1. Bob Hicok doesn't submit to literary journals. Literary journals submit to Bob Hicok.
2. Bob Hicok is a robot who can transform into a giant mechanical pencil full of poetry.
3. Bob Hicok heard that you should write what you know, so he wrote everything.
4. After a Bob Hicok reading, all the audience members are pregnant, including the men.
5. Bob Hicok rhymes with orange. And orange likes it.
6. Bob Hicok publishes children's novels under his pen name, J. K. Rowling.
7. You may have noticed Bob Hicok's poems turning up in the same journals where you publish. That's because Bob Hicok is stalking you.
8. Bob Hicok has earned the little-known but lucrative Wile E. Coyote Super Genius grant.
9. Bob Hicok isn't an unacknowledged legislator of the world because everyone realizes he's in charge.
10. When Bob Hicok flies into town for a reading, he actually flies himself.
11. Bob Hicok doesn't refer to himself in the third person. He refers to himself in the infinitieth person.
12. Bob Hicok travelled back in time and shot Wild Bill Hickok for spelling his last name differently.
13. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of Bob Hicok.

Please share your fun Bob Hicok facts in the comments or your blog!

The power was out here for two hours or more today (I left before it came back on, so I don't know exactly how much), which made it pretty difficult to get work done. Fortunately, I was way ahead. Ugh.

Anyway, Jeff tagged me with this TV list. Basically it's TV shows I like or don't like. I'm only going to list things that are still appearing, so no "old Simpsons reruns" on the list of things I like.

TV shows I like:
1. House: an utterly preposterous show plotwise that's carried by a dynamite lead performance from Hugh Laurie and likeable performances from basically everyone else in the cast.
2. Futurama: the new movies or whatever they are will apparently be out at the beginning of next year. Woohoo!
3. High Stakes Poker: almost all the players are the best in the world, and the interplay between them is even more diverting than the actual cards.
4. The Daily Show: still really good, and I think I like their new generation of correspondents (especially John Hodgman, Aasif Mandvi, and John Oliver) more than some other people I've read.
5. The Shield: there's no way they're going to untangle the current season in just two episodes.

The shows I don't like part is kind of difficult, because there are lots of shows I don't like but simply ignore, so I have no real strong feelings toward. I tend to manage this even with shows I would utterly hate if I watched them. But here are a few:
1. Anything on ESPN: this network has taken the all-flash-no-substance approach of MTV, added in a good helping of journalism compromised by investments in the things it's reporting on, topped it all off with some really annoying personalities, and applied the whole mess to something I give a shit about. Special mention for Around the Horn, one of the most godawful pieces of garbage on the air. Four ugly newspapermen shouting stupid things at each other about sports, and keeping "score." Wow, great.
2. Gray's Anatomy: I watched an episode of this with Shawn and Shanna. Otherwise, it would just be on my ignore list. All I'm going to say is that the name "McDreamy" sets my teeth on edge and makes me want to punch Patrick Dempsey's smarmy face.
3. Neil Cavuto's show on Fox News. I single this one out because it's always on when I'm at the gym, and it combines Fox's hilarious leading question headlines ("Would Hillary Clinton support sacrificing babies to Satan?") with some of the most amazingly trivial entertainment/lifestyle stories around.
4. Mind of Mencia. Another show I see because it's often on right before the one I actually want to watch, in this case The Daily Show.
5. The Sopranos. Okay, I just did that to see if you're paying attention. I like the Sopranos just fine--I do get annoyed by treatises on the cultural significance of the Sopranos, microanalyses of when the show started going downhill, and lengthy discussions of the possible subtexts of this one time Paulie Walnuts said "Fuck him, T!" This is part of my uneasiness over almost any enthusiastic subculture. It's nothing to be alarmed about.

Hmm, there are probably a few others I like or dislike a little, but that'll do for now. How about you? Answer in comments, or feel free to be tagged and write a post.

So my grandmother apparently has some old school papers and things of mine, and she managed to get this published in the newsletter at her retirement community (last year in November, though this is the first I've seen of it). I want to use the last part of her statement as a blurb on my first book, should I ever have one.

Sara tagged me to do this. It's only supposed to be 5 songs, but to hell with that. I like lists of 13, and I'd run out of room way too fast with only 5 songs.

1. "Forty Six & 2" by Tool
2. "American Jesus" by Bad Religion
3. "Rising Sun Blues" by Doc Watson
4. "Wish" by Nine Inch Nails
5. "Me and Mia" by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
6. "Never Talking to You Again" by Husker Du
7. "A.D.D." by System of a Down
8. "I Don't Believe You" by The Magnetic Fields
9. "Johnny Feelgood" by Liz Phair
10. "John Walker's Blues" by Steve Earle
11. "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz
12. "Waiting Room" by Fugazi (thanks, Mary!)
13. "Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check" by Busta Rhymes

As always, if you want to play, consider yourself tagged. Lord am I having proofreading problems today...

So I watched Children of Men this weekend, and in addition to being a good all-around movie (though so dark that it'd be hard to watch it again), it has a great sequence near the end where Clive Owen has to get into a building during a full-scale battle (with tanks and rocket launchers in addition to automatic weapons) between government and rebel forces, neither of which would mind him being dead. The whole thing is very well executed, simultaneously chaotic and coherent, exciting and excruciating, and it got me thinking about my favorite movie action sequences. Here are 13 of them, with no real attempt to rank them.

1. The gun battle after the bank robbery in Heat. Great sound and cinematography, real squad-level tactics, and an amazing kinetic feel.
2. The bus/train wreck in The Fugitive. Harrison Ford's last movie before he entered the Mr. Frownyface Grump portion of his career, in which I don't think he's made a single good movie. Ford leaping out of a crashed bus and fleeing a derailing train while wearing shackles is a great set piece.
3. The Wesley/Inigo duel in The Princess Bride. Clever, funny, and thrilling all at once, plus compulsively quotable. "I am not lefthanded either!"
4. The chase at the end of The Road Warrior. About 20 minutes of a massive car/truck/motorcycle/helicopter chase.
5. The final gunfight in The Wild Bunch. Four outlaws commandeer a machine gun (plus some grenades) and take on an entire Mexican army to get revenge for a dead friend, killing dozens before they're overwhelmed. I think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would have ended the same way if Sam Peckinpah had directed it.
6. The Liam Neeson/Tim Roth swordfight in Rob Roy. It's rare for the villain to come off as well in the climactic fight as Roth does here, and Neeson's final dispatching of him is really brutal.
7. The Battle of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Almost entirely CGI, so it may seem a little cheap to have it here, but it was well executed. The Battle of Pellenor Fields in The Return of the King was also very nicely done.
8. The saloon shootout in Unforgiven. The movie does an amazing job of constraining the violence and building the foreboding right up until the end, when it all finally breaks out all at once with Clint Eastwood killing at least a half dozen men in the space of about fifteen seconds.
9. The D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan. Another long, grueling, successfully rendered battle. I found the rest of the movie to be something of a letdown after it.
10. The swordfight with the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Okay, it's not really a great action scene, but it's hilarious in its deliberate low-budget grossness, and of course the quotability is off the charts. "All right, we'll call it a draw."
11. The three-way duel (thruel?) in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. This movie took flak for being incoherent and loud and overlong from people who claimed they liked the first one, conveniently ignoring that the first one was exactly the same way. This scene is totally over-choreographed, but it's still tons of good fun.
12. The lightsaber fight in The Empire Strikes Back. The two-on-one fight in The Phantom Menace was better staged as a pure action scene, but damned if I'm going to pick the scene from the vastly inferior movie.
13. The tennis racket/ski pole fight at the beginning of Roxanne. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? And appeared in decent movies?

I've already thought of honorable mentions too: the train-station shootout in The Untouchables and the wrong-way tunnel car chase in Ronin. Anyone else?

Jeff tagged me with this question (which is a good thing since I didn't have anything particular in mind to write about today):

Say someone asked me, "I kind of like poetry, but I don't know anything about contemporary poetry. Who should I read?"

Well, I'll try to give them a pretty good cross-section of poets I think are good right now. And it's restricted to American poetry because any attempt on my part to recommend writers in other languages (or even for the most part in other countries) would be laughable. And no personal friends, mentors, or blogroll buddies are eligible, sorry.

Off the top (more or less) of my head:
1. B. H. Fairchild
2. Bob Hicok
3. David Wojahn
4. Larissa Szporluk
5. Gabriel Gudding
6. Martha Collins
7. Major Jackson
8. Jeffrey McDaniel
9. Yusef Komunyakaa
10. Katie Degentesh
11. A. E. Stallings
12. Zachary Schomburg
13. Sherman Alexie

Wow, that list is damned inadequate in a lot of ways. Anyway, if you read this and want to do your own list, consider yourself tagged.