White On Brown

All dolled up, lookin good enough to wait, make ready to think stew spin wheel in place.

Answer comin up one minute now or then resume the hunt for gold as soon as nudge jolt

torpedo or grieve. They’ll leave soon enough peace to move breathe mouse quiet then,

don’t nobody look can concentrate then, no worry lookin good enough to wait , think, stew.. funny lines, sag, bag, hair on white.

Square one back to white , waiting for Godot or something else that’s heavy: baggage, gold boat. Got an idea no more no less white on brown tree, chair, anything that don’t move fast enough, paint. Plastered.

Angel Penny

Blue green pink 92 yr old tells the story of unloved unwanted copper things that sit in a corner but now they burn a hole in her sorely unsafe pocket so dear they are. Blue green pink lady she misses that.

Neila Mezynski

Crawling like lice looking for a way home

I was crawling along a suburban road

With other metal entombed insects

With frowning faces

And pantomime hands

No angels in this queue.

I saw Satan

In a BMW

He was an advertising exec

And his legion of horned helpers

Were real estate agents

Happily extract your soul

With a handshake

White teeth

And a business card.

The music played

God bless it for trying

But it could not drown out

The urban frustration

Scattered like lice

Each seeking the perfect follicle.

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Not all flowers are what we would consider beautiful. Some are simple and delicate, some are strikingly colorful and included in bouquets, but still others are rather plain, open only at night when we usually can’t see them, or even smell like rotting meat. We have to remember we are not the plants’ primary audience.

Dr. Debra Trock, Senior Collections Manager in Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, discussed the co-evolution of flowering plants and their various animal pollinators during her monthly enrichment talk. Held the third Tuesday evening of each month in one of Chabot’s second-floor classrooms, these free talks from local researchers are open to Chabot staff, volunteers and guests.

Dr. Trock began her talk by clarifying the concept of co-evolution. Evolution happens within populations over time, as natural selection favors the individuals best able to reproduce in any given environment. And co-evolution occurs when two or more species evolve together, each adapting to changes in the other. She also illustrated the basic internal biology of a flower, labeling the various regions of the pistil, the female reproductive structure, and the stamen, the male structure.

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“Evil” Itself—Our Greatest Foe

The horrific beheading of American journalist James Foley by radical militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forces civilization to face its greatest foe—evil itself.

On August 19, a four-minute, forty-second video titled A Message to America was streamed online via social media networks and was swiftly routed around the globe. The malicious intent of the ISIS video was undeniable, and the careful crafting that produced it added a sense of stealthy eeriness to its message.

A Message to America stunned the international community. British Prime Mister David Cameron denounced the video as “brutal and barbaric,” while US Secretary of State John Kerry described Foley’s murder as “ugly, savage, inexplicable, nihilistic, and valueless evil.”

World leaders and media outlets grapple with words to describe A Message to America. Adjectives and nouns are strung together in carefully prepared texts. Yet, despite the horrific nature of the act, some media sources are loathe to interject the language of good and evil in describing terrorist activity.

A case in point is an op-ed published in The New York Times on August 22 titled “The Problem With ‘Evil.’” The article was written by Michael Boyle, an associate professor of political science at La Salle University.

Boyle argues against the use of moralistic language in denouncing foes. “Condemning the black-clad masked militants as purely ‘evil’ is seductive,” he contends. He fears what he calls “a disturbing return of the moralistic language once used to describe Al Qaeda in the panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.”

The argument is not without substance or merit. Boyle has a point, but the point Boyle presses would be far more sensible if evil did not exist. Evil does exist. Evil itself is our greatest foe.

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Ode to the Archipelago

It’s becoming a tradition, I suppose. Last year, we exchanged vows wearing nectar-scented plumeria leis. We stood barefoot between onyx lava rocks, water pooling around our ankles; our intimate ceremony officiated by a conch-shell-blowing minister who had survived a shark attack. The ginger glow of the Maui sunset erased our wrinkles long enough to trick the camera lens. Curious onlookers wondered if we were newlyweds or oldyweds renewing our vows. We kissed like it was the first time.

This year, I’ve come to heal: to remember who I was before I squeezed life through a computer screen.

I’m more myself here than anywhere. How inconvenient. An archipelago, 2,500 miles from the continent I call home; exposed peaks of a great undersea mountain range. Life is fragile here and will, one day, return to the sea.

The first thing I do is inhale the moist, oxygen-pumped air, my body craving deep, enriching breaths after 365 days of arid high-altitude breathing. I perch at the edge of land and sea. The rhythmic lull of the Pacific draws me into the primordial ooze, reminding me where I’ve come from and where I’ll return.

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