Governor Blago gets lit­er­ary on us at his post-​impeachment press conference:

He closed his remarks by quot­ing from “Ulysses,” a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

“We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” said Blago­je­vich, pref­ac­ing his read­ing by acknowl­edg­ing he first heard Sen. Ted Kennedy quote the poem at the 1980 Demo­c­ra­tic National Convention.

The Vul­ture runs down the seven most bizarre moments from the People’s Choice Awards held Jan­u­ary 7th.  Not a dis­tin­guished list (nor even a very good one, for that matter), but their number one moment–Jay Mohr’s accep­tance speech for Gary’s Unmar­ried–caught my eye:

I would really like to thank my wife, my best friend, the fun­ni­est guy I know. And not even the rain has such small hands, baby girl. I love you.

Not sure about the “funniest guy” ref­er­ence, but: the poet; the poem. Per­haps Mohr’s nearly per­fect Christo­pher Walken impres­sion could have made the line work.

A tepid case for the quoted poet by Billy Collins; a glib con­fla­tion of text mes­sag­ing with ortho­graph­i­cal experimentation.

Pump­kin Islands: an arch­i­pel­ago in the north Atlantic, so called because of the enor­mous pump­kins that grow here, some­times as large as sev­enty cubic feet. The inhab­i­tants put them out to dry, remove the insides and use the fruit as boats, the stems as masts and the leaves as sails. The inhab­i­tants are pirates who prey on the neigh­bour­ing islands and are called “pumpkins pirates” by their ene­mies the Nut­nauts, against whom they launch their fleet of vast pumpkins.

–Lucian of Samosata, True His­tory, 2nd cen. AD

The dust is clear­ing a bit for me after the mad scram­ble of hol­i­day trav­el­ing (my trip specif­i­cally involved icy stretches of Iowa high­way in a rental car bear­ing tiny moun­tains of presents given to my one-year-old son). In get­ting a jump on the work of the New Year™, I wanted to offer my first after-​Christmas post as the first in a Monday-​morning series that I hope to con­tinue through­out the upcom­ing year. Its aim is to present a lit­er­ary foil to the stream of com­men­tary ema­nat­ing from this very blog through­out the day.

Each Monday morn­ing, I will present an imag­i­nary loca­tion (coun­try, ocean, land fea­ture, city-​state, etc.) excerpted from the fan­tasy Baedecker The Dic­tio­nary of Imag­i­nary Places, by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. Think of it as a post­card from a fan­tasy world to yours be used as an anti­dote to the startup of the real world work week, much like the one Jamie Foxx’s Max inserted in the sun visor of his taxi cab in the Michael Mann film Col­lat­eral. Just don’t expect to get hijacked by Tom Cruise and make time with Jada Pin­kett Smith–if that could happen to you, you prob­a­bly don’t read this blog.

With­out fur­ther com­ment, the inau­gural Monday morn­ing imag­i­nary place: