WITHOUT SIMPLE PLEASURES, LIFE CAN devolve into a complicated search for meaning; with simple pleasures, it still depends on you.
Monotheist Koan
Q: CAN GOD MAKE A rock so heavy He can’t lift it?
A: Yes. But God can lift it anyway.
Pithyism #2<1
MARRIAGE IS NOT A MATTER of being with the one you get along with better than anyone, so much as one with whom not getting along is preferable to being alone — and without whom you wouldn’t get along at all.
(On the occasion of his 16th wedding anniversary, which is three months shy of their 22nd meeting-anniversary, which latter is (two years less than) half his life, which really isn’t long enough at all)
Sizing Science Fiction
ADMIT IT: YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED to compare the Millenium Falcon to a Danube-class runabout. Well, they’re about the same length according to Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS. SD scales nearly every species, starship and space station in the visual science-fiction universe (I mean, he’s got Robbie the Robot and the whale probe from Star Trek IV and the space stations from 2001 and DS9 and even real vehicles like the Apollo rockets and ISS and and and GoshWowBoyOBoy).
Metaphorager say: 5 beanies. Click ’em out.
5 thoughts: James Joyce
Fig. 1: James Joyce
1. James Joyce is yet another proof that one man’s mind can be bigger than his skull. (If not, generational banks of Joyce scholars would have quit writing about him long ago.)
2.) Until Finnegan’s Wake, no Irishman had ever beat the Jews for mind-stretching eloquence. (Since the Talmud, the best we’ve done is Groucho Marx and Yehuda Amichai.)
3.) Come to think of it, FW and the Talmud do make two nice bookends for the Western literary tradition: what the Talmud does to Aristotle, Joyce does to Webster. (Said comeuppances piercingly beautiful to see.)
4.) If a man can spend a quarter of his life writing his Perfect Book, there’s hope for the rest of us.
5.) But only if we can manage not to be humbled by such wit-wraps as “Nations have their ego, just like individuals,” “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake,” or “Men are governed by lines of intellect – women: by curves of emotion.” Or: “Agenbite of inwit.” Or even:
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now.
(O, now, what’s the use? Another Guinness pour my muse, poor favor, purring kittenkilkenny of katzenjammers … [tape ends])
The Face That Launched A Thousand Orbits
PUT YOUR FACE AND/OR NAME on the Space Shuttle while you still can[1] at NASA Face in Space, then download and print the evidence. (This is a metaphor for something or other; p’raps best not think too hard on’t.)
[1] Said shuttle program being shut down soon. Accept reasonable substitutes.
Life? On Titan? Maybe.
Fig. 1
. Astronomy Now: Something strange is happening on Titan.
. Science Friday: Titan’s Chemistry and the Search for Life.