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.")

"In the long run, reality turns out to be inextinguishable, unreachable.  One can find out more and more about it, but not everything.  Even so, it's advisable to try to find out a little more, because in certain investigations surprises do occasionally occur." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"One loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they've always been there." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

"The best thing to do is to travel and to lose all theories, lose them all." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"I must breathe in and breathe out, regularly, steadily, evenly, deeply. . . . In—out—in—out—in—out—that's right!  I'll manage if I go on—I'll get there if I go on." —John Cowper Powys, Porius

Here's the link to our Breathing Circle, the most popular interactive feature on this site.

Author Jeremy Edwards answers the age-old question, "to flirt or not to flirt?"  He backs it up with science and suggests wearing it as a button: "Game theory says I should flirt with you."