Obama and McCain on Global Poverty

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Wheat Field With Ravens

My dad just found out he won second place in a poetry contest hosted by the South Carolina Writers Workshop. Congratulations, Dad!

Here it is:


Wheat Field With Ravens

The path from left,
brown and green, is his,
Vincent's path, dipping forward,
then back, up the middle, a field
of yellow wheat cut in two.
The storm about to fall
dark above the bright wheat,
lit, not by sun,
but by Vincent, a year
before the end. Vincent's
light, with ravens suddenly
starting, as if hearing
the single pistol shot followed
in six months by another,
younger brother Theo's,
leaving canvases scattered,
all but one unsold,
and us as heirs.


JC Raff
6-6-08/6-21-08

Sleep deprivation

I read this last night studying in my psychology textbook:

"Evidence suggests that sleep deprivation contributes to a large proportion of transportation accidents and mishaps in the workplace... In recent years, a number of major ecological disasters, such as the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the running aground of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker, have been blamed in part of lapses in judgment and attention resulting from sleep deprivation."

This BBC article lists the Challenger Space Shuttle among the disasters.

I got about 3 hours of sleep last night... :(

On a happier note, we also read about the macaque monkeys in my psychology book--unbelievable!