- Depression is not a disease. It's a sane response to a crazy world.
- The New Yorker (March 2010) http://tinyurl.com/hcase #
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Depression is not a disease. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.
- The New Yorker (March 2010) http://tinyurl.com/hcase
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
- If this is what it takes to break the block, so be it. Elegy for an Underwear. http://whomeninja.com/?p=526 #
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
- If this is what it takes to break the block, so be it. Elegy for an Underwear. http://whomeninja.com/?p=526 #
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
We don’t take kids seriously. We take ourselves too seriously. Which is why Santa is dead, Imaginary Friends have left the building and the horrible closet from our childhood doesn’t have skeletons, it has a 200 megaton nuclear bomb and a BIG RED BUTTON in the drawer.
So, I was at this amazing talk on codes and code breaking by Simon Singh, the author of The Code Book and other killer pop-science books. He did a little show and tell with a vintage gizmo called The Enigma. It was basically a really tricky code making gadget used by the Nazis to piss off the Allies.
Secret codes were generated using an insane set of permutations and combinations and the British code breakers, and Alan Turing (big daddy of the modern computer) were draining the country off it’s tea reserves trying to hack the damn thing.
Simon Singh bounced off some numbers and asked the audience to guess how many combinations of codes were possible. A little boy raised his hands. People sniggered. Simon Singh asked him to name a number over 100 if he could, and the boy went, “umm… yeah… umm… I know the answer,” more sniggering from the audience and the kid says, “20 factorial 6 into 2 factorial 6,” or something like that. It completely stumped Mr. Singh. He finally had to admit he wasn’t quite sure of the answer himself but it ranged in the vicinity of a hundred million million… million. Which as it happens is really close to the little boy’s qualified guess.
Later, snooping around Simon Singh, trying to touch the Enigma (yeah I’m that kind of geek so sue me), it all fell into place. The kid’s a prodigy. He’s studying university level mathematics and has a fascination for probability. And while others were chatting around, Doogie Howser tapped the keys of the Enigma, as kids usually do, and ended up throwing some other crazy numbers that brought around a moment of uncomfortable, uncertain, incredulous silence.
His mum is thinking of getting him an Enigma machine of his own so he can send his granddad secret codes. I wish she’d get me one too. On a student budget, I can barely afford a pencil sharpener.
Any how, it turns out the Brits did manage to break the code but kept it a secret for 30 years. 30 YEARS! Guess why? Because after the war, they tried to sell all the acquired Enigmas to their buddies, the Aussies and the Americans. I don’t know, but maybe the cold war would have gotten a little colder if this had slipped out.
Moral of the story:
Don’t mess with kids, they might just win a Noble Prize and leave you out of the thank you speech. And send me money… so I can buy a vintage Enigma Machine and send you secret love notes.
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You know how it is with really large folks being super light on their feet? Watch them move on the dance floor and it’s glide and swoop versus your bump and grind.
So it is in nature.
This how the humpback whale feeds on the little fish. It spots a school of herring and then gradually descends circling slowly around the fish. This causes a wall of bubbles to form around the herring. Being fairly low in the food chain, and hence not very sharp, the herrings believe the wall of bubbles to be impenetrable. So just as they are thinking “DAM(n)!”, the whale swoops up from right under them, and with its mouth open, swallows them all.
There is a certain beauty to all this, forming a wall of bubbles, or spinning an invisible web, or changing color to match the terrain. It’s like a grand scale illusion where the magician introduces a saw floating in the air and then proceeds to cut the lady in half, without touching the saw, and takes his bow. You leave thinking, great trick, but he hasn’t put the lady back together.
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Yesterday afternoon in the
Hostel toilet
I came across an
Underwear
With musical notes
All over it,
And from the time I
Unzipped
To the time I
Zipped up,
A flood of thoughts
Ran through my mind
In that
Toilet,
I thought for instance of
How
Could someone forget
Something like that?
What was it like?
Did he just come in
Do his bidding,
Then button his jeans
And leave?
His underwear forgotten
Like the thoughts we think
On the bog?
And when would he realize his
Mistake?
Walking down winter’s street,
Hands in his pockets
Scrunched up into fists,
Thinking about how cold he felt
All over,
He’d hurry to find the next
Public washroom,
Being denied rudely
The privilege
Of using the one at the last
Italian cafe,
He’d stumble upon the
Spotless pay as you go
Loo,
And unzip
And find
To his impatient surprise,
His frozen balls
Resting unhappily
On his lap,
Like the hobo’s dog
On the sidewalk outside
Tescos,
And wonder
- What!
And the last thought that crossed my
Mind,
As I shook off the last drop,
Was about
The music notes
On the underwear
-What song did they sing?
So I am back in my room
Penning these thoughts
Lest I forget them,
An elegy for an underwear
Shed off like music lessons
Or the ghost of a symphony
That’s been carried for too long.
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- Twitter Virus on the loose. If you have received any tweet from me saying- LOL is this you… don't open the link. I did not send it. #
- hi. this you?? LOL . http://pduda.mobi/adgga #
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Twitter Virus on the loose. If you have received any tweet from me saying- LOL is this you… don’t open the link. I did not send it.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
The title isn’t entirely true to the content of this post. The poem was written after midnight, but Turbulence was coded one evening. It was however refined late at night. And why does Turbulence settle in with the poem? Because code is poetry too.
Turbulence
A little art program inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, the drip artist. You can paint the canvas in 2 ways:
- Move your mouse around for broad strokes and the color is automatically generated by the position of your mouse.
- However, if you click and drag your mouse across the canvas, you get a narrower stroke and you can pick a color from anywhere on the canvas.
Click to make your own Turbulence.
Your Fingers Like Poems
I had a block for a really long time, and then I read ‘You Begin‘, by Margaret Atwood. So yes… this poem is inspired, but it tells its own story. I’ll be performing it soon.
This is your hand,
Like poems your fingers
Touch, press, caress,
Cajole and read the world
As they sculpt it and shape it
With meaning and form,
You hold her hand,
Cupped in the cave of your palm,
Guiding her across the street,
And at once your fingers
Are anchors and she stops on the
Sidewalk, her little thumb resting
On the curve of your wrist,
This is her hand,
Sticky with the sweetness of ice cream spent,
And tiny like the May bud that blossoms
On the sidewalk where she kneels down
To pluck it,
And your hand now a mother
Pats hers away,
Let the little flower stay,
This is my hand,
Your fingers trace rivers on the
Lines of my palms,
They linger on the mound of my thumb,
They explore the crevices where fingers meet,
How long will I live?
And you trace my life
All the way to my nose,
This is your hand,
Now holding a tooth brush,
Now framing the moon,
Now cold, now warm, caressing
Her palm,
Now warm, now cold, now gripping
My arm as the girl in the movie
Turns around and screams,
These are shadows of our hands
On the wall and they tell stories
Of birds flying and dogs barking,
These are your fingers on my back,
On my face,
These are my hands on your hair,
On your nape,
This is your finger on my lips,
Shh… she is still awake,
And into the night when everything sleeps,
While she plucks flowers by fairytale streams,
And I wrestle dragons, and you travel far,
These hands, they whisper our dreams.
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