35 New Links Added

From Denny: Added a pack of new links under Agents and Editors as well as Writing Links. Found a bonanza of goodies. Some Christian writing links and editors as well.

7 Tasty Posts 4 Halloween AND Funny, What More Do You Want?

This little kittie is staying indoors come Halloween night... smart move, Oh, Wise One...

From Denny: What is Halloween without something a bit campy and ridiculous? The first post has a recipe and some sophisticated inexpensive decorating ideas. The costume ideas for you and your soon-to-look-ridiculous dog are the funniest. I like the X-Ray Machine costume best.

The second recipe shows you how to easily assemble your own Oreo cookie black Halloween spider cookies which are sure to be a hit with the kids at the door or your friends at your posh Halloween party!

Halloween

Video and Recipe: Halloween Pumpkin Chocolate-Chip Pound Cake, Decorating Ideas, Pumpkin Carving Tips, Amusing Costume Ideas for You and Your Pets

Recipe: Fun Halloween Oreo Spider Cookies



OK, these posts are so scary they are funny! (Lame, I know... I just love it when people over-hype their products. It's so outrageous.)

Funny

Lampooning Perfectionists is the latest Cheeky Quote Day! segment over at The Social Poets to get you laughing and thinking about how to improve your life without making it stressful.

Lampooning Perfectionists - Cheeky Quote Day 28 Oct 2009

I went cruising the web looking for more funny chocolate quotes than I already have stashed on Romancing The Chocolate blog and ran into funny Sandra Boynton's site. She has a new movie short just released a couple of days ago. B. B. King sings alongside his famous sidekick Lucille.

Let's all support her as this is her first movie debut. The little documentary that sidekicks it is interesting as to how many people it really takes, all the hoops they have to jump through, just to make a tiny film - and she made it funny too!

5 Funny Chocolate Quotes, Sandra Boyntons B. B. King Video

In case you missed any of these cute little Halloween funnies over at Dennys Funny Quotes, here's a repeat:

Video: Creepy Hotels for Halloween Getaways

Repeats:

Funny Halloween Quotes, Halloween Cartoon

Cheeky Quote Day at The Social Poets, Funny Halloween Animation

Editorial Cartoons over at The Social Poets 24 Oct 2009

From Denny: Help me celebrate The Social Poets one year blog anniversary by laughing at today's editorial cartoons of the week collected into one post. There is certainly plenty going on in American culture that the cartoonists are not short of issues to lampoon.

Editorial Cartoons This Week 24 Oct 2009 at The Social Poets, go here.

*** Thanks for visiting, everyone, and for all your great support! Certainly never expected so many by the hundreds to show up so quickly; glad you are enjoying what I find and post, thanks again!

4 Funny Posts and 4 Yummy Recipes

Cartoon by Todd Zapoli

Dennys Funny Quotes: 42 Monday Morning Funny Coffee Quotes, Coffee Cartoon

The Social Poets: Roundup of Sunday Funnies: Hillary's Stressed, Obama Dances

Romancing The Chocolate: Funny Chocolate Quote 17 Oct 2009

Recipe: Fun Halloween Oreo Spider Cookies

Todays Funny Chocolate Quote 15 Oct 2009

Recipe: Velvet Chocolate Cheesecake

Comfort Food From Louisiana: 3 Recipes: 3-Step Slow Cooker Baby Back Ribs, Sweet Tangy Slaw, Sweet Potato Roasted Garlic Turnovers

Easy Key West Ribs From the Slow Cooker

Cheeky Quote Day! over at The Social Poets

*** Comedians like Jay Leno keep us laughing with a ready quip!

From Denny: In the mood for some hilarious Jay Leno quotes? Hike on over to The Social Poets for this week's Cheeky Quote Day! segment. If ever there is a cheeky guy Jay Leno is rated at the top.

For 35 Jay Leno Quotes, Cheeky Quote Day 21 October 2009, go here.

Here's a trio sampling:

* A Minneapolis company has come out with a credit card size shotgun that fits in your wallet. The inventor says he invented it to give people a sense of security. Oh yeah, what makes you feel more secure than sitting on a shotgun? Now how does this work? What's the first thing a thief steals? Your wallet, oh, now he's got your gun too!

* In California, 50 women protested the impending war with Iraq by lying on the ground naked and spelling out the word 'peace.' Right idea, wrong president. (George Bush was in office, not Bill Clinton.)

* Wait till these Enron guys find out that in prison, the term "Insider trading" has a whole new meaning.

*** Thanks for visiting!

For 35 Jay Leno Quotes, Cheeky Quote Day 21 October 2009, go here.

Cheeky Quote Day at The Social Poets, Funny Halloween Animation

Halloween: the only time of the year we can get away with acting "socially inappropriate," i. e., obnoxious! :)

From Denny: Make sure you get your silly Halloween seasonal laughs today reading Cheeky Quote Day over at The Social Poets!

Thanks for visiting, everyone, really appreciate all the many visits every day and your support! Have a great day!

Funny Halloween Quotes, Halloween Cartoon

This is cute: instead of being known as the black sheep of the family this guy is known as the black sheet - it is Halloween! :)

From Denny: Tomorrow is Cheeky Quote Day! over at The Social Poets. I started researching funny Halloween quotes. Can I tell you there were very few of them? Quite surprising! I did find some great little jokes and funny ghost stories to share. Here's a sampling:

Quotes

* I'll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween. – Charles Swartz

* Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain. - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

* This Halloween the most popular mask is the Arnold Schwarzenegger mask. And the best part? With a mouth full of candy you will sound just like him. - Conan O'Brien

Thanks for visiting!

Cheeky Quote Day! 7 October 2009

From Denny: Sometimes, writing poetry feels like running full speed down the rabbit hole. It might account for why so many poets tend toward the morose: Whiners' Poetry. While I was researching funny quotes for this Cheeky Quote Day I was surprised at how few poets have much of a sense of humor. Can I tell you I did a lot of editing? Notably, some of my favorite poets like Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde and Carl Sandburg were brimming over with sarcastic funny one-liners.

It's OK to whine every now and then - but we writers need to keep in mind the well-being of the reader. Drowning in sadness rarely is a help to others. Defensive poets counter with they are only writing for themselves. Fine, then don't publish it; keep it to yourself. "Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read." - Voltaire. (A high standard but certainly worthy of a challenge to the writer; it only makes you a better writer.) When you write to publish, you establish a connection with your readers and owe them a valuable read. That is what builds community, you and the reader together.

There is this perception today that to write good poetry it has to be sad and mournful or ridiculously silly like for a children's rhyme. The best poets throughout history often struck a chord in the middle ground for the exploration of serious social issues and the human condition.

Serious subjects can reflect the sad, the intellectually indignant or the morally obscene perspective. It's also important to offer more to your reader. When you write think of different angles of the problem and wonder aloud about different solutions.

Many a poet has inspired world leaders to reconsider a policy position or expand their belief system. Many of our American Presidents have been strongly influenced by their favorite poets. "When power narrows the areas of a man's concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence." - President John F.Kennedy

As you explore how to write your own poetry, consider challenging and expanding your own belief system. "Be the change in the world you wish to see." - Gandhi

Here's the best of what I gleaned for you to enjoy!



Photo of e. e. cummings blue bench - click on the Photo Credits link for more information and the poem written on the bench enlarged to read.

Quotes

* I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. - A. E. Housman

* I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. - Russell Baker

* Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. - Christopher Fry

* If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone. - Thomas Hardy

* A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. - Edmond de Goncourt

A few cheeky poems:

Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught the whiff of a soul
The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering?
The tree of the paper still grows. - Pixie Foudre

If conditions aren't right
The poem won't come out
It will sit inside and stew
And emerge a different beast. - Ed Northstrum

Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry. - Muriel Rukeyser

There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. - Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968

Quotes

* You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. – Joseph Joubert

* Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. - Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest

* Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. - Carl Sandburg

* The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. - Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel á l'ordre, 1926

* A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. - Yevgeny Yentushenko, The Sole Survivor, 1982

* Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. - Robert Frost

* Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. - Robert Frost

* A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. - Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 1957

* A sold poem loses half its meaning. - Glade Byron Addams

* Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. - T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

* I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. - Robert Frost, 1935

* Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. - Robinson Jeffers

* When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. - Stephen Spender



* Poets are like magicians, searching for magical phrases to pull rabbits out of people's souls. - Glade Byron Addams

* It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. - W.H. Auden

* To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. – Robert Frost

* No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. - Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires

* A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. - E.B. White

* Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. - G.K. Chesterton

* A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. - Salman Rushdie

* I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. - Carl Sandburg

* Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. - Carl Sandburg

* A poet can survive everything but a misprint. - Oscar Wilde

* Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. - Percy Byshe Shelley



This photo has a great story from the photographer too, click on the Photo Credits link to read.

* The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. - Jean Cocteau

* Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. - Don Marquis

* Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets. - Dudley Moore

* Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. - Novalis

* Poets are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts. - Archibald MacLeish

* Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money. - Robert Penn Warren

* The phone rings and I curse. Literary editor. Seasonal verse. - Wendy Cope

* There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. - John Ashbery

* To have great poets, there must be great audiences too. - Walt Whitman

* Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us. - Antonin Artaud

* You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. - John Ciardi

* Poetry is what gets lost in translation. - Robert Frost

* Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. - Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

* Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. - W.B. Yeats



And let the voices from our ancient world history have the last words:

* Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. - Plato

* The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. - Aristotle, On Poetics

***

Photo Credits

Photo of spiraling downward staircase - no attibution

Photo of e. e. cummings blue bench by Tony the Misfit @ flickr

Silent Dreams fog photo by Sudhamshu @ flickr

Poetry sign photo by jurvetson @ flickr

Photo of spiral hand, Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Mean by Use your Hands @ flickr

Roundup of Sunday Funnies, Cartoons - Olympics, Obama and Oh, No!

From Denny: I like the way this cartoon was put up crooked on the cartoon site, probably unintentional but somehow telling. It's pretty much how regular Americans feel in their life right now: everything is askew since the job situation is up in the air. Most Americans only work up to 33 hours a week and without benefits. Big Business has been throwing its weight around to bully the American worker for the past 25 years.

All this colossal mess started with the electing of Republicans into Congress who were unashamedly in the pockets of lobbyists. While Washington has always suffered from the lobbyist plague; today lobbyist ratios have increased to hundreds per legislator. They were allowed to run amuck during the Bush years and multiplied like whore rabbits. Will someone please quit feeding them or organize a "hunt and shoot on sight" with the gun lobby?

The Jay Leno Show

Jay Leno: The International Olympic Committee voted, and Chicago didn't win. Which, hey, I can understand that. It's October, Chicago never wins in October.



Palin chose an author known as a White Supremacist to write her book. No wonder it's a best-seller with the racist crowd:

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Jimmy Fallon: Sarah Palin's 400-page memoir: It starts out OK, it get's really exciting, and then confusing, and then the last 100 pages are blank.

The unsympathetic Polanski trying to weasel his way out of answering for his creepy ways:



Definitely a satire on the Republican Party's mental hospital antics of the Birther and Death Panel bizarros that have backfired on their strategists with the public:

The Tonight Show

Conan O'Brien: First lady Michelle Obama just made an appearance on "Sesame Street." It was all going very well. But then Big Bird showed up and things got a little uncomfortable.

Big Bird: Well, look who's here to push her husband's socialist health care agenda.

Michele Obama: Well, Big Bird ...

Big Bird: Or maybe you're here to finally show us your husband's United States birth certificate.

Michele Obama: No, Big Bird, I'm not.

Big Bird: That's 'cause you can't.

Ah, local politics is always dirtier than the national. It's dirty in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and every other state in the Union. The listed are the stars of long-term corruption.

The Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert: There's no better way for the International Olympics Committee to shed its reputation for corruption. Because next to Chicago, nobody looks corrupt.



The Jay Leno Show

Jay Leno: Tom Delay on "Dancing Wth the Stars" the other night. There was one very odd moment when the judges revealed their score.

Judges: 6-6-6.

The Late Late Show

Craig Ferguson: Forbes magazine released its list of the 400 richest people in the country. It was shocking to me. I had no idea there were 400 rich people left in the country!

Well, this little list should keep them talking at the water cooler this Monday morning! Have a great day! :)

This Weeks Editorial Cartoons 3 October 2009

From Denny: Cartoonists have been busy this week! So much in the news to lampoon - G20 meeting and protestors, swine flu fears, new "no texting while driving" law, Iran's empty promises about nuclear weapons, the current status of job seekers in America, trying to marry off Rush with the Truth but he won't have a shotgun wedding and President Obama juggling world affairs, two wars and vying for the 2016 Olympics to come to Chicago (they lost out to Brazil, congrats Brazil! South America has never hosted the Olympics.)

Swine Flu Fears - so powerful you no longer need a handgun in America...



Sad news of recent tragic deaths due to distraction from texting while driving prompted a new federal law to prohibit it:



The latest pastime trend to find meaning in life among jobseekers:



The latest desperation among job seekers to find any or full time employment. These days big companies like Exxon only employ people for up to 32 hours so they don't have to pay them any benefits. Even the U.S. Post Office does the same; only 4% of them are full time employees:



These two cartoons talk about how much the President has on his plate:






This one depicts how the Democrats and the President are beginning to look like they are attempting to take on too much in the field of multi-tasking and starting to look ridiculous.

Well, I guess, someone has to make up the work load that President Bush and Cheney sloughed off because they went to bed early and vacationed for a month at a time on a whim. The government started grinding to a halt so I guess the Dems have to speed things up just to make up lost ground:



Then there's everyone's favorite: Iran. They always seem to have a surprise-in-a-box or so they believe themselves to be that clever.



Loved the Kooky Jar one as it sums up the world belief system about the ruthless crass leaders of Iran. You have 7th century hearts and minds in charge of nuclear energy. Are you kidding? That's like asking a three-year-old to play with matches near a gas jet.



The one of the Secretary of State says it all about how Iran continues to screw over world leaders with deception after deception after lie after lie.



The G20 meeting of world leaders and their protestors, opinion of big banks:





While the world of truth-tellers keep trying to marry off the liars in a shotgun wedding...