Virgil

1) If you live in the United States and you haven’t heard, you must be bound in dungeon with no communication to the outside world. There is a hurricane coming up the east coast with a direct hit to New York City. This is not very common, though if I look at the historical list of NYC hurricanes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ork_hurricanes) I can kind of estimate one every forty years or so.

2) Hurricane Irene is currently a category 1 and expected to stay that ...

It’s kind of rare to have an earthquake on the east coast. I’m sure the Californians or anyone who lives in a major earthquake zone are not going to think much of it. It was a 5.8 magnitude, centered south of Washington D.C., traveled up and down the east coast as south as South Carolina and north as Maine, and you can read about it here: http://news.yahoo.com/quake-rocks-wa...181550612.html.

I was in the middle of an all day meeting of about a dozen engineers ...

While perusing the headlines today I came across this in The Atlantic monthly magazine.

It's a Pattern: London Rioters Are Leaving Bookstores Untouched

While the rioters in England this week have looted shops selling shoes, clothes, computers, and plasma televisions, they've curiously bypassed one particular piece of merchandise: books. The Economist observes that while rioters have a centuries-old history of book burning, "books are losing out to high-end jeans

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A found poem is poetry taken from prose writing and reshaped to a poetic form. It’s “found” because the reader is so impressed with the writing that he sees a poem there in the language waiting to be crafted.

I came across this passage (from a third party reference) in the Old Testament that I was taken aback with its beauty. I probably had heard it before and never thought twice over it, but this time it sunk in and I realized this was poetry waiting to be shaped.
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If you have never heard of it, the contest is a hilarious parody. The objective is to write the worst opening of a novel in imitation of an actual 19th century English novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. It was Bulwer-Lytton who wrote this opening:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the

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