Bad Photoshop! Bad!

This was the main image on last Friday's Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. Usually I feel a little bad making fun of design choices on not-so-major newspapers—presumably everyone's doing the best with the resources and talent they have on hand. But this Photoshop siamese-twin montage is realy too much. Though including the deposed police chief's microphone as a sort of cancerous growth sticking out from the Mayor's neck does add a bit of metaphoric interest.

Sabbath Poem: La Palabra

"La Palabra", by Pablo Neruda. [Spanish text w/translation] I first read this in a bilengual edition of Fully Empowered. The last couplet stuck with me in Spanish from the start, but only lately have I been feeling confident enough in my skill to try memorizing the whole thing in the original. At present I've got about three-quarters done (one recitation every morning for about a month). Maybe another week or two and I'll be there. In the mean time, here's what I sound like reading it. I seem to have adopted a quasi-Argentine way of pronouncing my y's and ll's, even though most of the Spanish I hear is of the Mexican-influenced Univision Newscaster Standard.