News of the Day

Question: Why are people on Facebook saying that Jon Bon Jovi is dead?

Answer: Because people on Twitter are.

Sigh...  Apparently, it's a hoax. (I checked with New Jersey.) I hate getting my news from Facebook.

Meanwhile, my friend Bill sent me this article on "the microeconomics of poetry." Oh, so that's why I'm so poor. I asked him to recommend any good second job he can think of, but so far he's employing my husband to fix his garage, which is good enough for now!

A fine working poet is our poet laureate, Philip Levine, and this is his News of the World, which you can get here from Random House. Many thanks to President Ronald Reagan for establishing that position for a national poet, and to Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac for reminding me of that.

And you'll want to read "Human Beauty," by Albert Goldbarth, the poem up there today, with its lovely claim that "the poem is an origami bird," which will fit right in among the other origami folds of my brain. But now I'm off to handle the tiny accordian folds of cupcake liners and mini-cupcake liners, because the holiday baking continues, and it's Fat Tuesday in the blog!