January 24, Saturday night -- Reading Robert Burns

Where else do you see silver haired men wearing fuschia haired wigs and face masks, or playing bagpipes with leopard print bags secured to the chest with bicycle chains, but at
Edinburgh Castle, in the Tenderloin, for Robert Burns Night, celebrating the 250th year since the poet's birth (Burns is the revered Scottish poet who wrote Auld Lang Syne)
Janis, a Buddhist Nun, who does street ministry in the neighborhood, not only reading from the poetry of Robert Burns, but also enlightening us on the plural of haggis -- hagi -- a little beast (and culinary delicacy) that lives so high in the Scottish hills that half its nearly extinct population is born with right hind and front legs shorter than the left, and vice versa, so they can navigate the steep trails--they are nearly extict because the terrain and unevenness of appendages makes reproduction nearly impossible. Haggis is, actually, sheep intestines stuffed with oatmeal.

Robert Burns wrote poetry to protest the English colonization of the highlands "my heart's in the highlands a' chasing the deer..."

Robert Burns was not only an outdoors man but also a ladies' man. "He had a love of the feminine, " one reader said. "In those days there were no drugs and no i-pods, so what else were you going to do?"

Robert Burns also wrote about war and soldiers. "....bring him home" one reader recited, and the crowd responded by stomping and clapping. This could actually be possible, as we now have president, vaguely related to the Scotts-- the O'Bamas.