I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

Here's a Kafkaesque retroactive lifetime goal: a centipede has been "temporarily waysided" from opening our dictionary of magic words.  Technically and poetically, it's a "human centipede with 2 legs for a hundred spines."  And the centipede's name is Pearl.  Here's the entire list of unopened books into which the centipede may or may not make headway.

To avoid performing an ordinary social duty or otherwise excuse a breach of civility, merely say:

"Nothing is interesting save to see what happens next." —John Cowper Powys, Porius

"The skeleton key to getting to know ourselves is the discovery that we can get to know ourselves on many levels."
—Jerry Stocking

Riding the skeleton key into the garden of forking paths, from Punch, 1852.

From our former outpost at Twitter:

To those who praised me for not being the least bit affected by a U.K. reader's colorful broadside against one of my books ("STOP producing useless works of nothingness" and "The best use of this work would be to shred it for hamster bedding"), I must confess that I hadn't been aware of the review; I was frankly too busy working on useless nothingness!  However, the review is absolutely correct that my book (and, truth be told, my entire body of work) is marvelous for hamster bedding.  I challenge hamster caretakers worldwide to purchase any one of my books, shred it, and verify that it's the best hamster bedding nobody ever used.  Send photos and results to the e-mail address provided here.

"One of the saddest things in life is that the remark which one fails to catch the first time, and has to have repeated, is so seldom worth it." —E. V. Lucas, Down the Sky

Good news: it ain't so bad in Hell — the damned don't even want to escape — and we can offer empirical proof: folks on earth* seek longevity.

*Recall the first noble truth of Buddhism: life means suffering.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"To read is to risk making one's self vulnerable, to risk encountering what Wayne Booth has called 'the otherness that bites.'" —Megan O'Neill, Popular Culture (2001)

From our former outpost at Twitter:

From our former outpost at Twitter (where we sometimes drop the majestic plural or Victorian "we" so as to save a character):

"Transparency is so yesterday, and opacity so everyday, but [translucency] remains intriguingly unexplored."
—Jeff Hawkins

Previously re: translucency:

Attending a mime's birthday party

Unveiling the hidden

"I'm afraid ... the more absences there are, the more things are possible.  And so if there's an absence the size of God, then there probably isn't anything so appalling that we can count on not meeting it." —Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard (the astonishing secret history of the tragic lives of the Romantics)

One hundred years ago today, on July 3, 1913, Uncle Sam came out as a cross-dresser in LIFE magazine.

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation.  By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." —Pearl S. Buck

You can guess where we're going with this one.  What if Alice and the Wonderland caterpillar had found romance?  Arthur's Home Magazine wondered the same thing (not really) in the same year that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published.

From our former outpost at Twitter:

It's commonly believed that the psychedelic drug LSD was first synthesized by the chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938.  However, we can confirm that LSD was first "cooked up" by one Mrs. Threadneedle in 1847.  The acronym LSD has nothing to do with her chemical compound but rather the cost of her "soothing syrup."  (L.s.d. stands for the old British monetary values of "pounds, shililngs, pence," from the Latin "librae, solidi, denarii.")