:03 PM
Hm. I guess I did say that. Sorry. Me now thinks me then was being a snit, but who knows. I am stuck on your usage of comprehend because that's the only characteristic of God I've been able to grasp out of this conversation. Now I find out that not only is God incomprehensible, but living in Alaska is incomprehensible and by extension *every experience or person that is not your own or yourself* is, in the end, incomprehensible. I'm incomprehensible to you and vice versa, if by comprehend you mean "know to the supremest extent exactly what it is like to be you/me". So being incomprehensible is not a special quality of God. It's a quality of everything. So we're back to square one. Got any more ideas?
Re: The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/8:02 PM
To go back to Occam for a minute: This morning, if you are like most people, you woke up and took a piss. Why did you take a piss? The simplest explanation is that your bladder filled up while you slept with liquids you'd drunk the night before. Yes, you could also say that God made you piss, and that could be true. But the first explanation makes sense, is predictable, and follows certain basic rules, such as that liquids can't just disappear. The God explanation requires, yes, assumptions. These are: 1. God exists, 2. God has the power to make you piss, and 3. God is interested in whether or not you piss. To say the least. None of these is certain or even proveable, WHETHER OR NOT they're true. Occam says that, for the purposes of studying and predicting results, the God-made-me-piss explanation is unnecessary, unuseful (except for getting into Heaven, yes), and even harmful if, for example, you're trying to predict when you're going to need to piss and ignoring the properties of full bladders. This is THE ONLY THING OCCAM'S RAZOR SAYS. Everything else that has been suggested about Occam here is nonsense.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/7:43 PM
Why can't there be a God who's comprehensible at this time? Because we don't understand the Big Bang? That's nuts. If you believe in God, you should believe God just created the universe in an instant out of nothing, which is comprehensible if you believe God can do whatever he wants, which you should. "You're the one trying to offer proof that God doesn't exist." -- As ecargo pointed out, Occam is pretty poor "proof". "You're the one trying to offer proof that God doesn't exist. That's where this whole thing started." -- Why don't you search this page for the words PROOF and PROVE, then try saying that again? "my guess is that if there is something so grande that it could make everything from nothing then it is likely it would be well beyond our grasp to truly understand it." -- Well, that's not my guess. Try this: If you'd never heard of God or omniscient omnipotent deities, and you heard that someone had created the universe in an instant from nothing, would you really automatically assume that that "someone" was beyond comprehension and could do everything else? Why would you? Suppose, to use your example, you heard that a person created an apple out of nothing. Would you believe that person was incomprehensible? Would you believe that person was omnipotent?
Re: a comment on Semaphores from the Chaos by cyan9	10-Apr-06/7:24 PM
Silly, pedantic me. It's still misspelled.
Re: Narcolepsy by Sunny	10-Apr-06/7:23 PM
"shudders" - heh. This poem isn't about narcolepsy at all.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/7:20 PM
Maybe your problem isn't that you find God incomprehensible, it's that you find beards incomprehensible.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/6:25 PM
The so-called "atheists" on this site aren't the ones denying other possibilities. The "believers" are. They (by which I mean "you") are denying the possibility that there is no God, or that there's a very simplistic, comprehensible one.