cosmic rapture

plees freeze flees

desert sand flee Continued from lunching intense

What really happened was... no lunch, no wine, no tribespersons bearing platters of desert delicacies. No deep fried date hearts in scorpion sauce. No.

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On the third day they crossed the Mazzambimbi at Monk’s Fjord and found themselves in the badlands. Trudging through the sand on zir two pairs of legs, stepping gingerly over the rotting carcasses of dead donkeys, even JillJack found it heavy going. “Stop pissing in my ass” ze told zirself crossly.

One man, one woman, one hermaphrodite, one soul-sucking alien monkey and one soul-sucked zombie Albanian ex-organ-grinder: the outcast mutant outlaws were on the case. Their mission?
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what is and what will never be

The isthmus of isness
protrudes into the Sea
of serendipitous stochasticity.

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think size matters

Where thought and brains are concerned, size does matter. In a different, subtler way than one might think. The nature, scope and number of thoughts that can be thunk within a given brain: these things are not completely and comprehensively determined by the raw number of neurons, the brute material amount of grey or white matter of the brain concerned.
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140 bird-brained stupidities

Nowhere to be, and not much to say
last week, next month or even today?
Don't get all sad or twisted and bitter
dumb it down, cut it back, put it on Twitter.

Cats miaow, dogs bark, cows moo and goats bleat
but only a birdie goes tweet tweet tweet tweet
If that makes you that much more twisted and bitterer
you must be a twit, a twat or a twitterer.

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free lunch

yes	no
good	bad
light	dark
....	....
....	....
....	....

Here's a very strange and interesting experiment: For each pair of words, choose which word goes in which column, so that each column contains words of a similar nature, following the example of the first three pairs in the table at the right. Ready?

Ok, here goes: "night" and "day". Next pair: "right" and "wrong". Next: "black" and "white". Next: "life" and "death". Next: "cold" and "hot" Next: "hate" and "love".

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great misnomers in history

Human rights (human wrongs?)
Real numbers (not as real as other kinds)
Corporate employee communication (managers pretending to talk to managees pretending to listen.)
Human intelligence (nuff said!)
The Final Solution (still not solved)
Negative growth (give me a break)
United Nations (give me another break, but much harder)
Collateral damage (and vertical and horizontal and intra- and infra-lateral death)
Creationist science (the Pope shits in the woods)
Work/life balance (equilibrium reached when hours per week for Work = 67, Life = 67 and Sleep = 35, and care and maintenance of important accessories eg children are outsourced to so-called professionals)

Any more? send 'em in and I'll put 'em up.

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the Seeker's Gift

S was captured by a roving ranger of the Sunnees---a cheerful bombing people---and taken into the cruel, dry heart of a vast and trackless desert populated but thinly by scorpions and fleshbeetles. On arriving at the main encampment of the Sunnees, S was hauled before the tribal chieftain, Islimiri, a tall and rangy man in a loose burnoose sunburnt to within an inch of his life, his broad splayed teeth gleaming bone-white in a leathery face.

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Venn diagrams

I'm going to be using Venn diagrams in some future posts, so I thought I'd kick off with this one. It's pretty self-explanatory. It shows two sets, A and B, and the intersection of A and B at Area C. It shows the members of sets A and B, and of Area C. The background is the universal set containing everything that is, was, will be, has been and could be in every manner, way, shape, form and dimension.

Of course, "aware" and "alive" are subjective judgements expressed in language statements which are frequently if not always unreliable in terms of conveying meaning faithfully.

One point to note: this is a 2-dimensional Venn Diagram. Consider the additional richness of a 3-dimensional. Or 99-dimensional. Or infinity-dimensional.

And one last question to ponder: Is the universal set a member of the universal set? This paradoxical question is similar to Bertrand Russell's paradox about whether the barber---who only shaves those who don't shave themselves---shaves himself.

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the conservation of beauty

A mother and her son had an argument. About something stupid. The argument started small then grew bigger and louder until the son got so angry that he took a knife and slashed a beautiful artwork his mother had spent years creating, had poured her heart and soul into. Unsurprisingly, she was heart- and soul-broken when her life’s work---and her relationship with her son---was destroyed in an instant of boiling rage.

After the argument, things were never the same between mother and son. The deep love they had had for each other gradually dissipated into a dark fog of resentment and acrimony. Much as she tried, the mother could not forgive her son. The painting had been very beautiful, mysterious, deep and rich with meaning. She could not make sense of its destruction. How could a portal into other worlds ever be shut? The loss was too great to bear, too heavy a burden to carry. She couldn't understand or accept that such magic and beauty could be lost to the world.

Until a still small voice reminded her about the story of the story of the painting that was lost. And then the mother remembered the Law of the Conservation of Beauty: that across reality as a whole, beauty may never be lost or gained, created or destroyed, but only may change or be changed into a different form.

And the Law of the Conservation of Love? That Law states that love may never be created or destroyed but only may change or be changed into a different form. Such as hate, or fear.

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