eminent scientist and patron of the arts...

To hear him tell it 

professor Carl Djerassi 

set half the world free

Yankee ingenuity

Steel-tracked vehicles 

swiftly co-opted for war 

 conceived for logging

auxotroph

In Jurassic Park 

 the protein diet's complete 

 lysine-rich tourists

to know

Share a bed? Easy! 

See inside another's head? 

 Aspirational

flip-flopper

Dogged journalists 

 digging for the real Romney 

grasp only shadows

hello? hello??

Congressman Akin 

believes he's been called by God 

alas, "wrong number"

champion of ignorance

Congressman Akin 

staunchly defends his beliefs 

 in arrant nonsense

ungrounded

Congressman Akin 

doesn't bother to check facts 

 they'd just confuse him

divine displeasure?

Hurricane Isaac 

Republican Convention 

 date with destiny

courage

Subversive satire 

 jabs even at Pakistan 

 anonymously

hand-over

As the Yanks withdraw 

 Afghanistan's rag-tag troops 

claim sloppy seconds

troglodyte

congressman Akin 
relies on garbage "science" 
 to blame rape victims

Thou shall not pervert justice

LandOwner justice 

 Dorothy Stang's murderers 

serve less time than thieves

East scarp

Across Nevada 

 "basin/range orogeny" 

 built morning launch sites

tendentious II

Roughgarden contests 

 what Dennett had made so clear 

 Don't call it conflict!

get over it III

England's prince Harry 

still a kid at twenty-six 

 makes prudish Yanks blush

the decider

Competing networks 

 battle to control your brain 

 Free-Will illusion

demos

Courting splinter-groups 

 dysfunctional parliament 

 hostage to the Few

it takes a village

Three pounds of neurons 

 chatter and cooperate 

 to conjure a mind

edifice complex

Monumental art 

 won't spring from good governance 

autocrats build big

tendentious

For Joan Roughgarden 

 in biologists' language 

 rape is everywhere

cherry-picked data

Hurricane Isaac 

takes aim on the convention 

divine displeasure?

private cave

What's reality? 

Time and Space aren't out there 

constructs of your mind

flailing

Al-Assad's death-grip 

could tear #Lebanon apart 

 as he's going down

pride

John Glenn's mother crowed 

 "if washing machines could fly 

 my boy could land them"

empty pedestal

Neil Armstrong's passing 

 leaves some big footprints unfilled 

heroes have grown scarce

happy hunters

Trophy cairns of skulls 

mark the the owls' favored perches 

pride in jobs well done

heft II

Chris Christie's big job 

 eclipse Ron Paul from the Press 

his shadow is broad

Zombie ec

In a real science 

 disproven ideas stay dead 

 not Hard Currency

Rachel

Who's responsible? 

Corrie embraced martyrdom 

 by a bulldozer

Tinkerbell

Newt shrivels and dies 

 as attention turns to Mitt 

like a salted slug

get over it II

 issues are boring!

 skinny-dipping lawmakers 

 sell more newspapers

get over it

Prurient Press corps 

 skinny-dipping lawmakers 

 match made in heaven

heft

Chris Christie's image 

overflows the tv screen 

 get a shorter lens

Objectivism

Ayn Rand's selfish creed 

would have each treat his neighbors 

 as foreign nations

adventurism

Support our soldiers! 

Make sure they're where they belong 

 bring then home alive

feckless

Tacit assumption: 

all wars are fought overseas 

warps debate at home

thou shalt love

Bibi's status quo

 taught a nation's youth to hate

 unsustainable!

boundaries

scared of loneliness 

they started a family 

but walled out the world

space

Summer's best movie 

 Pygmalion meets Groundhog Day 

 don't miss "Ruby Sparks"

man's second-best friend

Amundson's pipe-dream 

for racing to the South Pole 

's harnessed Polar Bears

friend of the Devil

Iran's ambition 

regional hegemony 

rides on al-Assad

overshadowed

Mitt bought a problem 

campaigning in Paul's shadow 

 nobody sees him

born to kvetch

Chronic malcontents 

 forty years eating Manna 

made farm-labor sweet

value-free

Materialists 

 know the price of everything 

 but nothing's value

retronym

Incoherent light 

 never needed a label 

 before the laser

ad hoc

Bad economists 

 choose metrics after the fact 

 to fit their theories

Dullard

Naming Paul Ryan 

Romney cast a long shadow 

 over his own bid

real values

The next Spotted Owl 

may be a desert tortoise 

developers'  bane

through a glass, darkly

In her own image 

 Ayn Rand's objectivism 

 left no place for love

pot calling the kettle

Mitt Romney's gambit 

calling Obama "angry" 

makes him sound unhinged

think big

The whole aspen grove 

 not kin, not community 

 one organism

speculative

More froth than substance 

FaceBook's market cap. cratered 

as employees sold

foreign enemies

Ahmedinejad 

 and Bibi trust each other 

to keep voters scared

retro

Caterpillar stock 

 pays quarterly dividends 

 so old-school, it's hot

paddleboard

Standing too far aft 

the wind yaws my bow around 

 back towards the lee shore

roue

To hear him tell it 

 professor Carl Djerassi 

set half the world free

oops

Vendee Globe racers 

hid their flaws 'til sea trials 

 stable upside-down

Maine's innovation

Steel-tracked vehicles 

swiftly co-opted for war 

conceived for logging

nutritious!

In Jurassic Park 

the protein diet's complete 

 lysine-rich tourists

to know? to know??

Share a bed? Easy! 

See inside another's head? 

Aspirational

there's no "there" there

Dogged journalists 

 digging for the real Romney 

grasp only shadows

lossy

Tonal languages 

roughly sketched by pounding drums

 baffled explorers

temporal

Assad's armed forces 

 still dominate Damascus 

the rest is Allah's

watchmaker

In the Multiverse 

 William Paley's Watchmaker 

 must exist. . . somewhere

human drama

Why bury bombers?                  Antigone knew

 hang them from the city walls    even in direst wartime

 for the sport of crows               the gods claim their due

outrage

cowardly congress 

 won't impeach a president 

even for murder

constructive

Stop fretting and sing! 

 just miss by a whole octave 

call it "harmony"

rabbi? or rabbit?

rabbi Elyashev 

lives through his seed, not ideas 

that's not Moshe's way

one's place

Beneath the surface 

 "Hunger Games" is about class 

 Jonathan Swift's heirs

how are the mighty fallen

Art's built of contrast 

 there can be no real despair 

 where there was no hope

Hobbesian

"The Dark Knight Rising" 

evokes The Terror in France 

 shorthand for chaos

history's judgement

In the First Lord's words: 

 "rum, sodomy and the lash"

conquered an empire

indelicate

Visiting London 

Mitt Romney's diplomacy 

doesn't look prepared

valor

Bucking hurricanes 

 Goss turned back for Dinelli 

 somebody had to

Liberty's legacy

Thomas L. Friedman 

 sees us as liberators 

 living in the past

Nelson's memory

The French love sailing 

 as much to beat the English 

as to get somewhere

shear

turbulent mixing
where tow airmasses collide
strong lift, strong gnar-gnar

ambivalent

The Church is hedging 

 teaching that abstinence works 

 . . . except for Mary

chicken

Mofaz made his point 

Bibi doesn't have the balls 

 to stare down the Right

low-rise

Dicey foundations 

 Long Island's just a morraine 

where the glacier stopped

ponderous

Jim Bridger Dragline 

 makes new slate out of old shale 

beneath its steel treads

cost analysis?

Curiosity 

 took plutonium to Mars 

 risks more than sky-high