a wily kernel coinage

(image by Steilos Faitakis via surlaterre dot me)

Horapollo.

"THE ANGEL that presided o’er my birth
Said 'Little creature, form’d of joy and mirth,
Go, love without the help of anything on earth.' "

William Blake

Ghosts & semi-ghosts.

"I am eternally grateful to Dorothy Day for conveying to me the nicest poetical compliment I have ever received. She had been in jail in the old Women’s Prison at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue for protesting against air-raid warnings. There the prisoners got a shower once a week. It so happened that a poem of mine had recently appeared in The New Yorker, of which the last line ran: 'Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.' One of Dorothy Day’s co-in-mates was a whore who went off to her weekly shower quoting it. 'My God,' I thought, 'I haven’t written in vain.' " --W H Auden

How to clean a hat.

Jack Vance's Big Planet (& its sequel Showboat World) takes place on a planet that has "30 times Earth's volume" & only "one-third its specific gravity." I don't know if anyone has actually run the figures in the ensuing 60-odd years, but i get a radius of 1.92757321 times Earth & a mass of 2.38324146 for this redoubtable sphere. Its gravity works out to be 0.642524403. Clearly a metal-poor system, there are none quite so small among the known candidate stars; however, tau Ceti & Kapteyn's Star are in the ballpark...

For Stanislav Petrov Day.