Dru says:

After ten years of nonstop publication, The Harrow is planning to take a one-year hiatus this summer. We’ve currently closed the zine to new submissions, although we’ll be continuing to publish new issues until we’ve worked through our existing queue of poems, stories, and reviews. So, if you’ve already had a work accepted, or if you’ve submitted something and are still waiting for our decision, have no fear — The Harrow’s not going to leave you out in the cold. I expect we’ll be publishing into June or July, at least.

However, as soon as we’ve emptied our queue, we’ll put The Harrow on a 12-month publishing hiatus, during which time its staff members are going to take some much-needed R&R and turn their attention to their long-neglected families, friends, pets, careers, and hobbies. The Harrow will remain online during its hiatus, so you needn’t worry about broken links to your favorite works.

The Harrow Press, our book publishing arm, won’t be neglected while the zine is on hiatus — in fact, we’re hoping that some time off from monthly publishing will give us a chance to pursue a book project or two this year.

Updates on The Harrow’s status and on upcoming book projects will be posted here on the zine and on my blog, and on our entries at Duotrope and Ralan.Com. Keep checking in, and please don’t hesitate to email me directly if you have any questions or concerns.

I wish you all a happy new year!

Dru Pagliassotti
Editor in Chief
DruPagliassotti.Com

I’ve been active with the harrow since 1999 in a variety of capacities, and I’ll keep the website up and running… but it is time for a break.

Yuka got a breathing exercise tape a few years ago like this: Breathing: Three Exercises - Dr. Weil, and I started doing this exercise of breathing in for 7 seconds, holding it for 7 and exhaling 7, and repeating it 7 times. It is really calming and stress reducing. I try to extend it as long as I can, and this year’s goal is to do it in a cycle of 20 seconds. That is, 1 breath per minute. And to be able to keep it going for as long as I can pay attention. I did it for 5 breaths in 5 minutes today. It is a curious feeling.

Jero - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jero (ジェロ? born Jerome Charles White, Jr. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 4, 1981) is an American-born Japanese enka singer. His maternal grandmother was Japanese. He is the first black enka singer in Japanese music history.

I like enka for some reason. It is sort of Clint Eastwood getting in touch with his sensitive musical soul. There’s a serious comic element in nostalgia… and probably concealed weapons.

Blogging for lazy people - a thaumaturgical compendium says Alex. I’m not lazy, just uncreative. There is a difference.

Things I’ve done are in bold.
Things I am indifferent towards or actively would like to avoid are crossed out.
Things in normal type face are things I’d like to do.

Start my own blog
Sleep under the stars
Play in a band
Own a cell phone
Visit Hawaii

Watch a meteor shower
Give more than I can afford to charity (I don’t think this makes sense)
Visit Disneyland / Disneyworld
Climb a mountain
Sing a solo
Bungee jump
Participate in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony
Teach myself an art from scratch
Adopt a child
Purchase real estate
Had food poisoning
Visit Parliament / Capital Hill
Grow my own vegetables
See the Mona Lisa in France
Sleep on an overnight train
Have a pillow fight
Hitchhike
Take a sick day when you’re not ill
Build a snow fort
Hold a lamb
Go skinny dipping
Run a Marathon
Been on television
Ride in a gondola in Venice
See a total eclipse
Watch a sunrise or sunset
Hit a home run
Go on a cruise
See Niagara Falls in person
Visit the birthplace of my ancestors
See an Amish community
Teach myself a new language (English was hard enough)
Have enough money to be truly satisfied
See the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
Go rock climbing
See Michelangelo’s David
Sing karaoke
See Old Faithful erupt
Buy a stranger a meal at a restaurant
Visit Africa
Walk on a beach by moonlight
Be transported in an ambulance
Have my portrait painted
Go deep sea fishing
See the Sistine Chapel in person don’t like lineups, and there are other perfectly cool chapels without peeps
Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris bottom was boring enough
Go scuba diving or snorkeling
Kiss in the rain
Play in the mud
Go to a drive-in theatre
Be in a movie
Visit the Great Wall of China
Start a business
Take a martial arts class
Visit Russia

Serve at a soup kitchen
Sell Girl Scout Cookies
Go whale watching
Get flowers for no reason
Donate blood, platelets or plasma
Go sky diving
Visit a Nazi Concentration Camp
Bounce a check
Fly in a helicopter
Save a favorite childhood toy
Visit Quebec City
Eat Caviar

Piece a quilt
Stand in Times Square
Tour the Everglades
Been fired from a job
See the Changing of the Guards in London
Been on a speeding motorcycle
See the Grand Canyon in person

Published a book
Visit the Vatican
Buy a brand new car
Walk in Jerusalem
Have my picture in the newspaper

Read the entire Bible (NT? SRV? which bible?)
Visit the White House
Kill and prepared an animal for eating
Had chickenpox
Save someone’s life
Sit on a jury
Meet someone famous
Join a book club
Lose a loved one
Have a baby
See the Alamo in person
Swim in the Great Salt Lake
Been involved in a law suit
Been stung by a bee

Ride an elephant

What I learned from this is interesting. I’ve pretty much done what I want, and if I’ve not and want to, it is just cause it hasn’t come up in the right context (like cruises and adoption), I’m not interested in visiting things in italy or america

I like that the NYT has this post, especially in comparison to some of the Canadian newpaper posts I saw online that just cut and paste the from Harper’s web page: Conservatives Appointed as Senators in Canada - NYTimes.com

Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed 18 Conservatives to Canada’s unelected Senate on Monday, a move that broke his longstanding promise not to name additional members to the upper chamber of Parliament until it is transformed into an elected body.

Opposition parties had in recent weeks challenged the appropriateness of Mr. Harper’s making appointments to the Senate after he suspended Parliament to avoid a near-certain defeat in a no-confidence vote.

Though that vote will take place after a new session begins in late January, opposition members contend that Mr. Harper no longer has the confidence of Parliament. His Conservative Party does not hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons.

The announcement of the Senate appointments was unusually low-key and came after many Canadians had already begun taking time off for Christmas and New Year’s Day. Mr. Harper said in a statement that he had made them to ensure that the Senate seats are not filled by the opposition parties should they defeat his government and take power in the new year.

I guess Harper’s setting the tone for the Conservative government for the new year… I think that if Harper was someone’s friend, s/he might say that he’s acting sneaky, duplicitous, self-serving, manipulative, malicious, and a number of other things. As it stands, he’s our PRIME-minister… and as such he sets the tone for the country. I wonder what words we should use to describe him.

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Mr Pants@

A Child’s Christmas in Scarborough

Whenever I remember Christmas as a child in Scarborough, I can never remember whether the slush was new or old, or whether we lived on the sixth street north of the shopping plaza stoplights and I was seven years old, or whether it was the seventh street and I was six. But still my nose and fingertips tingle at the thought of Christmas in the row-housing, whose names rang their challenging, forlorn ways down to the fast-backed, nerve and gear-wracking lanes of the freeway: Elegance Manors, Tweedingham Mews, Buckingham Back Courts; and I am again a boy among boys, riding our crash-barred, chrome-bedazzling bikes through the supermarket swing doors, grabbing girls’ toques and Popsicles in the Macs Milk and diving with our arms spread to make angels in the snow-banks that the ploughs churned up, plunging our hands to the soggy, stitch-straining armpits and pulling out, as I am doing now, uncles with ham-red hands, scratchy and sizzling-hot in their wife-bought cable-knits and après ski, who through the live-long Christmas afternoons watched the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Rams battling in full colour on a purple field, and sat through Sugar Bowls and Dust Bowls, Cotton and Flannel Bowls until the punch bowl was emptied for the last time and they moved up the queasy, shifting stairs from the rec-room to the hall. And clear as the chlorinated water in the taps, but not so clear as a secret rivulet in the snows that we boys found near the highway that was gone in the spring when the hill was cleared for a condominium, I see Uncle Harry turning away the Salvation Army girl at the door and making us all laugh as she fell on the path on the ice I should have chipped away.

Slashdot | Nobel Jurors Facing Bribery Probe
We all make mistakes, and past errors are not indicators of future malfeasance, but I would assume that these sort of things should be publicly responded to by the Nobel people, unless they’re trying to muscle in on the igNoble Prize people.

RockDoctor writes
“A report is circulating that in the run-up to the selection of prize-winners for 2006 and 2008, some members of the Nobel jury accepted an expenses-paid trip or trips to China to explain the selection process. Thats not, in itself, an incriminating event Is there something that were doing incorrectly, or not doing? is a valid question, and if there was dishonorable intent, it doesnt seem to have worked too well the last Chinese Nobel Laureate was in 1957. There does seem to be embarrassment about falling into an obvious conflict-of-interest mantrap.”

PhysOrg mentions that a corruption prosecutor is also looking into a Nobel-related sponsorship from a pharmaceutical company that was linked to one of the winners for this years Medicine prize.

See also Nobel jurors face bribery probe for China trips - Yahoo! News and Nobel prize committees accused of bribery

2000-year-old Antikythera computer comes back to life
Watch a working model of the ancient clockwork device that some call the world’s first computer

Read more about the original Antikythera discovered in 1901, and here’s a video with more background and images of the original. Trez cool!

Colorado Doctor Finds Foot In Newborns Brain is not what I was expecting. But what could I have been expecting… I was thinking of posting my own MRI scans from Nov. 2003 when I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It looks like a bunny. Seriously. Anyway, as of a couple of months ago it was re-diagnosed as a ‘just some thing’, so I’m not that worried about it any more. I mean, what’s the problem with just some thing in your head? It is not like it could be anything strange or serious, could it. Now you see why I click on links such as Colorado Doctor Finds Foot In Newborns Brain. The thing in my head must be telling me to, or is it the potato chips I ate last night.