1. Chicago is called the Windy City, not due to the breezy lakefront location, but rather because a New York newspaper editor coined the term just before the turn of the century as a derogatory comment on what he saw as the excessive braggadocio of Chicagoans.

2. Frankfurters were renamed hot dogs during WWI, in protest of all things German.

(Yes of course the government is wasting valuable time and resources passing/proposing petty resolutions about fries. I avoided the issue by ordering waffle fries for lunch yesterday. I have no patience for that nonsense.)

And the day�s just begun.

3. Speaking of wasting time, the republican senator from New Mexico needs a bit more focus.

I love the BBC website. It might simply be because they say �honour,� not �honor.�

Ah. Which reminds me of what I learned yesterday: The sole reason I�m not a successful poet is that I�m prone to overwriting. In correspondence with poets who�ve achieved a moderate level of success or more (according to the vague standards I�ve established but am unable to articulate), I note the same sort of succinctness. Though of course if the poet is more experimental, messages tend to lack capitalization and punctuation, as well. The most recent message consisted of �That�s fine. Thank you.� A few simple, yet effective words and lots of white space. You�d better hope you remember what your initial inquiry was, because your message will never be forwarded at the end. Only their words.

I could take a lesson. It�s unlikely. Nobody wants to hear my poetry, though I must say the poem about my guitar was great. My workshop classmates mistook it as an ode to the penis. They loved it.

Sigh.

Sapphire, Kate�s blogsitter for the duration of her European vacation, today writes of considering what your 10-year-old self wanted to be when (s)he grew up as a helpful tool for those at a career crossroads. It�s a quaint and charming idea, but it�s not so helpful to me. At 10 I wanted to be a farmer�s wife. Somewhere around 12 I threw nurse into that mix, since we�d obviously live so far from town that I�d need to take care of the large family I was sure I�d have. For a bit in college, I fancied being a writer for a university (since I was, well, a writer for a university). We�re getting off track. Back to 10. Maybe the point of the exercise isn�t to help us make career choices, but rather to make us grateful we didn�t become the person we thought, as 10-year-olds, we wanted to be. I would be miserable in that Country Woman dream world.

So I�m just saying maybe it�s not as bad as I thought. That�s not to say I should be complacent, or that I should not move out of my present home, but just that I�m okay at this very moment. Huh. It feels strange. Hungry.