To never being in a rut

The rain, which threatens the sky outside my office window as I type this, is one of nature’s many palindromes.

It hangs heavy in the clouds, brooding, and then drops to the earth, only to evaporate, seconds, days, years later, into the atmosphere again, eventually snuggling in with another cloud.

It’s recycling at it’s unadulterated best.

And it’s also a palindrome, without, say, a word. But who needs them anyway?

Figuratively speaking, precipitation is the same thing, spelled forward and backward.

Which brings me to my next point: precipitation is notoriously good at getting out of ruts.

Sure the rain many create grooves and holes in the earth or Highway 101, but it nonetheless almost-never fails to escape a rut.

Neither — I have discovered from extensive study — does Ventura.

Check this out:

Re: Ventura,

Rut?

Never!

Or try it like this:

reventurarutnever

!!!

The media myth: the Lois Lane and Superman syndrome

Myth: That all reporters and writers are fabulous and lead fabulously interesting lives.

Truth: They’re pretty ordinary.

Nowhere was this more evidenced than at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies annual media conference held last weekend in San Francisco.

In a historic-looking church on Franklin Street, a hundred-or-so writers, editors and miscellanies, sat around and talked about, among other things, “the end of the paper trail,” “using public records,” and things that “just don’t look right,” handily referred to as JDLR, with the “D,” morphing into the handiest tense, i.e., don’t, didn’t doesn’t, etc.

One thing that JDLR was the collection of oddballs cloistered in a drab, tired, ’70s-style conference room, looking equally drab and tired. Of course, there were the typical media-type stand-bys: the all-out news-nerd, the I-write-a-column fashionista, the bar-fly investigator and the local-politics junkie, but most of the journalists in the room were, quite frankly, normal looking.

They did normal things like fall asleep during lecture, drop their pens, stare into space, forget their umbrellas.

What did Lois Lane and Superman do to these poor people?

The fact is, reporters aren’t celebrities. They aren’t all fabulous and they don’t all lead fabulous lives.

Some are fabulous, some aren’t; some do lead fabulous lives, some don’t, just like any other profession except maybe cattle roping, which I’m pretty sure is the path least traveled to a glamorous life.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Fabulousness does not a good article make.

And backwards it almost, but doesn’t quite, make sense: ssensuolubaf. (It does comes dangerously close to “sense” with “sens” — think on that, dear reader.)

No lemon no melon!

What is a palindrome?

A palindrome is a word or group of words spelled the same way, forward and backward, like racecar. It can also be used to refer to a group of words that mirror each other, like “reporting on reporting.”

This blog will explore how palindromes affect perception, and the significance of palindromes popping-up in nature.

It will be about parallel words as much as it will be about parallel worlds and world views.

It will also be about a bunch of other bizarre things I find worthy of blogging about.

No lemon no melon!