All Peoples Are at Times Cat in Water with This Language but It Does Promote International Bird on Shoulder

There are two (non-crisis, one sweet, one bad) real life news items dominating my thinking but I can't talk about them onblog no matter how much I dang, which is as it should be. Have three questions for a Wednesday after a three day holiday weekend during the Blog Days of Summer in Rustbelt, Blegsylvania:

• Like the new header? I was bored thinking of something to write about besides what I want to write about (or rather, what I've written, what I'm writing about but I won't publish here). I'm not sure I do like this header, whether I like any header at all, and if I do decide to use a header should I pick a permanent one or rotate them? If I rotate them, how often? Does anyone know how to set up headers so that a designated set of headers come up randomly each time the blog loads? Onandonandonandon.
• I've asked this before: is Windows 7 getting sketchier re: everything, but especially the internet regardless Firefox, IE, Google Fuhrer, whatever?
• Reading Age of Greed reminds me there are reasons Cassandras are ignored: there's always another clusterfuck, the worst since the last one and the worst until the next one, which isn't a question as much as to note the human need to believe in the exceptional nature of one's lifespan (in as loud or quiet or greedy or generous or proud or humble or any either/or you choose). Clusterfuck as prime mover, the catalyst of the necessary processes of what daily grinds.

• Going there.
• The problem with Democrats and social/cultural issues.
• Jokes about the Democratic Party. 
• Obamadick.
• Operating instructions.
• Vomit in your mouth both as noun and verb.
• Hedges, Nadar, the revolution in Narnia.
• Late-modern Capitalism.  
• Control through fear.
• Metropole cacaphony.
• This is true: I'd never heard of Casey Anthony until yesterday. 
• Cracker candidates on Casey Anthony.
• OLIE. Follow-up.
• Things you may have missed.
• Felt Tip. 
• By request of a friend. I really recommend Bryce's show if you don't already. One of my favorite three hours of the week.
• Buy me this for my birthday.
• Under the influence.

THE NEW HIEROGLYPHICS

Les Murray

In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.

Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.

Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2SO4, for musical notes,
but mostly it's diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure

have escaped their toilet doors. I (that is, saya,
ego, watashi wa) am two eyes without pupils;
those aren't seen when you look out through them.

You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.

The effort is always to make the symbols obvious: 
the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course
for flying doctor. Pram under fire? Soviet film industry.

Pictographs also shouldn't be too culture-bound: 
a heart circled and crossed out surely isn't.
For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.

Black is the ace of spades. The king of spades
reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
If is the shorthand Libra sign, the scales.

Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs
and computers can draw them faster than Pharough's scribes.
A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action,

but everywhere there's sunflower talk, i.e.
metaphor, as we've seen. A figure riding a skyhook
bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace,

two animals in a book read Nature, two books
inside an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks
denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.

Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one. Sun and moon together

inside one is poetry. Sun and moon over palette,
over shoes etc. are all art forms--but above
a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that

and you're starting to think in World, whose grammar
is Chinese-terse and fluid. Who needs the square-
equals-diamond book, the dictionary, to know figures

led by strings to their genitals mean fashion?
just as a skirt beneath a circle means demure
or a similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.

All peoples are at times cat in water with this language
but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.