One of the gadgets I've been eagerly awaiting is the Microvision Pico Projector.

This product has some serious potential. If you haven't heard about it, it's a cell phone-sized projector which will plug into, well, a cell phone, or other device (TV, Wii, you name it) and act as a projector for photos, videos and presentations. You can see pictures of how they see it being used here.

Anyhoo, I've been using my iPhone a lot lately to watch podcasts, TV shows, etc. It is a great personal media player. But I can't help thinking how much better Strong Bad Email would be four feet tall and projected on wall. Also, since we're a one TV family and living in an apartment, it will be great on those occasions when my wife wants to watch her detective show and I want to watch Futurama or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I can't find any word on when they expect this to come to market, but it's one more thing to keep an eye on.

So after rediscovering A Coney Island of the Mind, I found a copy of A Far Rockaway of the Heart in my local bookstore. It's such a pleasure to have new poems by a poet so dear to my heart. The book is so crisp, so hard to keep open, the virgin spine aching for the first crease.

His poetry (forty years after Coney Island) has become much richer. Though it still has a wonderful light, easy tone, I find the imagery a bit more filling, more layered. You feel his consciousness of history, personal and private, but he still sounds like a god friend having a crazy late night conversation.

I'm amazed, almost on every page, to find poems that so effortlessly take in the history of America, Hieronymous Bosch, an entire childhood, the rise and fall of Ezra Pound and so much more.

I just discovered Pinger. It's a service that lets you send people voice mail messages without actually calling them. So it's a kind of cross-breed between voice mail and text messaging, I suppose.

The great thing about it is you can leave someone a brief message if you don't have time for a full-blown conversation. Plus, you can express yourself as well as ever, rather than relying on terrible abbreviations and the 20th century's emoticons.

Of course, the bad thing about it is that it opens us up to the possibility that we'll just be using voice mail to avoid talking to the people whom we call friends.

Ultimately, whether any new technology is humanizing or alienating depends on how we use it, and on the individual user. I think Pinger is a great service, but I think I'll also have to be careful to only use its powers for good.

I was recently down in PA to visit my folks with my wife and sister in law. There, we watched The Darwin Awards, a surprisingly enjoyable movie with so many great cameos. One of those cameos involved the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which, in my book, pretty much made the movie worthwhile there and then.

I immediately sought out my old copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, a wonderful book of poems, which was such a treasure to me all those years ago when I first was getting into poetry. In those early days, this book never left my side. (And if you ever see any of my very early poetry (which, God willing, you never will) they are very directly and very obviously influenced by Ferlinghetti.) My friends and I would read from this book to each other, along with Ginsberg, Cummings, Keats and many others. They were some of the happiest moments I remember from growing up in small town Pennsylvania.

Ferlinghetti has such a way with words. His poems nearly dance off the page, and so do you when you read them. His poetry is full of love and life and true music, at once accessible to everyone and rewarding of multiple reads over multiple lives. The back of one version I have (a fourth printing) mentions that he printed the book in paperback originally in order for it to fly far and wide, reaching the largest possible audience. I think that is Ferlinghetti to me, the poet who wants everyone to read and hear and love not just his own poetry, but the living and everlasting, everburning soul of poetry which lives in every place and time.

If you know anyone who loves poetry but finds contemporary poetry too obtuse, send them this book. It will reignite the flame.

A new way to be sarcastic on the Web.

I'd like to propose a better way to convey sarcasm on the Web. It occurs to me that a lot of digital communications are perhaps misinterpreted when the sender is trying to sound sarcastic and the reader reads the message without that crucial sarcastic tone. For example, the phrase "that was just perfect" takes on opposite meanings with and without sarcasm.

My suggestion is that we use a compact marker to start a sentence which we intend as sarcasm. This could and should be something very simple, "~" for example. So a sarcastic sentence would read "~that was just perfect". This way the reader is clued in at the beginning to the tone of the sentence.

This method could also be expanded to other modes. A sentence could begin "^that was just perfect", with the "^" indicating a depressed tone, much as :-( indicates unhappiness. Or, we could use "!" to indicate an upbeat tone, "!that was just perfect!" (I know that this is accomplished with the end exclamation mark, but I think it's just as important to know at the beginning of the sentence.)

I've always been fascinated by John Ashbery. Ever since reading Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror I've been a fan. I don't always understand his poetry, but I find myself lost in the texture and music of his language, and going along for a wonderful ride. To me, his language is magical, like being lost in a dream. You're sometimes not sure what is happening, but everything is in context, everything feels right.

I just bought a collection of his later poems, Notes from the Air. It is an excellent collection, and a great place to become acquainted with Ashbery.