I do not live in Iraq. I've never been there, though I have spent time in the Middle East. I am not a soldier, and I do not patrol the streets of Baghdad, or fight to maintain safety while Iraqi citizens attempt to control the direction of a new government.

But news reports and military maps seem to suggest an unfortunate reality. United States and the coalition of armed forces appear to occupy only a tiny section of the whole, while insurgents continue to struggle. I cannot attest to the...

Regular Users of Joe like myself probably found themselves somewhat shocked when the new, revitalized forum layout arrived the other day. I spent about an hour fiddling with the buttons and switches, locating forum threads, and trying to determine who mudflap was, the lucky SOB.

Maybe one or two months into my term here at JoeUser, it occurred to me that this site is FREE. While there are many free blog sites out there, most require the purchase of upgrades to create an adequate venue. So...

I encountered a slightly different variation on this riddle once again in LABYRINTHS OF REASON by William Poundstone. Anyone with the slightest interest in logic and the concept of paradox should read it.

A man by the name of Bernard Lowell, at the age of twenty, moved from his home in a small town in Ohio to Las Vegas, Nevada. He was fascinated by the games of chance, and by the people who thought they could beat the games. Games like craps and roulette held little interest for him. He p...

Note: I have heard this riddle presented in many forms. Most recently, I read this version in LABYRINTHS OF REASON by William Poundstone.

The jury found the prisoner guilty of the worst sort of murder. Well within his rights to sentence the prisoner to death, the judge could not indulge himself and have the manner of the murderer's death exceed a simple hanging. Nevertheless, the nature of this specific crime filled the judge with outrage, and he struggled within the bounds of his mandate ...

I am not rewriting metaphysical treatises on existentialism or empathizing with Joycean characters neglected by Dublin, Ireland. But time parted for me and I held the universe in my palm for an endless segment of reality.

This took place as the New Year began. Slumped back into this hairy, soggy desk chair as usual, typing into an article my half-formed thoughts, I suddenly understood a simple, yet profound truth: I am using a computer.

I admit that I am no genius. I feel comfortable pl...

What kind of arms do you bear? When you are not bearing your arms, where do you store them? In general, how often, would you say, do you bear your arms for the purpose intended by the Second Amendment to the Constituion of the United States of America?

There is a right, as provided by the Second Amendment, to bear arms. Debates continue in and out of courtrooms as to how such a right should be protected, limited, and monitored. While discussions tend to polarize our citizens along politic...

You silly, silly people. What have you done now? All of your focus on saving poor, defenseless American flags has blinded the educational system and warped your children's sense of values. They all believe that killing Iraqi civilians is freedom, while seeing a blurry, surgery-enhanced nipple is worse than. . ..No. It's so bad that there's nothing worse, anywhere.

BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer reports that "more than one in three high school students said it [the First Amendment to the ...

Horrors are easy to come by these days. Horrors arrive in torrential rains or waves, or rise from the earth when subterranean rock plates collide.

There is something altogether different--a sense of truth, perhaps--when one human kills another, however; you wonder about reasons and God, morality and faith. Horror derives from a lack of apocalyptic finality after millions die in trench fighting or succumb to rampant disease in World War I; or when neighbors kill neighbors in Civil Wars throu...

My mother's father, Reuben Hoffman (you can look him up), had a defect in his color-responsive cells, the cones of his retina--making him colorblind. He passed the X-chromosome to my mother, and she forwarded the darned thing on to me, and to my younger brother, too. You get a lot of you-know from people--friends, family--everyone, for the most part, when they find out about the colorblindness. I mean, you're not missing a leg or commoding into a bag. They can make fun of you if they like an...

Hate for the Sake of Feeling

You lose friends, sometimes. Casual friends, intimate friends, you lose them in places that you know the best. Forget them: that's the easiest way to do it. Take them for granted. Try to make them responsible for your well being. You lose them before you even know they're gone.

Sometimes they resurface, unbidden and unsought. They forget why you left them behind, and the forgetting makes them angry. They feel something and they want an explanation.

Th...

A Sense of Time

A strange sun follows me where I go
trying pale white water paint
to pretend colors I cannot believe:
a pale blue mountain side
becomes a thin, pale sea.

I am in the forest underneath the trees
where the rivers run
under a lazy, speckled sun
running through river bells
to a moonlit, soundless sea.

Tossed far into the running winds
my way of life passed into dreams:
should one death hang me so?
I hang, dripping from the sky
into the tremendous wealth
and inev...

Crestone, Colorado

something living here
in the death of winter.
what lives buries its belly
next to the earth
sticking stalky roots and stems
into the ice
ducking below
the shallow air.

this stubble of plants clutch
to something i cannot understand.
I am nothing, here
nothing acknowledges
my boots in the snow,
the snow is ice,
gives nothing to the texture
of my boot soles,
gives nothing to my weight
or heat, silently breathing wind
to dry away my voice

and i am gone.
...

Was I Playing Texas Holdem When That Tsunami Hit?


Lately, I've played some poker.

Not just "poker", but Texas Holdem, the Cadillac of poker amongst a parking lot filled with old Datsuns. You only get two of your own cards. You have to share the rest with other players, and there may be a lot of other players.

However, there's only five other cards, given to the table in three increments starting with three cards, then one each on the last two rounds. The winner, as in all forms of ...

You're the Writer

why does he have to die
you're the writer
she said

looking up from the dark
with a finger
scratching there
and here

and i say what
because i had forgotten
with the smell of apples

in her hair and all
through the room even
as the fan blew
rotating blasts of wind

rhythmically around
the night inside these walls
which forever

are forever


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when it happenend

she told me he turned from red to blue
he gasped for air reflexes
she was crying, too,
mind (hers) couldn't take it in
but it did get
in daryl is

dead.


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