Nehaveigur

Category: Quotes

  • Ecojargon

    There’s something about the way ecologists talk that makes my eyes glaze over: Prairie plants sequester carbon, prevent erosion and provide key habitat for endangered wildlife like Monarch butterflies and rusty-patched bumblebees — ecosystem services desperately needed across the Midwest. This is from an otherwise interesting and well-written article about…

  • Feynman vs. The Abacus

    This is an anecdote from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! It nicely shows what genius actually consists of: Not raw processing power (that’s what the abacus represents), but simple mental connections and intuition. The setting is Brazil, where Feynman spent some time. A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I…

  • Many and Few

    Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Jim Harrison wrote that our wounds are far less unique than our cures. Here is David Foster Wallace: TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose…

  • Aspirations for 2026

    I wish to you the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity.…

  • Pastwatch

    At a house party this fall, I noticed a wall-to-wall bookshelf filled with science fiction paperbacks. I recognized some of the authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and Poul Anderson, but most of them were new to me. Frederik Pohl and Orson Scott Card took up a lot of the shelf…

  • Motivation

    It seems obvious that to build effective organizations, incentives have to be aligned with the desired outcomes. For example, we should give big bonuses to those with the best performance. As Daniel Pink observes in Drive, it’s more complicated than that: Enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels…

  • Unedited

    Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.” Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek

  • Arctic Facts

    Here are the facts I found surprising enough to highlight in my copy of Arctic Dreams: Most animals live lives in biological keeping with the earth’s twenty-four-hour period of rotation. They have neither the stamina nor the flexibility, apparently, to adapt to the variable periods of light they encounter in…

  • Arctic Dreams

    Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez still shows the Soviet Union on its maps of the Arctic. There is no mention of global warming, unthinkable for any contemporary report about the region. That’s because it came out in 1986, but that hardly matters. The important parts are untouched by time. One …

  • Lack of Desperation

    I recently discovered Sam Kriss’ Substack, Numb at the Lodge. I wish I could write like that. At the same time, I don’t envy Kriss. He’s desperate. Whatever he describes, it’s terrible. Here he is about the impact of smartphones: We thought we were just having fun times with devices;…

  • No Book? Big Whoop

    Asterisk Magazine’s current issue is about books. Here’s what the magazine editors have to say about those fiber and ink bundles: Books are sources of great and enduring pleasure, but is it really a loss to society if people find their fun elsewhere? One can read for information, but –…

  • The Funny Side of Cancer

    He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind unraveled the secret code of evolution while his heart laughed at fear. He once said: The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but…

  • The Rational Optimist

    Reading and thinking about Birds, Sex & Beauty by Matt Ridely reminded me of his other books I’ve read over the years. He’s a wonderful writer and keen observer, especially in his books. His political writing, for example in the Times, is angrier and not always well argued. The first…

  • Life Without Clocks or Mirrors

    I’ve always been immoderatly clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs everyone sighs about, a glut of clocks and my thin neck twisting to their perfect circles, around and around and around. This is from Wolf…

  • Greatness Can’t Be Planned

    No plan survives first contact with the enemy Helmuth von Moltke The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything Dwight Eisenhower I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s possible to will greatness into existence.  On the contrary, to a first approximation none of the grand strategies that I have…

  • Rome Was Different

    In SPQR, Mary Beard provides an overview of the history of ancient Rome from its founding to the first century AD. She knows her stuff and there are some surprising insights. For example, I didn’t know how much the Romans where sticklers for the rule of law. Unfortunately, her prose is…

  • Playing With the Sun As With a Little Brook

    Girl lithe and tawny, the sun forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes and your mouth that has the smile of the water. A black yearning sun is braided into the strands of your black mane, when you…

  • Birds, Sex & Beauty

    We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine,” then why the extravagance of the score? Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Natural selection, defined by genes that benefit survival becoming more frequent,…

  • Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry

    It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colors for a hundred million years. I’m a mammal and mammals don’t do beauty much. We mammals…

  • Free Energy

    The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring old ideas like wind or solar, but about exciting new inventions like zero-point energy and cold fusion. There were books that described how Nikola Tesla…

  • Rejecting Authenticity

    It doesn’t matter much if it’s authentic. What matters is if it’s good. Good and inauthentic is better than bad and authentic. This is true for food and it’s true for literature. Richard Ford: If I can use whatever I make of myself to write something that will make a…

  • Living

    Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the…

  • Helmets

    The idea behind the helmet law is to preserve a brain whose judgement is so poor it does not even try to stop the cracking of the head it’s in Jerry Seinfeld My father had a story of him cycling around Sheffield in England in the 1960s. Encountering a hill…

  • Where the Mountains are Nameless

    There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There’s a land – oh, it…

  • Marxism

    Radical: My reading of Marx. Reactionary: Your reading of Marx. Revisionist: Their reading of Marx. Realistic: None of us have actually ever read Marx Eric Jarosinski: Nein. A Manifesto

  • Life on Mars

    In 1996, Bill Clinton announced that we had found signs pointing to life on Mars. A meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, originating from Mars, contained structures that looked like small fossils. It later turned out that they probably weren’t. This week, something similar happened: The Perseverance rover found geological features…

  • Shakespeare

    There are things we like the idea of, but if we’re honest, we don’t want to do them. Contributing to a tight-knit community, going to church, farming and going to the theatre come to mind. This summer, I spent a few days in Manhattan. By chance, I came across a…

  • Your Photos Have Already Been Taken

    Taking photos on vacation is pointless. For any tourist attraction, you’ll find pictures that are better than you’ll ever be able to take yourself online. Any mildly interesting sight has already been photographed. You or your friend posing in the foreground doesn’t make the photo any more interesting. Will Self says…

  • Moana

    My kids don’t care what I’m reading. Sometimes, when they have run out of other things to do, they leaf through my current book, only to toss it aside contemptuously after a few seconds. Kon-Tiki is different. As soon as they saw the photos of the six bearded Scandinavians sailing…

  • Give Me My Task and Let Me Do It Right

    Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh Grave, where is thy victory? Oh Life, you are a shining path And hope springs eternal Just over the rise When I see my redeemer Beckoning me Just let me sail in To your harbor of lights And there and forever To cast…

  • Shrunken Heads

    This is from Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. Heyerdahl and his friend Herman Watzinger talk with Jorge, a Peruvian acquaintance, over dinner. I laid my fork carefully aside, and Jorge told his story. He was once living with his wife in the jungle, washing gold and buying up supplies for other gold-washers.…

  • More on Assembly Theory

    I recently posted on Assembly Theory. I’ve read up on it some more since then and found this review of the theory by philosopher Johannes Jäger helpful. Recursivity makes the dynamics of the model historically contingent. In the end, the kinds of objects that you actually can assemble are not…

  • We Are Meant To Be Many Things

    Singular focus is not a human trait. It is a machine trait. Human life is fragmented on purpose. We are meant to be many things: friend, worker, parent, neighbor, mentor, pupil, citizen.Matt Duffy This is from a though-provoking blog post on virtue by Matt Duffy on Signal-Noise Ratio.

  • Fractured Entanglement

    The most interesting perspectives on AI can be encountered on the Jim Rutt Show, which I have previously referenced with regards to AI risk. In a more recent episode, Rutt interviews Ken Stanley about his Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis. A preprint describing this hypothesis is available here. Here is how…

  • Not People

    With ChatGPT-5 just having come out, Adam Mastroianni has posted a timely reminder on Experimental History: Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they…

  • The Last Picture Show

    The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurthy is set in a small Texas town in the 1950s. McMurthy didn’t idolize the time or the place, which is clearly modeled on his hometown. Instead, he pulled off the seemingly impossible: Lots of shocking descriptions of sex, but without being titillating. Sex…

  • Scientists are Weird

    Derek Lowe on his blog, In the Pipeline, on the scientific worldview: [It] is not a mindset that most people naturally find comfortable. Or comforting. You get used to it, you even learn to like it, but I think it’s important to never lose sight of its fundamental strangeness. We’re…

  • Star Bowl Spinning Overhead

    Writing by starlight Can’t see the words Fill a page Nothing there Waterfall distant sound Tree against stars Milky Way Juniper Jupiter white rock Wind dying my heart At peace a Friday night Big Dipper sits on the mountain Friends lie in their tents I sit against rock Star bowl…

  • All That Is Earth Has Once Been Sky

    Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone. Thus easily can Earth digest A cinder of sidereal fire, And make her translunary guest The native of an English shire. Nor is it strange…

  • Open Day and Night

    O goddess-born of great Anchises’ line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies. Virgil: AeneidJohn Dryden Translation

  • Napping Outside

    One of my favorite things when I’m out backpacking or canoeing is to take an afternoon nap under a tree somewhere. Karl Heinrich Waggerl wrote about this experience in his Wagrainer Tagebuch (Wagrain diaries). Waggerl was an Austrian writer who is so unknown in the English-speaking world he only has…

  • Everybody Sees That I Am Old But You

    Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead, But I. So I, as I grow stiff and cold To this and that say Good-bye too; And everybody sees that I am old But you. And one fine morning in a sunny…

  • Network Television

    [Larry] Gross and several of his colleagues once did a fascinating bit of research to demonstrate what television of that era was capable of. He analyzed the responses of a large group of people who were asked how they felt about the biggest hot-button racial issues of the 1970s, such…

  • People Don’t Read

    Women read more than men, but that’s an incomplete observation, Oy argues here. Nobody reads contemporary literary fiction any more. People still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction. They argue that it’s at least partly a quality problem: For the last twenty years American literary…

  • A Canny Eye

    Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is full of small facts and anecdotes that Dillard encountered in her extensive reading. Here is one that I enjoyed: This routine always calls to mind the Angiers‘ story about the trappers in the far north. They approached an Indian whose ancestors had dwelled from time…

  • Unfathomable Intricacy

    Creation is so much more complex than it needs to be. The universe doesn’t just appear to be fine-tuned to support life but fine-tuned to maximize possibilities. This is the Anthropic Principle, but even more so. Here is Annie Dillard’s in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: That there are so many…

  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

    I have known about Annie Dillard for some time but I have never before read anything she has written. In retrospect, that was a mistake. There is no better nature writing than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan, Dillard possesses an awe of nature that is…

  • Bigger Brains

    To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have ten times fewer neurons than zebrasfish, yet by some measures are just as smart. Even discounting species-specific differences, the relationship between neuron count and intelligence…

  • Bees and Fish

    Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses: [Insects’] failure to adapt, however, are dazzling. Howard Ensign Evans tells of dragonflies trying to lay eggs on the shining hoods of cars. Other dragonflies…

  • Flowers, Raindrops, Tracings

    We’re all flowers for the void Gary Snyder We’re just raindrops on a window Jerry Seinfeld Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery Annie Dillard

  • When Adventure’s Lost its Meaning

    In the quiet misty morning When the moon has gone to bed When the sparrows stop their singing And the sky is clear and red When the summer’s ceased its gleaming When the corn is past its prime When adventure’s lost its meaning I’ll be homeward bound in time Bind…

  • Information Content of the Genome

    On Asimov Press, Dynomight asks how information there is in DNA. How should we define the “information content” of DNA? I propose a definition I call the “phenotypic Kolmogorov complexity”. Roughly speaking, this is how short you could make DNA and still get a “human” […] So what would this number be? My guess is that you…

  • Bad Advice to a Young Scientist

    Freeman Dyson, in 2007: Sixty years ago, when I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology. My prediction was an extreme example of wrongness, perhaps a world record in the category of wrong predictions. I was giving advice about future employment…

  • Intelligence and Race

    It’s hard to have a good faith discussion about human intelligence with anyone, especially about the genetics of intelligence. This 2019 blog post by Ewan Birney and others is the best I’ve come across on the subject so far. For most traits, including IQ, it is not only unclear that…

  • Temptation

    No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find…

  • My Reactionary Demands for Art

    The artist is the creator of beautiful things Oscar Wilde In high school, I got into an argument with my art teacher. For a project counting towards my final grade, I wanted to create a naturalistic drawing. My teacher objected, claiming that naturalism lacked creativity. She became more agitated than…

  • Drinking With a Little Bird

    This is a poem by Austrian actor Kurt Sowinetz. You can watch him recite it here but I as far as I know, it hasn’t been transcribed or translated anywhere. Below is my attempt at an English rendition. I’d like to toast a little birdthen be astute enough to understand…

  • Revelation and Delusion

    This is from Feet of Clay by Anthony Storr, as quoted in Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way…

  • LMMs as Information Retrieval

    Are we close to developing large language models (LMMs) that have artificial general intelligence (AGI) soon? Some think we’re already there, but according to this paper, assuming that LMMs are on the cusp of AGI is based on a misunderstanding. Cosma Shalizi, one of the co-authors, has more on his…

  • No More Holy Age Than Ours

    There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their…

  • Under the Banner of Heaven

    In They Call me Trinity, a comedy western starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, a group of Mormon pioneers is harassed by a languid, land-grabbing criminal called the Major and an allied band of Mexican bandits. Because their religion does not permit them to fight, the Mormons initially respond to the…

  • Friedrich Schiller

    Friedrich Schiller was the Jack Kerouac of Germany. Both were rebellious, youthful writers that didn’t only inspire a generation, but represented some feeling that still defines their entire nation. As a result, both of them may perhaps be more admired than actually read. Here is an essay on Schiller by…

  • Mistakes

    This is Daniel Dennett quoting William James in Intuition Pumps: He who says “Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe … It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of…

  • Intuition Pumps

    Like all artisans, a blacksmith needs tools, but – according to an old (indeed almost extinct) observation – blacksmiths are unique in that they make their own tools. I met Daniel Dennett in Ghent in 2008. The students of the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie had been organizing a symposium that…

  • What Stirs the Life in You?

    The Garden’s scent is a messenger, arriving again and again, inviting us in. Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles stir life underground. What stirs the life in you? The garden asks. The garden thrives. Invites us to do the same. Saplings break through darkness -ladders set against the sky. Mysteries ascend. Rumi,…

  • Why We Die

    In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan looks at longevity, and whether there may be a way to extend it. I’ve talked with Ramakrishnan a few times when I did my PhD at the same Institute where he solved the structure of the ribosome. Remembering those conversations, it occurs to me…

  • God On Their Side

    Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well…

  • Getting Spoiled

    The more money you spend of travel, the higher your expectations. The higher your expectations, the more likely they are to be disappointed. Luxury travel – business class flights, five-star hotels, expensive restaurants – make you sensitive to the slightest perceived imperfection. David Foster Wallace, in A Supposedly Fun Thing…

  • Being Yourself

    Almost everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird. If you’ve got even an ounce of strange inside you, at some point the right decision for you is not going to be the sensible one. You’re going to have to do something inadvisable, something…

  • Shaman

    Nothing remains of the millions of brilliant men and women who lived before we invented writing. A few cave paintings and some carved figurines are the only exception. But what about their music, their science and their worldview? We know next to nothing, and this is likely to remain the…

  • A Thin Film of Inertia

    The world is covered with a thin film of inertia. Maybe it is created by entropy, or human nature, or a magic yet-understood, or all three. Divine beings pierce it effortlessly, Let there be light is a powerful command. We can pierce this inertia too, with a little effort. In fact it…

  • What’s Enough?

    How do you know what’s enough until you find out what’s too much? Tom McGuane in All That is Sacred

  • Life Prefers Ice

    Robert Frost holds with those who say the world will end in fire. Freeman Dyson was agnostic on whether the world will end in fire or ice, but he thought that ice would be preferable. Cold environments are fundamentally more hospitable to complex forms of life than hot environments. Life…

  • Infinite in All Directions

    The universe seems to be designed not just to allow live, but to favor interesting, diverse live, with plants and animals and minds and cultures. It didn’t have to be this way. There seem to be safeguards built into the universe to prevent one lifeform taking over, resulting in bland…

  • Smooth Between Sea and Land

    Here, on the level sand, Between the sea and land, What shall I build or write Against the fall of night? Tell me of runes to grave That hold the bursting wave, Or bastions to design For longer date than mine. A. E. Housman

  • Our Biotech Future that Didn’t Happen

    I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses on the social and political influences on scientific research. Most of the attendants were academics in the life sciences from the U.S. and Europe, and…

  • Shotgun Seminars

    In Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson describes a way to organize that I have not encountered before. It seems ideally suited to journal clubs to make sure that everyone has read the paper and can express their thoughts on it without the help of PowerPoint: At our institute in…

  • Fred?

    From out of the cold Caribbean Into the Desert Libyan There crawled a strange amphibian, And we shall call him “Fred”! You say you want to call him “Ted”? But I want to call him “Fred”! You like “Maurice” instead? Or “Barnaby” or “Red”? Or “Lucifer” or “Ned”? Well, anyway,…

  • Humility

    Here are some good quotes on humility: Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less C. S. Lewis You might not think of humility as a scientific concept, but the special brand of humility that is enshrined in scientific culture is deserving of special recognition for…

  • Sick

    “I cannot go to school today!” Said little Peggy Ann McKay “I have the measles and the mumps A gash, a rash, and purple bumps My mouth is wet, my throat is dry I’m going blind in my right eye My tonsils are as big as rocks I’ve counted sixteen…

  • Niven’s Laws

    There are several laws, or maybe aphorisms, that science fiction writer Larry Niven has come up with. Wikipedia has a good list, and here are my favorites:

  • Santa and the Reindeer

    “This is the hour,” said Santa Claus, “The bell rings merrily.” Then on his back he slung his pack, And into his sleigh climbed he. “On, Dancer! On, Prancer! On, Donner and Blitzen! On, Comet and Cupid!” cried he. And all the reindeers leaped but one, And that one stood…

  • Ecstatic Truth

    The French novelist Andre Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.” […] After I short Family Romance, LLC in Japan, Japanese television started to get interested in the phenomenon that nowadays, from an agency that employs some two thousand people,…

  • Every Man for Himself and God Against All

    I have never seen a movie by Werner Herzog’s but after reading his memoir I will have to. Here are some of his insights: We weren’t backpackers who carry practically an entire household on their backs in the form of a tent, a sleeping bag, and cooking equipment; we walked…

  • The Uniform of Individualism

    The has been too little personal involvement, and too much involvement in organizations which were insisting that other organizations should do what was right … Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line. Wendell Berry This is from an essay by Wendell Berry in the…

  • Stigma

    Common sense dictates that there’s an optimum level of introspection, and it’s possible that many of us do too much soul-searching. A related idea is that increasing awareness of mental health struggles may be counterproductive. This hypothesis is further explored in this article: We propose that awareness efforts are leading…

  • Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

    Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is full of insights about human nature. Of the many quotable passages, this one foreshadows what Richard Feynman wrote 200 years later about epistemic democracy: It had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were…

  • Optimum Introspection

    I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul;…

  • The Giant’s House

    This novel by Elizabeth McCracken is a story about freaks and how on the inside they’re like the rest of us. It has many good parts. Here’s one: “It pains me to say this,” he told me, “but I’m not susceptible to love. Probably I’m immune.” He sighed. “That sounds…

  • Point of View

    Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless Christmas dinner’s dark and blue When you stop and try to see it From the turkey’s point of view. Sunday dinner isn’t sunny Easter fests are just bad luck When you see it from the viewpoint Of a chicken or a duck. Oh how I…

  • The Inner Ring

    The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. This is from This is Water, a 2005 David Foster Wallace. 60 years before that, C. S. Lewis wrote about a specific…

  • This is Water

    From a commencement address given by David Foster Wallace: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.…

  • The Value of Doubt

    The government of the United States was developed under the idea that nobody knew how to make a government, or how to govern. The result is to invent a system to govern when you don’t know how. And the way to arrange it is to permit a system, like we…

  • Skin Stealer

    This evening I unzipped my skin And carefully unscrewed my head, Exactly as I always do When I prepare myself for bed. And while I slept a coo-coo came As naked as could be And put on the skin And screwed on the head That once belonged to me. Now…

  • Shel Silverstein

    Writing for both young kids and for Playboy, Shel Silverstein has one of the most interesting biographies I’ve come across. He also wrote the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay, and had sex with “hundreds, perhaps thousands of women”. Here he’s…

  • The Night is Darkening Round Me

    The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow; But a tyrant spell has bound me And I cannot, cannot go. The giant trees are bending Their bare boughs weighed with snow, And the storm is fast descending And yet I cannot go. Clouds beyond clouds above me,…

  • Tree House

    A tree house, a free house, A secret you and me house, A high up in the leafy branches Cozy as can be house. A street house, a neat house, Be sure and wipe your feet house Is not my kind of house at all – Let’s go live in…

  • This is Just to Say

    I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold William Carlos Williams: This is Just to Say

  • Smut in Arabian Nights

    The English translation of 1001 Nights by Richard Burton from 1888 is explicit for its time, and it seems that Burton made the translation even spicier than the original. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid once slept with three slave-girls, a Meccan, a Medinite and an Irakite. The Medinah girl put her…

  • Early Bird

    Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird And catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early early bird – But if you’re a worm, sleep late.Shel Silverstein