Give the Oar to the Queen

The moon on this Moon-day is waxing toward full toward the end of the week. TulseyTown this morning is cold with a return of Northerlies for a brief visit before yielding fully to Spring tomorrow . . .

If you don't paddle your own canoe, you can't begin to get where you want to go.

Queen Latifah is celebrating her 54th birthday today. The Academy Award nominated actress and the only rap singer to receive (to date) a Kennedy Center honor recognition and to sing at The Nobel Prize ceremony, was born today in 1970, Newark, New Jersey.

There's an “authority gap,” – the way we still take women less seriously than men – that still tends to stifle contributions to our universal well-being. We remain more reluctant to accord authority to women and anyone who is not the white, male, middle class default. – Author Mary Ann Sieghart at TED Women, October 2023.

Today is John Updike's birthday. Twice honored with Pulitzer Prizes, the poet, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and novelist was born on on this date in 1932 Shillington, Pennsylvania.

Down Time

… I look out the window again.
A wisp from the woods announces that my neighbor
is burning brush.

… Is there anything to write about but human sadness?
Even if there were, I couldn’t write it today.
My neighbor’s smoke has stopped rising; his fire, too,
is down.

– John Updike, Poetry, 1994.