Stickermania #3: The Purple Pen Project

(Click on images to enlarge)

Here at the Plogquarters, we've been mightily inspired by the subversive sticker project - thanks to my beloved Manchester mishpokha for the Best. Gift. EVER!!!!

Welcome to the launch of a new campaign - the PPP (or Purple Pen Project). All you need to participate are:

-sticky labels, or paper with adhesive. (not necessary if one goes the chalk route)
-something purple to write with (it doesn't have to be a pen - that was just for the cool acronym)
-righteous anger and a burning desire for equality

It's so simple - but can be so effective! Subliminal advertising is everywhere - let's put some worthy messages out there and see how far-reaching and widespread this can go.

Start sticking, sisterhood!

(And if you send your efforts to me, you will warm the cockles (cuntles?) of my feminist soul)

x

Dr Plog's One Hundredth Post

To my eleven followers and countless readers ("countless" in the literal sense of the word as I appear to have no way of gauging, or am I merely as uninternetty as I've long suspected?) - I THANK YOU! I have reached my century and now I must retire this experiment, this ill-advised ... folly!

Just kidding, folks!

It's actually been great doing this, being here: far, far less scaryintimidating than I'd imagined. I am not a Child of the Web (oooh, free horror film title for any would-be Wes Cravens amongst you) and although I've been known to exhibit exhibitionistic tendencies (wee early century swing phase), this is on a much larger, unpoliced scale. Less sexy too. Unless ... hmmm ...

(DOCTOR PLOG then bursts into Halle x Gwyneth-sized tears and runs up to the podium, the delicate fringe of her emerald-green, slit to the j-lo buttcheek dress swishing glamorously around those red-soled shoes that all those lemming-stars ponificate about - you don't see Tilda Swinton and Fiona Shaw waxing lyrical, just sayin'... )

DOCTOR PLOG: (Melodramatically, between tears, yet actually genuine, heartfelt. I just have impulse control issues) I'd like to thank Meg, without whom I wouldn't be here - no, really! Girlfriend bullied me into it! I'd like to thank the blogs that have inspired me and the commenters who bring the funny and the insightful. And I'd like to thank the LA City Bus Company for taking a chance on an unknown kid ...

END SCENE

Blogging has helped my confidence, given me an outlet for all that goes in (not a euphemism) and shaped the way I literally "see" things (Lady Camera accompanies me on a lot more adventures these days). I am having more adventures these days: being braver about approaching new people and seeking out different things, ostensibly for "the blog" but really for me. And finally, FINALLY - after years and years of the most painful writers' blockage caused by Theo (Mr P's name for my thesis = the root cause of my ph.depression, my ph.dystopia, my ph.dysfunction, helped along by my "frenemy" Mary J) - I am remembering how the act of writing itself is so deeply gratifying even if the end result is messy, misspelt, misshapen: full of tangents, full of non-sequitirs, full o' shite. In other words: all one hundred posts, present crapola included, which makes me even more appreciative of your indulgences. Mille grazie!

x x x

Love Letters Of 1939

"One kiss would, I think, help to reassure me that there are some lovely things left in the world, that there is some good besides the monstrous evil into which we are plunging."

If you love history, or if you love the (lost? losing?) art of letter-writing or even if you just love love, you will adore this series of correspondence between Gwynne and Winnie Meara, an English couple like many separated at the outbreak of the Second World War. Just published in the Times by their son David, they "paint a vivid picture of the hope and despair of so many people at the time, as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made his fateful declaration on September 3, 1939."

(Image from here)

Duffy Shows No Mercy

... and we are all the better for it!

The following is the first poem from new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, first woman in the position since its inception in 1599! And it's timely, passionate, ballsy (I hate that word but my version, cunty, has so far failed to catch on). It's called, simply, Politics:

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

English Is Tough Stuff

A clever poem I found while googling "welsh humour" - go figure! - by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), a Dutch linguist and critic who published under the pseudonym Charivarius.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Surreal

Oddness afoot at the House of Plog:

He is down in his study living, eating, breathing Iraq as his deadline looms.

I am taking notes on a film (see above) for a paper I am co-authoring on Jews and pornography.

So my moans and muzak are providing the soundtrack for his death and destruction.

It is so in my nature to try and make a point here equating war and porn in a grand (but ultimately shallow) statement but, luckily for you guys, it is too early and my brain hurts.

I-Writeus

I have just been diagnosed with iritis (after three wrong diagnoses of conjunctivitus and three useless series of antibiotics - more like iwrongus, so be vigilant about checking, eye-infected people). One of my favourite people M said it sounded like an illness a writer would get:

IWRITEUS

And I am more comfortable with the prognosis spelt that way! Just like I prefer thinking in terms of my "feyonce" (rhymes with Beyonce.) Aaahhh, words! And spelling! Two of my Favourite Things!

Is how a word is spelt important to you? Does it affect how you think of the word? What about with names, for example? Is Catherine the same as Kathryn? Is Jeff the same as Geoff?