Here is an article in today's Boston Globe about the rise of good espesso in Boston and New York. This is important, because yesterday we learned how how coffee makes you manly.

For what it's worth, I've been to Simon's, and I thought the one cappuccino I had was good. Of course, I'm not really used to drinking espresso, so I may be easily impressed.

In the spirit of Adrianne's poetry month and today's beautiful blue sky, I give you a poem by William Wordsworth:

Daffodils

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

In the spirit of spring poetry, I thought I would post a work by Fyodor Tyutchev, in my case also a recent discovery of a poet. The translation has been rendered by none other then Vladimir Nabokov and nine out of ten slavicists agree that he’s done quite a nice job. But for those who happen to have the Russian, there is also the original.

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.

How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.

Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.

(~)

It's April, and everyone knows what that means: poetry party! Break out the beer pong and your freshman seminar books, because this is going to be awesome.

I thought I'd start things off (assuming other people are interested, of course) with a little something by Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Jane Kenyon.

I hear the always-sad voice of the oriole
and I salute the passing of delectable summer.
With the hissing of a snake the scythe cuts down
the stalks, one pressed hard against another.

And the hitched-up skirts of the slender reapers
fly in the wind like holiday flags. Now if only
we had the cheerful ring of harness bells,
a lingering glance through dusty eyelashes.

I don't expect caresses or flattering love-talk,
I sense unavoidable darkness coming near,
but come and see the Paradise where together,
blissful and innocent, we once lived.

I only recently stumbled upon Akhmatova, and had a hard time choosing which poem could persuade you to read more of her work.

Anyone else want to bite?

Perhaps my new favorite thing in the world is this audio recording I discovered of Ernest Hemingway descibing the plot of a book, "In Harry's Bar in Venice" (which, to my knowledge, he never got around to writing). Besides Hemingway's awkwardly stilted delivery (not to mention his over-emphasized way of saying "Cipriani"), it includes such memorable lines as:

Harry's Bar is a small place, but it is, in effect, a microcosm of all of that great and beautiful city which has been so well described by those writers, Ruskin, Sinclair Lewis, Byron, and others.

Or, perhaps my favorite:

God himself is absent for a time, probably on his own business, but he returns to Tornicello to bring happiness to these star-crossed lovers.

Truly some of the best 8 minutes of audio I've heard in my life.

(I should mention that there's apparently an entire Salon.com Audio page, which I was unaware of, that has many other clips posted more recently than 2001.)

Just one question for all of the people making such a fuss about Boot Camp.

Are you aware that dual booting sucks?

Gruber points out that it's a good thing for Mac because it might remove the last stumbling block before a lot of people. But I'm not really sure that it will. I used to keep Windows on my Linux boxes, so that I could play games and whatnot. But all that really meant was that I never played any games and I wasted 5 or 6 gigabytes of hard disk space.

Suppose that you're a Windows user, and for you Application X is the "killer app." Whatever it is -- Halo or Windows Paint or whatever. Sure, you might think for a second, "Sweet, now I can have a better experience from my OS, and just use Windows when I need Application X." But after a minute, you'll also think, "Wait, do I really want to have to stop everything else I'm doing and reboot my computer to use Application X? Do I really want to have to maintain two copies and configurations of a lot of software (mail reader, IM client, etc) in order to exist comfortably in the operating system where I use Application X?"

No, you don't. So you're back to choosing between Application X and your operating system.

It's also true that this is a no-lose situation for Apple. But it isn't news worthy, because there's just to way that it wins more than a handful of converts.

One of my favorite fellow blawgers, Blonde Justice, has been having an interesting debate over on her site.

She started out with a discussion about how widespread the prosecutor's witness-coaching behavior from the Zacharias Moussaoui trial actually was. That turned into a hypothetical about whether to disclose information about a lying witness to the attorney that you had to hand the case off to. Next, she asked the same question, but threw in a statement from the opposing attorney that they'd drop the case if you lied, and whether that changed anything.

It was an interesting discussion.

I love reading Blonde Justice because not only is she a young public defender, like I'm about to be, but she can be really smart without being pretentious. I think that's what I like most about criminal defense attorneys.

Due to a convergence of TBND contributors' reading lists, I've proposed we hold a seminar of sorts. In about three weeks, we will try to coordinate a series of posts on T.S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. With any luck, myself, Todd, Ruth, and Adrianne will all get involved, and anyone else with something to say (or a bone to pick) should feel free to contact us about writing a guest post on the topic. We'll aim for the 26th as a publication date, so by picking up the book now, anyone should be able to finish in time to take part in what promises to be a lively debate. While everything that might usefully be said about Kuhn's work has probably already appeared in print in the 44 years since it was first published, maybe we can add some new insights. And besides, when is it not fashionable to be seen reading Kuhn?

People (especially my fellow Bostonians) are probably already aware of this, but it's still pretty remarkable that Massachusetts will require residents to have health insurance. While that sounds scary, the structure of the legislation is interesting:

Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not purchase it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will allow more of the working poor to buy insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. Businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed up to $295 per employee per year.

Basically, it seems that a lot of individuals and businesses not paying for insurance will be fined, with those fines going back into insurance. This will then subsidize people who actually can't afford insurance.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about "requiring people who can afford insurance to buy it," but at the very least, this sounds like an interesting experiment. Plus, it sounds like they've been doing they're homework on this issue:

Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's communications director, said that for those people with incomes above 300 percent of poverty, "our assumption was that these would be mostly single mothers who just did not have the wherewithal to get insurance. It turned out it was mostly young males. In some cases they are making very attractive salaries. These are people who just don't imagine themselves needing care, but of course when they break a leg when they're out bungee jumping they go to the hospital and we end up paying for their care anyway."

Yes, I know the sentiment all too well. I like to think of it as machismo, although I suspect others would just call it being a damned fool.