“The void could not ‘take it’ anymore”

-Solomon Birnbaum 2004

“Voids abhor voids”

-D. Birnbaum

I suggested a dozen years ago that the word known to all men must be love.  Hugh Kenner has suggested that it is “perhaps” death – a revelation that would hardly require a mother’s ghost to divulge.  Another writer, Thomas Sawyer, in the James Joyce Quarterly, proposes that the word known to all men is “synteresis,” which would seem rather to be the one word unknown to all men.

Their principal charge is to care for a Donkey, which, in its better moments, is revealed as an archaic incarnation of the Logos.

It is a little known fact that drinking angostura bitters with grapefruit can cause life-threatening infection with mites. 

I love these. Have I mentioned that I love these?

You hadn’t – thanks!

This is a good excuse for me to explain my quotes tag just for the record, although this is probably unnecessary.  Anything I put there is a quote* from something I’m reading, usually quoted because it sounds funny out of context (this is often true even of quotes that are also funny in context).  I don’t put them in quotation marks because I find quotation marks make them markedly less funny for some reason.  But if it’s tagged “quotes” then I didn’t write it (except for this post itself).

If I’m quoting something for being well-written or insightful or funny on purpose or good in some other way that reflects well on the writer, I will usually tag the name of the writer and the source as well.  This pretty much constitutes a mini-recommendation.

I started doing the “quotes out of context” thing in my Facebook statuses a while back and people seemed to really like them, which is why I’ve started doing on tumblr, which if anything seems like a medium even more suited for the activity.

*quotation, if you must

You can ridicule his turquoise period – indeed he laughs at it himself – but you can’t deny that his message is a positive one.

The peculiarly English word “Science” (all other languages use the word to mean “systematic inquiry”) has come to mean “a field of study close to what non-physicists imagine physics is like.”  (Deirdre McCloskey)

One famous exception is John Searle, who has made it clear that, if (say) his best friend turned out to be controlled by a microchip rather than a brain, then he would regard his friend as never having been a person at all.

Geller also claimed to have strengthened the mystical powers of the island by burying there a crystal orb once belonging to Albert Einstein.

SUPER-SYNERGY IN THE BRAIN: THE GRANDMOTHER PERCEPT IS MANIFESTED BY MULTIPLE OSCILLATIONS.