Wal-Mart Super Centers, etc.

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From a website called Scarf Creations:

“Mike Smith has been a Elvis fan since he was 3 years old, when he heard his dad’s 8 track of Elvis. Mike’s career started when he was 25 years old and he performed in Kennett, Missouri. Mike has performed throughout Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois and Tennessee… at private parties, nursing homes, charity events, country clubs, restaurants, Wal-Mart Super Centers, etc. I perform in three stages of “Elvis” from his wild suits, 68 leather , to his most famous jumpsuits.”

“Besides doing Elvis, Mike works full time for Pepsi Mid-America in Sikeston, Missouri. I have performed 75 shows in the 3 years of my career as an Elvis impersonator and my recent being “The Jailhouse Rock” in Illinois.”

Christmas in Kennett

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We’re blogging this Christmas Eve from Terry and Nancy’s home in Kennett. Everyone but Ripley and I are packed in at the First Presbyterian Church for the annual choral extravaganza.

A few minutes ago I had some delicious chicken salad that Nancy made. She said it was quite likely that Lance Armstrong enjoyed some of this very same chicken salad earlier today. He and Sheryl Crow were in for an early Christmas and Nancy sent over some sandwiches. We are but two ships, knoshing in the night.

The past we imagined

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“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

Almost a year ago, I posted this line from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. It still bothers me to think that my past (good and bad) is not fixed. Permanent. That today’s past will look different to a future me. On the other hand, I’ll probably feel differently tomorrow.

More Billy Collins poetry

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The poem I couldn’t remember was by Billy Collins. Here’s another:

Flames

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it.

Untold stories

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I think the best part of publishing (?) a website is connecting with others. I get the most amazing email from strangers who google their way to my sites. Got a couple tonight. Maybe it’s the holidays. People are wondering about old friends:

“By chance I typed into Google the name Norman Shainberg as part of the research I’m helping my father with. Mr. Shainberg and my father were in the same room together at Stalag IX C known as Meiningen, during the WWII. IX C was a camp for Krieges who were recovering from wounds prior to being shipped out to more permanent locations. Dad’s note book indicates that Mr. Shainberg was the pilot of a Boston, and that he had lost his leg to the propellor upon bailing out over Pas de Calais, France in July 1944. Is Mr. Shainberg still alive? My father is well and lives in Montreal. I’ll have to direct Dad to your web site, he’ll be very interested.”

Unfortunately Mr. Shainberg died about 20 years ago. But it sounds like he lived an amazing life.

5 good responses for telemarketers or collection agencies

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Merlin, lives in San Francisco, California where he “drinks coffee and listens to Canadian power pop” and makes lists. Let’s add Merlin to the list of people I’d like to know just a little bit.

1. I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with human sacrifice?
2. Seriously, will you still be this interested in me after we’ve dated for a while?
3. Would you be able to tell if I were defecating right now?
4. I am French. Your money means nothing to me.
5. I can smell your panties through the phone.

Doc Searls describes blogs

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“… linky journals. What matters most about them is not where anybody falls on the power curve, but that every writer inhabits a place where anybody can write anything about anything, with a good chance that, if it’s interesting, others will find it, remark upon it, and use it to scaffold a shared understanding of whatever-it-is, and then some.”

Religious sites devoted to Elvis

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“The number of religious sites devoted to the King is just staggering: Church of Elvis, The Eighth Day Transfigurist Cult, Elvis Sance, The Elvis Shrine, The First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis, The Gospel of Elvis, Little Shrine to the King, and Oracle of the Plywood Elvis, and of course, The First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine.”

The review above was written by Kimberly Villalba Wright. I’m pretty sure I don’t know Kimberly but according to the credits on the review, she “was born in Hollywood, Florida, and has spent most of her life in Mobile, Alabama. She earned a BA in English at the University of South Alabama in 1997. Her poetry has appeared in the Epiphany, Arrowsmith, Doggerel, Dicat Libre, El Locofoco, as well as Poetry Caf. This fall, Wright will begin working toward an MFA in creative Writing at the University of Memphis. Wright currently resides in Kennett, Missouri.”

Kimberly… I’ll be in town Christmas Eve. Let’s hook up, pound some Buds and remember The King.

First and only woman executed in Missouri

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Half a century ago, radios throughout the country were broadcasting the news that a woman had died in Missouri’s gas chamber… the first– and so far, the only –woman ever executed in a state prison. Bonnie Brown Heady of St. Joseph and her lover Carl Hall had been convicted less than a month earlier of the kidnapping and murder of a little Kansas City boy, Bobby Greenlease. Former prison caseworker Gail Hughes remembers the Heady execution in an interview with Bob Priddy.