Lemon Curry?

[radarcake]

When God closes a door, maybe God has a good reason for wanting that door closed. Don't open that door, God isn't paying to air condition the whole world here. If you are cold, put on a sweater; if you are hot, put on a sweater. God gave you that sweater and wonders why you never wear it in public.

[radarcake]

Rued Langgaard: Symphony #16 “Deluge of Sun”

[radarcake]

 I am very self conscious about my lack of self awareness.

[radarcake]

I did dream yesterday, I dreamed I was in a house very much like the one of my childhood, but unsubtly different. Features of the home I knew where there, in the right places, but put together wrong. No, not wrong, it was as if the same house had been built, but it had been lived in differently. There were pictures on the wall I recognized from my memory, the color and composition were as I recalled, but the people and places in them were all different. The back door opened to a sloping rocky hillside my own home had not.

There was a couple living in the home, young as my self (or as I imagine myself). The young man explained that because of some fundamental force of balance in the cosmos I existed and he did not. In that I had been born, and because I was alive, he wasn't. It wasn't that he was another potential me, he wasn't someone I could have been, the time and place of his existence would have differed, as would the parentage. He was not at all alike to me, but still there was a point of relation between us, as a soul-in-law, or a spirit once removed.

He was asking something of me, a personal favor for he and his soulmate, and I understood and sympathized so very deeply. I still had lots of questions, but I had a rush of certain conviction. I had done nothing with my life, nor was I likely to. It was doing me no good but some else might have use of it.

I sat there holding a mug of something tepid, sitting at an unfamiliar table in a familiar room, looking at someone else' family reunion photo expanding in it's frame with more and more unknown faces, and a young couple sitting holding hands.

Why yes, of course I would do it for them. It was fine, it would be good, it was for the best, and it was right. Certainly, he could live, and I would die. So I did.

We embraced, he and I, and I collapsed in his arms. The weight of my limbs overtook me. A dull ache spread throughout my flesh, and my blood burned in my veins. In spasmodic paralysis I stared into the sad, grateful eyes of the young woman. She was somehow much more like me then the boy had been. She was so thankful, her lover was soon to be born, and so too in short order would she.

Darkness swallowed me, and then light, and I was awake. The sensation of dying was still with me, but I recognized it now. The heaviness of my body, the ache of my flesh, the acid in my muscles, the burning air in my lungs, the sticky fog in my skull, these are all constantly with me in the waking world. This is the sensation of living. I am alive, my life is my own, alone, and it is under no obligation to another.

[radarcake]

"What do you want to do with your Life? What makes you happy?"

I like to imagine I'm the captain of a space-freighter. I deliver industrial equipment to the colonies, fresh produce to space stations, and care packages to the needy. I can outrun the pirates, and never have need to hide from the cops. On the long haul flights I take in ancient public-domain books and movies. My trusty robot companion has made a game of modulating it's voice circuits to sound like old film stars, (it's favorites are Myrna Loy, James Mason, and Roddy McDowall). It handles most of the bookkeeping, routing logistics, and commodities brokering, leaving me free to putter around the ship singing nonsense songs to the machinery to keep all the little gaskets and o-rings happy. I'm good friends with a green pig alien who flies fighter escort for me in the dangerous Caleigh Sector and has forbidden me from dating his sister. I'm also friends with a cool insectile lady junk trader who sells me spare parts and likes to share the mead she makes herself. My great ambition is to convert one of my cargo pods into a swanky passenger deck (with lots of brass, velvet, and hardwoods) to attract some upscale clientele, or at least retirees and newlyweds looking for exotic destinations to remember.  Eventually I'll own a whole fleet of small trading vessels doing the same thing: "The North Wind", "Laguna Sunrise", "Rose in Heather", "Swiftsure", and "Queen of Ruritania".

This is what makes me happy, and it has absolutely no bearing or meaningful translation into my physical reality.

[radarcake]

Nat & The Mosquito

Nathaniel Carrington was alone in his apartment.  Partitioned apart in his compartment, separate from his neighbors.  He did not know them, he did not interest them.  He was superfluous to their world, without purpose or place in their experience.  The apartment may as well have been empty, except that it wasn't.  It contained a humming noise, composed of several overlapping hums.  A fan recycled conditioned air.  Electronic devices thrummed in perpetual mutual justification.  Charles Villiers Stanford droned unheeded in innocuous low tones from a set of small speakers.  And above it all, particularly somewhere above and behind Carrington's left ear, there was a whining buzz.  A buzzing whine that drifted to somewhere above and behind his right ear. This sound distracted him slightly from the sporadic tapping and clicks he himself produced in interaction with the glowing screen that strained his eyes and mind in half-hearted attention.  He had had friends, he was reminded by a flickering image of names, but he couldn't think of anything to say to them. Their circle and interests had diverged.  Nathaniel wasn't even certain what his own interests were any more, if he truly had any.  Those people had no particular use for him, they never had need of him, he felt no purpose in reaching out to them.  So he did not, and he remained alone.

 Except for that whining buzz.

The buzz whined closer and Nathan jerked his head slightly, limp hair swept across his ear and the buzz receded.

Moments later it came to rest upon the wrist of his right hand, which Nathan shook reflexively. Shooing the speck that emitted the buzz back into the air. For the first time it caught Nathan's conscious attention. A mosquito flitting in the cross currents of inefficient ventilation.

Undiscouraged, it returned to the back of Nathan's hand, this time settling near the knuckles. The bland voice of recollected encyclopedic knowledge recited in Nathan's mind the pertinent detail "Only pregnant female mosquitos drink blood." In short order a slight stinging sensation confirmed in Nate's mind the femininity of his little visitor. Again spasmed reflex action dislodged the small creature, but Nate resisted the impulse to swat at it. This tiny thing was a life, made doubly sacred by the potential for life it carried within. And yet it was insubstantial, individually without purpose or place in Nate's own experience. An inconsequential thing that would be unregarded and unremembered. Nat felt a sudden affinity for his miniscule companion and in stillness awaited her return. It was not long before instinctual persistence brought the insect to alight behind the webbing of Nat's thumb and he inspected the beast more closely. Thin wings glistened organically in the sterile artificial light.  Long lithe legs, sharply jointed, splayed to the earth and sky.  Contrasting stripes standing starkly against the background of Nat's dull flesh. Strangely beautiful, an intricate jeweled machine viewed against a backdrop of stale earthy squalor. The sting renewed and Nat endured it in passivity. The creature had a need, and Nat had a use. To this small wonder of nature Nat had a purpose. He felt more alive then he could recall having felt since the hazy rush of childhood. Indeed, he thought that he was in some way more alive then usual, was not his blood flowing into another creature, sustaining, nourishing more then just his own stagnant selfish flesh?

He had an urge to fling open the window and call upon the myriads of his visitor's ilk to join in the feast that he might feel his meager existence expand into the fulfillment of their legions. A generous earth, the tilling of whose soil would yield sustenance to a whole generation of tiny invertebrate souls. A populace unnoticed by any save their sanctified provisioner who would give freely of himself for the good of the many that they may be fruitful and multiply.

Still alone with his one tiny companion he began to itch. Nate's body resented and rejected the vampiric presence of the alien invader. The itch was growing, not from where she was, but where she had been. Red rash spreading from swelling white welts. This burning irritation was intolerable and she was the cause. A harmful detriment to his health and welfare. Nathan took a shallow breath and blew a puff across the back of his hand, but the little beast was unperturbed. He shook his hand in two spasmodic jerks, clenched and unclenched his fist, but the passenger did not seem to notice. Nathaniel still did not wish to harm the interloper, but he wished vehemently to be free of it's influence. With his left hand he struck out to brush across the back of his right and with vicious miscalculation caught the little mosquito he meant merely to displace.

Carrington looked upon broken striped legs in a smear of blood and black across his brutish finger and he felt revulsion, more for the mess that was himself then for the mess that had been something else. A napkin was dirtied and discarded, but he felt no cleaner.

Nathaniel Carrington was alone in his apartment, it may as well have been empty, except that it wasn't. It contained guilt, disgust, and loathing. It also contained the scent of cardamom tea, less vibrant now then when it had been freshly brewed, at least to the senses of the gentleman who held the lukewarm mug peculiarly against the mottled back of his hand in an attempt to soothe itching skin. He sipped at the tepid fluid, but it did little to ease his nerves or the gnawing emptiness at the pit of his being. The man reflected that his sins, like the rest of his being, were inconsequential. His sorrows, like his joys, would remain unregarded and unremembered to any save himself, and he did not matter. He was at peace with this truth, and no one was present to observe otherwise.

[radarcake]

I have a deep and abiding need to be liked. My informed insecurities tell me the less I am known the better chance I shall be liked. This is why I feel compelled to avoid social settings, personal interaction, and self expression.

[radarcake]

Blake’s 7 Full Theme - Dudley Simpson Orchestra

[sagansense]

What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.

In 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe published ”Eureka,” a 150-page prose poem on the nature and origin of the universe. The work, an overheated grab bag of metaphysics and cosmology, was a flop. A reviewer for Literary World likened it to ”arrant fudge.” A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the critical consensus. ”Eureka,” he wrote, ”makes no deep impression … because we are aware of Poe’s lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural science.”

Of course, Eliot had a point: ”Eureka” was the work of an amateur, a backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time.

But Eliot — himself no scientist — was underestimating his fellow poet. Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary science’s best guess for explaining how the universe began.

Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single ”primordial particle” in ”one instantaneous flash.”

”From the one particle, as a center,” he wrote, ”let us suppose to be irradiated spherically — in all directions — to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space — a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.”

The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into ”previously vacant space”), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn’t find mainstream approval until the 1960’s.

This wasn’t Poe’s only uncanny display of prescience. He also came up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einstein’s equations in 1922. Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn’t widely accepted until the 1930’s, after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data from the velocities of far-flung galaxies.

Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too. And he was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).

So what accounts for Poe’s prophetic genius? Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesn’t explain just how the poet derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book, ”Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time” (Joseph Henry Press), he argues that the history of astrophysics is littered with such ”prediscoveries,” or ”instances of theoretical anticipation.”

”There are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of what’s known and what’s already been found,” Mr. Siegfried explained in a telephone interview. ”The distinction with prediscovery is that theorists discover the existence of something observers have never seen. It’s one thing to figure out an explanation for the observation. It’s another thing altogether to suggest something exists that no one had any idea about beforehand.”

Source: NYTimes

Illustration: Harry Clarke for Edgar Allen Poe via this post by kateopolis

[radarcake]

You know those viral mass solicitation emails that have a bunch of random junk text in them? What if someone uses a few of them to intentionally encode secret messages, like Numbers stations. Lost in the anonymity of the random mass emailing are a few addresses used by agents who know what they are looking at.

That would be a neat possibility to analyze, and possibly a story to be told, or suppressed as the case may be.

[radarcake]

I think the phrase "Practice Makes Perfect" is somewhat misleading. After all, the textbook definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result", i.e. practice making perfect? In my experience what practice makes is "consistent", which while conceptually related, is not the same thing. Indeed consistency may degenerate into routine and from there into the greyness of the mundane. However this may be more from a misleading interpretation of the meaning of "perfect", you may well execute the perfect archetypal example of a flawed concept. You may prepare a cookbook perfect Chicken Marengo, but this does not guarantee your guests shall find the ingredient combination of chicken, fried eggs, and crayfish to be a palatable one. To practice unto perfection the playing of scales, or to type a thousand words of inane doggerel a day, still leaves the practitioner at an appreciably vast distance from composing a symphony or great piece of literature. To strive for quality in your work is not quite enough, one must also strive for a surpassing quality of endeavor.

[arsvivendi]

[mountain-time]

[radarcake]

Today's snow on the point of Longport

[radarcake]

[glitchin-company]

C:\Users\company\gl;t^[h\gl;t^[h\_2.jpeg

[bunglespleen]

'The fools! They'll see! They'll all see!' crowed Professor Langston, holding aloft the potion that would cure blindness in people of extreme gullibility.

They Called Me Mad, Retro Hugo winner 1946 (via bunglespleen)