Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Happy Fibonacci Day! 1/1/23

As carbonel pointed out, this works in both the American month/day format and the European day/month format.

Apropos of nothing in particular, Mike Ford doing Wodehouse doing Borges.

The Boston Department of Parks and Recreation is using drilling radishes as part of a landscape restoration project.

A total collapse of modern civilization would be a serious blow to the already sluggish economy, and the economic damage could amount to $80 trillion per year (the total value of all human goods and services). All in all, it would have serious implications for the upcoming elections. —Randall Munroe

It makes sense in context.

"If you ever find yourself raising log(anything)^e or taking the pi-th root of anything, set down the marker and back away from the whiteboard; something has gone horribly wrong." —Randall Munroeq

[Poll #1063324]

( footnote )

Our friendship transcends conventional notions of identity, gender, and sandwiches. —D. C. Simpson, in today's Ozy and Millie.

I am a Kentish village sufficiently obscure that google just wants to give me links to long lists of placenames (e.g., from century-old Ordnance Survey six-inch maps) and odd bits about applications for planning permission, and Wikipedia says only that it could be an encyclopedia target. However, brisingamen says Garlinge Green is pleasant.

Also, apparently I remind mrissa of Lemon Zinger tea, or vice versa.

A conversation with cattitude about birds of different sorts, including the chicken he's planning to roast for dinner, birds flying overhead, and the birds in a dream he'd told me about, led me to the remark "Not all the birds of the mind are imaginary." Some are remembered.

That led us to a bit from Sondheim's Into the Woods: "Manticore? Imaginary. Griffin? Extinct." Thence, to the question of whether the griffin was, in fact, a bird. I asserted that it was a mammal, because it had fur. Cattitude noted that the question was whether it had breasts, and I observed that this might be difficult to discover in the absence of a good museum specimen, because soft tissue doesn't fossilize and illustrators might have drawn breasts that didn't exist, if they liked the idea, or omitted actual breasts if they thought them inappropriate (either as too sexual or as insufficiently aerodynamic). It then occurred to me that the classical griffin is half lion: the front half. The back half is the eagle. That suggests that griffins are part of the very small group of egg-laying mammals: a cloaca from the eagle side of the family, and breasts from the lion side.

In a discussion on james_nicoll's journal, the quote "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" came up, with the attribution to Frank Zappa and, I think, observation that it's hard to track down where/whether Zappa said it. A quick Google got me a discussion of who said it first, which comes to no firm conclusion, but eliminates some possibilities (e.g., some people credit Laurie Anderson, but she says she got it from Steve Martin) and includes an email from someone who decided to try dancing about architecture. At an open mic.