I am currently working through the backlog of submissions for Astropoetica. I apologize for the wait, but I expect to be caught up within the next week.

I do want to take a moment to address a problem I encountered this morning. Perhaps I have been a bit naive, but I have generally assumed that those submitting to Astropoetica are submitting their own work. It’s such a niche market, after all; whom would you plagiarize? Robert Frost? Diane Ackerman?^*

However, I recently received a compelling submission that turned out to include the plagiarized works of some early Chinese poets. I confess, up until this point, I haven’t been too paranoid about this kind of thing, so I haven’t run obsessive background checks on all the poems I have published. Why did I check these poems in particular? I can’t say I recognized them right off the bat, though I have read one of the poets who was plagiarized.

Who knows? Maybe I was thin-slicing, a la Malcolm Gladwel’s Blink. Or maybe I just had plagiarism on the brain after a Turnitin vs. intellectual property rights debate we had in class.

So! In case this wasn’t already abundantly clear:

I have no interest in publishing plagiarized poems.

I have no interest in publishing plagiarized translations of poems.

I read diversely, and I am pretty good at finding stuff. Don’t try me.

^* If I receive any Frost or Ackerman rip-offs after this post, retribution will be swift and merciless.

The OCLC has posted a list of the top 1000 books held by member libraries. Plenty of religious tomes, classical texts, and reference materials here, but the real shocker for me was entry #15: Garfield, by Jim Davis.

Seriously? Garfield? More copies than Tom Sawyer or MacBeth? Or, comparatively, Calvin and Hobbes at #77, and Farside at #115?

Maybe they’re the de-thoughtbubbled versions alluded to in BoingBoing’s recent post on the strip.

Or maybe the shear number of volumes implies a more insidious mind control campaign. I know my elementary school library held many copies. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Congrats to Matt and the Starclimber team for their recent progress on their space elevator prototype. It’s looking good! (Though I think it would look even better reflecting funhouse distortions of you and Ash instead of your couch, but that’s just me.)

Google has a sweet cartoon up in honor of Percival Lowell’s birthday today. If you click on it, you can play with Google Mars — lots of spiffy interactivity to be found in the elevation, visible light, and infrared maps here.

I am reminded of Ann K. Schwader’s poem “Mousing Mars“in Astropoetica’s fall issue. Scroll right!

Ãron and I took a nice hike through the Leon Sinks Geological Area yesterday. We had the perfect weather for a change — sunny, breezy, and not at all humid. Best of all, the mosquitoes haven’t yet risen to suck the blood of every last living thing in Florida, so we were able to make our way quite unmolested.

Anything Ãron might have said to the contrary about me getting my head stuck in a tree near Big Dismal is entirely untrue. Anyone who knows me well knows just how much I love nature and with what elegant grace I find my way through it. Ahem.

This is a photo I took of the Little Dismal sinkhole. (I suppose they’re calling it “Hammock Sink” on the maps now, but I prefer the former.)

None of the trees in this picture attacked me.