Iridicide

Cook a rainbow, and see what you've got left.

Kether

And when you call me "Godthåb"— for "Greenland"— both to be drawn out long and low, as if an electronic voice through a loudspeaker— it is as if you were to call me "crown of the head"— in place of my proper given name— both to be spoken in that electric loudspeaker voice— as if expecting me to react just because it is in the same tone of voice as the sound of my name...

Homer Never Nodded Like This

They were having some Sunday afternoon readings at the bookstore, with a painfully earnest audience, necks craned diagonally, sitting in plastic-and-tube-metal chairs, while earnestly painful speakers declaimed their way through short story and poem, like your high school forensics meet. I would have been glad not to be there. No doubt these people, English majors and public radio pledgers all, fondly imagine they are recreating some scene from around a Bronze Age campfire, "Listen to the storyteller!" I got news for you, baby: Homer was never like this. Homer was never leadfooted. Homer was never dull.

Overheard in a Hospital Waiting Room

"...and then she flew to Kansas City, and she ended up dancing all night..."

JUDY 451

Back in the 90s when I was living down in Illinois I noticed the bizarre proliferation of personalized license plates with meaningless numbers tacked on the end.

I remember one, though, which made strange sense: JUDY 451

Ah, yes: JUDY 451, "the temperature at which punch bowls catch fire, and burn"...

You Won't Find These Action Figures Anywhere

DR. GOODBYE AND VIRTUAL PARKER FOREVER

Villainous Dr. Goodbye in his shocking pink leisure suit, about to hold the Moon for ransom, from the James Bond movie Doctor Good-Bye starring Keanu Reeves as James Bond Agent 007™. And lovely but villainous sidekick Virtual Parker Forever, ready to abscond with the ill-gotten winnings from the nuclear lottery in her cadmium-lined purse— but can she survive betrayal by her computerized alter ego Virtual Parker Forever 2.0?

Fully jointed and poseable action figures, about 12" tall. Relive the thrill of the rogue lunar module flying across the vast enclosed empty spaces of the space dock. Can Agent 007™ survive explosive decompression in the hard vacuum of outer space? Keanu Reeves James Bond Agent 007™ action figure sold separately.

Yellow Nine

NINE.

A Pair of Black Cats

Stumbled across this black cat on a blog out there somewhere, lost track of just where.


Then I rummaged around on Google Images and came up with this black cat. Somehow they seem like long lost twins.

The black cat that's been flying around in my imagination for like 40 years now is a black cat, jumping through a number 9 (though from right to left), against a blue night-sky background, beneath a yellow five-pointed star, and the cat is named Jinx. In some variants, JINX is stamped in big bold letters right across the black cat jumping through the number 9. All as if printed on a playing card.

"The Poor Mimic the Blind"

I have certain snippets and forms of words which have drifted around in my mind like flotsam and jetsam for decades now. In some cases I have no idea what they mean, or where they came from.

One such meaningless slogan is "The poor mimic the blind." That one's been bouncing around in my head for over 20 years.

And I haven't a clue what it means.

• "The poor mimic the blind"
  
  
• "Ignore alien orders!"
  
  
• "Relax, Frankie, don't do it!"
  
  
• "Who takes up dumby, may call for trumps."
  
  
• "Slowgan on the highway is a speedster in town."
  
  
• "The bigger the wheel, the ranger the forest."

Random sayings which have been knocking around in my skull, some of them, since before Nixon's jowls departed for San Clemency.

Sun and Moon

If the sun is gold, then the moon is silver. That's obvious. But if the sun is bronze, then what is the moon? Don't tell me aluminum, they didn't have aluminum back then. Maybe if the sun is bronze, then the moon is tin? Or quicksilver, yeah, maybe the moon is quicksilver.

Admit it, you know what I'm talking about. Moreover, in your more lucid moments you know that much if not most of our human knowledge is of a piece with bronze suns and quicksilver moons. And it is meaningful and valid and truthful, for all that. Without it we would be blind and deaf and dumb.

Now ponder for a minute how many of our modern philosophies have been designed with the express purpose of barring the gate against such suns and moons, as if against a marauding criminal horde. As if to say, "You shall come in through the front gate only, single file, no jostling; and then only when we deign to admit you. No crawling in over the back fence, please!"

Of course, the deep-seated need to be a gatekeeper (and such a stringent and authoritarian gatekeeper, at that) must never be spoken of: if one were a psychologist, one would suspect there are "control issues" in play here.

Metaphor and symbol and sign are the Morpheus and the Trinity and the Neo in this Matrix. But what of they who have appointed themselves the Agents?

Automatic Self-Writing Lord of the Rings Computer Geek Parody

You know, some parodies almost write themselves once the basic idea pops into your mind. So I was middling pleased with myself the other day when this little piece assembled itself in my head, almost without effort:

Three laptops for the Elven-hackers using WiFi,
  Seven servers for the Dwarf-admins in their halls of stone,
Nine PCs for Mortal Men doomed to bluescreen,
  One OS for Bill Gates on his dark throne
In the land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
  One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
  One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.

I was middling pleased with myself, that is, until I Googled around and found that only about 15,000 sites had beaten me to the punch on this parody, or some facsimile thereof. :-(

In fact, I found about 60 search results in Google for Linus Torvalds and Tennessee Tuxedo!

What does it take to be original these days?! I can almost envision the Internet turning into the cyber equivalent of all those monkeys pecking away on typewriters and producing the works of Shakespeare...

Burnham's Laws

Back almost 20 years ago, I used to have posted on my refrigerator an intriguing little list called "Burnham's Laws," brainchild of James Burnham:

1. Everybody knows everything.
   
2. Who says A must say B.
   
3. Just as good, isn't.
   
4. You cannot invest in retrospect.
   
5. Wherever there is prohibition there's a bootlegger.
   
6. In every project there's a Schlamm.
   
7. You can't divorce yourself.
   
8. Every member must pay his dues.
   
9. No excuse, sir.
   
10. If there's no alternative, there's no problem.

Burnham was a senior editor at National Review, and I hate to admit I'm old enough that I remember reading him— if I remember correctly, he was a Trotskyite-turned-conservative. His books The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Suicide of the West (1964) are still worth a read. George Orwell based his threefold division of the world into Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, in 1984, on Burnham's analysis in The Managerial Revolution.

The Ebony Baboon

The Ebony Baboon is a dread night to smell,
A somewhat detectable habit as well.
With eyebrows upraised, but with no truth to tell,
They bid us cry uncle, who've bent down to fell.
And as they go forth, with a steamboat, on knee,
Like monks to their matins at Byzantium town,
It's tilting at windmills to say you and me
Could ever, on zebraback, cob Arthur's crown.

   —Spring 1977

Nine Questions

Some people hear music in their head. Well, I do too, but sometimes I hear odd forms of words instead.

I often find these tuneless snatches burbling up out of the depths of my mind, like late-night voices swelling up out of the static between stations on the radio dial. Or like The Beatles' Revolution 9. Usually they slip back into the submnemonic depths from whence they came, forgotten almost as soon as they are formed. But once in a while, when my mind is still, I manage to snag a few and hang onto them.

I'm on vacation this week. My mind is still. And what (if anything) any of this mental flotsam and jetsam may mean, I leave to you:

1. Q. How can it be that "is" is?
    A. "'Is' Is" Is.

2. Q. Is "is" is, or is "is" isn't?
    A. Definitely is.

3. Q. Do I have the whole pie?
    A. No, you haven't, but others may have: begrudge them that not.

4. Q. Can it all be said?
    A. Whereof one cannot blent, thereof one must be stegnant.

5. Q. Why is blue blue?
    A. Blue always comes fifth; better start with red, black, white, green.

6. Q. May I?
    A. If you need to ask, you dasn't.

7. Q. But what if I really, really want to?
    A. Already you're pretending that you're not angling for excuses.

8. Q. Why me?
    A. From half past ten till half past midnight, FIRE...

9. Q. Any question with no answer?
      Nine, nein, NINE.

Bonus geek points to the first person who can identify who my roving subconscious borrowed the answers to 4 and 8 from: no fair googling!

Behavior in an Ecological Nietzsche as Explicated in Zoology 101

Birds drinking cream from milk bottles in the morning in England as a learned response

Monkey tribe washing sweet potatoes in the river in Japan as a learned response

From 1958 on, monkeys washing sweet potatoes in the sea water at the beach for seasoning as a learned response

Throwing wheat and dirt into the water so the wheat will rise to the surface to be carried off by monkey welfare sponges waiting downstream as a learned response

Younger male monkeys and more than 1/6 of older females and all baby monkeys eating caramels laid on the ground every 18 months as a learned response

Male monkeys, sporting Reagan buttons and crewcuts, more conservative than female monkeys as an unlearned response

Shooting African baboon troops to cause avoidance of safari automobiles by troops absorbing survivors of a massacre, as a learned response

Male monkeys surprised by blasts from an airhose while playing with coffee pot rings naively in a lab cage and rescuing friend monkeys from the dire fate of playing with coffee pot rings naively in a lab cage as a learned response

Female monkeys overcoming reactionary and antirevolutionary responses to coffee pot rings and engendering consciousness-raising among friend monkeys in lab cages as a learned response

Monkeys eating strychnine and staying around lions dismissed from serving as role models for fellow monkeys as a learned response

Electrified floor grid with Mr. Edison's light bulb as a warning to impress monkey as an amateur lever-pusher, which is transmitted to monkeys watching the scene in horror through a glass window and also to entertain them as lever-pushers while watching movies, as a learned response

Monkey with a television camera on its face transmitted to movie screen where other monkeys exhibit similar physiological responses as transmitted through the ether, while eating popcorn, as a learned response

Isolated monkey who had never learned to relate also unable to transmit responses to the monkeys in the TV studio via wireless signals, while wearing a TV camera pointing at its face, as a learned response

—actual lecture notes I took one day in Zoology 101, spring 1977

Euclid's Fifth

Axiom 5 (Cf. Euclid's Fifth-- Postulate, Symphony, or Amendment): For every universe of discourse, and every paradigm not in that universe of discourse, there exists (a) none (b) at most one (c) one and only one (d) at least one (e) more than one (f) a countably infinite cardinality (g) an uncountably infinite cardinality of universes of discourse coincident with that paradigm, and parallel to the first universe of discourse.

The Commentary on Axiom 5: Choose one, (a) through (h), like picking up off the ground one acorn out of thousands. In the first analysis your choice is free, but to be informed by it is to be bound, and to be bound by it is to be informed. You are what you geometrize, but in the final analysis the geometry, like the joke, is on you. Plato: ho theos geometrizei. Mighty oaks from little acorns. The oak, like the joke, is on you. Aristotle: Entelechy! (Humpty Dumpty: "Impenetrability!") So in the final analysis (but only in the final analysis) you cannot plead the Fifth.

Spending Spree

A hunnert dollars here
A hunnert dollars there
Pretty soon you're hunnert dollared
Clear up through the county

Snooker

1. [n] a form of pool played with 15 red balls and six balls of other colors and a cue ball
2. [v] leave one's opponent unable to take a direct shot, in a game of snooker

The men in the tuxedoes at the snooker table. The expert at the card table: "Putting aside all high-minded purposes, if this book sells it will have succeeded of its chief end, as the author needs the money." The experts at the snooker table, in the Victorian room with high windows and wainscoting around on the walls. The man— in the helmet— by the tower: "Press the button. Codeword delta— delta— delta." ———"If this book sells, it will have succeeded of its high windows, as the man in the black helmet— by the tower— needs the codeword." Potting a red, then nominating a colour. The usual shot is half-on or quarter-on, so as to succeed of clearing the in jaw. Putting it shut will set you up for making out the next shot, without resort of a safety. But bringing it half on will also lead to a bring-back, which sets you pretty for leading on through, and perhaps even the coveted mark of running the balls for a century. This is seldom seen in amateur play, especially that of the player at the village pub, a game chap who is often little more than a set-to potter with hopes of pocketing a colour. So in his game, he must set himself to be snookered. This the seasoned balls-runner sees, and knows well to avoid as he is able. His game is an odd-up favourite to surpass the bar, and to make for home with scarcely a foul or baulk to be found out against his name.

Kether

And when you call me "Godthåb"— for "Greenland"— both to be drawn out long and low, as if an electronic voice through a loudspeaker— it is as if you were to call me "crown of the head"— in place of my proper given name— both to be spoken in that electric loudspeaker voice— as if expecting me to react just because it is in the same tone of voice as the sound of my name...