amphichon

“Antique shops?” the woman in Tourist Information began memorizing my features in case a robbery was reported later. “Why do you want antique shops? The best bargains are the charity shops.”
“It’s my mum’s birthday,” I lied. “She likes vases.”
“Oh. For Mum? Oh! Isn’t Mum lucky having you as a [...]

When heaven above was not yet named,
Nor earth below pronounced by name,
Apsu, the first one, their begetter
And maker Tiamat, who bore them all,
Had mixed their waters together,
But had not formed pastures, nor discovered reed-beds;
When yet no gods were manifest,
Nor names pronounced, nor destinies decreed,
Then gods were born within them. – from Enuma elish, the Babylonian creation [...]

I hate to break such a long and pleasant silence on amphichon with such tragic news, but Kurt Vonnegut died today, and I miss him already.
Hello, babies. Welcome to earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you have about a hundred [...]

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us
An’ ev’n Devotion

Happy birthday, Rabbie Burns.

[Note: I needed to link to this poem for someone, and I couldn’t find the full text of it anywhere online, so I have retyped and posted it from my own copy of New and Selected Poems. It is certainly under copyright and it may be that Ms. Oliver really does not want [...]

To shave, or not to shave: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The stings and abrasions of unsharpened razors,
Or to take shade amid a sea of stubbles,
And by inaction keep them? To shave: to scrape
No more; and by not shaving, say, we end
The chin-ache and the thousand natural cuts
That skin is [...]

Sometimes political correctness is, to put it succinctly, a pain in the ass.
Mitt Romney of Massachusetts got himself into hot water on Saturday by referring to Boston’s Big Dig as a “tar baby”:
The best thing for me to do politically is stay away from the Big Dig – just get as far away [...]

So McSweeney’s does a quarterly thing which they call McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Actually the Quarterly Concern came first, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency sort of sprung up from that. You could call the Concern a magazine, if you’re comfortable using the term for something that could be anywhere from a 300-page sumptiously bound [...]

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted. – José Ortega y Gasset, by way of Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Incidentally I’m almost done with Omnivore’s Dilemma, and once I’ve finished it I’ll have more to say about it here, but in the meantime, what [...]

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of “not knowing”. – Mark Danielewski, {color:blue}House of Leaves, pg 34.
Q: But what benefit does one gain from this acceptance of “not knowing”?
A: None, really, except for the ability to focus on the known and the knowable, ie, the practical, the mundane.
Q: [...]