brilliant mistake
brillmiss at gmail dot com
the known and unknown in the oceans - colored dots are half-degree squares where some measurement has been made, white areas have no measurements (from the Census of Marine Life)
via Vancouver Sun
We know more about the surface of mars than the bottom of the ocean.
The Court refrains from second-guessing the expressed motives of the Committee members, but nonetheless must point out that tradition is a murky and dangerous bog. While all agree that some traditions should be honored, others must be put to rest as our national values and notions of tolerance and diversity evolve. At any rate, no amount of history and tradition can cure a constitutional infraction.
[…]
The retention of the Prayer Mural is no doubt a nod to Cranston West’s tradition and history, yet that nod reflects the nostalgia felt by some members of the community who remember fondly when the community was sufficiently homogeneous that the religion of its majority could be practiced in public schools with impunity.
Judge Ronald Lagueux, ruling in Alquist vs City of Cranston, Jan 11, 2012 (pdf). Jessica Alquist protested an overtly Christian prayer banner hung at her school. The school district not only refused to remove the unconstitutional prayer banner, they refused a compromise offered by Alquist to secularize the prayer by removing the words “Our Heavenly Father” and “Amen.”
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
Theodore Roethke, Dolor, 1943
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top,—
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
Theodore Roethke, Moss-Gathering, 1944
Public Enemy performs on Skid Row, 1/15/2012 (see also) (via)
(Source: youtube.com)
Cup shaped like an hawk, c 1600. The wings can flap via hinges.
(So, basically, I spent my vacation on the V & A website. I’m not sorry.)
Ohara Mitsuhiro and Kaigyokusai Masatsugu, Netsuke with octopus, c 1825-1875



