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I used to work for the factory where they make hydrants, but you couldn’t park anywhere near the place.
Steven Wright
“For a long time nobody thought that they would be able to add this corpus of Greek inscriptions to their personal library.”
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And yet when love-making is not in question, the snail is by no means sociable, although it has been observed in one branch of the family, snails engaged in mutually polishing a neighbor’s shell with the foot.
Snails and Their Houses (1888)
Erland Josephson on Scenes From a Marriage.
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Another reason steaks should fall from the sky is because they have protein.
I’m reading some important essays by a writer named Natalie. This is her strongest point on the theme, “If something other than water were to fall from the sky, what should it be?” She’s the author of another influential article which argues that you should be able to bring your pets to school. It opens, “If you don’t know alot about cats, read the next paragraph and you’ll know ALOT about cats!” I love that she imagines her readership and addresses them.
Workspace 6.10.13
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πρωκτὸς καὶ χρυσὸς τὴν αὐτὴν ψῆφον ἔχουσιν· ψηφίζων δ᾿ ἀφελῶς τοῦτό ποθ᾿ εὗρον ἐγώ.
‘Anus’ (πρωκτός) and ‘gold’ (χρυσός) have the same numerical value: I once discovered this while casually calculating (Greek Anthology 12.6).
The commonest number system for the ancient Greeks assigned numerical values to letters of the alphabet, so it was possible for a word to have a numerical value (i.e. the sum of the values of each letter in the word). I think πρωκτός and χρυσός both have a value of 1570. Some people wrote poems in which each verse or couplet had the same value, and apparently some people calculated the values of words to kill time.
I’m pretty sure she’s faking it: she doesn’t even know what words are yet.
So I got this birthday card and I recognized my portrait immediately. She explained that she got me six presents for my birthday! Then she gave me the first present, the picture on the right of a whole pallet full of presents. Now I know that probably sounds adorable, but it turns out she was just bullshitting about the other five presents. When she realized she was found out she began trying to gift me whatever happened to be nearby like a common scoundrel.
She couldn’t wait to give me this birthday card. I opened it and thought to myself, wow, she drew me a girlfriend for my birthday, that’s interesting. Five minutes later I sat down in a lawn chair in the sun with a cold beer and behind my sunglasses I worried privately: have I become so pathetic that an eight-year-old can see it and pity me? No, probably not, I thought. I’ll bet she overheard her mother feeling sorry for me; kids pick up on that sort of thing. Then, halfway through the beer, I realized suddenly, no, I’m way off base, none of that ever happened. She was not-so-subtly wearing a “girls rule” t-shirt herself. Already she’s learning that you can communicate indirectly and thereby avoid embarrassment and rejection—one of humanity’s most useful little tricks.
I got a couple sweet birthday cards from a couple sweet sisters. I know this probably isn’t unusual, but N. (on the left) really has her own distinct style with crayons. I’ve known a few zilcharian* artists, and they always have distinctive traits, but I don’t think I’ve ever known one to really have a grasp of their own style. I don’t have her other drawings to compare, but that it only seems to be true of crayons makes me think I’m on to something.
On the other hand, V. (on the right) is just getting the hang of reading and writing. Mid-winter she was still struggling to remember all the letters and their shapes and now she’s full on sounding out words. You can see right away that Nick, I Love You, and Violet are words that she writes often, while she was clearly struggling with Happy Birthday. (She still asks me how to spell my name every time, then I tell her that she already knows it, and then she writes it perfectly. She doesn’t make me specify upper or lower case for every single letter anymore.) Whereas N.’s card is marked by extensive symmetry (I especially like the 4-3 pattern of the candles, although note the balloon strings), V. hasn’t quite learned how to plan kerning. I can remember very clearly as a child trying to space out the words Happy Birthday and usually failing on the first try. I’m pretty certain that she was observing N. while she was working, based on the exclamation point, which I’ve never seen her use before, and the looping pattern of the frosting on the cake. I’m seriously considering changing my research to zilcharian art.
*I should admit that I just made this up out of the blue because there doesn’t seem to be a term preceding denarian?
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Remember that physical beauty is evolution’s way of assuring us that the other person doesn’t have too many intestinal parasites.
They didn’t make a huge mistake!
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Science, its imperfections notwithstanding, is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled.
E.O. Wilson
A reproduction of Archimedes’ Planetarium, Rome
