Make someone’s Valentine’s Day special: enter the third annual VD limerick contest. Even if you don’t, you really should link it on your weblog too. Then it gets onto Blogdex, you see, and someone stuck for a poem for their sweetie notices all these great limericks, and the rest is history, see?

Plus, you could win a Bug button. They’re going fast, BTW. I had a hundred made last week, and have shipped out half of them already.

They seem to be popular in the Low Countries, and Oakland/SF. The guy at the post office is starting to wonder what’s in all these envelopes making the tinny kaching-kaching sounds going all over the world.

I’ll be horsing around with the design today so don’t worry if something goes fffft. Or zzzzzt.

The light was good this morning. I left the house later than usual, so the sun was up. Also it was colder than yesterday and the sky was nearly clear, about a quarter full of cold-looking snow clouds, so rather than crappy grey drizzle (albeit the snow falling on the vineyards up the hills around Vienna was a pretty sight) we had great contrast today and good color saturation, with the color balance skewed a little towards the blue part of the scale. The woods weren’t woods, they were armies of individual naked black trees set apart by the snow on the ground and when the passenger train zoomed past it made no sound. That drew attention to the noises in the car: mostly just Anner Bylsma playing Bach on an old cello from the Smithsonian, along with an occasional grunt from the driver, the steady rumble purr of a small diesel motor; now and then interactions with other drivers such as “oi, oi, oi,” or “go for it, dude,” and a couple medium-length streams of filthy invective. Now and then a chortle, or even chuckle, over the ticker-tape of wisecracks running across the inside of my forehead.

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Announcing the First Annual metamorphosism.com Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest, which is the third contest of its kind since we also had the Feral Living Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest two years ago and last year, which I see the Internet gods have been kind enough to leave online, so far.

Rules:

• You may enter as often as you wish

• Leave your entries in the comments to this post
• Deadline is Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2004
• Winner gets a Bug button if they want one, as well as admission to the pantheon of past Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest Winners

More rules:

• We did philosophers last year… let’s see… entries this year must include a reference to a well-known psychiatrist/psychologist, or a parasite (Latin or vernacular names okay).

• Extra credit for Tolkein reference.

Candy hearts courtesy of Acme Heart Maker.

The Bug buttons are here. If you want one, send me an e-mail with your mailing address and how many you want.

1. Fear and crashing correlate positively: the scareder you are, the more you crash.
2. It is possible to fall on your back hard enough to see stars.
3. My father-in-law is nearly 70 and skis like a god. He says only scaredy-cats fall onto their backs.
4. Likewise, the less scared you are, the less you crash. If you grit your teeth and go for it, it helps.
5. It is possible to go from hating skiing to loving it in just three days.
6. The food they serve in the lodge tastes good but makes you fart.
7. If you do enough skiing, you can eat all you want, and drink all the beer and schnapps you want, and not gain weight.
8. No matter how good you think you are, as soon as you congratulate yourself, a 5-year old Austrian child zips past.

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