From our former outpost at Twitter:

Sean Tejaratchi notes that "In the future, everyone will be offended for 15 years," and it's a worthy addition to our ongoing contention that:

Perhaps Andy Warhol Was Wrong, For a Fascinating Variety of Reasons

(Click the title above for our surprising research.)

The genius behind Nein Quarterly noted that "In the future, we'll all have 15 minutes of future," and it's a worthy addition to our ongoing contention that:

Perhaps Andy Warhol Was Wrong, For a Fascinating Variety of Reasons

(Click the title above for our surprising research.)

We won't deny it: we were disappointed to learn that this introduction to zoology was not — literally — illustrated by an artful crayfish.

We bemoan the rampant demythologizing of our culture, yet the trend began with our founding fathers.  Originally, the immortal declaration was that all men are created eagle (a vestige endures in the word egalitarian).  "The entire conceptual castle of our mind relies on this creation of abstractions by metaphor from the foundations of our bodily experience in the world" (Piero Scaruffi, The Nature of Consciousness, 2006).  The eagle has landed as Apollo has fallen, leaving a hollow nest egg.

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.