From whiskey river:
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear
of [...]

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[Note to regular readers: You may have noticed a change in my online tempo in the last week -- I sure have: my visits to your blogs are a little more erratic, my postings here a little less... I don't know... "focused," maybe?
Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 [...]

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From whiskey river (italicized portion):
The landscape opens its eyes and sits up,
sets out walking followed by its shadow,
it is a stela of dark murmurs
that are the languages of fallen matter,
the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements,
sand and water talking in low voices,
the howl of pilings as they battle the salt,
the rash confidence [...]

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On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing [...]

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We saw Avatar the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little — there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we’d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go.
My [...]

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[A museum's 3D representation of Wilder Penfield's so-called "cortical homunculus" depicting the relative importance of various senses, as measured by the percentage of our brains devoted to them. Photo by Robep on Flickr; click for original.]
From whiskey river:
Burning the Old Year
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry [...]

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[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, "a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang." More info here and here.]
From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different [...]

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Bobby McFerrin is brilliant. (And so are his audiences. It’s just that he’s the one onstage.)
[Hat tip to Janet Reid.]

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My review of this book is now online, over at The Book Book.
Short version:

Non-fiction, written by a neurogeneticist and evolutionary biologist.
Based on fairly current research. Informative. (Especially on the question of what makes you turn your head at someone, or not — at least if they’re within sniffing range.)
Not as provocative as you might imagine, [...]

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[Artist's rendering above depicts "planets colliding in a sun-like binary system about
300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Aries." Click image for more info.]
From whiskey river:
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in
it after all, a place for the [...]

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