I posted the following comment to the FCC regarding Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) – Docket 03-123.
There are simply not enough qualified American Sign Language Interpreters in the world to meet the needs of all consumers of Video Relay Services, so I oppose the rule that all calls must be answered within 10 seconds. It takes much longer to train a sign language interpreter than it takes to train a text relay operator. The rule might apply for text relay, but in this real world we live it, it is not applicable. Perhaps in another 5 years, if many sign language interpreters are recruited into interpreter training programs in order to fill the need for qualified video relay interpreters, we can comply with this rule. At this point, it is impossible.
Daniel Greene is a multi-talented actor who is as comfortable and capable behind a microphone as he is on stage. He takes direction very well and is delightful to work with… Daniel also has the uncanny ability to slip effortlessly into any character I suggest to him—as well as many he has developed on his own. Not only can he get into character quickly; he can maintain a character for long periods of time without losing any of the character’s strength or energy… Working with Daniel has been a joy. Directing him, watching him, and hearing his work is a treat! —Penny Abshire, Senior Producer/Director/Writer, The Commercial Clinic
If you have a testimonial to add, please leave a comment here or on my LinkedIn profile. Thanks!
Ernest Charles Greene May 9, 1911 – February 8, 2004
My grandfather died last Sunday evening, and for me, this marked more than the end of one man’s life. It marked the end of Granny and Grandpa, the only couple I’ve ever known that loved each other so much and stayed together for so long, seemingly without ever fighting. Grandpa’s death also marked the passing of the last of my grandparents. Though I count myself lucky to have had grandparents well into my thirties, I was nevertheless deeply stung by the final disappearance of an entire generation of family.
Ernest Greene was actually born Ernest Greenberg, and his father changed the family name in 1918, when Grandpa was seven years old. I can only guess the name change was a safeguard against anti-Semitism or enmity toward Germans. He had a younger brother named Howard, a father named Abraham, and a mother I was lucky enough to know until I was four years old, Grandnanna Gertrude Greene. In photos I’ve seen of Grandpa in his youth, he was a striking young man with a full head of blond hair. He was a boxer, and he was also a jazz trumpeter and harmonica player. As I heard it, he met my grandmother, Helene Kupferman, at work; she was the boss’s daughter. Early photos of them show a playful young couple striking poses at the beach—him showing off his biceps and her kicking a leg to the side like a flapper doing the Charleston. When I looked through these photos with Granny years ago, she said, “Weren’t we cute?” They were.
I first met Ernest Greene when he was only 57 years old—a mere 20-odd years older than I am now. I remember him as a robust, jocular fellow with a quick wit and a humble but confident stride. I remember watching him work in the garden, play golf and tennis, and I remember him roughhousing me when I was only two or three. There are a few childhood memories I have of Grandpa that I’ll always cherish. One was the times he tucked me in and told me “Ynnad” stories. Ynnad was Danny spelled backwards, and Ynnad stories were simple adventures with morals at the end. I think one of them had something to do with a bicycle—either losing the bike or having an accident, and the moral was something like, “take care of what is yours and you’ll have it for a long time.” Grandpa certainly exemplified this in his dealings with family, his business, and even—all things considered—his health. I also remember silly things like when Grandpa played “This little piggy” with my toes, and when he told jokes like, “What did Shakespeare say to the bowlegged cowboy? ‘What, ho! What men are these, who wear their trousers on parentheses!’” I also remember walking up the steps to a country club for dinner with Granny and Grandpa when I was only about four years old. Grandpa was holding my hand, and he gave it a squeeze. He said, “You know what that means?” And I said, “No, what?” “It means,” he said, “that I love you.”
That wasn’t the sort of thing Grandpa would say freely after I outgrew my cute little kid phase, but I think it’s a nice insight into his softer, more vulnerable side that we all know he must have had. He certainly showed that side to my grandmother. Most of us know Ernest Greene as a successful businessman, but Granny didn’t marry him for his money. When she met him, he didn’t have a penny to his name. I remember Granny saying, “I kissed a lot of boys before I married your grandfather. I didn’t marry the first man who came along; I chose him.” They chose well. Together, they raised my uncle and dad, built a business into a very profitable venture, scrimped and saved, traveled the world, grew old together in their own home, and still had enough fortune to provide comfortable lives for their children and grandchildren. There are many opportunities I’ve had in this life that I never would have had were it not for the man we remember today, and for that I am forever grateful. In the long run, though, what’s important is not the money Grandpa made, but the family he created with his wife. His passing marks the end of Ernest and Helene Greene on Earth, and for that I am sad, but if there is a heaven after life, I am happy to imagine Granny and Grandpa reunited and rejuvenated, the way I remember them for the first 18 years I knew them.
It was very sad for me to see my once healthy and strong grandfather become frail and thin with age. He even began losing his memory the last couple of years, though he never lost his charm. A couple of Thanksgivings ago, at the end of the meal, Grandpa turned to Uncle Chuck, and asked very politely, “Do you have a place in your house where I might lie down to rest?” He might have forgotten it was his own house, but he certainly didn’t forget his manners!
I’ve been told you should always say, “I love you,” to the people you love when you talk to them on the phone, lest it should be the last time you ever speak to them. About a month ago was the last time I spoke with Grandpa, and thanks to some coaxing from my partner Andy, the last thing I said was, “I love you,” and the last thing Grandpa said to me was, “I love you, too.” I feel at peace with Grandpa, and I’m glad he is now at rest.
My best friend, Paul, lost his grandmother just two weeks ago, and I would like to share with you something he quoted when he eulogized his grandmother. The Native American Ishi people of the Pacific Northwest imagined that their dead spoke to them saying “When I am dead, cry for me a little, think of me sometimes, but not too much. It is not good for you to allow your thoughts to dwell too long upon the dead. Think of me now and again as I was in life, at some moment that is pleasant to recall, but not for too long. Leave me in peace, as I shall too leave you in peace. While you live, let your thoughts be with the living.”
I choose to remember Granny and Grandpa together, healthy, active and always in love. Granny and Grandpa are gone now, but their marriage will always be an inspiration to me as I go on to create my own family. Goodbye, Grandpa, and as a contemporary of yours once said, “Thanks for the memories.”
Those who are interested may make contributions in memory of Ernest Greene to the following charities:
I created this site to explore the possibilities of hyperlinking haiku poems, knowing that the medium of hypertext would encourage me to free-associate and be more prolific. I am interested in your experience as a reader of these poems. Most poems will offer at least two hyperlinks, so you, the reader, may also free-associate by following the links that most appeal to you.
What is Hyper Haiku?
Haiku is a poetic form with one stanza of three lines; the first line has five syllables, the second line has seven, and the third line has five. As long as one follows those simple rules, the form gives great freedom for expression. Hypertext links pages and sections to each other through hyperlinks. Therefore, hypertext haiku, or “hyper haiku,” comprises haiku poems that contain hyperlinks to other haiku poems and so forth.
A New Form:
From what I have gathered, mine is the first site on the Internet to offer haiku poetry that follows the haiku form, makes grammatical sense, and contains hyperlinks within each haiku poem that link to other haiku poems. Here is a survey of the literature published in the field of hypertext haiku as of January 19, 2003, the date when this page was first published on the Internet.
This page praises the elegance (their word) of the haiku poem, and it offers several examples of translated haiku poems by “the four masters” Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shika. Several examples are given of haiku poems translated from Japanese into English. It is important to note that these translated poems do not fit the haiku form of five, seven, and five syllables in English; they did fit the form in Japanese, but the English translations of these haiku poems could not be considered haiku poems themselves. Also it is important to note that, while this page gives several examples of idyllic poems, it also shows us that haiku can be about the seedier aspects of the human experience. See the poems by Issa near the bottom of the page for examples of this.
I found this site when I searched the Web for the word “Hyperku.” I had originally thought of calling my site “Hyperku,” but I wanted to see whether anyone else was using that word, and how they were using it. This author’s idea of “Hyperku” is haiku with links in it, like mine, except his links lead to offsite pages on related topics rather than to other haiku as mine do. After seeing his definition of “Hyperku,” I decided to be more cautious of naming my site “Hyperku,” because I didn’t want my brand of hypertext haiku to be confused with his. One thing I love about this guy’s page is that it’s written in XHTML and CSS, like mine, and it’s quite handsome as a result!
Besides the first two sites that came up in the search results (both related to the link listed above), I found that a lot of sites referred to a now-defunct music search site called Hyperku.com. Many of the pages in the search results that referred to Hyperku.com were in foreign languages. However, from what I could gather from my understanding of foreign languages and the few English sites that referred to Hyperku.com, it seems that the site had something to do with Audiogalaxy.com. What on earth Hyperku means to these people is beyond me! All I know is that I did not want my hypertext haiku site to be associated with these music sites, so I decided against calling my site “Hyperku.”
A Google Search of “hyperhaiku” led to this page and the one below. Visually, this is an interesting Flash presentation; I like its use of graphics, movement, sound, and typography. It certainly fits the genre of multimedia. However, there are no links in the presentation, and no allowance for user interaction, so I don’t believe it could be considered hypermedia. In literary terms, the poem is not a haiku poem, for it does not fit the five, seven, and five syllable form. I would call this “multimedia poetry” rather than “Hyper Haiku.” Still, it’s interesting to see what else is out there.
This is, in my opinion, a fine specimen not only of good quality haiku writing, but also an effective use of the Flash medium. After seeing this, I certainly have no qualms about using the term “Hyper Haiku” for my site. The one thing the author’s “Hyperhaiku,” lacks is links within the haiku poem, an important distinction that makes hyper haiku “hyper.” My haiku poems not only contain links within them; they contain links to other haiku poems on my site.
I found this site after I had already completed mine. The author uses a strange, non-grammatical syntax (or lack thereof) in concocting poems that fit the haiku form. There is an abundance of hyperlinks in each poem, but there is no clear sense of connectedness between the words and poems. Rather, these hyper haiku seem to be random groupings of words mathematically assembled in the proper syllabic form. For me, the lack of cohesive syntax leads to a lack of semantic meaning at the textual level (surely each word has its semantic meaning intact, but the combination of words is so random as to be meaningless). I do not see such a haphazard conglomeration of words as haiku poetry, but I respect the author’s freedom to experiment, and I imagine that, while the experiment does not work for me, it may very well work for others. Even if an experiment doesn’t “work” for anybody, the experiment doesn’t “fail” as long as it demonstrates the results of trying something. As least this poetry fits the form of haiku and contains hyperlinks, which is more than can be said for much of the other “Hyper Haiku” out there.
This site is a fascinating international site of haiku poetry written in Russian and Japanese. It is a good thing to remember that the World Wide Web was meant to be written in all the languages of the world, not just in English. If your browser is able to render these pages in their intended alphabets, it is a testament to the multilingual power of HTML and WWW standards. This looks like a very interesting site. I cannot critique the poetry except to say that I don’t see any links in it, so I don’t see why it’s called “hyper” haiku, except that it’s presented in HTML. In any event, this is a good quality site.
This is a collection of haiku poems that fit the form and have, in my opinion, some literary value. They do not have any hyperlinks, so I would not call them “Hyper Haiku,” but they are good examples of haiku nonetheless.
This is an experimental site that haphazardly throws five, seven, and five words together to make nonsense poems. The poems do not fit the haiku form of five, seven, and five syllables, and they do not make any sense to me, but each word in each poem is a hyperlink that replaces the word you click with another word. Interesting experiment.
My First Hyper Haiku Poems
Drugs* are everywhere.
Even the lights* inject
a stimulating dose.
*Lights are shining* bright.
Why they shine I can’t divine.
My eyes are quite blind.
She called it *shining,
said* Scatman. Danny’s finger
said REDRUM! REDRUM!
*Alcoholism--
A disease that *tells me I
*don’t have a disease.
*Yo hablo ingles.
Y yo hablo español.
¡Me gusta hablar!
I am my *ego.
I* need to get out of my
own way. God help me!
*Yo entiendo
Mas que yo puedo* hablar.
Olvido mucho.
“I think I *can! I
think I can!” Said* the little
train that thought she could.
Moi, je *parle français*
et je parle anglais aussi.
J’aime beaucoup parler!
*Parisians treat you
like the shit they don’t pick up
when they walk* their dogs.
*Hello. How are* you?
I’m fine, thanks, and how are you?
Fine, thanks. So, what’s new?
“All my friends *are gay!”
(Absolutely Fabulous)
“All—My—Friends—Are—Gay!”
An Invitation to Poets:
If you have a 5–7–5 (syllable) haiku of your own based on one of the words in one of these haiku, please post it below as a comment. Thanks!
P.S. I wrote this in a Hypertext class for my B.A. in English with a concentration in Communications and Media Study. Originally, each poem was on its own page, with at least one hyperlink to another page. You can see where the links were by the asterisk (*) at the end of word (forward link) and the asterisk at the beginning of a word (backward link).
Daniel Greene 