Diwan: A Wind: the singing comet

      "Now, thin fruit flies like thunderstorms
      And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
      And tax firm men like fat tax forms--
      But time flies like an arrow.
      When tax forms tax all firm men’s souls,
      While farm girls slim their boyfriends’ flanks;
      That’s when the murd’rous thunder rolls--
      And thins the fruit flies ranks.
      Like tossed bananas in the skies,
      The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
      Then’s the time to time the time flies--
      Like the time flies like an arrow."

—Edison B. Schroeder, 1966

(via)

"Ergodic literature is, by its very nature, non-trivial in its construction..."

"Was it David Cross who said that if someone sends a kindergarten class into a burning building, we have to be allowed more choices than calling them tiny heroes and 'not supporting kindergartners'?" --DirtyOldTown on Metafilter

"The Age of the Blog is surely dead, after all, as lost to us as the Silurian and trilobites."

"It grieves me to say it, but the fact is the man is too decent for this line of work. His tragic flaw is that he truly believes in a glorious America of patriots, of decent men and women motivated by the noblest principles reaching across the aisle for the greater good.

This lovely place has never actually existed, outside our dreams and some inspiring old black-and-white movies, but Mr. Obama honestly believes in it. It's been a breathtaking failure of imagination on his part.

Meanwhile, the only thing keeping me going today is the fact that I know the country has always been a work in progress, always teetering just inches from a collapse into raw fascism. The fight is never finished. America is the land of the unkept promise and the invented past. Anybody who thinks we're worse now, in the era of Charles and David Koch and Mitch McConnell, than we ever have been before, needs to read up on just about any decade you care to choose, from 1776 forward.

Blood, brutality, racism, corruption, abuse of power, murder, betrayal, hate--it's all there. The Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the Dawes Act, battered union organizers and dispossessed sharecroppers and murdered civil rights workers, brutal cops,soulless capitalists, starvation and misery in the midst of plenty--that's our history. The Kochs and McConnell didn't invent it, they're just the latest iteration.

If Mr. Obama had understood all this going in, he might have had a fighting chance to be one of our truly great presidents. Instead, he truly believed in the fundamental goodness of the nation and its people. He was Jimmy Stewart when what we needed was, God help us, Kevin Spacey. My heart breaks for the man." --Deborah Weiss on Esquire dot com

"The object does not yet have a formal name; it is called '1110113Y' on the Hubble website and 'PT1' within the New Horizons team."