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With superb irony, I am posting this in anticipation of the SunWinks! column that should have appeared last Sunday. I know I said it would appear later in the week, but I only got it written yesterday and I am loath to step on Sharon’s and Len’s toes by posting it today or tomorrow. So it will appear on Sunday the 21st, Carol’s birthday.
Open letter to East Vancouver, Washington:
Every election I get insulted with smear flyers from euphemistically-named committees. I am speaking out today because we need not to let this sort of yellow campaigning go unchallenged.
The Right Wing benefits from a complacent, poorly-educated electorate. I got this flyer in the mail this week. Stonier’s opponent and her party have no compunction about benefiting from garbage like this. No attempt is made to support its ridiculous accusation that “she always chooses government;” there are not even any specifics, let alone documentation.
The people who produce this may not have to justify their cynical posturing, but they do have to identify themselves and how they are funded. So, they form a PAC with the Orwellian name of “Quality Communities Committee.” Then, because they have to, they identify their top five contributors…as The Reagan Fund. That’s a giveaway, thankfully. All the same, this dodge insulates the people who pay for this behind a couple layers of anonymity, and allows Stonier’s opponent to keep her hands clean.
Monica Stonier is a highly respected educator and community leader. To twist that into “she never held a private sector job” is just laughable. Nevertheless, I worry about how many people fail to see through this sort of smear tactic. That’s why we need an educator in Olympia, so our public schools can continue to produce engaged and well-informed citizens.
Please vote, and please do your homework. If mudslinging doesn’t work, maybe it will stop.
Doug Westberg
Dear SunWinkers!
A tasty confection the metaphor,
As sweet to an ode as a petit four,
A friend to the scribe,
Which, aptly applied,
Your poem will be so much the better for.
Last week, we introduced the idea that our language is built through metaphor. There were so many great stories to choose from, and all from just the one book: Loose Cannons, Red Herrings, and Other Lost Metaphors by Robert Claiborne [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988]. (I have half a dozen others.) So this week, I’m just going to throw out a few more word stories and let you either work on last week’s prompt, or a completely different prompt which I’ve supplied below.
Annie Oakley
Phoebe Anne Oakley Mozee, a.k.a. Annie Oakley, gave shooting exhibitions in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 1800s. One of her most famous tricks was to throw a playing card into the air and shoot a hole in it. In that era, “comps,” complimentary tickets for theater or sporting events, had holes punched in them to prevent them being resold. Ban Johnson, founding president of the American League, took to calling such comps “Annie Oakleys,” and the name stuck. Later on, the nickname came to refer to other freebies, such as a walk in baseball. Alas, the nickname is virtually forgotten today.
Have you ever thought about where the name “cockpit” came from? As you might guess, it’s just what it looks like, a reference to the small sunken pits in which cockfights were held. A metaphorical cockpit is any small space in which intense fighting takes place, hence its application to the pilot’s compartment of a fighter plane. Continue reading
On a blue canvas
God sponge-paints with smoke over
Bright moon, two contrails
SunWinks! 