Literary Quotes

This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, March 3, 2026. Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "World Cuisine." I'll be soliciting ideas for cooks, fusion chefs, immigrant cooks, eaters, farmers, foragers, food scientists, inventors, recipe writers, famous figures in food history, cooks of disadvantaged groups who should have become famous, superheroes, supervillains, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people active in the food world, cooking, gardening, harvesting, foraging, preserving, writing recipes, discovering things, decolonizing diets, building or using kitchen equipment, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, kitchens, restaurants, food trucks or carts, campfires, barbecue sites, laboratories, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, picnics, grocery stores, farmer's markets, roadside fruit stands, U-pick farms, gardens, food forests, other places where people make food, world cuisine, ethnic cuisines, cookbooks, online recipe archives, permaculture, heritage diets, climatarian diet, traditional foodways, culinary archaeology, food sovereignty, drought-resistant crops, trial and error, ethnic spice sets, weird food, fusion food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, new ideas in cuisine, alternate agriculture, lab conditions are not field conditions, ethics of food, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One has to figure out how to feed a diverse, far-flung group of people who sometimes have special dietary needs.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, including some aspects of food science.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different diets.  This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find and prepare enough food to survive, when city libraries are out of reach.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman uses herbs and healing foods to care for her village.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania.  Igor enjoys cooking and has gotten at least one of the werewolves curious about cooking the human way.

Hart's Farm is a community with food used as one of the popular bonding methods.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates in the Caribbean, among other groups and places, leading to a wide variety of foods.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all of whom need to eat.  Primal soups and high-burn soups often have special dietary needs.  Comfort food and healing food are also very popular here.  The Rutledge thread includes Kardal and his food truck Syrian Foods, along with references to Vermont, French, and hippie cuisines.  Pain's Gray, Shiv, and the Finns are all fond of cooking too.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

Today we went up to Champaign-Urbana to celebrate Black History Month by visiting black-owned establishments, along with some other stops.

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These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poem: "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"
Poem: "Embrace My Fate"
John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds Order
Poem: "The Spectrum of Your Being"
Early Humans
Birdfeeding
Vocabulary: Bricolage
Today's Adventures
Science
Birdfeeding
Meteor Shower Calendar
Philosophical Questions: Life
Edible Landscaping Order
Meme
Photos: House Yard
Water
Birdfeeding
Books
Follow Friday 2-20-26: Active Communities on Dreamwidth Winter 2025-2026 A-I
Energy
Birdfeeding
Community Thursdays
Photos: Flowerbeds
Books
Birdfeeding
Hard Things

Safety has 49 comments. Food has 53 comments. Wildlife has 39 comments. Food has 67 comments. Robotics has 146 comments.


Last week's half-price sale in Not Quite Kansas went well. All sponsored poems have been posted, so you can find those via the title links on the sale page.


The 2026 Rose and Bay Awards are now open for excellence in crowdfunding. It's time to vote for your favorite projects!

The award period for eligible activities spans January 1-December 31, 2025.
The nomination period spans January 1-January 31, 2026.
The voting period spans February 1-February 28, 2026.

These are the handlers for the 2026 award season:

Art: gs_silva Nominate art! Vote for art!
Fiction: fuzzyred Nominate fiction! Vote for fiction!
Poetry: gs_silva Nominate poetry! Vote for poetry!
Webcomic: curiosity Nominate webcomics! Vote for webcomics!
Other Project: curiosity Nominate other projects! Vote for other projects!
Patron: fuzzyred Nominate patrons! Vote for patrons!

"The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds" belongs to Not Quite Kansas and needs $34.50 to be complete. Raymond and Gideon get attacked on the way home from research.


The weather has been variable here. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a large flock of sparrows, several starlings, one male and two female house finches, one female and two male cardinals, a mourning dove, and a fox squirrel. I flushed the great horned owl from the ritual meadow when I went out there. A skein of geese flew overhead, going north. Currently blooming: crocuses.

This poem is spillover from the October 2020 Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from wyld_dandelyon. It also fills the "demons" square in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, an unprovoked attack, hellhounds, violence, gore, unexpected rescue, playing with prey, fatally injured opponents, minor injuries to main characters, awkward discussions, willing sacrifice, intimate magical healing, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

This microfunded poem is being posted one verse at a time, as donations come in to cover them. The rate is $0.25/line, so $5 will reveal 20 new lines, and so forth. There is a permanent donation button on my profile page, or you can contact me for other arrangements. You can also ask me about the number of lines per verse, if you want to fund a certain number of verses. So far sponsors include: fuzzyred,

355 lines, Buy It Now = $44.50
Amount donated = $10
Verses posted = 13 of 118
Amount remaining to fund fully = $34.50
Amount needed to fund next verse = $0.25
Amount needed to fund the verse after that = $0.75

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This poem is spillover from the October 6, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from librarygeek. It also fills the "How do you want to do this?" square in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, sorting through a lair acquired by combat, reference to past abuse, cursed artifacts, damned souls, worry, magical body modification, restraint for safety, awkward emotional discussions, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

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These are the notes for "The Spectrum of Your Being."

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Sunday Word: Bricolage

bricolage [bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

noun:
1 a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2 (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3 (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4 the use of multiple, diverse research methods.


Definitely useful if you like upcycling.

Scientists just mapped mysterious earthquakes deep inside Earth

Scientists at Stanford have unveiled the first-ever global map of rare earthquakes that rumble deep within Earth’s mantle rather than its crust. Long debated and notoriously difficult to confirm, these elusive quakes turn out to cluster in regions like the Himalayas and near the Bering Strait. By developing a breakthrough method that distinguishes mantle quakes using subtle differences in seismic waves, researchers identified hundreds of these hidden tremors worldwide.