Splash du Jour: Tuesday

"In my last years as an editor I saw more and more stories and poems that amounted to a kind of literary MTV - they were sleek and shifting, quick and gadgety. I could have filled the pages I was editing with competent examples, by truly talented writers, of this 'tough, urban' writing, this so-called sudden fiction. Suddenly read, suddenly forgotten, but that hardly matters, as readers weaned on TV and videos we'll think we're getting the real thing, and maybe if we went and tried to read, say, Alice Munro or Keith Fraser, we'd have real trouble, would grow impatient for the payoff, the climax, the wrap-up and credits, and on to the next channel. Click."
-- Steven Heighton –

Have a great Tuesday!

Adventures in Duckfarming: Part 1

My friend, she buys a fresh herd of ducklings every spring.
The above photo is of this year’s batch of peepers!
She raises them, like the good Duckmistress she is, and teaches them to read only the best Duck-literature.
Later, they will enjoy frolicking in their own swimming pool in the yard.
Then, as unthankful as last year’s batch, they will fly away.
Is there anything more thankless than a duck?
Well, how about a cat?

This is Zeus.
He was eyeing the peepers today! Oh, yes he was.
Licking his paws. Salivating. Filing his claws, at one point.
Just as Zeus was dragging the ol’ barbeque out of the garage, he looked over and saw the dreaded Duckmistress, holding a broom, and glaring at him.
He knows better than to mess with the likes of her!
For now, the peepers are blissfully enjoying their duck existence.
I will keep you posted here, as to their progress toward adult-duckhood through the 2007 season!

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Splash du Jour: Monday

Middle age: the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel just as good as ever.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)

That is so true! So true!
Have a great Monday!

CONTEST WINNER!

The first [but not last] Great Bookpuddle Book Giveaway has come and gone!
Several of you have taken a crack at it and have guessed the right book, which is Ian McEwan’s Saturday!
However, the lovely Isabella of Magnificent Octopus was the first to get it right, and therefore, she wins her choice of the four books that were listed on the blog.
Congratulations Isabella!
Just send your mailing address to bookpuddle@yahoo.com and lickety-split… you shall have a new book sent to you!

I think I was a bit too obscure with my 4 clues. Next time around I will try to be less sadistic. But here is the explanation…. my [sick] rationale:

1) H.P. will probably take Monday off.
Just as Isabella had mentioned in her answer…. the main character Henry Perowne, had a hell of a Saturday [the novel takes place during this one day], and so, I am assuming that he does not exactly go to work on Monday.
I know. I am sadistic!

2) 53 / 1977.
There were 53 Saturdays in the year 1977.
[Should I just be shot to death and that’s it?]

3) In six days J.F.K. will be murdered.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated on a Friday [Nov.22, 1963]…. hence, six days earlier would be a SATURDAY!

4) CouldawouldashouldawonaBooker!
I always thought that Saturday should have won, in 2005. I even wrote about it.

Next time it will be better!
Less insane.
More fun.
Thank you all for playing. For splashing around!

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It's Time For A....

For those of you who are interested, please note the hint I have dropped at the end of last night's posting!

FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Hmmm... is that redundant?
FREE book giveaway?
What would the opposite be?
OBLIGATORY book giveaway?

OK, this is a CONTEST of sorts, wherein the fine folks at Bookpuddle will send you a free book if you can decipher the name of a bestselling contemporary novel, from clues given by a sadistic Blog-Proprieter. [me].
My ONLY hint, is to tell you that it is NOT the bestseller that you see in the image there... it is not that wonderful epic, Things To Make.

I am not going to reveal the answer until Sunday evening!
Unless no one at all responds.
Then.... I will reveal the answer perhaps like never!
And I will conclude that none of you are "into" receiving a free book in the mail, nor are you very much "into" Book-games in general.

Enough preamble. Here goes.
Here are the four clues:

1) H.P. will probably take Monday off.
2) 53 / 1977.
3) In six days J.F.K. will be murdered.
4) CouldawouldashouldawonaBooker!

The first person to correctly guess the name of this book will receive their choice of the following brand new [unused] novels in the mail, sent to them absolutely free!

Oryx and Crake / Margaret Atwood
Lighthousekeeping / Jeanette Winterson
On Love / Alain de Botton
Headhunter / Timothy Findley

SERIOUS HINT UPDATE!!!

It is now the next day and I feel bad because I may have made my four hints a bit too difficult.
So.... I am going to give the following SERIOUS HINT!
The book in question is one of the ones in this list --> [CLICK]

ONLY YOUR FIRST GUESS WILL COUNT,
SO YOU MUST MAKE IT A GOOD ONE!

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Splash du Jour: Friday

There’s a line between love and fascination
That’s hard to see on an evening such as this,
For they both give the very same sensation
When you’re lost in the magic of a kiss.
-- Ned Washington –

Have a great Friday!

Scenes...

Sometimes I like to write short stories.
No. Correction. I always like to write short stories.
It’s just that I don’t always do it!
If I had less limits upon my time, and was a little more courageous with what I’ve got, I would be writing more.
That’s my current excuse[s]!
Some of my stories are more like little vignettes. In fact, I prefer to think of them as “scenes”. This takes the pressure off!
From time to time I would like to share some of these scenes with you here on Bookpuddle.

I am a writer, but the kind that spends most of his time tottering on the nest. Occasionally a breeze knocks me off and I flap around, swoop, and somehow get something near to a horizontal approach as I thud and tumble onto the ground.
But I always have to climb back up that tree, foot over wing.
I long for the day when I will fly, breeze or no breeze.

Here is one of my scenes:

• The Lenkos •

There were quite a few rickety and tumble-down houses on Emmett Street but none as ready to collapse as this one. Eight people lived in it, the Lenkos. They didn’t smell good.
Legend had it that it was the house itself that smelled, and mostly of cabbages. Like rot. As you walked down Emmett, and got closer and closer, the smell would be there to meet you. Year round! So, perhaps the place transferred its age-old unwashed dilapidation onto its inhabitants? This was a widely accepted theory, and Lenko lineage had outlived any current townsfolk that could say any different. The address had served many generations of the same family.
The only other theory, its corollary, that the bodily odor of the family had in itself affected such an amount of atmospheric square footage, seemed harder to believe. At any rate, those of us who went to school with the Lenkos knew one thing for certain. The stench was real and distinct, and whether it was on them or in them was irrelevant to anyone involved in the act of breathing, as we schoolkids so often were.

Kenny Lenko, the one closest to my age, ate spiders. It was Jim Clark that saw him doing it at recess one morning. Over by the wooden shed where the janitor Mr. Speers locked up the soccer balls and baseball bases and stuff. There was Kenny, hunched over in the corner. Picked one of those big-bellied jobbies right off of its web and popped it into his mouth, just as Jim’s shadow loomed from behind over the entire scene.
Within minutes the entire playground knew of it. And every kid wanted to see a repeat performance, instant replay if available. Even the other Lenkos!
Kenny was dragged to every corner of the school, every webby dark place, smelling bad the whole way there. It was not a good day to be a spider. Kenny ate all that we could find for him.
And the boys laughed and jeered, and the girls danced around and chanted:

Lenko, Lenko!
You really stenko!
Kenny Lenko!
You really stenko!

His siblings, up till then an equally raucous part of the proceedings, and perhaps even feeling that their family had produced a sort of mythical hero, now sank bank, realizing that joining in meant self-abasement. They huddled together in their little cloud of mutual fumes.
And I sang the song and pointed and danced.

In the winter we would play hockey at a rink behind the high school. An unwritten yet clearly understood rule when forming teams was that no Lenko was allowed, as their distinct odor was not seasonal in nature. It was as bad in January as July. They could watch, but from far away. Every so often we might get one or two of them to clean the fresh fallen snow from the ice, which they willingly did.
One day we played furious hockey until long after the streetlights were on. As night advanced, one by one, even future NHL hopefuls trotted off home. I stayed. This one night, I was left on the rink alone.
I skated on, as one possessed. Providing play-by-play commentary, I raced around the rink, slapping the puck past invisible goaltenders, and then flying around the net with all of the gyrations of the pros! I would collapse on the ice, listening to the thousands of fans cheer.
On one of my circuits around the rink, I was flying at top speed, stick-handling like Guy Lafleur (who was real big back then) when all of a sudden my skate hit a rut in the ice and I went hurtling forward, out of control, right into the boards.
I was impaled.
Skewered.
Shish-kebabbed.
The hockey stick, which at the point of impact had been straight out in front of me, dug into the foot of the boards. The other end dug into my abdomen, lifting me off the ice, and snapping the stick in two. I lay there writhing and sucking air from all seven continents of the earth, blood on the ice from some sort of bonus wound.
Gasping like a pickerel in the sand.
There was the sound of someone running towards me. Run run run, slide. Run run run, slide.
I was being rolled over onto my back, and then I could feel my legs being bent at the knee, pumped back and forth so that my breathing could get in sync again. And it worked.
I was being hoisted up. The clicking of my skates against the ice.
All the way home, which admittedly was not very far, I was supported by this Rescuer of the Bleeding and Skewered. My skates on the asphalt. My skates on the concrete.
Until I was set down on the steps of my own house. I did not go in but just leaned my head against the cold siding, and said “Thank you” as Kenny the Spider-Eater turned back and smiled, not saying a word. He was already walking away.

And as I leaned there against the house, all I could think of was how the whole way home, from the rink through the little alleyway, then the front of the school and then all the way down Argyle Street to here, to right here... I did not once smell cabbage. Or rot.
And yet everyone knows. I mean, it’s a well-known fact that their odor is not seasonal in nature.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2007

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Have a great Thursday!
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Touchy Subjects

I find it more disappointing to read through a book of bad short stories than to endure a bad novel.
I was thinking about this quite a bit today, and now that I am at my beloved Starbucks, it is still on my mind. I wonder from whence cometh this quirk of mine!
Hmmm…
The short answer would be →I think that with a collection of short stories, if the first few are not all that great there is always the hope that they will get better.
With each new story my faith is renewed. So if I am let down time and again, hmmm…. I feel that. Because see, I try to enter in to the context of a short story with all of the same intensity that I would a novel.
So while a bad novel is like being struck in the face, a bad pile of short stories is like turning the other cheek.
A reader is now fielding repetitive slaps!

But as much is this is the case [for me] there is also the corollary to consider.
What happens when I stumble across a great book of short stories?
One that starts with a few ripping-terrific stories, and consistently stays that way!
Answer? →I fall in love all over again, with the act of reading!
I turn the last page and wish there were more, and I say to myself [as I get another coffee]… “Every segment of that adventure was time and energy well spent.”
That is exactly how I feel about the latest collection of short stories by Emma Donoghue.

Touchy Subjects, is the title, and they are!
As my reading partner put it, “Nothing seems too odd or too off limits for her to write about - AND rope us into. I guess once you have written about a woman who churns out rabbits, you can handle just about any topic.”
Emma’s former book of short stories, The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, gets its title from the lead story, which is about a…. [go figure!] woman who feined giving birth to rabbits!
That book was excellent too, but this new one is even better.
Touchy Subjects [published in 2006 by Harcourt and now available in Virago tradepaper] is broken into five sections → Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death, and the stories found in each of these categories stay very centered around these themes.
These are nineteen deeply rich tales of the joys and struggles [mostly struggles] of love relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. And familial. And marital. Of friendships platonic and otherwise.
Of people reaching toward self-identity. Sometimes finding it, sometimes not.

I think that Emma Donoghue is "eccentric" in the best sense of the word.
Unconventional, slightly strange, and just off kilter enough to show her readers that they are the same!
That none of our lives are simple, or even normal. Her stories reveal a world full of ambiguities and contradictions, which is exactly the world any truly living person experiences.
She can take the most common of occurences [a woman looking at a clothes rack, a man writing phrases in the sand, someone looking absently and curiously through a woman's cosmetic case, a couple deciding upon the exact shade their house ought to be painted, the love of our pets, a 42-year old woman wanting to bear a child]…. she can take these things and show us that they are all touchy [as in sensitive, delicate] subjects.
I realize I have not really said anything specific about the writer’s style [per se] or her incomparable command of dialogue. I don’t want to.
I want you to READ HER.

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
-- Sigmund Freud –

Have a great Tuesday!

The Good, The Bad, & The Smugly

This evening, during a lull in my Starbucks coffee-drinking, I am thinking of moments when I have been the recipient of Good Samaritanism.
A good deed!
By "Samaritanism" I am referring of course to that parable in Luke ch.10 where the guy from Samaria does a good thing to some other guy. When I was a kid in Sunday school I would hear the story of the Good Man of “Some-Area” and I would wonder why, after all these centuries, they still couldn’t figure out where this guy was from!

Anyhoo… I recall something that happened right here, in this very Starbucks a while back.
I was reading W.G. Sebald’s amazing book, Austerlitz.
In fact, I was asking a nearby stranger [a girl, whom I could see was reading something in French] to translate a phrase for me.
On page 264, Sebald had written, "a travers une breche d'incomprehension."
She looked at the phrase in the book and was stumped.
Then, like a Good Samaritanness, she went to the dictionary section of the store, and came back to me with the following translation, based upon the photo of caged zoo deer that Sebald had presented on the same page... "In the context of what is being said here, the author is suggesting that the caged animals in the zoo look at us as though we too are imprisoned or unable to be free, and they find this hard to comprehend."
And she was cute!
She had me at “In the context…”

But this is not even the Good Samaritan part yet!
While this was going on, while I was having this cross-cultural experience with her, someone was smashing into my car in the parking lot.
And taking off!
Of course, there in the warmth of the coccoon-like store, and smitten as I was, I was utterly oblivious to the havoc outside.
But when I went to leave, well… I saw that the rear half of my car was smushed in!
And on my windshield, under the wiper, two pieces of paper fluttering...

One note said:
“I am sorry. I seem to have hit your car. Here is my phone number. -------“
“SEEM?” What does "seem" mean?
The other note said:
“I saw this person hit your car and leave. I chased them and made them come back. Here is my phone number. --------“
The Good Samaritan.

So I called the second number first.
Talked with this guy.
He told me that he saw this woman back her big black 4X4 right into my innocent white Oldsmobile.
She lifted it right off the ground, and then she took off.
He had just been leaving the parking lot himself at the time, so he chased her a few blocks, flicking his lights on and off until she finally stopped. Obviously, she realized that her license plate number would have long since been written down!
The gig was up!
She returned to the scene and he made sure she left the information on my windshield.
He then got my license number paged over the PA system inside the store.
But I was so engrossed in my… French-translation class… that I did not at all hear the announcement. [I learned all this when I talked to the guy on the phone.]
Next, I phoned the girl… The Ungood Smasharian!

I explained to her that she had two options.
Either, a) I would require all of her insurance information so that I could get my car fixed at her expense [whereupon her rates would skyrocket and her driving record be tarnished] OR… b) she could pay me a fixed amount of cash to compensate for the loss of resale value to my car and, in turn, I would not phone the police and tell them of her methods of umm… ACCIDENT REPORTAGE!
She chose option B, as I knew she would.
[Really, I had plans to get rid of my car soon anyways.]

She then asked, “Would it be OK if you picked up the cash where I work?”
I said, “Sure. No problem. Where do you work?”
She named one of the more famous Strip Clubs in town.
Hello!

I said, “Umm. OK. I guess I could endure such a predicament.”
She was a waitress there, not one of the [ahem…] “ballerinas”!

So, next night, there I was.
Music pounding, the Maestro at the door, [folded arms the size of ditch culverts] he stops me and says I need to pay a cover charge.
I scream at him over the blaring music…. “I WILL BE QUICK… JUST NEED TO SEE THIS GIRL. WAITRESS!” and I show him her name on my piece of paper.

His eyebrows raise, and he points in the general direction of somewhere.
Before I had time to adjust to the flourescent lighting some girl in a Budweiser bathing suit was asking me if I want to... get to know her better, or something, and again, I displayed the piece of paper and screamed stuff.
She nodded and went to get the girl.
[Did I watch that Beerbottle walk away from me? What do you think?]

From behind the bar The Ungood Smasharian© walks up to me, all cleavage and teeth.
She’s got an envelope in her hand and she opens it and begins to count out on the table more twenty dollar bills than I have ever seen in one place in my lifetime!
Lots of people are watching me now.
People that don’t even have eyebrows are raising them! And every guy in the place is wondering if he should worship me or mug me!
I mean, this is not the usual direction of such transactions in these places… female to male.
[At least this is what I am told!]

We both then signed dual copies of the pre-written contract we had agreed upon, over the phone.
It succinctly stated that with this monetary payoff we were severing all future legal relationship with each other.
It was like a real quick divorce, but where you are already in the Strip Club directly afterward, without having to get in the car and drive there!

There was a certain aura about me now.
I almost wanted to sort of bask in it and stay for a little drinkskie-poo, but no. I turned and left.
And as I walked past the Maestro, I could see a newfound respect in his eyes… yes, by God, there it is. A glint.
For I had just become a legend in those few short minutes.
The only man that ever walked out of that establishment with more twenties in his pocket than he had when he arrived!

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Splash du Jour: Monday

"I am impressed when music matters, when genres are broken, when spirits are lifted, when people make a difference, and when people are true to themselves."
-- Nelly Furtado –

If you need a little convincing, if you need to be persuaded of this woman’s innovative musical prowess, watch this VIDEOCLIP!

Have a great Monday!

My New Hands

Well, yesterday I did something that is so uncharacteristic of me that I still can’t even believe it happened.
← I bought cosmetics.
Must explain.
Must explain.

I spent the whole day at the St. Laurent Mall.
My main quest was to find a real nice pair of jeans after my favorite pair suffered a bit of a malfunction [a rip] in a… umm… too obvious spot.
Why is it so difficult to find a good, and I mean PERFECT pair of jeans?
It seems when I find the exact style I want [low-rise, narrow leg stuff] and the right shade of fade and all… they do not have my blasted size? But then, all of the jeans I would only buy if I were blind, they are ALL in my size!
So, in this dejected state, I drifted into a Bowring store because all the scented candles drew me hitherward. In there I bought a four-set of Hi-Ball glasses.
As I exited the store [I’m getting to the point, I’m getting to the point] I ran DIRECTLY into one of these gals that are out there in the centre of the thoroughfare trying to hawk some sort of make-up or miracle cream.

She had this granular stuff that looked like road-slush in a little plastic spoon and she was waving it at me and saying something.
To humor her, I stopped walking and she moved in for the kill.
“Hello, sir. Would you like to try some of this junk?” she said [or something to that effect].
My first thought, and it was a loud one, was… “Oh my God, woman! Are you ever barking up the wrong tree on this one!”
“No, sorry I…..” I began to say.
But she had me at “Hello”… apparently. She had my number!

She very quickly blurted out something about “dry skin”.
And this struck a chord with me. I will tell you why.

Even on the drive to the Mall earlier, I was looking at my hands and shaking my head at myself, because my hands are SO DRIED OUT!
They are positively Saharan! Chafed and dry!
And they've been this way for a long time, because I work a minumum of eight hours a day in direct and constant contact with paper and cardboard. It literally tears my hands to shreds.
As she blabbed about whatever, I set my shopping bag down and looked at my gross hands, and then at her road-slush stuff.
Little did this chick know that she had just nabbed onto the Driest-Handed Guy in the Mall©.

So I began to rub my hands together with this goop in them. Just as though I was washing my hands. The granular aspect of the stuff felt great. Relaxing.
Even as I was doing this though I was still saying to myself, “This is so not going to work…. like how in the world will this make my hands nice and soft? Nope, this is not going to…” but she was already spritzing my hands with a spray bottle of water, rinsing them off into this basin thing and as she did so…. my eyes became saucers!

With every spritz, it felt like I was growing new hands!
Literally incredible, as in, hard to believe.
I was speechless [and for me that’s a big deal, means the wheels are turning…] and then she put this other stuff on my hands to seal the deal!

“This is a moisturizer to apply after your exfoliation. It comes with the purchase of the aromatic salt scrub!”
I knew then that she had sold me on the stuff.
I had new hands!

Now it was time to talk business.
How much were my sweet-smelling aromatic handsies going to set me back now? [$]
$he told me.
Hmm… they are not exactly giving it away… but I bought it.
So….. you yourself may be wondering by now [if you are still reading]… “WHAT IS THIS STUFF?”
Well, there is the picture of it at the top of this blog.
That’s the road-slush.
Then the other stuff is the moisturizer… shown [above] in a nicer bottle than the smaller “FREE” one I was given.
Now here is the kicker.
Wanna know what the main ingredient is?
Salt from the Dead Sea!
Dead Sea salt crystals absorbed into a mixture of carefully selected aromatic oils!
That’s the scrub portion of the process.
Then the moisturizer consists of Dead Sea minerals & plants extracts. Also liposome complex → ginseng extract, aloe extract and vitamin E.

It’s made in Israel by a company called Dead Sea Premier.
See the Canadian version of their website → HERE!
[Note: The preceding was tapped out by some seriously supple, fragrant new hands!]

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Your Honest Opinion?

For those of you who read this blog on a regular basis, you will know that I live in coffee shops.
I would say that 90% of my blogs are written [composed] in coffee shops.
My backpack is like a part of my actual body! I go nowhere without my Mac-laptop!
The Hunchblogger of Notre Dame!

Anyhoo... oftentimes I overhear other people's conversations, in these coffee shops.
Especially if I am a bit bored.
Sometimes, if the eavesdropped-upon blabbing is about books I will scribble my blog-address on a Starbucks napkin, or piece of paper, and hand it to the person[s] as I leave, and ask them to check out my site.
Is that self-aggrandizing or what?
Thing is, I have a real desire to expose myself....!
Well.. you know what I mean?

So.... last night I was on the phone with my friend, and I mentioned that I would like to have some more official way of dropping the bookpuddle hint to strangers!
Something like a business card that I can carry around.
That was all I said.

He ran with the idea!
Today, when I got home from work, he had sent me the image that you see above, and told me that he has already made a heap of [color] business cards, and is going to send them to me in the mail.
No more writing on scrap pieces of paper.
I thanked him profusiously.

OK, here is my question though!

Is this a weird thing to do?
Hand people cards, directing them to your blog?
I mean... no matter what you think about it, I am going to DO IT!
But.... would you do such a thing?
I want you to respond, picking one of the following options:

1) I would never do such a thing. Too presumptuous.
2) I can see why you would want to do such a thing, you arrogant beast!
3) I think it's a great idea, albeit a bit over-desperate and slightly retarded.
4) You are inspiring me to do the same thing. What is your friend's phone number?

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Splash du Jour: Friday

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
-- Willa Cather –

Have a great Friday!

On Severance

I am just sitting here at Starbucks reading an excellent, wonderful book.
It’s called Anil’s Ghost and it’s by Michael Ondaatje.
I cannot believe I have not read this guy before. He is so amazingly good.
And so I set the book down for a bit, sipped my coffee, and thought of ways I would most NOT want to be killed. I’m talking about execution-style!
I have [quickly] concluded that there are really NO ways that I would like to be killed, sort of…. but the way that would most bug me would be flat-out decapitation.
Beheading.
I so would not go for that!

Anil’s Ghost takes place in the Sri Lanka of the mid-1980’s to early 1990’s, a period of serious political upheaval and violent uprisings. Please forgive my ignorance in not knowing exactly the situation there today, whether or not such violence as is discussed in this book is still taking place.
Suffice it to say, there are a lot of brutal killings talked about in the pages of Anil’s Ghost, and some of these victims end up with their heads on stakes, as a warning [I guess] to other people that still have their heads nicely attached to their bodies and whatnot.
Other people have been thrown from helicopters into the ocean, probably weighted down with stuff, or having their hands tied behind their back, and you’ve got to admit, there’s nothing good about that either.

But having your HEAD CUT OFF?

For one thing, I cannot think of something more horrible than knowing that sometime hence, soon even, you WILL have your head cut off.
It’s the knowing that would bother me, I think.
I think of people condemned to death during the French Revolution and stuff.
Wasn’t the whole decapitation thing really in vogue about then?
I simply cannot imagine that some people, thousands of them even, have had to sit in dungeons and cells and KNOW that soon they would be parting ways with their noggin!
Burning would be bad.
Getting shot? → Not good at all.
Poisoned? → Not my cup of tea!
Thrown from a helicopter? → I’ll pass.

But, for the record, I am going to say here and now that I am going to be profoundly disappointed if one day something other than my neck separates my brain from the rest of me!
Amen!
-- Cip

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Part of teaching is helping students learn how to tolerate ambiguity, consider possibilities, and ask questions that are unanswerable.
-- Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Have a great Wednesday!
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