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Almost every American schoolchild learns the alphabet in sequence via a sing-songy thing which ends–nowadays–with “Now I know my ABCs/Next time won’t you sing with me?” (In my day, it was “Now I know my ABCs/Mommy, aren’t you proud of me?” I’m guessing the Alphabet Teaching Powers That Be determined that gender specificity for the end tag was too Mommifying.)

This page came to its septuple-acrostic form because after I decided to acrosticize “Letter Getter” the question “WHICH letters?” naturally came up. “ALL of them” was the natural answer. I have a strong feeling that I am the first person to present the alphabet in the same letter-grouping as the childhood song (when viewed as columns) in a quintuple-acrostic segment of a septuple-acrostic array. (I have a stronger feeling that a Hill of Beans is more valuable, and more nourishing.)

This array is sufficiently Procrustean as to challenge internal meaningfulness. Behold the words, without their acrostic emphasis:

Less apprenticeship for THUGS–quiescently we beg
Egoed Bums jk us; if we squawk then we renege
Trade yr old CDs for link–reserve your flexy tat
Telemarketers harumph & praise your sexy fat
E-Z, friend–I know a Goddess–curvy & azure
Righteous/graceful–pops–but to bereave a grizzly? Grr

Meter’s pretty good, rhyme OK, but the content is both like a dilirium dream and an opera singer not quite hitting the high note–or so it seems at first blush (it is only a few hours old).

This is not my first foray into sequential alphabetization. I leave you with this sonnet, done over four years ago, with the single acrostic “Alphabet Soup” and managing to get A through Z in order by the final couplet. Cheers!

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Here are the words, which are not only snaky but go behind objects:

VelociRapture’s easier to mock than to accept
Or so it seems to one who’s stunned from go go go go go
Recursion’s that divertissement that takes unextra step
To plow through tweaked [infinity] where Tiny makes it so
Inconsequentiality’s what gives the grave its sting
Conversely, knowing that they MATTERED helps most folks feel Super
Understanding Truth it pays to linger on the lingua
Leaving an Escape Clause should you need to fly the coop
A relative positioning will get us low or high
Remaining are unfathomed depths that boil down to Why

This is yet another excursion into Vorticularity. I keep coming back to the subject…inexorably…as if drawn into it…

The truth is, the stuff we’re made of exerts a force on everything else, everywhere. It’s in the equations both Newtonian and Einsteinian. Even a paper clip influences the farthest star.

My own private vortex-maker is my pencil, which is also my ambassador, my spokesmodel, and my toy. I will never be so poor as not to be able to scare up a pencil stub and an illustration substrate. If I were desperate, I’d sneak onto the nearest golf course and lift a scorecard and a pencil from the rack by the clubhouse. They’re complimentary, which is one modest earmark of Civilized Intercourse (that was an awful pun, folks).

I have posted this on a Facebook 30-day artist’s challenge, and a friend of mine commented “Wheeeee!” I’m glad she enjoyed the ride. I hope you do too.

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I am writing directly to my computer screen, and you are reading it slightly-to-much later, in part thanks to Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of Morse Code and pioneer of telegraphy. The dot-dash conversion of alphanumerics precursed, and presaged, the zero-one reduction of information used in original machine language, and upon which all computer/systems now depend.

Doing the above page, I wrote the acrostic first. The “Mama” of the acrostic made me think of the Motherboard, so I found a suitable photo source and started to draw one, quickly finding out that it would take me far longer to render an acceptable Motherboard than I had time (every page has a Midnight deadline) or inclination (prefer nudes, portraits, and comic-strip continuity drawing to circuitry illustration). So I faked up some of the Motherboard and calligraphed the label in a homey and quite large font for coverup. I then went whimsical and thought “Mothraboard” and “Bad-A** Mutha, Bored” would be good completative compositional elements. It also tickled me to double my Samuels with the Pulp Fiction incarnation of Samuel L. Jackson.

Lastly: when it comes to Data, we are ALL Babymamas. What you are reading is data I’ve labored to give birth to. Remember me on Mother’s Day! 🙂

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Happy Valentine’s Day to lovers old and young. Please have this slight but sweet acrostic confection. Why I spelled Indulgence Induldence I cannot say for sure. Perhaps something duld my sinces.

I have created a Valentine for my sweet/fine/incredible Girlfriend, Denise. It is for her eyes only. I encourage you to likewise make Valentines for those you love, from afar or otherwise. This is a day for Sweethearts.

Some time ago I drew Denise reading, and acrosticized the occasion, thus:

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Friends, may your Valentine’s Day be filled with Love and Kisses.

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Long ago I did some purchasing for a software engineering concern. One vendor offered a cut-rate screaming deal on a ONE GIGABYTE HARD DRIVE. It could be mine for a mere two hundred and ninety dollars.

Now I have something that holds thirtyfold what that dinosaur would, and it set me back ten bucks. I should use it more often in case things go Kablooie.

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Saturday morning our Village of Oak Creek was fabricked with the satin of joined snowflakes. I have not seen snow falling all that many times in my life–spending most of my life in the Valley of the Sun, I was 21 years old the first time I saw snow falling–so it is new enough to me to seem miraculous.

I owe my knowledge of the word (or words) Uffda (or Uff Da) to my sweet former wife, a small-town gal from Minnesota. During our 23 years of marriage, which ended a year ago last December, I also learned to say “come here once” instead of “come here, please” and “well, you’re welcome” instead of “you’re welcome.” Uffda usually follows some kind of accident (like dropping the fried egg on the floor) or burdensomeness (like working a double shift)–at least that was my inference. I am not bilingual in Minnesotan; but I often say “Uffda” just after getting my old bones off the couch after sitting there for more than an hour. Comes in handy, and trips off the tongue!,

It was one of those days John Lennon sang about when he sang “Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These/Strange days inDEED…” Suddenly I found myself again at Urban Beans in Phoenix, Arizona with the smallest of time windows. It was 5:35pm. Caffeine Corridor would start at 7:00PM, and I had to talk to at least two people beforehand about at least two different things. After the event I had to dinner&drive back to my home and my love, with an image to post befor midnight. And I hadn’t ordered my large plain-drip coffee yet.

At 6:17pm I was finished with the image. Necessity is the mother of inspiration: I knew I had to keep it minimal–MINIMAL? A theme tailor-made…

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Enigmatic & quite a show
Entertaining & awesome glow
As we lessers contract catarrh
Rheumatismatical Epstein-Barre
There’s our Life-Grantor SUN so fair
Heaps of Energy with a flare

George Carlin, pointed tongue in cheek, on Sun Worship: “I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to “God” are all answered at about the same 50% rate.”

To cover all the bases, though, Carlin prayed to Joe Pesci: “You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Two reasons: First of all, I think he’s a good actor, okay? To me, that counts. Second, he looks like a guy who can get things done.”

George Carlin and the Sun have two things in common. Both have radiated enormous energy; and both are not on Earth, but some other Where.

 

 

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Today’s post gets a little personal. My father’s mother, whose maiden name was either Cora or Marguerite Price, and whose Uncle Arthur co-founded the city of Chandler, Arizona, left this earth in the first part of January, 1979. It wasn’t till I started this page, based on a framed photograph of her probably taken in the early 1930s, that I discovered how dark the dark side of my memory of her could get. I suppose she did the best she could, and I owe her my life, my circumstance, and a lot of my DNA; but my poor Uncle Jim (birth name: Brian Aylesworth Bowers) and my poor father (he could have signed a contract with the Chicago Cubs, and would have if he’d followed his dreams)! There is a Latin phrase, “de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est,” that I am defying here. She ruled with an iron fist in a satin glove.