The old guy put down his beer.
Son, he said, (and a girl came over to the table where we were:
asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink.)
Son, I am going to tell you something
The like of which nobody was ever told.
(and the girl said, I've got nothing on tonight;
how about you and me going to your place?)
I am going to tell you the story of my mother's
Meeting with God. (and I whispered to the girl: I don't have a room, but maybe...)
She walked up to where the top of the world is
And He came right up to her and said
So at last you've come home.
(but maybe what?
I thought I'd like to stay here and talk to you.)
My mother started to cry and God
Put His arms around her.
(about what?
Oh, just talk...we'll find something.)
She said it was like a fog coming over her face
And light was everywhere and a soft voice saying
You can stop crying now.
(what can we talk about that will take all night?
and I said that I didn't know.)
You can stop crying now.
Do the Dead Know what Time It Is? - Kenneth Patchen.
Parrot Passionately And Dramatically Sings 'Here Comes The Sun'
Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 short film Powers of Ten is one of the best bits of science communication ever created…and a personal favorite of mine. Here’s a description of the original film
Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward — into the power hand of the sleeping picnicker — with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.
As an homage, the BBC and particle physicist Brian Cox have created an updated version that reflects what we’ve learned about the universe in the 45 years since Powers of Ten was made. The new video zooms out to the limits of our current observational powers, to about 100 billion light years away, 1000X wider than in the original. (I wish they would have done the zoom in part of the video too, but maybe next year!)
And if you’d like to explore the scales of the universe for yourself, check out the Universe in a Nutshell app from Tim Urban and Kurzgesagt — you can zoom in and out as far as you want and interact with and learn about objects along the way
Checking In With Baritone Mariusz Kwiecień At His New Opera House
For a long time, a primary goal of the artist was to violate taboos. Then the culture simply ran out of ways to shock
Coming in 2022
Quite a few preview pieces are now up, of what books we can look forward to this year, including:
- 2022 in books: highlights for the year ahead by Justine Jordan and Katy Guest in The Guardian
- Fiction to look out for in 2022 by Alex Preston in The Observer
- The 21 Most Anticipated Books of 2022 in Time
- The Best Books of 2022: A Preview by Chloe Shama in Time
- The 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2022 at Oprah Daily
- Books 2022: A pick of of what's coming up at the BBC
- The best science books coming your way in 2022 by Simon Ings in the New Scientist
- The 30 Most Anticipated SFF Books of 2022 by Christina Orlando at Tor.com
- 2022 Upcoming Japanese Fiction Releases by Alison Fincher
