East indeed. Weekends are my prime opportunity to read manga. Since a kind, kind friend gave our Pundit all eight volumes of Marmalade Boy a month ago, this week #5 was up (but I find the cover on #4 too amusing to pass up). Notwithstanding, I have as little good to say about the East Side (of the USA) as usual. The weekend is just half over, and I've already come into contact with enough anti-social poets and heathen WPI students to leave my mind feeling unclean (I will spare the details, but I swear, whenever those WPI kids board the bus to the mall, the mean IQ drops 20 points). For those interested in the real East Side and whatnot, I found this funny hand sign guide for y'all to enjoy. And, to my fellow Yankees, be happy you weren't raised in LA; just look at the illiterate Myspace I got the East Side from!

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As bad as poets and students might be, we did have a few fine student poets at an Assumption poetry event yesterday. I read "Sonnet CXXXI", but would have read the newer poem below were it not for the circumstances. Penned for one Miss Taylor Nunez, it's entitled

Sonnet CXXXIII~ the Tudor Cherryblossom

A wholesome girl arises from the ground.
Belonging so much that she stands apart,
I learned her character is in the art
Incorporated with her when I found
A Tudor cherryblossom or a rose
Or an azalea tattoo she put,
Like a convenient cinque'foil, on her foot.
It's visible whenever Taylor goes
To find a dance at night, or saunters through
The pale and early morning, so to eat,
Abloom below black tights that never meet,
Her ankles. My advice is that, should you
Encounter Taylor, try to get to know
Her well, so friendship flower's roots will grow.

Hers is the first tattoo I have seen that is an addition to rather than a mutilation of a woman's beauty (and probably the last, as I tried to argue her out of plans to submit to the needle in the future). Taylor was actually present to cover the event for the Provoc, but sadly her cherry blossom tattoo (which looks more like a Tudor rose) was obscured, so she could not indeed be my Exhibit A; apparently her leggings do sometimes "meet her ankles".

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For the first time, I think, I have a favorite painting. Yester evening, I was milling through the Kevin Alfred Strom Art Gallery, the site of the renowned white nationalist. His taste is impeccable, and my, some of the works simply make one's heart melt. Witness the sweetness of Morgan Weistling's "Emerald Dreams", left. Weistling, apparently, is a contemporary American artist who adores to paint rustic images of this sort, as well as some Christian images. His website is here. However, the favorite I spoke of is John Everett Millais's "Apple Blossoms", below. It rather reminds me of the Campus Ministry office, where Assumption's ladies of beauty and virtue are often gathered in wholesome company. If young women were like that, it would be my utopia. Not that men too haven't strayed from their proper occupations, manners of conversation, and dress, but I have a feeling we are more hopeless, so 50% will just have to cut it.



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Finally, as I was browsing the 2010 Senate races on Wikipedia, I was surprised to learn of Rand Paul's good fortunes. I knew one of Ron Paul's sons was planning to run for Senate in Kentucky, but I hadn't heard of how well his campaign's taken off. In the polls, he's caught up to the other Republican, and he's within a few points of potential Democrats for the November election; he can easily catch up in the meantime. The younger Dr. Paul, website here, is the real deal- proudly pro-life, wants out of the UN, and against the Iraq war ... yeah, remember that? Obama has been Nixonianly slow with his withdrawal.