The poems are based on an original by William Carlos Williams, called This Is Just To Say. In an episode of This American Life entitled Mistakes Were Made, program contributors created their own versions.

My favourite is the trio by Shalom Auslander:

1
I’m sorry you’re overweight
And drinking
And feeling like everything
In your life
Is doomed to failure
But this is probably why
Mom said
I was her favorite

2
It sucks, little doe
That I hit you
with my car

But at least
You weren’t alive
To watch the hunters
Shoot your children

3
He was a troublemaker, okay
And didn’t know when
To shut up

Still
We never would have killed him
If we’d known he was the Lord

There’s not much poetry here. Should there be more?

• “Storm” by Tim Minchin | 3quarksdaily: I’m perhaps well behind the pace in being exposed to this wonderful 9-minute Beat poem, but I still think it’s worth sharing.
• Free speech? Only if you’re a charity | Memex 1.1: Science Fiction author Harlan Ellison explains why he doesn’t speak for free. A gloriously eloquent rant.
• Back to the Future at Tenenbaum Copyright Trial | TechLaw: In 1993, Prof Pamela Samuelson’s The Copyright Grab warned that large copyright owners were planning a "maximalist agenda" for the digital age. Most of their eight action items made it into the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998. Yet as this recent copyright cases shows, many of the issues are also still raw and open to discussion.
• Thailand’s royal sub-plot | Inside Story: Increasingly, discussions of Thailand's chronic political schisms are mentioning the monarchy. Here’s one such excellent backgrounder.
• The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim | Times Online: Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived not one but two atomic bombs. And he’s not the only one.
• Goodbye dolly, hello Nintendo | smh.com.au: Apparently little girls are giving up playing with dolls at an earlier age to use more “structured” playthings and interact with their peers. This article pitches that as a moral panic, with quotes from two psychologists who, presumably, make their living from kids who are developing “abnormally”.
• Finding Utility in the Jumble of Twittered Thoughts | NYTimes.com: Despite starting off with this hackneyed pair of sentences — “The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?” — this is another good article covering the possibilities for Twitter. Mind you, I wouldn’t want my urgent medical alerts sent by a low-reliability system like Twitter!
• Newspapers Begin to Push Back on the Web | NYTimes.com: A nice backgrounder on the current moves by Associated Press to prevent people linking to its content. It doesn’t cover everything — it’s a complicated issue! — but it’s part of the picture.
• Super-fast trip to a world full of surprises | smh.com.au: Mark Pesce’s op-ed piece for Fairfax on the National Broadband Network.
• Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check | SafeKids.com: “Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million ‘cases’ of teen-to-teen cyberbullying in 2006.” Indeed, let’s focus on where the real risks are, not the imaginary or extremely rare ones.
• WDM-PON blurs the boundary between metro and last mile | ibresystems.org: WDM-PON (wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical network) could provide broadband operators with an elegant way to simplify and futureproof their access network architecture. Here’s a summary of recent developments.

• NSLU2-Linux: Technical information for hacking the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device, along with the Synology DS101, the Iomega NAS100d, the D-Link DSMG600 and other ixp4xx-based devices with large attached storage.
• Hacking WD MyBook World Ed: Western Digital's My Book World Edition network storage device is actually a little Linux RAID server. This Wiki has technical information on how to hack them.
• Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like A Horse: Well, she does. And here's the website. Proof that people have too much time on their hands.
• A twittering experiment | eicolab: An interesting use Twitter, with a comment added by yours truly.
• Friends, Enemies and My Army | Viddler.com: Another recent presentation by Mark Pesce, this one at the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, on 25 May 2008. A nice trip through the power of Twitter, the "nuclear option", and the surprising influence of Josh Marshall's army.
• Phoenix Lander “Talks” to Twitterers | NYTimes.com: Includes an interview with the NASA employee who's been playing the part of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft on Twitter (@MarsPhoenix).
• Australian Strategic Policy Institute: "One for the feed reader", I've been told. I haven't explored this site yet.
• A discussion paper on the singular use of “they”: This link looks like it solves this question forever. If only people read it…
• Twitter Co-Opted by Users as Better SMS, Social Media Platform | URBEINGRECORDED: Yet another superb essay on the impact of Twitter.
• The Gruen Transfer | ABC TV: A new TV series looking at the art and science of persuasion as used by the advertising industry. Much good stuff here.
• Ern Malley | Wikipedia: Not exactly a new story, but I was recently reminded of this wonderful literary hoax from the 1940s.
• Scaling a Microblogging Service – Part I | Hueniverse: A comprehensive but fairly technical explanation of the problems Twitter faces.
• The Digital Media Revolution | YouTube: Mark Pesce, Technology Futurist speaks about the Digital Media Revolution at the SAGEM conference, April 2008, in Adelaide. Will the government heed his advice? In 5 parts, this links to part 1.
• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address | YouTube: An inspirational 15 mins about the importance of following your dream, even if the end result isn't clear. "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back."

My friend Matt says: Three huh? Pop Rocks; Hopscotch and a Stopwatch.

He’s pretty clever, I think. Now, whatever happened to Pop Rocks?

It’s 8am, a crisp winter morning. 11C outside. I drag a battered flannelette shirt over my t-shirt — a shirt that’s now 12 years old, I remember. I bought it at Gowings when I first came to Sydney, and it’s still wearable, more or less. Where will I buy everyday clothes now that Gowings is gone?

The shirt smells of smoke. Why is that?

It’s not the acrid stench of cigarette smoke, but the dusty odour of burnt wood. Eucalyptus. A bushfire? Ah, no, I remember now. Sitting by the open fireplace at The Duke Hotel… red wine… the memories flood back as the coffee kicks in…

“What are you writing?” asks a gravelly voice.

A tall, thin lad with long greasy hair has spotted the newspapers spread across the table between me and the Snarky Platypus, the open notebook, the pen in my hand. The page is empty.

“Nothing, yet,” I reply.

The lad is drunk. Very drunk.

Stinkingly shit-faced drunk.

He looks a bit like a younger, thinner Tex Perkins, only more dangerous.

“Let me write something then,” he slurs as he grabs the pen and starts flipping pages. “I’ve just come from Silverwater.”

“Reason enough to celebrate then,” I say.

The Snarky Platypus says nothing, sips his wine.

I notice the lad’s got a friend with him, somewhat less drunk. We exchange a knowing glance as the lad writes boldly, aggressively across a double-page spread:

THIS IS YOUR MIND

And he underlines it. And again. And again and again and again and again — stabbing the page repeatedly until the pen rips right through the paper.

He stops, picks up the notebook and stares at it curiously for a few moments, surprised at his own aggression.

Suddenly a woman’s voice says “Can I write you a poem?” and her hand takes the notebook. She’s young, neatly dressed and coiffed, well-educated, bright-eyed and perky. “I’ll write a poem,” and she starts jotting down what she hears as the drunken lad rants to us, his friend, to everyone, to no-one in particular.

This is what she writes:

Explain the whole universe.
Which big cunt.
It’s coming around.
Peter Jackson died about the cunt.
But happy and healthy.
There’s all different Peter Jacksons.
We’re all happy.
What’s going on down there?

She explains that this is her technique. She listens to conversations and as soon as she hears a phrase that sticks out she writes it down. Then the next one, then the next. This is her technique, but I’m allowed to use it if I like.

In thank her, and tell her that her poem will be on the Internet in the morning. I ask her name so I can give her proper credit.

“Amala,” she says, “A M A L A,” assuming immediately that I’ll need to have it spelt out. “Groom, G R O O M for Mary.”

Amala Groom, there is your poem, on the Internet as promised.

“Another drink?” I ask the Snarky Platypus? “Here or somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else,” he says. He downs the last of his wine and we leave.

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