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  • How I learned to stop worrying and love computer programming

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    wombat
    in

    As a go-getting engineering student, I chose my first university elective to be Computer Science 101. I didn’t like it. The lectures put me right to sleep – and I’m a lecture lover. The exams were not a problem. But the projects were another story. The first few were easy. But as they got harder,…

  • My brutish love of poetry, part 4

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    by

    wombat
    in ,

    Poetry can be dangerous. Yes, it can be pretty, pithy, wise, amusing. But it’s gotten me and countless others into trouble. My web site here is a pretty safe place and I’ve quoted some pretty safe poems. There are many poets I love who are big troublemakers. Some write about the experience of love and…

  • My brutish love of poetry, part 3

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    by

    wombat
    in ,

    Another gift of Canada is exposure to French Canadian poetry. If you know even a little bit of french, you can poke around at the edges. I am a fan of Anne Hébert and of her cousin Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. His life was brief and his family posted his works here. Somehow poems in…

  • My brutish love of poetry, part 2

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    wombat
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    In 1920, Marianne Moore wrote a poem that begins: The Fish wade through black jade. You can immediately see that this poem plays with line breaks and structure and is not about meter and rhyme. Yikes, free verse. What is there for a brute lover of poetry to sink her teeth into? Marianne Moore is…

  • My brutish love of poetry, part 1

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    by

    wombat
    in ,

    I never studied poetry the way I studied other subjects. But I love it, poems stick in my head for years, I can recite a few, and sometimes reading a poem colors my thoughts for hours. Since I don’t know or understand many underlying references and details, I love poems like a brute, like an…

  • Musical cross dressing – Bill Evans and “I love you Porgy”

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    by

    wombat
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    Trio performance Here is a link to the Bill Evans Trio playing “I love you Porgy”. I bought this on vinyl years ago. Recently I had to chance to play “I love you Porgy” with some friends. And I thought about singing it. The lyrics are very much from a woman’s point of view: I…

  • It’s a boy thing

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    by

    wombat
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    I like boy things. When I hear about explosives and magnets and highly nauseating g-forces I am drawn like a moth to flame. I once spent a week in Mumbai hanging out with an engineer who designed ship propellers. You only like me for my propeller talk, he’d say. Not true, but I did like…

  • One and a half lingual

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    wombat
    in

    When your mother tongue is not your mother’s, you grow up with an echo. In our house, English was the official language, the language of information transfer. Cantonese, my parents’ first language, was the language of emotion and of secrets. It was the language of outbursts. Here’s a typical example, an exchange between my mother…

  • My favorite feminist film

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    by

    wombat
    in ,

    Is also my favorite film. And believe me, coming up with a fave is not easy for me. I don’t think I could come up with a favorite book. This film, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, stands out because I think it’s flawless. I wouldn’t change a frame of it. The movie came out…

  • Viva le vélo

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    by

    wombat
    in

    I wrote a novel for twelve year olds that features bicycles. The novel is set in China in 1902, when the bicycle was a fairly new technology. Many key features of the modern bicycle were present in the 1902 bicycle. So, why bicycles? When I was in Africa for six months in 1991-1992, Chinese bicycles…