Thanks for publishing this. Your columns are usually intelligent and thoughtful, but in not distinguishing solar thermal generation from the other methods, you conflate matters seriously. It should be obvious to any thinking human that there's all the free power we will ever need in the form of solar radiation. The question is what the cheapest, most efficient, and least toxic methods are for using that power. In this regard, solar thermal generation is quite simply the only effective approach. It's simple, it's cheap, it works.

Why build nuclear power plants and create horrible storage dilemmas when we already have available the thermonuclear energy of the hugest power plant in the system, the sun?

Amen, brother Ben. Said it once, and I'll say it again. Amen, brother Ben. Thanks. Felt almost as good as throwing a shoe myself.

No it wasn't. Wonderful, that is. One of the articles you linked to mentioned Robert Frost's wonderful moment at Kennedy's inauguration, Maya Angelou, and Miller Williams. Frost quoted the best poem ever heard at an inauguration, but only because the wind wouldn't let him read the one he had written, which was the usual lame stuff. Maya Angelou is a great woman, but bless her heart, she is an awkward, sentimental poet, truly awful. Miller Williams is indeed a good poet--I suspect Clinton, while not having an appreciation for poetry, was at least aware enough to know who the best-known poet in Arkansas was--but his piece for the inauguration was pap.

The attitude seems to be that if any of the philistines uses poetry in any way whatsoever we must be breathless with admiration (to support the cause), and it is unthinkable to criticize the piece in question.

To me this is like admitting the patient is dead. Real poetry doesn't need protection. It doesn't need apologists. It will kick you in the ass if it needs to. Enough of this shallow feckless blather. Poetry requires intelligence, perception, deep power with language, greatness of heart. It is not for weaklings or wannabes. It does not ask permission of power and it does not need the praise of the deaf.

Alexander's poem is a lame iteration (yet another list--when your imagination fails you, resort to a list) of abstract and vague assertions, a parade of cliched images in the name of hopefulness. The horribly awkward and unmusical use of the word "encounter" is just one example of many failings.

I'm all for metered verse, and I agree with Berger that what is important about poetry is precisely that it is NOT ordinary speech, but musical and measured. Poetry is a thing that can be done with language that we do not usually do, just as dance is a thing with movement that can be done that we do not usually do and painting a thing that can be done with vision that we do not usually do. However I detect no meter in the print version of the poem. Perhaps Alexander read it in a cadenced fashion, but a good poem puts the music in the words, so that anyone can hear it mentally by simply reading. It does not require the author to superimpose a rhythym.

Salon could do with an editor who actually knows a thing or two about poetry. But what is the point of complaining? The lack of awareness is endemic in this culture.

Old age isn't for sissies. I wish I could remember who said that. Great works by older masters include the poems of Yeats, who probably wrote more and shrewder and more beautiful and more moving poems about aging than anyone ever. And not a shred of sentimentality in them, by the way.

Me, I'm 64, considering these matters. Check back with me in a couple of decades.

The old are always saying, "You too shall come to this."

The young are always answering with a kiss.

And thanks to jb1955 for the information, if I am remembering the moniker correctly.

UBERGEEKY

(a memoir of the downfall)

‘Twas Bush league, and the slimy toads

Did lie and gamble with our fate;

All flimsy were the moral codes

That should have kept them straight.

“Beware the Ubergeek, you con,

The tongue that speaks, the mind that thinks;

Avoid the democrats, and shun

Decent people as dinks.”

But look: A supple mind commands

The field, and bullies must obey:

They robbed us blind, but now their kind

Has had its brightest day.

Like crawfish in the bottom mud,

They stirred up clouds of murk and muck;

They hadn’t tortured, pillaged. They were good.

And what kind of a name is Barack?

They never thought the time would come

When brains and courage beat their butts,

When honesty thrashed villainy

And said, Now who’s the klutz?

“And hast thou lost to ubergeeks?

Go to your cells, you thieves and crooks.

O blessed day, let habeus stay!

A Potus who reads books!”

‘Twas Bush league, and the slimy toads

Did lie and gamble with our fate;

All flimsy were the moral codes

That should have kept them straight.

Kudos, as usual. I read you every morning just to start the day off with common sense (which means, not "frequently seen sense," but fundamental or basic sense).

Minor grammatical observation from a word geek. "Breakdown" as spelled is used as a noun. When you intend the verb, as you did here, you spell out two words: "break down." A breakdown is something that has malfunctioned. The action is to break something down, and "down" is a particle.

All that gold and guilt and murder. And gee, didn't they just recently, after nearly four hundred years, allow as how maybe Galileo was right after all?

I grew up a Southern Baptist in Mississippi in the 60s, which is crazy enough. But at least I'm not a Catholic.

These people presume to speak for Jesus?

Give me a break.