Yesterday, maybe I should have

posted something about Shakespeare.

But, really …?

I’m pleased to note that others filled the gap.

The curse of doing

All animals do, not just humans
but we can do more –
we can do more damage –
and we do
because all we can do is do
and we’re better at this never-ending doing
with our bilateral complementary prehensile limbs
extreme unspecialisation
resulting near-infinite adaptability
and capacity to change the environment … that rashly gave us life.

Gaia, you may have met your match.

Advice given on World Poetry Day

Don’t walk on the beach in bare feet
lest you cut your sole open
although that’s better than cutting your soul open
metaphysically speaking

Don’t try to take a taxi to the nearest supermarket
this annoys the drivers
because it’s less than ten metres from the rank
and they don’t know what to charge

Haikus followed by titles #3

Train kept a-rollin’

Ain’t that the truth – ’s how I got

from York to London

And that was called

Meditation on at least one crucial aspect of Newton’s laws of motion, especially in respect of railway travel between major hubs in the United Kingdom transportation network

Haikus followed by titles #2

Features get coarser

Thicken with age and living

Time triumphs. Again.

That was titled

Reflections in a mirror as one approaches one’s seventieth, eightieth or ninetieth birthday (beyond that, wisdom supervenes, one would hope, but even if it doesn’t, don’t give up, you can never foretell with any certainty what might or might not happen in the future)

Haikus followed by titles #1

Terse verse, long title!

What’s that about: surely not

Padding out haikus!?

That was called

A Moment of Discovery in Siobhan Hathaway’s struggle to make sense of the heterodox literary formulations that she discovered in her great-nephew’s notebooks and diaries shortly after his departure on his round-the-world travels – or should that be travails?

Those physicists, eh!

Whilst trying to create a new phase of matter – ‘a new form in which matter can exist, beyond the standard solid, liquid, gas, [and] plasma – physicists made an ‘extra’ dimension of time, ‘even if this may be physically impossible in reality’.

https://www.livescience.com/fibonacci-material-with-two-dimensions-of-time?link_id=28&can_id=a367c14fc230ba9d62daa63bfafa4a6d&source

One sympathises. I’m sure so many of us mix up space, time and matter in all sorts of ways in our busy-busy lives. It’s lucky we’re usually less ambitious than the scientists or we’d all be being swallowed up by any mini black holes that Fred and Freda manage to fabricate in their shed.

Thirty first day of Summer

According to the Second Book of General Ignorance the ‘strangest substance known to science’ is water. Apparently, it behaves so differently from any other liquid that ‘theoretically it shouldn’t exist’.
That might seem to be a tad harsh but water has the last laugh by actually existing. Really, laughing water? That’s not even the tip of the iceberg:* Lloyd and Mitchinson claim there are sixty six other ways in which water is abnormal. Relax – they don’t list them.

* Note indirect but nevertheless gratuitous water reference

Twenty first day of Summer

Maybe time for a summer break.

Twentieth day of Summer

Dave Smith, in a recent letter to New Scientist, suggested that our species is misnamed: maybe we should be called Homo callidus. Callidus means clever, crafty, cunning, sly … you get the idea. He goes on to say that a species that could solve the climate and biodiversity crisis would logically be called Homo sapiens veritas (truly wise). I think sapiens vere might be more accurate but I’m no scholar.
Anyway, that is clearly not us, with our current institutional arrangements and collective mindsets.