Sarah Palin — turkey trots

Too much Thanksgiving Turkey? Keep a close eye on the background, and you may never eat one again. Thanks to Matt Wardman for one last Sarah Palin interview. She tells us that what candidates go through is brutal, but compared to the turkeys it’s a Sunday School outing. I gather the death penalty was abolished in Alaska in 1957, so all the Governor thereof has to deal with is bizarre farm animal executions. Whatever they did, don’t do it. And as you give thanks for home and family, and the pilgrim fathers and the mothers of the Revolution and the Grateful Dead, above all, I hope you remembered to thank God you’re not a turkey...
Those wanting practice at noticing things in the background may care to limber up with this slightly wondrous road safety ad that has been doing the round of UK cinemas:

Poetry and Religion

On a day some sit down for turkey dinners, and some celebrate Saint Cecilia, patron of musicians, two pictures of arrayed religion I took a couple of years ago in Växjö Cathedral (Sweden) where they do incredible things with glass, and a poem from the incomparable Les Murray, Catholic Poet, who writes poems to the glory of God:

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.