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GARDEN
Why do the televangelists beg and cajole me, constantly ask me for my money? Surely they must know that in Eden which they promise, we are all naked and have no pockets.
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RELEASED
It happened again last Friday as it does almost every Friday. A quick check discloses another band has released an album Live In Concert. Pause to consider the absurdity. If you are in concert the odds are astronomically in favor of your being live. I suppose someone would attend a concert where the band wasn’t…
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EARLY ARRIVAL
Autumn came on hard today the drop in temperature not unexpected in these climes, but still unwanted, forcing the closing of windows. Still, as the afternoon faded, I shouted toward the window a reminder not to go gently into night to fight the soon approaching dark. The squirrel on the lawn outside the window stood,…
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PROBLEM
Stuck in traffic yet again my mind wanders, unimpinged by the need to pay careful attention to the car on front also frozen in place. I am back in school listening carefully as the teacher explains the problem: “You are at point B and I am at point A. The points are 100 miles apart…
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THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE
The key, he knows is to eliminate the impossible. Once you do that what remains, no matter how improbable must be the truth. Holmes, as it comes out might have been right. Oliver Wendell was, but how can you know when you’ve eliminated all impossibilities? Doyle (Roddy perhaps) would note that improbabilities can look a…
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ACT IV
He knew he should not have brought the gun. He hated guns, they served no purpose in his world of words. He wanted to look at it, to stare at it, really. He thought that if he did so he might be better able to write about the senselessness of the world in which he…
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THE BLINK
In the elemental scheme of things we humans are, at best, middling. We are minute in the scale of the universe, our time not even a glimmer, and as we age, time contracts, but only in the shortening forward direction. But pity the poor hydrogen-7 isotope whose life is likely over in 30 yactoseconds, absorbing…
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WHAT IS IT NOW, PILGRIM?
It is far past time that I went on a pilgrimage. I’m not at all sure just what sort of a pilgrim I’d likely be. As a now Buddhist child of the late 60’s, the Plymouth Colony model clearly isn’t workable. And in my own late 60’s, now with a fused spine and creaky knees…
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WALKING
Today was downright exhausting, and my hour long walk along the river left me dripping and drooping. It wasn’t different than most days, same time, same place, and the usual 756 miles, according to my old friend Orion, who was watching from his usual perch, unseen, as he prefers it by day. When I was…
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OH, REALLY?
The box said all natural. That alone was nothing unusual, but it was on tomatoes. How, he wondered, could tomatoes but unnatural, or worse still partially natural, partially not. Had they cloned the tomato? Would cloning make it unnatural, and if so, how could you tell it from the original which was natural? And these…