Throb

Fly

Success

Blood, body-snatching and the birth of modern surgery

Every thing t'was going smoothly
Every thing was going well
Every thing t'was flowing truly
When you kicked him down the well

He'd such a lovely, lovely body
Such a lovely soul
T'was such a lovely dance he did
A hangin' from the pole

Oh, t'was such a darling dance he did
A hangin' from the pole

de doop de doop de doop de doop
de doop de doop de dole

He'd promised that he was your man
He said he'd love you true
He'd seemed like such a wholesome boy
Before you ran him through

Such a whitebread wholesome boy
Before he hanged with you

You kicked and kicked and kicked and tripped
You tripped because you fell
You fell because you kicked the crip
You kicked him down the well.

Random happy composition on my desktop right now

Almost certainly

Backwards Light

In the past few years, scientists have found ways to make light go both faster and slower than its usual speed limit, but now researchers at the University of Rochester have published a paper today in Science on how they've gone one step further: pushing light into reverse. As if to defy common sense, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light.

Whoa.

Overheard

My brother and I spent an hour or so yesterday at an outside cafe (ok, bar) listening to (ok, participating in) a fairly loud argument about who was cooler: Robert Conrad (star of The Wild Wild West) or William Shatner (star of Star Trek), and who would kick the other's ass. It turns out that Robert Conrad did most of his own stunts and made up for his altitudinal limitations by rigorously studying pugilism, while Shatner is just the world's coolest has-been. Verdict: Conrad, sort of.

Dreck

I believe you are more dynamic than the laws of listening
I encourage you to allow yourself to decay
I wonder

I think everything is more than
death and sex

I have this memory of being a boy on a tube in a river

this funny sound with so much music

The difference between love and "I'm trying to impress you"

Tonight I went to see the Salon of Shame, a public reading of embarrassing journal entries, poems, and frank diary bits from the adolescences of strangers. I've participated in this show in the past (I have no shortage of embarrassing creative effluence from my past) but I'm always stunned by the hilarity which exists in the archives of the pasts of my peers. A girl got up and read the "romance novel" she wrote after reading her first at the age of 13: "My Flaming Desire," starring a girl who can "speak to animals with her mind" and a "handsome," "romantic" protagonist fireman Captain Jack.
My sides split and shall never mend, tho' how I long they will.

Letter from Mahmoud

. . . Do you not realize you are beaten, as a donkey is beaten, but knoweth not his donkeyhood is cursed? Your comics have turned against you in your own lair, and mock you without mercy. We have seen the videos of the Meal of the Correspondents, and we know how your left regards the men of the laugh as prophets and seers. It is only a matter of time before Johnny Carson (applause be upon him) returns from occlusion to request that you, Mr. President, take the Slauson cutoff, get out of your car, and cut off your Slauson, Hi-yo, salaam. And a third part of the Slauson shall be stained with the tears of the womenfolk, and (9323 words excised)

From Lileks.