A snip at $350.
Back story here.
Monday, January 12, 2026
AI FTW
Long story short: If you keep your requests to technical stuff, like how to do this that and the other on your iPhone, you'll be in seventh heaven with a chatbot.
My flavor of the moment is Perplexity Pro, which I subscribed to early last year for $20/month.
Best money I spent all year.
But I digress.
I may be a dyed in the wool Apple fanboi from the get-go but I'm also a TechnoDolt©®@, which means I routinely have problems getting my phone/iPad/Mac/Watch to do what I want them to do.
Yes, Apple has Help pages — thousands of them — with all the answers but good luck finding the right one, with language you can understand and detailed instructions you can actually follow.
That's where Perplexity Pro intervenes: I tell it or type in what it is I want to do and it takes maybe 30 seconds to search all those Apple Help pages and a zillion others before spitting out an easy to follow set of instructions in language I can understand, along with alternate approaches in case the first doesn't work.
Almost always — at least 95% of the time — the directions work.
I'm talking about stuff like how to add/remove stuff from my phone's Control Center and reorganize it: I spent a fair amount of time trying on my own before conceding defeat.
You instantly know if your AI is hallucinating because if it were, its instructions wouldn't work.
Sunday, January 11, 2026
J.R.R. Tolkien — using a tape recorder for the first time — reads from 'The Hobbit' for 30 minutes in 1952
Above, part 1 of 2; below, part 2.
YouTube description: "When Tolkien visited a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a manuscript of 'The Lord of the Rings,' he was shown a 'tape recorder.' Having never seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from 'The Hobbit,' and Tolkien did so in this one incredible take."
[via Open Culture]
Saturday, January 10, 2026
Why Richard Rorty is the patron saint of anesthesiology
It occurred to me as I read John Kay's lucid and insightful Financial Times column.
Kay wrote, "What mattered to Rorty was not the search for what is true, but the search for what works."
Here's his Times piece.
- Rorty's search for what works has lessons for business
When a student of business and economics wants to ponder the conceptual foundations of these subjects, Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, is the modern philosopher I recommend. This suggestion would have surprised Rorty. He was the archetypal American liberal, with no time or regard for the world of business and finance. His most important work, published 30 years ago, was "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", which debunked the notion that scientists could succeed in a search for the mirror of nature, the truth about "The Way the World Is".
Rorty was not a relativist who believed that all opinions were equally valid. He called the leftwing postmodernists of American humanities departments, who parroted phrases from the continental European philosophers he admired, creeps. Rorty was a modern representative of the American pragmatic tradition, associated with John Dewey and William James. By claiming that philosophical distinctions mattered only if they made a difference to practice, Rorty distanced himself from recent analytic philosophy. What mattered to him was not the search for what is true, but the search for what works. The test of a model, a way of thinking or a theory is not truth but usefulness.
Many of Rorty's philosophical critics claimed he was attacking a straw man, arguing that no one really believes they know, or might know "The Way the World Is". But I have met people who believe they know "The Way the World Is", in executive suites, on trading floors and in investment banks. I know consultants who are employed to report on "The Way the World Is". To be sure, there is an element of pragmatism in their approach. What better demonstration of their insight into "The Way the World Is" than their exalted positions and extravagant bonuses?
The academic search for truth, for scientific rather than commercial knowledge of "The Way the World Is", has different motives. The modern economist is driven by physics-envy. Physicists have the best claim to hold a mirror to nature: their models have proved so useful that no one would think about heat, pressure or motion in any other way. Many people claim this is because these theories are true.
The pragmatic Rorty argued that to say the theories are true adds nothing to the observation that the models are useful. This claim, applied to hard science, is a subject of continuing disagreement. But Rorty's perspective is surely right for complex and fluid situations whose outcome depends on human interaction. The soldier's war stories give insight into "The Way the World Is", but in a very different way from the models of quantum physics. No individual soldier — no general — ever sees the whole picture; no one can ever, in this sense, hold a mirror to nature. The best accounts will eventually come from the military historian or the novelist who pieces together — and manufactures — a narrative from fragments of information and experience. There can be many such accounts, some better than others, none representing a unique correspondence with the truth.
And so it is with business and finance. I have often given an account of an event in business history and been confronted by a participant who offers an account of "The Way It Was". But all he offers is an account of the way it was for him. Even an aggregation of such accounts can provide only a partial and controversial description of the whole. Economists often assert that economic theory says this or predicts that. But economic theory will never hold a mirror to nature. Good economic arguments are specific to their context. There are no universal economic laws, only trends and tendencies.
Yet business journalists continue to believe that chief executives can tell them "The Way the World Is" at their companies. Professional modelers imagine that by adding ever more realism and complexity to their black boxes, they come closer to describing "The Way the World Is". Visionary leaders imagine they can reconstruct industries through rationalist knowledge of "The Way the World Is".
Rorty's pragmatism can save us from these errors. His philosophy meets his own test: an understanding of it should change how we behave.
I frequently employed Rorty's philosophy (which I did not realize at the time was in fact a guiding force in my thinking, having no familiarity with the philosopher or his work back then) in the operating room during the decades I was gainfully employed teaching anesthesia to residents who were trying (not intentionally, true — but still doing a pretty good job of it) to make things more difficult than they needed to be.
Regularly something untoward would happen and the resident would explain that she was going to do this or that to treat it because it was logical.
I would respond that — rather than do what's logical — why not do what works?
But that's not what it says in the book, would be the response.
Yeah, true, I would say — but that's a patient on the table, not a book.
An example: A routine case begins, anesthesia is induced with propofol followed by a paralyzing dose of succinylcholine for intubation.
The resident puts the laryngoscope in the mouth, looks around and can't see the vocal cords.
Pulse rates — the patient's and the resident's — rise as the anxiety titer spikes.
All of a sudden the EKG beeps get irregular and we look up at the monitor and there are occasional PVCs (premature ventricular contractions, a dysrhythmia that's never a welcome sight in an unconscious, paralyzed patient with no airway but that oftimes occurs when the laryngoscope interacts with highly vagal innervated oral airway tissues in a not yet fully anesthetized patient).
The resident says, "Maybe I should stop trying to intubate and instead mask ventilate."
Makes sense, right?
But it's precisely the wrong thing to do.
Because if you choose that course of action, the succinylcholine will start to wear off and very soon you'll be dealing with a semi-paralyzed, unconscious patient struggling to breathe while you attempt to create a functional airway with the bag and mask.
Then you'll be faced with all manner of unpleasant choices.
Much better to continue with laryngoscopy and try to get the endotracheal tube in ASAP — forget about the PVCs, they'll go away once you get the tube in and oxygenate and ventilate the patient, dropping the CO2 back into the normal range.
In short, what works — not what's "true."
Orikaso Fold Flat Tableware
Constant readers will know I'm a sucker for things that transform.
Inanimate shape shifters.
These will do nicely.
They start out as a flat sheet of non-stick plastic and morph into:
• A 20 oz. dish with corners that snap together to create a natural drain/funnel spout
• An 18.8 oz. bowl
• A cup
Set of 5 (five) pieces: 2 cups, 2 bowls, 1 plate.
$25.
Am I A Workaholic?
It won't take long to find out.
Just answer the 20 questions below.
"If you answer 'yes' to three or more of these questions you may be a workaholic. Relax. You are not alone."
1. Do you get more excited about your work than about family or anything else?
2. Are there times when you can charge through your work and other times when you can't?
3. Do you take work with you to bed? On weekends? On vacation?
4. Is work the activity you like to do best and talk about most?
5. Do you work more than 40 hours a week?
6. Do you turn your hobbies into money-making ventures?
7. Do you take complete responsibility for the outcome of your work efforts?
8. Have your family or friends given up expecting you on time?
9. Do you take on extra work because you are concerned that it won't otherwise get done?
10. Do you underestimate how long a project will take and then rush to complete it?
11. Do you believe that it is okay to work long hours if you love what you are doing?
12. Do you get impatient with people who have other priorities besides work?
13. Are you afraid that if you don't work hard you will lose your job or be a failure?
14. Is the future a constant worry for you even when things are going very well?
15. Do you do things energetically and competitively including play?
16. Do you get irritated when people ask you to stop doing your work in order to do something else?
17. Have your long hours hurt your family or other relationships?
18. Do you think about your work while driving, falling asleep or when others are talking?
19. Do you work or read during meals?
20. Do you believe that more money will solve the other problems in your life?
Well, the returns are in.
Next step is here, where you can join Workaholics Anonymous.
"The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop working compulsively."
Friday, January 9, 2026
Jar Opening Hack
This occurred to me a long time ago.
I couldn't open a jar whose lid was not cooperating.
I wasn't near a hot water tap and I didn't have something to bang on the top.
What I did have was a bunch of rubber bands in a drawer.
I grabbed a handful and voilà : a ready–made, quick 'n dirty rubber jar opener.
I crushed the handful of rubber bands tightly around the lid and twisted and friction did what friction does and darned if the top didn't instantly loosen.
One more thing: Don't forget to scream at the top of your lungs at the instant you apply maximum force — this enhances your power.
There's a reason shotputters and discus throwers and their ilk bellow at the moment of truth.
Girard-Perregaux Vintage 1945 Jackpot Tourbillon
Long story short: You pull the little lever at the side of the case and the reels within begin to spin.
Out of 125 possible combinations of bells, spades, diamonds, clubs and hearts, only one — three bells in a row — represents the jackpot, signified by the sound of a tiny mechanical gong within.
You know you want one.
It was introduced in 2007 and no more than 100 are estimated to have been made.
So don't hem and haw too long.
A lot more fun than playing sudoku while you're waiting for the plane that never seems to arrive.
One of my favorite ads of all time
It appeared in the Charlottesville Daily Progress many years ago, I'm thinking c. 2005.
I will say that I have extreme respect for electricity and the damage it can do if you mess around with it.
That's even though I got an A in Electrical Shop at Washington High School in Milwaukee back in the day when such things were part of the regular curriculum.
Thursday, January 8, 2026
The World's Largest Operating Musical Instrument — the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ — is at Macy's in Philadelphia
True.
Craig R. Whitney, in a June 9, 2007 New York Times article, described how the massive pipe organ (above and below), constructed for the 1904 St. Louis International Exposition where it was a smash hit (though it bankrupted the Los Angeles Art Organ Company, which built it), subsequently made its way to Wanamaker's in Philadelphia where President William Howard Taft dedicated it in front of 40,000 people on December 30, 1911, then occupied the vast, 149-foot-high Grand Court center space specially designed for it by Daniel Hudson Burnham, resounding in glory before slowly deteriorating over the decades to the point that by 1995 only about 20% of its pipes were playable, with just two of its six keyboards functioning.
When Macy's took over the store in 2006, it decided to pull out all the stops... in an attempt to restore the great instrument to its former power — and beyond.
Here's the Times story.
- Amid the Shirts and Socks, a Concert Can Break Out
What do you do if you buy a famous downtown department store and find an organ with 28,482 pipes occupying thousands of square feet of perfectly good retail space?
If you're Macy’s, you let devotees of the instrument put in 61 more pipes and give them thousands more square feet to set up an organ repair shop.
Diapasons, it would seem, are as much music to Macy's as cash registers, coin counters, and customers at its Center City store here, a Philadelphia institution that was originally a Wanamaker's. So the company let the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, a private group of aficionados who have been helping to maintain the instrument for years, install another stop and set up a repair shop after Macy's took over the store.
"Every lunchtime, people hear the organ and feel good — and people are in a mind to shop when they’re feeling good," explained James Kenny, the store manager. "It’s the ultimate feel-good experience."
The organ, the world’s largest operating musical instrument, has never sounded better, according to the store's staff organist, Peter Richard Conte, who has been here 20 years and fills the place with warm waves of sound at noon and in the evening, daily except Sunday.
"In 1995 it was down to about 20 percent of the pipes being playable, maybe," and only two keyboards working instead of six, Mr. Conte said. "Now it sounds loved again."
With money from private donors and more than $100,000 from Macy's this year, the staff curator, L. Curt Mangel III, with his assistant, the Friends and numerous organ groupies, now have 95 percent of the organ playing again. Next year they expect to have it all up and running for the first time in decades.
Today Mr. Conte and the Friends have the run of the store for the annual Wanamaker Organ Day, and Mr. Conte will play something new: his own transcription of Elgar's "Enigma" Variations (Op. 36), at 11:30 a.m. Shoppers are welcome.
He has been working feverishly on the Elgar for weeks, with all-night practice sessions, alone in the store except for a guard. "It’s probably the most difficult piece I've ever done," he said before trying out several movements at a Wednesday evening concert, his fingers slinking from keyboard to keyboard and darting restlessly over the 729 stop-control tablets as phrase seamlessly followed phrase and crescendo climaxed and faded into descrescendo.
The Elgar sounds impressively orchestral on this organ, with its 462 sets of pipes, including stops named for orchestral violins, cellos, flutes, orchestral oboes, clarinets, French horns, tubas, and trombones. It has just about everything else imaginable — chimes and even a kitchen sink (for the curators to wash their hands) — in a forest of pipes ranging from 32 feet to less than an inch long, spread over both ends and multiple rooms and floors off the store's Grand Court.
Next year a long-muffled section of 2,000 more pipes, now being cleaned and restored, will rejoin the rest in a more audible spot, and Mr. Conte expects to luxuriate in its liberated sounds, including three more French horn stops made by the Kimball Organ Company of Chicago.
"I love the sound of French horns and I will probably use them a lot," he said.
The instrument started life at the St. Louis International Exposition of 1904, when the Los Angeles Art Organ Company built it along orchestral lines, rather than according to the baroque organ ideal, as Bach and Buxtehude knew it.
It was a smash hit at the fair, but bankrupted the company. Then it languished in storage until 1909, when John Wanamaker bought it for the Philadelphia store that he was planning to open two years later.
His son, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker, saw the vast, 149-foot-high Grand Court center space in the building Daniel Hudson Burnham had designed for them as the ideal place for "the finest organ in the world," and 40,000 people and President William Howard Taft came to the dedication ceremonies on December 30, 1911.
Until his death in 1928, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker oversaw successive expansions of the organ in the store's own organ shop on the building's roof. The changes were so extensive that the instrument's "string" section finally had more pipes than most large organs do altogether.
Famous organists flocked to play it over the years, and both Marcel Dupré and Virgil Fox developed signature pieces on the organ, but when Lewis Rodman Wanamaker died, the organ's importance faded. Wanamaker's itself was sold to Woodward & Lothrop in 1986; then it became a Hecht's; and in 1997 a Lord & Taylor store. Macy's took it over last year.
Each of the owners recognized the unique historical value of the organ, and Lord & Taylor hired Mr. Mangel as curator in 2002. The difference now, as Mr. Conte sees things, is that "Macy's gets it — it understands how to use this instrument and market it to the public."
Martine Reardon, the Macy's national headquarters executive overseeing holiday events, including now the annual Christmas organ and light show in the Philadelphia store, said, "The Wanamaker Organ's legacy is as legendary as the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks."
Next year, Macy's 150th anniversary, the store hopes to get the Philadelphia Orchestra to come and play Joseph Jongen's "Symphonie Concertante," a work for organ and orchestra commissioned by Wanamaker's in 1928 but never performed at the store.
And the Friends, with a $150,000 donation from the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust, have set up a spacious repair and organ-building training center on an unused floor of the store. Early this year the additional 61 new pipes, a rank of singing vox humana stops, joined nine others in a chamber rebuilt especially for them and brought the total to 28,543. To many, their vibrato tones call to mind a choir of angels.
Mr. Conte patted the huge console that controls the pipes and said, nodding at Mr. Mangel, "Baby hasn't been given such care and tending since John Wanamaker." But he still hopes Baby will throw no tantrums at today's performance.
How does it sound?
Find out for yourself, right here.
Helpful Hints from joeeze: What's the best way to remove strong odors from a cutting board?
Sandra Wu took the question and responded in Cook's Illustrated; the published dialogue follows.
....................
Q. What's the Best Way to Remove Strong Odors From a Cutting Board?
A. The dishwasher is the best way to clean plastic cutting boards, but often you can't wait two hours to reuse a malodorous board.
To find the best way to remove odors without a dishwasher, we took four cutting boards and cut a large onion and made garlic paste out of raw minced garlic on each of them.
Once they were nice and smelly, we used a different odor-removal method on each board before immediately washing it with hot soapy water:
1. Spraying with a mixture of 1 tablespoon of bleach and 1 gallon of water
2. Scrubbing with a paste of 1 tablespoon of baking soda and 1 teaspoon of water
3. Spraying with distilled white vinegar
4. Doing nothing more than washing with hot soapy water
After the boards were wiped dry, we sliced apples on each one.
Tasters were required not only to taste the apples for off-flavors but to sniff the boards as well.
The results? Only the baking soda paste-treated board was odor-free; the other boards suffered from varying degrees of sulfurous odors and allium flavors. Tasters were nearly unanimous in finding the apples cut on the baking soda board "fine," with "no off-flavors."
So the next time you stink up your cutting board, scrub it with a baking soda paste and follow up by washing it with hot, soapy water.
..................
Sign of the Apocalypse: Reusable Color-Changing Silicone Ice Cream Cones
Features and details:
• Color change is activated by contact with ice cream, then reverts to original as ice cream is consumed
• Set of 3 different colors (we'll choose)
• Flexible food grade silicone
• Washable; dishwasher-safe
• 3" x 3" x 3"
• Rated age 3+
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
'Ubik' — Philip K. Dick
This 1969 novel is one of four by Dick selected by the Library of America for republication of the best of the master's work.
It's the only one of the four I hadn't previously read.
The other three in case the suspense is killing you: "The Man in the High Castle" (1962), which won the Hugo award; "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965); and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968).
Short (213 pages) novel shorter: "Ubik" is a fever dream, unbelievably wonderful with its startling language and descriptions of people and sudden tangents and jaw-droppingly original and apt neologisms.
Excerpts, describing some of the characters:
.......................................
After he had dressed — in a sporty maroon wrapper, twinkle-toes turned-up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel....
Square and puffy, like an overweight brick, wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot-colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers....
She wore an ersatz canvas workshirt and jeans, heavy boots caked with what appeared to authentic mud. Her tangle of shiny hair was tied back and knotted with a red bandanna. Her rolled-up sleeves showed tanned, competent arms. At her imitation leather belt she carried a knife, a field-telephone unit and an emergency pack of rations and water. On her bare, dark forearm he made out a tattoo. CAVEAT EMPTOR, it read. He wondered what that meant.
A young stringbean of a girl with glasses and straight lemon-yellow hair, wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts.
A good-looking, older, dark woman with tricky, deranged eyes who wore a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks.
A wooly-haired adolescent boy wrapped in a superior and cynical cloud of pride, this one, in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers.
The mannish, thirtyish, sand-colored lady wearing ersatz vicuna trousers and a gray sweatshirt on which had been printed a now faded full-face portrait of Bertrand Lord Russell.
Over by the window G. G. Ashwood, wearing his customary natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top and train-engineer's tall hat, shrugged indifferently.
It arose from within a slender, earnest-looking individual who sat bolt-upright in his chair, his hands on his knees. He wore a polyester dirndl, his long hair in a snood, cowboy chaps with simulated silver stars. And sandals.
Beside it stood a beetle-like individual wearing a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie.
.......................................
Four for the road:
"We haven't gone anywhere. We're where we've always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it's lost its underlying support and it's ebbed back to previous forms. Forms it took fifty-three years ago. It may regress further."
"Maybe, he thought, I've come to the end. He began to walk toward the abandoned drugstore, not taking his eyes from it; he watched it pulse, he watched it change between its two states, and then, as he got closer and closer to it, he discerned the nature of its alternate conditions.
"At the amplitude of greater stability it became a retail home-art outlet of his own time period, homeostatic in operation, a self-service enterprise selling ten thousand commodities for the modern conapt; he had patronized such highly functional computer-controlled pseudo merchants throughout his adult life."
"And, at the amplitude of insubstantiality, it resolved itself into a tiny, anachronistic drugstore with rococo ornamentation. In its meager window displays he saw hernia belts, rows of corrective eyeglasses, a mortar and pestle, jars of assorted tablets, a hand-printed sign reading LEECHES, huge glass-stoppered bottles that contained a Pandora's heritage of patent medicines and placebos...."
Mag Rx — 'If you can't read the labels, taking pills can be bad for your health'
From websites:
- Mag Rx
Clip on to any prescription bottle to read the super tiny print on the label with 2.5x magnification.
It's a matter of safety: we have to be able to read labels on pill bottles to be sure we're getting the right dose or even taking the right pill.
But that type is awfully small.
With this magnifier, we can read those labels clearly.
Attaches easily to most standard prescription bottles and folds back against bottle for convenient storage.
Features and Details:
• Magnifier folds back against bottle for convenient storage
• Clip-on magnifier fits most standard prescription bottles
• Ensure you are taking correct dosage
• No more squinting to read labels
• Easily read fine print
$9.
'I Love LA'
I avoided watching this new 8-episode series because as it is I have so many shows with multiple episodes on my Watch List already.
I broke down last night, figuring I'd at least have a look and beside they're only about 30 minutes long apiece.
I'm glad I did!
Created, written by, and starring Rachel Sennott, it's wickedly — and I mean wickedly — smart and funny.
Tuesday, January 6, 2026
Helen Frankenthaler at MOMA
[Jacob's Ladder (1957)]
Opening paragraph of last month's New Yorker review:
"'Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep,' at the Museum of Modern Art, is a masterpieces-only spritz of an exhibition. It features five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler. They were all raised on Park Avenue, educated at Bennington College, and classified as second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but I have trouble seeing them as one and the same. The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel. The organizing force behind them, if you can spot it, has a wily mind and a preternatural gift for dispatching cliché from the canvas. After 1952, I don't know if Frankenthaler could have painted a cliché if she tried."
The show will remain up through February 8, 2026.
[Mauve District (1966)]
[Commune (1969)]
[Chairman of the Board (1971)]
Can't make it?
[Toward Dark (1988)]
A curator's guide to the exibition is here.
Levitating Lamp
By Front Design Studio in Stockholm, Sweden, part of its Magic Collection.
The Levitating Lamp has a shade that seems to float in mid-air.
The shade actually hangs from the ceiling on thin wire; the light comes from a bulb in the top of the base.
Apply within.
The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa [II]
The environment is the soul of things. Each thing has its own expression and this expression comes from outside it. Each thing is the intersection of three lines, and these three lines form the thing: a certain quantity of material, the way in which we interpret it, and the environment it's in. This table on which I'm writing is a block of wood, it's the table, and it's a piece of furniture among others in the room. My impression of this table, if I wish to transcribe it, will be composed of the notions that it is made of wood, that I call it a table and attribute certain uses to it, and that it receives, reflects and is transformed by the objects placed on top of it, in whose juxtaposition it has an external soul. And its very colour, the fading of that colour, its spots and cracks — all came from outside it, and this (more than its wooden essence) is what gives it its soul. And the core of that soul, its being a table, also came from the outside, which is its personality.
I consider it neither a human nor a literary error to attribute a soul to the things we call inanimate. To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn't have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it's every bit as erroneous to attribute beauty to things. It's every bit as erroneous to say that things possess colour, form, perhaps even being. This ocean is saltwater. This sunset is the initial diminishing of sunlight in this particular latitude and longitude. This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells — better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature.
Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that's the body.
In these considerations there may be an entire philosophy for someone with the strength to draw conclusions. It won't be me. Lucid vague thoughts and logical possibilities occur to me, but they all dim in the vision of a ray of sunlight that gilds a pile of dung like wetly squished dark straw, on the almost black soil next to a stone wall.
That's how I am. When I want to think, I look. When I want to descend into my soul, I suddenly freeze, oblivious, at the top of the long spiral staircase, looking through the upper story window at the sun that bathes the sprawling mass of rooftops in a tawny farewell.
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