Monday 28 February 2011

Discovery

Princesses

You make life a fairy tale …
Grimm!
 — John Cooper Clarke 'Twat'

Monday 21 February 2011

Place To Be

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
 — Joseph Campbell

Friday 18 February 2011

The Unremunerated

Take a look you may see me on the ground
For I am the parasite of this town
 — Nick Drake 'Parasite'

Thursday 17 February 2011

For Nothing

So the great affair is over
but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant
and so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon
or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
if you really want to go that far.
 — Leonard Cohen 'Death Of A Ladies' Man'

Like A Stray Dog In The Night, I'll Shuffle Off Alone

We all make our futures
but I have lost mine; 
I'm hoping for a miracle 
but finding no sign....
— Peter Hammill 'This Side Of The Looking-Glass'

Adrift

Adrift without a course,
it's very lonely here, 
our only conjecture 
what lies behind the dark.
 — Peter Hammill 'Childlike Faith in Childhood's End'

Between The Shadows Of His Memory

Imagine blue dissolve into the empty night
 — Neil Young 'Touch The Night'

Done

When the day is done
Down to earth then sinks the sun
Along with everything that was lost and won
When the day is done

When the day is done
Hope so much your race will be all run
Then you find you jumped the gun
Have to go back where you'd begun
When the day is done

When the night is cold
Some get by but some get old
Just to show life’s not made of gold
When the night is cold

When the bird has flown
Got no-one to call your own
Got no place to call your home
When the bird has flown

When the game’s been fought
Newspaper blown across the court
Lost much sooner than you would have thought
Now the game’s been fought

When the party’s through
Seems so very sad for you
Didn’t do the things you meant to do
Now there’s no time to start anew
Now the party’s through

When the day is done
Down to earth then sinks the sun
Along with everything that was lost and won
When the day is done

 — Nick Drake 'Day Is Done'

Losing My Religion

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Thinking Outside The Agora

The Thought Occurs


 

Einstein's Riddle

There are 5 houses of 5 different colours. In each house lives a person of a different nationality. Each of the 5 residents drinks a certain type of beverage, smokes a certain brand of cigar, and keeps a certain pet. None of them have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same beverage.

The question is: Who owns the fish?

Clues:
The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is on the left of the white house.
The resident of the green house drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The resident of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The resident of the centre house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The person who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
The person who keeps the horse lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill.
The person who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The person who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.

Saturday 12 February 2011

Little Golden Book Titles That Never Made It

You Are Different And That's Bad
The Boy Who Died From Eating All His Vegetables
Dad's New Wife Robert
Fun Four-Letter Words To Know And Share
Hammers, Screwdrivers And Scissors: An I-Can-Do-It Book
The Kids' Guide To Hitchhiking
Kathy Was So Bad Her Mom Stopped Loving Her
Curious George And The High-Voltage Fence
All Cats Go To Hell
The Little Sissy Who Snitched
Some Kittens Can Fly
That's It! I'm Putting You Up for Adoption
Grandpa Gets A Casket
The Magic World Inside The Abandoned Refrigerator
Garfield Gets Feline Leukemia
The Pop-Up Book Of Human Anatomy
Strangers Have The Best Candy
Whining, Kicking And Crying To Get Your Way
You Were An Accident
Things Rich Kids Have, But You Never Will
Pop! Goes The Hamster...And Other Great Microwave Games
The Man In The Moon Is Actually Satan
Your Nightmares Are Real
Where Would You Like To Be Buried?
Eggs, Toilet Paper, And Your School
Why Can't Mr. Fork And Ms. Electrical Outlet Be Friends?
Places Where Mommy And Daddy Hide Neat Things
Daddy Drinks Because You Cry

Friday 11 February 2011

Expletive Excreted

Choices Choices

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me
than a frontal lobotomy.
 — Tom Waits

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Litterature

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book;
I'll waste no time reading it.
 — Moses Hadas

A Bit Severe

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
 — Billy Wilder

Hind Sight

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
 — Mæ West

Forgive And Forget

He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.
 — Forrest Tucker

Us And Them

Tuesday 8 February 2011

No Place Is A Good Place

eutopia = good place
outopia = no place

Say It Like It Is

unabbreviated
polysyllabic
obfuscating

Kind To Be Cruel

Always forgive your enemies; 
nothing annoys them so much.
 — Oscar Wilde

Monday 7 February 2011

Opportunism

An unwatched pot immediately boils.

Sunday 6 February 2011

Mathematics Made Simple

Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem
Any adequate axiomatisable theory is incomplete. In particular the sentence "This sentence is not provable" is true but not provable in the theory.

Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem
In any consistent axiomatisable theory (axiomatisable means the axioms can be computably generated) which can encode sequences of numbers (and thus the syntactic notions of "formula", "sentence", "proof") the consistency of the system is not provable in the system.

Incompleteness Theorem

I'm not a complete idiot.
Part of me is missing.

Saturday 5 February 2011

Hofstadter's Law

It always takes longer than you expect,
even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
 — Douglas Hofstadter 'Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'

Insider Anagram


Tuesday 1 February 2011

Outclassed

Acronym



 Intelligent
Design
 Instead
Of
Teaching
Science

No Worries

Italian Anagram


Yeah … Write

Error Message Haikus

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Windows XP crashed.
I am the blue screen of death.
No one hears your screams.

First snow, then silence.

This thousand dollar screen dies
So beautifully.

With searching comes loss
And the presence of absence:
"My novel" not found.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.