What would I be if I were a product?

god of the machine is a hearing aid that makes amusing belching noises, uses the Amazon API and checks your spelling.

That’s actually pretty close. (Link from Spleenville via Cut on the Bias.)

Many poets write about writing poetry; Allan at Rough Days links to a long list. This makes sense, because poets spend a lot of time writing poems. But few poets write about reading poetry, which is odd, because poets (one hopes) spend even more time reading poems. The best poem I know about reading poetry is by J.V. Cunningham. It says that the poem lives only in the mind of the intelligent reader, not on the page, and that to reconstruct the poem, to enter so far into the thoughts of someone else, is itself a creative act.

Poets survive in fame.
But how can substance trade
The body for a name
Wherewith no soul’s arrayed?

No form inspires the clay
Now breathless of what was,
Save the imputed sway
Of some Pythagoras,

Some man so deftly mad
His metamorphosed shade,
Leaving the flesh it had,
Breathes on the words they made.

I oppose mild gun laws, because they don’t work and cultivating disrespect for the law by passing ineffective laws is a bad idea; and I oppose harsh gun laws, because they do work, and disarming the citizenry is a worse idea. That said, I suspect the shootings in Maryland are exactly the sort of crime that Draconian gun laws would discourage. Susanna Cornett plausibly speculates — Susanna is always plausible — that the Maryland perp is employed, reasonably functional, without a criminal record, and an ardent gun hobbyist. (Also white, male and in his 30s or 40s, which is less relevant for our purposes.) If owning guns were essentially illegal, wouldn’t shooting sprees of this type by otherwise law-abiding people be among the first things to go?

The Brady Campaign, oddly, says it will “refuse to capitalize” on the shootings in Maryland, when to do so would be far less dishonest than usual.