“…Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.”
“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he said. “You needn’t look to the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”
—Flannery O’Connor
—from Wise Blood
falcate /FOWL-kayt/. adjective. Sickle shaped. Hooked. Curved to a point. From Latin falcem (sickle) + -ate (resembling). Not to be confused with defalcate (to embezzle, sadly not pronounced to rhyme with defecate).
“In conversation Mr Cave employed with lip-smacking relish the terms ‘petiole’, ‘inflorescences’, ‘falcate’ and ‘lanceolate’, and he was also comfortable with ‘sessile’, ‘fusiform’ and ‘concolorous’.” (Murray Bail)
“Doug took hairpin turns in conversation. Normally I didn’t mind, and even liked it—I was glad I could follow his falcate thoughts.” (Alena Graedon)
“…but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet…” (David Foster Wallace)
“In my mind I saw the rainbands of the storm, the falcate concentric arms, reach out across a thousand miles to embrace the coast.” (Greg Jackson)
“The dark moon that overtook us after the Sabbath ended on the evening we spent in Sepphoris would show the first, falcated trace of its rebirth on the evening after next.” (Nick Tosches)
The Boise Public Library has installed a vending machine for personal, handwritten letters. → The Letter Box Project
Salvador Dali’s body to be exhumed to resolve paternity case
Sometimes you just need a little good news (and if the comment(er)s are lousy, don’t tell me about it). → Strangers buy car for 20-year-old Texas man who walks 3 miles to work every day
And the data are in…yay scIEnce. → The ‘i before e, except after c’ rule is a giant lie
8 compelling cats that changed Russian culture. [Thanks, Reader A.!]
Up a wombat’s freckle: Barry Humphries on the development of Australian slang [Thanks, Reader B.!]
Baby steps… → How to capture videos of brains in real time: Watching mice think as they walk
The Cognitive Bias Codex visually organizes more than 180 ways we “think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.”
Highlights from the most recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, including “woke,” a new sense of “thing” (originating, in recorded form at least, on the television show The West Wing), the “particle zoo,” and “post-truth.”
Today in 1990, 1,426 people are suffocated and trampled to death in a tunnel near Mecca during the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. The stampede started when seven people fell from a pedestrian bridge onto pilgrims exiting the tunnel below, causing panic exacerbated by failed ventilation in the 110°F heat. Amazingly, this wasn’t the most deadly such incident: at least 2,236 pilgrims were killed in the 2015 “Mina Stampede.”
► Breakdancing Gorilla Enjoys Pool Behind-the-Scenes is pretty glorious.
A strangely compelling video: ► Pingsider | How Table Tennis Balls are Made
Reader B.: “A dilemma in the definition of limen, it does not distinguish between a conscious threshold and unconscious threshold. There are blind people who, while they can’t see, nevertheless respond to visual cues without understanding why. They are consciously blind, but some part of their brain is still taking in and reacting to visual information. So, does limen describe a threshold to the physical capacity of our senses or to our awareness?”
Reader A.: “Thank you for your newsletter. It’s the highlight of my week and always catches the corners of the internet that I don’t normally see. I found the ‘Fall’ video really disturbing, but not as disturbing as ‘Time for sushi’. ¶ Since pretty much everyone likes internet cats, I thought this article about the true and fictional cats of Russia might interest readers”
A different Reader A.: “I’m intrigued [by Minutiae], then I see it’s $14.99 for the app, then I have to think, that’s like 3 or 4 fancy coffees. I’m conflicted.”
Reader N.: “Thank you for the old photographs. When I was very young–about 4 or 5–I spent an inordinate amount of time quarreling with my parents. I thought that they could tell me about their childhood in a world without color, but I had seen the photos to prove that they grew up in a black/white/grey world. ¶ I have been happily reading your mailings…”
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