One of the most interesting themes in David Cronenberg's film adaptation of William Burrough's Naked Lunch: every act of creation murders the muse who inspired it.

Ironically, most people shout "Eureka" when they're not in Kansas anymore.

The sleep inducement surrounding Michael Jackson's death unmasked him as Osiris, the dying and resurrected god.  MJ wasn't addicted to plastic surgery per se but rather to being "put under" and rising again with a new face.  As Carl Jung explained, "the dying and resurgent god ... expresses a transformation of attitude by means of which a new potential, a new manifestation of life ... is created."  MJ's sequence of reincarnation was y=sin(x^2), with each vacillation of increasing frequency, to the point that he died nightly.  By the physical incarnation we came to know, MJ's spirit was too refined to operate within the mundane, just as a distilled spirit is so volatile as to hazard combustion.  The jokes about MJ's nose falling off were unwitting retellings of the Osiris myth; this time, the general public embodied Isis, putting the pieces back together while singing the magical incantation: "Ma ma say, ma ma sah, ma ma koo sah."

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An associate was worried about an "unexpected big drop" in his Web traffic.  "Unexpected big drop?" I mused.  "That sounds like the perfect epitaph!"

Our friend Jason disagrees with President Obama's chilling decree that information "becomes a distraction."  Indeed, Jason suggests that information ranks only fourth in terms of distraction:

1. Cleavage
2. House flies
3. Shiny objects
4. Information

Thanks to the Presurfer and Daily Fix blogs for showcasing our interactive Breathing Circle.

While geometers continue to puzzle over "squaring the circle," Prof. Oddfellow has circled the square with an interactive mandala for four-square breathing.  Tackle stress, anxiety, or panic attacks.  Click the image to load the page.

One derogatory term for glam rock is "hair band."  Yet all bands are "hair bands."  Even buzz-cut Sinead O'Connor was a hair band, for "Thesis and antithesis are inseparable, like an object and its shadow" (Pavel Aleksandrovich Florenskiĭ, The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth, 1997).

"It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal."
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

"We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown.  We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin.  At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print.  And Lo!  It is our own."
—Arthur Eddington, qtd. in Cosmic Trigger, Vol. 1 by Robert Anton Wilson

You've heard the cliché, "There's no 'I' in 'team.'"  Similarly, there's no "us" in "narcissism."

Speaking of contractions, there's no "big O" in "nymphomania."

"Ah, the spoon, the perfect spoon!  In its mystic bowl all men are one, and so are all women.  Champagne and shoulders, poetry and long scarves, loftiness, altruism, souls, hard work, conscience, sacrifice, all fuse into perfect oneness in the spoon.  All Whitman’s Songs of Himself and Other People lie in the hollow of a spoon.  If you seek the Infinite and the Nirvana, look not to death nor the after-life, nor yet to pure abstraction: but into the hollow spoon.”
—D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon

"The sky is the limit"?  Perhaps for meteorologists and airline pilots.  Why set one's sights so low?

I misunderstood a warning sign that said "Hot cars kill dogs." I thought it was referring to a Corvette (fast cars run over animals), or perhaps a Jaguar (for a play on the food chain).

Folklore warns against eating oysters in months without "R's" (namely May through August).  Those oyster-free months constitute the "dog days of summer," which is ironic given that "R is the dog's letter" (Ben Jonson, 1636).

"In the curl of my tongue is the question still sleeping."  —Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings

(Did we mention what an astonishing novel that is?)

Back in c. 1909, a teacher sent my great-great grandmother a note asking why her daughter didn't come to school and reassuring her that the classroom was warm, comfortable, and germ-free!  

Many decades later, I (as the hooky-player's 15-year-old grandson) testified before the Louisiana State Legislature on behalf of the state's first homeschooling bill.  That legislation became a model for several other states.