With many thanks to Mia, who was so kind as to transform my untamed handwriting and mathemes into shareable bits and bytes.

For Bill:  Soul's kin, and to whose body I would, without hesitation, give added years of life out of my own, if such a giving were possible.

They have declared that I cannot make you care; that we cannot move you to act. They ( Read more... )

Yesterday, two things happened:

California's Proposition 8 was ruled unconstitutional, and on the country's opposite coast, a Long Island man was arraigned on manslaughter charges for the August 1st murder of a 17 month old, whom he punched and choked to death in order to "make him act like a boy instead of a little girl."

This is what a toddler's ( Read more... )

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I am charged with a grim task:  the writing of an anticipatory eulogy. A beloved colleague is not long for this world, and I am bound by both professional and personal duty to try to speak in a way that does some justice - however inevitably inadequately - to his life and to his work, both of which have enriched us all immeasurably.  He is widely ( Read more... )

( Some aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are very complex. Others are manifestly not. )

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"Speak," she says softly, pressing her cool white hand against the wall of fire.  It is May. The month of revolutions. They are waiting, they Love.  Speak.  Speak May.  Speak revolutions.  Speak They.  Speak Love.  Even if you can only whisper.  The ash lifted, the planes are flying again:  look, they're waiting.  Here, lean on me.  It's time, time ( Read more... )

Apparently, I am ‘enigmatic.’  This is not the first time that particular - and largely inaccurate - adjective has been lofted my direction, so herein, at a couple of behests and the impetus of a spoonful of annoyance at such sobriquets, some tremendously time-wasting biographical fiddle-faddle.

( Behind the deceptively plausible explanations, what is it, really, that fuels the ravenous human hunger to read biography? )

I am told this is "the Women’s Century."   Tomorrow is International Women's Day.   It is women's day in what is, ostensibly, their century.

100 years. The number one hundred.  It is the basis of the mathematical concept of percentage, the number by which progress or amount is measured.

The United States Senate has 100 senators.  A mere 16% of ( Read more... )

All cookery of course is a form of chemistry, and involves a variety of molecular reactions. Baking, however, is even more dependent upon such reactions, and is also, therefore, more likely than its stovetop counterpart to produce the occasional spectacular, wildly unexpected result - of both the positive and negative varieties. In whipping up a ( Read more... )