Just when you think these kids are hopeless They play basketball (Friday's Sunday's Poem/Hot Actress 76)

Basketball
by Edouard Gilles Jr.


Basketball is the border between poverty and wealth.

A hole to exit from drugs and into society.

For real basketball players, basketball is their education, culture and career.

Places where drive by shooting is the u.s. postal service,

Places with black on black crime.

Where drug dealers are like sand.

And cigarettes are like vitamins, vitamins of death.

Places where parents lack control over their kids, and society has just given up.

Just when you think these kids are hopeless,

They play basketball to get out the misery of life,

And yet, their soul, their destiny, still unfulfilled.

_____________________________________________________________

About the poem: It's NCAA Basketball time, which is the only time I pay attention to basketball, as a rule (including providing you with Whodathunkit?!: The 64... make that 68 best things you REALLY WANT to know about this year's NCAA Men's Tournament.), so I went searching for basketball poems and found a bunch of them on Helium.com.

I liked this one the best -- not because it's depressing (it is) but because of the claim that basketball is seen as way out of poverty, and because of the vivid metaphor about drive by shootings.

About the Hot Actress: Camila Alves may not technically be an actress (she played "Chatting Woman #3 as an uncredited role in Snow Dogs), but she is Matthew McConaughey's girlfriend, and since Sweetie announced this week that she wants to see The Lincoln Lawyer and since I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't discontinued it, Matthew would be a Hunk of the Week, and since I'm pretty sure that's the only reason Sweetie would want to see The Lincoln Lawyer, I thought turnabout should be fair play, and I now intend to rent Snow Dogs.

click here for a list of all the Friday's Sunday's Poems.

A day out of the office beats a day IN the office, even without dramatic footage (I Get Paid For Doing This)

Last week Friday, I had a trial in Milwaukee -- a trial that, as it turned out, settled and the settlement took less time than the trial was planned to, which left me with free time on my hands, time that was not intended to be occupied by anything.

I opted to use some of that time to walk through a skywalk and look up and then to take pictures of what I saw looking up, because I liked the pattern against the blue sky:















And then I looked back and saw what I'm pretty sure is the tallest building in Wisconsin, looming geometrically behind the skylights of the walkway I was on, so I took a picture of that, too:

And then, on the way home, I saw that there were all kinds of police cars and fire trucks rushing by me, so I whipped out my camera again to take pictures that I was sure were going to be dramatic and that I could probably sell to a news organization later that day, capping off what was turning out to be a fine Friday morning, but it was just a truck that had tipped over:















I took video, too, but it's kind of pointless given that it wasn't very exciting, so my dreams of selling dramatic crash-scene footage were dashed, and I'm not posting the video.

After all that, I ate cold pizza on the way home and listened to the Savage Love podcast. In case you wanted to know how I finished off the morning.

Vote on how you think Governor Patsy is doing. (Publicus Proventus)

In their effort to game the public and trick them into thinking that Governor Patsy's robbery of Wisconsin's poor and middle class, Wisconsin Republicans are forwarding links to an online poll site that's meant to "measure" support -- but they're only sending the link to trusted members of the GOP in hopes of making it look like Governor Patsy has the public on his side.


That didn't work, as the link got out -- you can vote by going here -- and as of the moment I voted just now, the poll was showing 52% against Governor Patsy:




No doubt that means another fake death threat will be coming out soon. Got to do something to make people like you, right?

Also, if you go to that link and vote, and click "return to poll," you can vote again. So, um... just sayin'.