Poetry by Emily Dickinson

               Welcome to the Boykitten’s (or humanity's, take your pick) most collaborative effort ever! Poetry by Emily Dickinson is for all to partake in its many pleasures.  Steve Roggenbuck is the mastermind behind this deceptively simple concept. Multiple levels of collaboration are built into the concept. This allows people the ease to take part in the project in as big or as small of a role as they want. 

                Two roles are available to anyone interested.  You can work as a remix/editor of the material once it has all been compiled. Some material might be usable as-is, but other material might require forms of editing or rephrasing. While this may be wonderful work, going through the process of editing (and you can contact Steve at   steveroggenbuck[at]gmail.com for information on this) there’s a second role to play as well. 

                You can tag your tweets with #poetrybyemilydickinson. Any tweet with this tag will be considered as source material for this poetry project. So instead of using twitter for whatever you’re supposed to use twitter for, you can actually contribute something to literature and society in general. What Steve wants to do is show that Twitter and blogs are not useless for writers, but actually an important instrument in creating new bodies of work.

                Going through the tag, I’ve been introduced to countless new twitter friends and followers, including the 2011 Poet Laureate. I’m not sure if this is one of the desired results of Steve’s project, but it is an additional benefit. If you bother reading all the tweets under the hashtag, you’ll see a vast variety of people and ideas. Somehow, Steve’s managed to create an entire community of poets based off of a single phrase. These people have begun to follow and re-tweet each other. Already I have this as one of my saved searches, and I check up on it to see how people are doing. Personally, I don’t know how Steve is going to deal with re-tweets of the better ones (or more interesting ones).

                Part one involves the creation of this vast body of material. What I’d suggest is for you to do it, in order to create an even better project. The more participation this gets, the better it will be. Additionally, you might gain new followers and discover new online poets at the same time. Or you might become interested in poetry, which would accomplish another one of Steve’s goals. 

                Of course, Steve wants more people to get interested in this art form. Hopefully, by having such an easy way to encourage participation, he’ll be able to attract plenty of new people who otherwise might not have engaged or thought about poetry. That’s one result. Another will be the hope of Google-bombing the phrase “poetry by Emily Dickinson”. 

As I’m writing this, I notice the exact (un-spaced) phrase of ‘poetrybyemilydickinson’ is already the third result on Google search. So perhaps with a few more tweets, this can become the number one result. Steve’s calculations suggest this would hijack roughly 50,000 visitors per month. Instead of people simply finding out more about some dead person, they’ll find out more about an alive and kicking Steve Roggenbuck, a boykitten in the truest sense of the term.  Consider Steve the Santa Claus of online poetry, wrapping up gifts for your brain. 

                I encourage everyone to partake in this fun and interactive collaboration. Join the party. Participate today. Learn how to engage others through the power of poetry!

PS:

 If you would prefer to have poems of over 140 characters, there is another option as well. The fantastic concept is you ask to be added onto the author list. After that, you’ll be approved to publish a poem on there, full-length. Double-posting is not allowed, meaning if you’re the most recent poet, you need to wait until there’s a new submission. Go here "Let People Poems" to learn more about this wonderful site. Thank you.  

Is suing four year olds for negligence a lucrative business model?

This is a question we really need to ask ourselves as a nation. How much are four year olds worth? I’m assuming millions in terms of potential future earning power. Or you could simply just take away their toys and go “nah-nah-nah” to their faces, which might have the same benefit for some people.

Justice Paul Wooten of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan has decided that yes, suing a four year-old is a lucrative business and in fact legally sound. Citing previous cases from as far back as 1928, he’s determined that this four-year old will pay for acting in “an improper manner”. Really, she was just three months shy of five; maybe it is time that she grew up. Thus, being almost five made her a prime candidate for a lawsuit. Of course, it will be up the jury to decide if she’s guilty or not.  Perhaps this now five year old should have acted with ‘due care’ while she was racing her bike with a friend on East 52^nd street in Manhattan.

It was a normal day in April, 2009 for the 87 year old Clare Menagh. She walked outside her apartment and was brutally hit by one Juliet Breitman, who was being watched by her mother Dana Breitman. The hit was hard, Clare needed hip surgery. Juliet’s training wheels on her bike couldn’t have prepared her for this. She rode on the sidewalk with these training wheels, which is technically legal for anyone under the age of 14 to do in New York City. Since Clare was 87, the chance of her surviving that sort of surgery was slim and she passed away three months later.

After Clare passed away, Clare’s estate got in touch with Juliet Breitman, informing her that they were suing her four year old daughter. This case exemplifies America’s evolution. Previously Clare’s estate might have said “Listen, we understand it was just an accident and it wasn’t intentional. We forgive you.” Now we have a far superior system that legally allows them to say to Ms. Breitman “We’re suing your four year old daughter for all she’s worth. I hope you can find a good lawyer! She’s going to wish she was never born, which wasn’t that long ago anyway.” So clearly we have improved ourselves as a country. 

Sure, some may say that perhaps the Justice Paul Wooten has a sort of bizarre name, and that it sounds kind of made up. Even more might argue the purpose of sending a five year old through our circuitous legal system will only speed up the evolution from idealistic young child to cynical teenager. Maybe by the age of nine Juliet will be a jaded teenager who believes in nothing. But I argue that Justice Paul Wooten decision doesn’t go far enough.

Children are being born each and every day. Our legal system has no way of dealing with these potential troublemakers, who cry loudly in supermarkets, retail outlets, and any other location where people might congregate. Suing children when they are born seems a bit too late. What Justice Paul Wooten should have done is use this opportunity to stem the tide of trouble-making before it begins. 

That’s right; we need to have all those thinking of being parents to pay a fee. Whenever any couple gets married they think about either having children or adopting some. As soon as any couple marries they need to immediately fill out a questionnaire. Most of it will be perfectly innocuous, like asking what their favorite TV show is, if they like dogs, favorite soda. But then there will be the following question:

“Do you plan on having or adopting children and raising them as your own?”

If they answer “yes” to this question, fine them! That’s right, in order to better protect our society, we must pre-emptively fine anyone who plans on having children in the future. By doing this, we will be able to avoid these kind of lawsuits in the future by just referring to the fine. It doesn’t have to be a particularly large fee, only about $10,000 or so. 

Before you pass this off as ridiculous, simply remember that we’re the country who regularly sues restaurants for having their coffee too hot and not warning us about it. We’re the country that needs to explain to people that contents may be hot for fear of being sued.  

So yes, we’ll see just what happens with this Juliet Breitman case. The jury might decide that suing a four year old is “insane and a total waste of everyone’s time”. Maybe it is time for all of our young children to grow up, to learn how to take responsibility for their actions, to learn the alphabet, to learn that Santa Claus isn’t real. America doesn’t allow for children to be children anymore, there’s no more innocence left.