April 2012
54 posts
“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.”
—Bill Watterson
“They’ve promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”
— Oscar Wilde
“
I know that things can really get rough when you go it alone
Don’t go thinking you gotta be tough, to play like a stone
Could be there’s nothing else in our lives so critical
As this little hole!
My life in an upturned boat, marooned on a cliff
You brought me a great big flood
And you gave me a lift
To care, what a gift
You tell me with your tongue
And your breath was in my lungs
And you float over the rift
I know that things can really get rough when you go it alone…
Don’t go thinking you gotta be tough, to play like a stone.
Could be there’s nothing else in our lives so critical
As this little hole.
Well this will be a simple song to say what you’ve done.
I told you about all those years and away they did run.
You sure must be strong
And you feel like an ocean
Being warmed by the sun.
Remember walking a mile to your house, a glow in the dark.
I made a fumblin’ play for your heart and the extra, the spark.
You wore a charm in a chain that I stole specially for you…
Love’s such a delicate thing that we do,
when we’ve got nothing to prove
Which I never knew
Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel... →
scientificamerican.com
Making the wheel was easy. It was the axle system that took forever. And it was an original thought, which is in face extremely rare. Civilization had already developed many metal tools before they perfected the wheel.
More:
The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place. However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. The earliest images of wheeled carts have been excavated in Poland and elsewhere in the Eurasian steppes, and this region is overtaking Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as the wheel’s most likely birthplace. According to Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, there are linguistic reasons to believe the wheel originated with the Tripolye people of modern-day Ukraine. That is, the words associated with wheels and wagons derive from the language of that culture.
“I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.”
—Haruki Murakami
“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
—On the Road by Jack Kerouac
