"Every bubble is the product of some form of irrational exuberance."
—Matthew Bishop, Essential Economics: An A to Z Guide (2009)

"Underlying every bubble is what I call a Big Truth."
—Peter Atwater, Moods and Markets: A New Way to Invest in Good Times and in Bad (2012)

"Every bubble is coming from the atman, soul, your being."
—Paramahamsa Nithyananda, Guaranteed Enlightenment (2009)

"Most bubbles are very friendly."
—David Lewman, SpongeBob SquarePants Survival Guide (2002)

[Our illustration is from Nursery Nonsense, or Rhymes Without Reason by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1864.]

I let go a year or ten ago
It's all a twilight zone
I don't know where I will go
The future's not my home
—Eric Berglund, "Illuminata," White Magic

André Gide: an artist shouldn't recount his life exactly as he's lived it, but rather live it exactly as he is going to recount it.

As Funny as a Traffic Light

(for Bernie DeKoven)

Sometimes glee lights up in the unlikeliest, most mundane of places. 

I was waiting to cross an intersection, behind a couple of pedestrians.  We waited and waited, yet the contrarian crosswalk signal kept playing a game of chicken with us.  Law-abiding citizens, we remained standing at the curb, even though the traffic on either side was similarly frozen with red lights.  The pedestrians in front of me pressed the crosswalk button repeatedly, to no avail.  As the seconds marched on, we all began to feel silly just standing there.  It was technically safe to cross, and we could feel deference to authority giving over to a craving for self-determination. 

As simple as their signals may be on the surface, traffic lights are so inscrutable.  How intelligent and authoritative are they really?  They might be hooked up to high-tech sensors and networks (some are, surely), but then again any one traffic light might be decades behind the times.  We know that some traffic lights are so smart and witty that they have their own Twitter accounts.  (A light on Michigan Avenue in Chicago tweets such wisecracks as, "I don't believe in false starts," "I hear your prayers, and I answer either 'yes' or 'wait,'" "They say we're all connected," "We have to stop meeting like this," and "From my vantage point, you've already involved the cops."  No kidding: https://twitter.com/#!/ChiTrafficLight).  We're left wondering if a non-responsive light is broken ("on the blink," as it were), or if we're being challenged by unknown forces to throw caution to the wind. 

As if of one mind, the pedestrians in front of me and I finally had enough of this Kafkaesque stalemate.  We stepped forward and boldly crossed that street in defiance of the laws of man and God.  And as our feet came down on that first step, the crosswalk signal glowed "WALK."  And the pedestrians in front of me burst out laughing.  They laughed, and they laughed, and they laughed as they completed their crossing.  And still they laughed.  "The light was red!" the man cackled.  "Then it turned green!" the woman cackled back.  When she'd finally caught her breath, the woman made a phone call to share what apparently had been the funniest experience of their lives.  "We were standing there," she explained, "and then we started walking ... and the light changed!"  But she couldn't explain further, as once again she was overcome with tearful hilarity. 

There's a Zen koan in there somewhere: "What's the humor of one light changing?"  The pedestrians howled on, and their laughter was contagious.  I walked on home, chuckling to myself, with a definite spring in my step.  I'd crossed paths with folks who don't want to have fun but who embrace life's subtlest perversities with gusto.

We're honored and frankly thrilled to see two spooky gems of our research feature in Long Forgotten's richly detailed and thoughtfully considered analysis of inspirations for Disney's Haunted Mansions.

We appreciated this review of our latest project in the Winnipeg Free Press:

From the Enduring Fascination with Last Words Department:

Enrique Vila-Matas recalls that his mother had a lifelong habit of saying strange things, to the point that his grandmother often explained to visitors: "The child, you see, has lived in Paris."  On her deathbed, his mother spoke a few last words that "due to their premeditated strangeness, sounded to me like an epitaph, though we didn't dare put them on her tombstone.  'I'll laugh at the bitter things I said,' she said.  Her two brothers looked dismayed.  'It's because she lived in Paris,' I told them."  (From Never Any End to Paris.)

(For Greg at Futility Closet.)

"The placid stream of my existence must mingle with the great river of my kindred that flowed underground, as it were, until it gushed forth at my feet and now bears me away – – –"
—Gustav Meyrink, The Angel of the West Window

"At this moment, with all the Magic Arts thrashing at the outer door, she is etched with stars."
—J. Karl Bogartte, "The Perfect Crime"

(For Clint Marsh)

Ah, the good-old-days, when waiting for the next slide in a slide show was fraught with momentousness.  The caption reads, "Just at that moment the showman thrust [emphasis ours] a fresh slide into his lantern, and presented to them another scene even more startling than the first."  Today's Flash slide shows aren't nearly so flashy, eh?  How can a showman thrust [emphasis ours again, though all this thrusting is admittedly wearing us out] a JPG?  We're reminded of beloved British comedian Stewart Lee, who recently asked his audience if anyone was old enough to remember when there were actually things, like letters written on paper or music recorded onto plastic discs.  This item from Frank Leslie's Illustrated, 1891, will forever make us pine for the nearly unbearable drama of magic lantern slides every time we open a lousy JPG.

We discovered this curious "ghost in a candle" trick in an issue of The Strand from 1895.

"Let's do so well that it can't possibly be explained by our talent or our training."
—the cruelly canceled yet deliriously hilarious Strangers with Candy

The law of spectral return:

"The light of those inconceivably distant stars in the Milky Way takes seventy thousand years to reach the earth; if there were a telescope powerful enough to bring the surface of one into view, the events we could observe, however much they appeared to be taking place before our eyes, would be things that had already been past for seventy thousand years.  The idea that shook him with its terrifying simplicity was that in the infinite expanse of the universe every event that had ever occurred must be preserved somewhere, as an image embalmed in light.  'Therefore,' he reasoned, 'there must exist the possibility—even if it is beyond the power of man—of bringing back the past?'"
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

An anagram in honor of Clint Marsh, editor of Swami Panchadasi's Clairvoyance and Occult Powers: A Lost Classic:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Prof. Oddfellow sends greetings from the "Other Side."

At age 75, Katsuhika Hokusai timelined his artistic quest: "At the age of 73, I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fishes, and of the vital nature of grasses and trees.  Therefore at 80, I shall have made some progress, at 90 I shall have penetrated even further into the deeper meaning of things, at 100 I shall have become truly marvelous, and at 110, each dot, each line shall surely possess a life of its own."  Vincent Van Gogh achieved Hokusai's dream at the age of 37.  (Michael R. Zomber, Park Avenue, 2010)