bluejoh has placed a treasure trove of links within a Ray Bradbury poem. Night Call, Collect.
It seems wrong to unthread such a dazzling post, but just one great site cited is this international tonguetwister collection. Here’s a French example:
Ta Kathy t'a quitté (bis)/ T'es cocu qu'attends-tu?/ T'as plus qu'à te cuiter,/ Et quitter ton quartier.
(Your Cathy has left you. You have been deceived, what are you waiting for? You have but to get drunk. and leave your appartment.)
And the German: Was blickst Du so stier Bube,/ warst Du in der Bierstube?
(Why are you looking so stubborn boy, were you in the beer bar?) -
or perhaps: Unter einer Fichtenwurzel hörte ich einen Wichtel furzen - ( Under a spruce root I heard a gnome farting)
From Sweden: Sju sjuka sjuksköterskor tvättade sina skitiga stjärtar i rosa champagne.
(Seven sick nurses washed their dirty behinds in pink champagne.)
And from Calabria: Avera ma vaju ma viu s'avera ma vaju ma jocu u pallone.
(I should go to see if I have to go to play soccer.)

May as well make it four consecutive posts about dogs. Blog LCD apparently. This one’s about Abby. Boynton was having her nightly bout of gloom in despair room, when she was sought out by this geriatric lab, who can barely walk 10 feet without falling, whose old hind legs give way as she sways and twitches, and pants breathlessly around, half blind, doing her ward round in the dark, like some neverland nanna. The original Pets as Therapy dog, all she has ever wanted is to place her head in a human hand, and be there. A presence. Now between lapses of senility and fragility, she’s working off the memory, of routine and learned domestic geography. All paths lead back to the mark of the pack, her kind, a hand in the dark. As I pat her hard white head I shake mine and say: fifteen Abby, you’re almost fifteen.

Of course, as boynton's mother has always said: there is never just one mouse ...
So Bronte has her hunting mind fully occupied. On the matter of humane extermination, see the electronic repeller (... which to boynton, resembles a vintage radio of the type that she is always hunting down in vain)
It delivers a tremendous blast of ultrasound -- inaudible to you and your pets -- that disrupts the nervous systems of those pests. They will in most cases leave your home within a few weeks.
While the RatZapper clearly worked for this woman, who closes her rapturous testimony with the appeal: Let me know if you are interested, and what we could do together...Boynton will stick with the old crazy canine snapper.

Trust your terrier... After 48 hours of "engaging her quarry", Bronte finally "bolted her quarry" and dispatched the mouse. It was quick and clean - so we suspect it's reasonably humane. Now Boynton just has to dispose of the body and re set the sculpture that rests in the fireplace. Five bowling pins and a bowling ball that the terrier toppled one by one the other night, with that sweet nostalgic bowling sound byte. It was the spare before the strike.

Dog Boy has "a tiny black Labrador heart pumping blood through his veins" (via gmtplus9)...boynton's always had a bit of a weak heart

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retro redux. Don't go past the e-cards on the 50's TV Guides link. Boynton just spent a happy hour among old friends... Long lost loves of her sisters like Dr Kildare and the boys from "Here Come The Brides"... (the three older sisters each staked out their own J brother) ... Sebastion Cabot (who was somehow scary to young boynton) and kindly Brian Keith. She thought her life would resemble "Please Don't eat the Daisies" - but so far she's only scored the canine whirlwind. She's tempted to link to Get Smart, and though she's been accused of writing a la Waltons, she'll finish with her all time favourite show, featuring one of the matching bookends.

Plath in Portuguese (via Enigmatic Mermaid )

Retro delight: US TV guides from 50’s...(via Quiddity)
and Taschen’s All-American Ads of the 60s... (via Boing Boing)... (Boynton was going to buy this book for boynton for Christmas. Maybe she’ll buy it for February.)

And fff-inally – Boynton has a friend (or two) for whom this guide to “cuss control” could come in handy. (via memepool)

Freida Hughes has written a poem attacking a BBC-backed film of her mother's life and death. (via Moby Lives)
Critical of both the producers and “their monster/ "Their Sylvia Suicide Doll” and the consumers: “the "peanut eaters, entertained at my mother's death" - one defence offered is that 'Sylvia Plath invaded her own privacy first…' In the BBC link, there is a kind of found poem in the photo of Ted Hughes with the words:
Ted Hughes: Did not want his life
to be dramatised
But of course, it is, currently in production. In his essay The Case against Biography Michael Holyroyd quotes Oscar Wilde 'Every man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” And in regard to the literary/artistic genre he notes the criticism that biographers “are continually trying to explain how the rabbit got into the hat before the novelist or poet produces her magic”
On a slight tangent, this is an interesting conversation with A.S.Byatt, re her book A Biographers’ Tale.
Boynton took heart from this observation: “a writer has a right to learn from what they intensely enjoy as well as what makes them think and understand” This morning Boynton had spent some enjoyable lowbrow downtime listening to an old tape she had once compiled of some corny uncool favourites from a decade ago. Unhip (quite a few feature on the pub Karaoke playlist) but they harbour all that standard nostalgic power that gets the mind (and heart) ticking over.

It’s beginning to slip from the headlines here, but earlier Boynton heard the inevitable call for perspective on the Columbia disaster with Jon Faine questioning the nine page local tabloid splash in the “mediafrenzy”...
See LivingRoom for more ( via bene diction)
These debates seem to ignore the global and symbolic meaning, the way the death of astronauts (like princesses) can hit a symbolic nerve that transcends (that given) our base equality. And for Boynton too it was some sort of universal connection to the bright moving star orbiting over the back yard. This is (apparently) an email from Laurel Clark on Friday:
This was definitely one to beat all. I hope you could feel the positive energy that beamed to the whole planet as we glided over our shared planet...

For the past five hours Bronte has been totally transfixed eyeballing a mouse. Likewise Boynton - monitor and mouse - when she should have been cleaning the house, defrosting the fridge, matching up socks.(via b3ta)

Last week in the stifling heat, we watched it slowly cross the southern sky. At first we thought it was a shooting star, and made a wish. Next morning I heard an astronomer explain that the light slowly crossing from east to west was the space shuttle. Today we wake up to the news: Columbia disappeared from radar screens at 9am (0100 AEDT Sunday), 16 minutes from landing, " After a brief crackling noise, contact was lost". A witness in Palestine Texas, sees...trails of smoke zig-zagging, going across the sky... And NASA spokeswoman Catherine Watson told NPR: "All of the flight controllers are just looking at all the data trying to figure out what happened." Watson broke down in tears when asked whether it was possible that the crew had survived.

(And see Quiddity for the poem High Flight)