This is a good idea that's maybe not explored to the fullest: Wired interviewed comic book store employees and owners and took photos of them at work and at home.

The questions seem like a missed opportunity ("If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?" Duh-hut!), but there are little interesting bits sprinkled throughout, occasionally transcending the stereotypes of comics store employees. I especially enjoyed the interview with Olive Panter, the daughter of comics artist Gary Panter (she was named after Olive Oyl, which seems unnecessarily cruel to me). Panter works at a Brooklyn store called Cosmic Comics, and she tells a story that is at once heartbreaking and embarrassing:

On a Wednesday, a regular customer came and bought a ton of comics as per usual. Then the next day he came in he was completely scab-covered and bruised on his face. We were like, "Dude, what happened to you? Are you okay?" Turns out he started falling down on a escalator while holding his comics and rather than protecting his face he protected his comics. But they still got a little bent, so the next day he came back and re-bought them.

A computer model that tracks the development of the English language thinks that the words bad, stick, guts, and squeeze are likely to become extinct in the near future. Of course, we're talking about English's near future, and so the scale you need to keep in mind is tens of thousands of years. I, we, two, and three are the oldest words in the language.

Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.

For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts".

Verbs also tend to change quite quickly, so "push", "turn", "wipe" and "stab" appear to be heading for the lexicographer's chopping block.

In case you haven't noticed, The Stranger's gone poetry-crazy in the last few months, and this week's new column introduces a new poetry contest for all you Metro riders out there:

We've already gotten a ton of submissions—some serious, some decidedly not—but we'd love to read what you have to say about riding the bus. Send your 50-word-or-less* bus poetry here. The best and funniest poems will run in the paper over the next week or two. Others will be included here on Slog. Go get all Robert Frosty on our asses!

*Someone sent an e-mail asking if the 50 words or less included the title. It does not. But if your title is 150 words long, we probably won't have room for it.

Last week on the Seattle Poetry Chain, the delightful Rachel Kessler whipped out a pantoum. I was highly pleased to publish a pantoum on Slog. A couple of foolish commenters didn't seem to understand that a pantoum requires you to repeat lines; otherwise it wouldn't be a pantoum. But ultimately everybody agreed that Kessler's poem was constructed out of materials that are almost too awesome for this world and poetry was saved for another generation.

This week, Kessler has chosen Rebecca Hoogs to continue the Poetry Chain. Hoogs is the first poet on the Poetry Chain in ten weeks I've actually met in person and I can tell you that she's a lovely human being. But here's what Kessler has to say about her:

Rebecca Hoogs is poetry’s dream date. She digs around in language, exploding words, and carefully crafts a poem-raft from the shards. “Cliché literally meant ‘stamped in metal’… I want to take language back to its original, concrete form and reanimate it,” I heard her say on the radio. Her poems dink around with multiple meanings, with the sound of language and what the words mean, but are solid, like rocks, in my mouth. Not only does she reanimate words, she brings all kinds of poetry to Seattle, sends poets into Seattle’s schools and inspires teachers and students of poetry at Seattle Arts & Lectures. She is wicked smart and funny and wears nice, sexy shoes and I am so happy that she wrote a whole poem about the word “suck” that ends with the line “I suck.”

According to Verse Daily, "Rebecca Hoogs' poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Journal, and Seneca Review. She received her MFA from the University of Washington and currently lives in Seattle." If you follow that link to VD (haw!), you'll find links to three other of Hoogs's poems. But here is the poem Rebecca Hoogs would like to share with us:

Many thanks to Rachel Kessler and especially many thanks to Rebecca Hoogs. Tune in next week to discover who Hoogs picks for the next poet on the Seattle Poetry Chain.