71. unimpeachable credentials

"No wise man will want to bring more long words into the world." --G K Chesterton

"If the lander set down in the equatorial region, the dominant feature of the landscape might be gargantuan spires and bladed ridges made of methane ice. Rising as tall as skyscrapers, these could be the product of the seasonal sublimation of Pluto’s icy surface as it gets closer to the sun."

nepenthecost
dead too far gone
rooted in cobweb-sepia
a wall that tears the skin to touch
steer t'ward the sidewalk spraypaint
for passage safe
the things that would be loved by us
are not the things we love

in the growing cold
armloads of bad promisesv toss

iceberg Lafferty
still to read
& maybe not even then

comprehend
in the crooked polyverse
if it still matters

iceberg lettuce

cryptic natural object
resembling a made thing
here because
here is where i'm finding it

whole branches of knowledge
turning into smoke

"...the church of my stroll
Has the form of an owl."

altered jingle

" 'There is an anomaly about the Earth people,' Frank said. 'Though incapable of intelligence, they operate with frightening instinct. They are not able to think, but they are well able to act; and that is the danger to us. They have the unity and communication of the hive.

'They remind me of the fireflies on Mercator. You remember how the millions of those pseudoinsects would cluster on hillocks and trees and all pulsate with their light together? Those on one hill would answer the beacon flashes of those on another hill, and yet they were creatures so small that fifty of them could be heaped on the end of your finger--and blind. Ah, they spelled out derisive words with their pulsing light on the hillsides, but the individuals of them were ignorant of words and of concepts and of all else.

"The people of Earth are like that, which is why it is called the Haunted Planet. The Hive Ghost hovers over them invisible, and they feel it from one end of their communities to the other. We can handle Earth individuals s though they were furniture or stones, but we cannot handle the Hive Ghost that hangs over them...' "

--R A Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968; 2017)

Ecpyrosis.

"Think not light poetry my life's chief care;
The Muse's mansion is at best but air;
But if more solid works my meaning forms,
Th' unfinish'd structures fall by Fortune's storms."

--Richard Savage

(via retro rockets on fb)

dozen. provider. brush.

Cherokee unicode.

"Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book." --M Train

Why Korzybski waned.

"What modernity liberated was carbon." --Mckenzie Wark

New edition England's Hidden Reverse.

"The saying in La Xagvar goes, le zazyzi'e vacri cu xamgu ju danmykai ('The air of freedom is good, even if full of smoke'), and this is thought to be the origin of the City's name." --"La Xagvar" at the Lojban Wiki

Michael Swanwick at first Laffcon.

" I was looking for a better term that 'hexadecimal digit' because a hexadecimal symbol is not 'decimal' - is 'nibble' the only alternate? ...the SWAC computer, which used hexadecimal (with letters U-Z) in 1950. ...many Tibetans count on their fingers using base 16 notation..." --Wikipedia Talk: "hexadecimal" (Also, "0x1CEB00DA ('ice buddha') was used as the origin for the binary file parser IceBuddha" from the linked article "hexspeak")

(via Evan Mitchell on Fb)

What to call yourself in Japanese.

rib katniss. assassin takbir.

(Dorothy Lamour and Jiggs during filming of Her Jungle Love [1937] via @Ble6750)

Discovering Electronic Music. (via Colin Hinz)

"...the first motley, the first mottled-green clown suit, was a snake suit. We were the original humorists." --Fourth Mansions

The architecture of crisis.

"And every wind is wet with carillons" --Eileen Duggan

The particle at the end of the universe.

"A man has to use his eyes, Foley, even in the dark." --Fourth Mansions

The Choctaw word for 'tornado": mahli chito.

The Women Scholars in Islam.

Altair myrrh spiralling
seagull over the viaduct
sound of voices quarrelling
Altair myrrh spiralling
& wolves caroling
two pirate ships have docked
Altair myrrh spiralling
seagull over the viaduct

(via commondreams dot org via gwyneth's livejournal)

Marisol & others.

"There is a truism that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, but this truism may not be true." --Fourth Mansions

"Meanwhile the peak oil movement hit its own peak between 2008 and 2010, and began skidding down the far side of its own Hubbert curve."