kirsten

hardrockward @ 2009-04-27T21:25:00

2009-04-28T01:29:04Z

Smoke rises from a cigarette because it is hot and lighter than air. The stream is smooth and shaped like a column because it is laminar, and all the smoke particles travel in parallel.

The flow is laminar because the cigarette's burning area is small, and the energy output that is driving the stream upward is only about one watt. Larger sources of smoke such as smokestacks or bonfires clearly do not produce laminar streams.

The scattering of the smoke marks the transition of the flow from laminar to turbulent, and is caused by the growth of small, invisible disturbances to the smoke stream that eventually create scattering. Turbulent flow is characterized by random fluctuations of speed and direction.

Careful measurements using lasers and special imaging techniques have revealed that the smoke stream is only a small part of a much larger invisible plume that rises from the cigarette, with the hottest and fastest moving part of the plume actually a few millimeters in front of the smoke stream.

As the plume rises, it takes the surrounding air with it and cools the air down which, surprisingly, makes it move faster.

In very still air, I have observed stable plumes that are as long as 30 centimeters, which become wavy just prior to scattering.

Peter Lipowicz
Senior principal scientist
Philip Morris USA

hardrockward @ 2009-01-28T14:45:00

2009-01-28T19:53:00Z

I took a good clear piece of Cork, and with a Pen-knife sharpen'd as keen as a Razor, I cut a piece of it off, and thereby left the surface of it exceeding smooth, then examining it very diligently with a Microscope, me thought I could perceive it to appear a little porous; but I could not so plainly distinguish them, as to be sure that they were pores, much less what Figure they were of: But judging from the lightness and yielding quality of the Cork, that certainly the texture could not be so curious, but that possibly, if I could use some further diligence, I might find it to be discernable with a Microscope, I with the same sharp Penknife, cut off from the former smooth surface an exceeding thin piece of it, and placing it on a black object Plate, because it was it self a white body, and casting the light on it with a deep plano-convex Glass, I could exceeding plainly perceive it to be all perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb, but that the pores of it were not regular; yet it was not unlike a Honey-comb in these particulars.

First, in that it had a very little solid substance, in comparison of the empty cavity that was contain'd between, as does more manifestly appear by the Figure A and B of the XI. Scheme, for the Interstitia, or walls (as I may so call them) or partitions of those pores were neer as thin in proportion to their pores, as those thin films of Wax in a Honey-comb (which enclose and constitute the sexangular celts) are to theirs.

Next, in that these pores, or cells, were not very deep, but consisted of a great many little Boxes, separated out of one continued long pore, by certain Diaphragms, as is visible by the Figure B, which represents a sight of those pores split the long-ways.

I no sooner discern'd these (which were indeed the first microscopical pores I ever saw, and perhaps, that were ever seen, for I had not met with any Writer or Person, that had made any mention of them before this) but me thought I had with the discovery of them, presently hinted to me the true and intelligible reason of all the Phænomena of Cork; As,

First, if I enquir'd why it was so exceeding light a body? my Microscope could presently inform me that here was the same reason evident that there is found for the lightness of froth, an empty Honey-comb, Wool, a Spunge, a Pumice-stone, or the like; namely, a very small quantity of a solid body, extended into exceeding large dimensions.

Next, it seem'd nothing more difficult to give an intelligible reason, why Cork is a body so very unapt to suck and drink in Water, and consequently preserves it self, floating on the top of Water, though left on it never so long: and why it is able to stop and hold air in a Bottle, though it be there very much condens'd and consequently presses very strongly to get a passage out, without suffering the least bubble to pass through its substance. For, as to the first, since our Microscope informs us that the substance of Cork is altogether fill'd with Air, and that that Air is perfectly enclosed in little Boxes or Cells distinct from one another. It seems very plain, why neither the Water, nor any other Air can easily insinuate it self into them, since there is already within them an intus existens, and consequently, why the pieces of Cork become so good floats for Nets, and stopples for Viols, or other close Vessels.

And thirdly, if we enquire why Cork has such a springiness and swelling nature when compress'd? and how it comes to suffer so great a compression, or seeming penetration of dimensions, so as to be made a substance as heavie again and more, bulk for bulk, as it was before compression, and yet suffer'd to return, is found to extend it self again into the same space? Our Microscope will easily inform us, that the whole mass consists of an infinite company of small Boxes or Bladders of Air, which is a substance of a springy nature, and that will suffer a considerable condensation (as I have several times found by divers trials, by which I have most evidently condens'd it into less then a twentieth part of its usual dimensions neer the Earth, and that with no other strength then that of my hands without any kind of forcing Engine, such as Racks, Leavers, Wheels, Pullies, or the like, but this onely by and by) and besides, it seems very probable that those very films or sides of the pores, have in them a springing quality, as almost all other kind of Vegetable substances have, so as to help to restore themselves to their former position.

And could we so easily and certainly discover the Schematisme and Texture even of these films, and of several other bodies, as we can these of Cork; there seems no probable reason to the contrary, but that we might as readily render the true reason of all their Phænomena; as namely, what were the cause of the springingess, and toughness of some, both as to their flexibility and restitution. What, of the friability or brittleness of some others, and the like; but till such time as our Microscope, or some other means, enable us to discover the true Schematism and Texture of all kinds of bodies, we must grope, as it were, in the dark, and onely ghess at the true reasons of things by similitudes and comparisons.

Observ. XVIII. Of the Schematisme or Texture of Cork, and of the Cells and Pores of some other such frothy Bodies.
Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon

hardrockward @ 2008-09-11T15:00:00

2008-09-11T20:01:55Z

Maxwell House Coffee's slogan, "Good to the Last Drop," ignited a controversy over the proper use of the word to. Pundits asked, "What's wrong with the last drop?" A renowned English professor at Columbia University finally decreed that the word to is good usage and includes the last drop. The word until would preclude the last drop. The slogan was first used by Coca-Cola in 1908.

hardrockward @ 2008-02-15T13:11:00

2008-02-15T19:13:38Z

i started a diary

define this word (please)

2007-12-13T06:11:58Z

gorgeous

ВКУСБУС

2007-11-17T12:30:29Z

FINE RUSSIAN CUISINE SNACKS, ON A TRAVELING BUS

here's what i did today

2007-10-16T23:01:50Z

that's 8 and a half by 11 baby

hardrockward @ 2007-09-24T11:21:00

2007-09-24T16:23:30Z

1. utterly or obviously senseless, illogical, or untrue; contrary to all reason or common sense; laughably foolish or false: an absurd explanation.

2. the quality or condition of existing in a meaningless and irrational world.

gary richmond : a view from the zoo

2007-08-09T03:02:21Z

Why is God putting up with our meaningless and futile defacement of His priceless work of art? I believe there is a complete explanation nestled in the middle of Romans 8:19-20:

For the Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope. . . .

Let me paraphrase the above verses. I think you will be moved by what God's spirit has revealed through the apostle Paul.

All of nature is awaiting with enthusiasm and deep longing for everyone who is going to come to the Lord to do so. God has ordered nature to put up with man's needless abuse. Nature didn't want to, but God ordered nature to take man's abuse to give man more time to come to Him. If you want to get a concrete picuture of what this verse is saying, consider this illustration.

Michelangelo is in his studio. Around the room are several of his most cherished masterpieces. His love and greatest skills are evident in every stroke of the brush and cut of the chisel. His work praises his genius and expresses his deepest thoughts. Suddenly, a servant boy that he loves dearly throws open the studio door. It is evident that he is severely mentally disturbed. He doesn't comprehend the love of the master artist and is, in fact, needlessly jealous of his abilities and authority. The servant boy rushes forward and slashes many of the paintings and dashes many of the sculptures to the floor. Much of the art is beyond repair and lost forever. Michelangelo walks to the servant boy and holds him in a long embrace. He then speaks softly, "My boy, you mean more to me than the art. I want you to be my son. We can work this out." Michelangelo shares with the other servants that for now the boy is not to be punished. The boy will be given more time to be willing for adoption. The servants express their anger and shock at what has happened but they promise to stand with the master's choice.

Our Father never misses a sparrow's fall. The fact that He has not destroyed us for what we have done to His beautiful creation is all the assurance we should ever need of His love.

[...]

At the present rate of extinction, we will be losing one-fifth of the world's species by the end of this century. There are times that I wish the animals would fight back. They could, you know. There are enough bees or bacteria to killevery man, woman, and child on the earth. But they won't, because they have been subjected.

There may be no greater example of God's patience with man than His putting up with man's abuse of His greatest creation. Remember that this is all to give time for people to come to the Lord Jesus Christ.

[...]

I've told you the bad news. Now let me tell you the good news. In fact, this earth will pass away, as will the present heaven, but the Lord will make new ones. They will be far better creations and they will be populated with perfect, sinless, and forgiven people. He will set His children on a cloud somewhere in eternity and speak these new creations into existence. You and I may be there to see it. The Scripture says that the new earth will have neither sun nor moon, for it will be illuminated by the glory of the Lord Himself. The seas will be no more, but no one will be disappointed. This just means that there will be lakefront property for everyone. Lots of eagles, I bet, filling crystal-clear skies. Did I tell you about the animals? They will all be tame. If you want to hug a lion, no problem. If you want to pick up a cobra, go ahead.

mary galbraith

2007-06-12T03:56:39Z

When the child's primal question, "Where is the other whom I can fall into?" must be answered, "There is no such one," the child must repress this catastrophic realization even as she forms a law of self-preservation based on it.

david attenborough life on earth

2007-05-23T16:03:37Z

A rattlesnake hunts mostly at night and does so with the aid of a sensory device which has no parallel elsewhere in the animal world. Between the nostril and the eye is the pit which gives the group as a whole its name. It detects infra-red radiation, that is to say heat, and is so sensitive that it responds to a rise of three hundredths of one degree centrigrade. What is more, it is directional and enables the snake to identify the source of the heat with precision. So, with the aid of its pits, the rattlesnake is able to detect the presence of a small ground squirrel crouching motionless half a metre away even in total darkness. The snake glides smoothly towards it on its belly scales in near-silence; once within range it strikes, shooting its head forward at a speed of 3 metres a second; and then its huge paired fangs inject its victim with a dose of extremely virulent poison. It must surely be one of the most efficient killers in the animal world.

Because, like all reptiles, it can absorb the sun's energy directly, its food requirements are small. A dozen or so meals a year are quite sufficient for it. Not for the rattlesnake the incessant daily search for food to which the endothermic mammals, even in a desert, are committed. Nor does it need, like them, to spend its days cowering in crevices and holes, panting with the heat, waiting for the cool night to fall before it can venture abroad. Curled up among the stones and cactuses of the Mexican desert, it is the master of its environment and fears nothing. The reptiles, by virtue of their water-tight skins and eggs, were the first vertebrates to colonise the desert. In some places, some of them still own it.

aldous huxley : ape and essence

2007-04-19T00:06:35Z

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the dumb or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, there aren't any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner's assistant leans almost amorously toward him. "Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way." And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man's humanity. And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which, while it raises our standard of living, increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for which, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of the War we don't want and yet do everything we can to bring about.

hardrockward @ 2007-01-30T18:02:00

2007-01-31T00:02:39Z

Many people who are dysgraphic will experience pain while writing. The pain usually starts in the center of the forearm and then spreads along the nervous system to the entire body. This pain can get worse or even appear when a dysgraphic is stressed. Few people who do not have dysgraphia know about this, because many with dysgraphia will not mention it to anyone. There are a few reasons why pain while writing is rarely mentioned:

- Sufferers do not know that it is unusual to experience this type of pain with writing.
- If they know that it is different from how others experience writing, they know that few will believe them.
- Those that do believe that the pain while writing is real will often not understand it. It will usually be attributed to muscle ache or cramping, and it will often be considered only a minor inconvenience.

hardrockward @ 2007-01-16T11:41:00

2007-01-16T17:41:35Z

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again, - the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn - living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards - the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak! - Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.

"God keep me! - keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.

But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.

hardrockward @ 2006-10-27T15:21:00

2006-10-27T20:28:03Z

dear friends:

i have a question for you which is extremely important to my future. please spend a minute or two providing an answer or ten and in return i will always be on your team, forever. this entails encouragement when you are having difficulties and bumming you cigarettes when you want some and always taking your side in an argument as well as many other things which i am not going to go into detail about because what really matters is not my definition of the term but yours. see? pretty good investment, i'd say. without further ado,

ways to make money without having a job, ready go

Broken Hart

2006-08-15T16:25:10Z

Chapter 1

Nancy opened her eyes. Today was the day that Gramps was going to teach her how to control the yacht! She couldn't wait until 9:00, when Gramps was going to teach her.

She stuck her head in Gramps's door. Gramps wasn't there, so she skipped off to the kitchen. Gramps wasn't in sight. Nancy frowned. "Looking for anybody, 'little one?", asked a hoarse voice. Nancy spun around, and looked into the shining blue eyes and smiling face of Gramps.

Nancy uttured one sound. "Gramps!", she shouted. "Yes, little girl of ten years, it is me.", answered Gramps quietly. "What time is it?" questioned Nancy hopefully. "It is 8:43, little one." "Ooooh, I just can't stand the suspense", moaned Nancy. Gramps just smiled. "We will go soon, little one."

Chapter 2

"We're finally here!", shouted Nancy happily.

They were at the yacht club. "This is sooo exiting." "Yes, little one," said Gramps. "Now watch me." So for the next three hours, Gramps taught and Nancy learned. Finally Nancy looked up and said, "I get it. Can I take the Ocean Spray out in the bay?" "Well," said Gramps doubtfully, "Only if I go with..."

"O.K., O.K., you can come with me."

"Well then, let's take 'er out.", said Gramps. Nancy was already at the dock.

Chapter 3

"That was way cool", breathed Nancy, as she and Gramps drove home. "I have to tell all my friends at school about it!"

Gramps just said, "Yes, little one."

Nancy said: "Gramps, you know that boat that was out in the river? And you know the people that were in it? They looked awfully suspichious, I mean, they had on hats and sunglasses and...", Nancy's voice trailed off. Gramps looked at her. "Little one, it is a very hot day." "But-", She looked at Gramps who was frowning and shaking his head. There was just no arguing with Gramps.

Chapter 4

Seven days and nights came, forming a week. It was on the eighth day that Nancy remembered the suspichious looking people on the boat. She had had a nightmare about it...She had been lying in bed. She couldn't fall asleep. All of a sudden, a sailboat materialized through the wall. There was a man and a woman on board. The woman reached out a hand. "Come," she whispered. "Come with us, little Nancy Hart." Nancy started walking toward them, but was stopped by a glass wall. The man and the woman both started laughing. Their laughter was cruel and evil. The woman's voice was sweet. "Thank you for touching that wall, honey." Then the man's voice came, "Now you are in our power forever!" Then they laughed again.

Chapter 5

Nancy opened her eyes. The man and woman were still there! She blinked her eyes. The woman was gone, but the man was still there. Nancy squinted up at him. Now she saw it was Gramps.

"Gramps," she said dreamily, "Can I go out on the yacht today?"

Chapter 6

The time was 8:40. Nancy and Gramps were at the dock, getting on the boat. "I wonder if I'll see those people again," thought Nancy to herself. Then she dismissed the idea, and started to pull up the anchor.

Chapter 7

When Nancy and Gramps got out on the river, Nancy started thinking about the couple again. She wasn't sure if they were real, or a dream. All of a sudden she heard Gramps say, "Ship ahoy! Starboard side," Nancy looked over to the right and saw the couple. She fainted.

Chapter 8

Nancy sat up. She scanned the room. Nancy was in the ship's cabin. Gramps was in the bunk beside her. He was groaning and moaning pitifully.

"What's wrong?" Nancy inquired uneasily.

"Poison...man...suspishus...woman...be careful..." Gramps whispered hoarsley. Those were the last words he said. Gramps was dead.

Chapter 9

Nancy didn't remember crying, or shaking Gramps, or trying to get Gramps to get up. She just remembered that Gramps was dead, and that she was going to get revenge, no matter what. She hurled herself against the door. It didn't open. She backed up, furius. She tripped over something, and bumped her head. She managed a smile. "I guess I got some sense knocked into me!" She walked calmly up to the door, turned the knob, and pulled. The door didn't open. Then, on a whim, she pushed the door (she was still holding the knob) and walked out on to the deck.

Chapter 10

Nancy smiled. She had noticed the couple's boat about five minutes ago. Now they were shrieking and pointing at something in the water, thier eyes wide.

Nancy drove over to the thing in the water. It was a rubber shark. Nancy picked it up it was

hardrockward @ 2006-08-09T16:56:00

2006-08-09T20:57:13Z

When I was at school I learnt about a King -- one of the Henrys, the one who had Becket murdered -- and he swore when he saw his birthplace burnt by his enemies that because God had done that to him, 'because You have robbed me of the town I love most, the place where I was born and bred, I will rob You of that which You love most in me.' Odd how I've remembered that prayer after sixteen years. A King swore it on his horse seven hundred years ago, and I pray it now, in a hotel room at Bigwell-on-Sea -- Bigwell Regis. I'm going to rob you, God, of what you love most in me. I've never known the Lord's Prayer by heart, but I remember that one -- is it a prayer? Of what you love most in me.

What do you love most? If I believed in you, I supposed I'd believe in the immortal soul, but is that what you love? Can you really see it there under the skin? Even a God can't love something that doesn't exist, he can't love something he cannot see. When he looks at me, does he see something I can't see? It must be lovely if he is able to love it. That's asking me to believe too much, that there's anything lovely in me. I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school -- a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire. All my life I've tried to live in that illusion -- a soothing drug that allows me to forget I'm a bitch and a fake. But what are you supposed to love then in the bitch and the fake? Where do you find that immortal soul they talked about? Where do you see this lovely thing in me -- in me, of all people? I can understand you can find it in Henry -- my Henry, I mean. He's gentle and good and patient. You can find it in Maurice who thinks he hates, and loves, loves all the time. Even his enemies. But in this bitch and fake where do you find anything to love?

Tell me that, God, and I'll set about robbing you of it for ever.

How did the King keep his promise? I wish I could remember. I can remember nothing more about him than that he let the monks scourge him over the tomb of Becket. That doesn't sound like the answer. It must have happened before.

Henry's away again tonight. If I go down into the bar and pick a man up and take him on to the beach and lie with him among the sand-dunes, won't I be robbing you of what you love most? But it doesn't work. It doesn't work any longer. I can't hurt you if I don't get any pleasure from it. I might as well stick pins in myself like those people in the desert. The desert. I want to do something that I enjoy and that will hurt you. Otherwise what is it but mortification and that's like an expression of belief. And believe me, God, I don't believe in you yet, I don't believe in you yet.

Graham Greene
The End of the Affair

this would make a good life philosophy

2006-07-06T16:23:49Z

politics

2005-10-11T20:35:57Z

"The Good Fairy, who visits the cradles of the privileged, is often the Bad Fairy in a luminous disguise. She comes loaded with presents; but her bounty, all too often, is fatal. To Urbain Grandier, for example, the Good Fairy had brought, along with solid talents, the most dazzling of all gifts, and the most dangerous--eloquence. Spoken by a good actor--and every great preacher, every successful advocate and politician is, among other things, a consummate actor--words can exercise an almost magical power over their hearers. Because of the essential irrationality of this power, even the best-intentioned of public speakers probably do more harm than good. When an orator, by the mere magic of words and a golden voice, persuades his audience of the rightness of a bad cause, we are very properly shocked. We ought to feel the same dismay whenever we find the same irrelevant tricks being used to persuade people of the rightness of a good cause. The belief engendered may be desirable, but the grounds for it are intrinsically wrong, and those who use the devices of oratory for instilling even right beliefs are guilty of pandering to the least creditable elements in human nature. By exercising their disastrous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which most human beings live and from which it is the aim of purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion to deliver them. Moreover, there cannot be effective oratory without oversimplification. But you cannot oversimplify without distorting the facts. Even when he is doing his best to tell the truth, the successful orator is ipso facto a liar. And most successful orators, it is hardly necessary to add, are not even trying to tell the truth; they are trying to evoke sympathy for their friends and antipathy for their opponents. Grandier, alas, was one of the majority. Sunday after Sunday, in the pulpit of St. Peter's, he gave his celebrated imitations of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, of Demosthenes, of Savonarola, even of Rabelais--for he was as good at derision as at righteous indignation, at irony as at apocalyptic thunder."

Aldous Huxley

"First of all, if you're depending on a ring tone or a vibration to prove you're a playa, then believe me, brotha, you are not a playa -- you hustlin' backward."

R. Kelly

"I blow my nose after work, I drool in my sleep and my shit stinks."

Evangeline Lilly

from "the sword of the sun" : italo calvino

2005-06-24T20:48:13Z

"This is a special homage the sun pays to me personally," Mr. Palomar is tempted to think, or, rather, the egocentric, megalomaniac ego that dwells in him is tempted to think. But the depressive and self-wounding ego, who dwells with the other in the same container, rebuts: "Everyone with eyes sees the reflection that follows him; illusion of the sense and of the mind holds us all prisoners, always." A third tenant, a more even-handed ego, speaks up: "This means that, no matter what, I belong to the feeling and thinking subjects, capable of establishing a relationship with the sun's rays, and of interpreting and evaluating perceptions and illusions."

Every bather swimming westward at this hour sees the strip of light aimed at him, which then dies out just a bit beyond the spot where his arm extends: each has his own reflection, which has that direction only for him and moves with him. On either side of the reflection, the water's blue is darker. "Is that the only nonillusory datum, common to all: darkness?" Mr. Palomar wonders. But the sword is imposed equally on the eye of each swimmer; there is no avoiding it. "Is what we have in common precisely what is given to each of us as something exclusively his?"

The sailboards slide over the water, cutting with sidelong swerves the land wind that springs up at this hour. Erect figures hold the boom with arms extended like archers', competing for the air that snaps the canvas. When they cross the reflection, in the midst of the gold that enshrouds them the colors of the sail are muted and the outline of opaque bodies seems to enter the night.

"All this is happening not on the sea, not in the sun," the swimmer Palomar thinks, "but inside my head, in the circuits between eyes and brain. I am swimming in my mind; this sword of light exists only there; and this is precisely what attracts me. This is my element, the only one I can know in some way."

But he also thinks, "I cannot reach that sword: always there ahead, it cannot be inside me and, at the same time, something inside which I am swimming; if I see it I remain outside it, and it remains outside."

His strokes have become weary and hesitant; you would think that all his reasoning, rather than increasing his pleasure in swimming in the reflection, is spoiling it for him, making him feel it as a limitation, or a guilt, or a condemnation. And also a responsibility he cannot escape: the sword exists only because he is there; and if he were to go away, if all the swimmers and craft were to return to the shore, or simply turn their backs on the sun, where would the sword end? In the disentegrating world the thing he would like to save is the most fragile: that sea-bridge between his eyes and the sinking sun. Mr. Palomar no longer feels like swimming; he is cold. But he goes on: now he is obliged to stay in the water until the sun has disappeared.