BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:THIS & THAT (BUT MOSTLY THIS)

DEATH RAYS

 "The most spectacular of the proposed application 
of electricity was the death ray, a concentrated
beam of electricity that could destroy people,
vehicles, or structures. H.G.Wells is usually 
credited with first imagining the death ray 
wielded by the invading Martians in his 1898 
War of The Worlds, and may have been inspired by 
the discovery of x-rays a few years earlier." 

John J. Corn and Brian Hoppigan. Yesterday's 
Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future 
(The John Hopkins University Press, 1984)
**

ON GOOGLE & OUR SENSE OF THE PRESENT

“Teaching students nurtured on Google, it’s often 
worrying how weak their grasp of chronology is: 
the cybersphere may be geographically vast and 
marvelously interconnected, but it is happening in 
an eternal present.”

Marina Warner. “Wimple Networks” in The New York 
Review of Books (June 23, 2022)

**
HOW TO PLAY THE STOCK MARKET

“If you are ready and able to give up everything
 else, and  will study the market and every stock 
listed there as carefully as a medical student 
studies anatomy, and will glue your nose to the 
ticker tape at the opening of every day of the year 
and never take it off till night; if you can do 
all that, and in addition have the cool nerve of 
a  gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and
 the courage of a lion -- you have a Chinaman's
 chance.”

       Bernard M. Baruch
**

GHOSTS

“Almost everything in the room will survive you. To
the room you are already a ghost, a pathetic soft 
thing, coming and going.”
                                   Don Paterson

Don Paterson. Best Thought, Worse Thought
Graywolf Press, 2008)
**

BIRDS & HOW THEY SLEEP

“Birds can be seen sleeping while perched on a branch, 
standing on one foot or clinging to bark. Some even 
sleep while flying, studies show that birds can let
one side of their brains sleep while the other side 
remains awake. They may also restrict full rapid eye 
movement (REM) sleep to only a part of the brain at 
a time, allowing them to maintain a standing posture 
while grabbing those deep zzz’s…”

Helen James, curator of birds, National Museum 
of Natural History . “Ask Smithsonian”  in 
Smithsonian Magazine (April/May 2022).
**

HEAT & THE HUMAN BODY

“The human body has evolved to shed heat in two main 
ways. Blood vessels swell, carrying heat to the skin 
so it can radiate away and sweat erupts onto the skin, 
cooling it by evaporation. When those mechanisms fall, 
we die. It sounds straightforward; it’s actually a 
complex, cascading collapse.”

Elizabeth Royte. “Too Hot To Live” in 
National Geographic (July 2021)


**

THE INTERNET

“The internet is the superhighway of 
grammatically incorrect moral outrage.”

Kathryn Borel. Interview with Nora Ephron 
in The Believer (March 2012)

**

ON PUNCTUATION 

Punctuation is pointless   Commas trip us up. 
Colons are intestines leading from little to 
less  Semicolons neither one thing nor the other  
Quotation marks to be purged of irony and ostentation    
Dashes fall over their own feet  The long dash is 
afraid to speak its mind.  Inverted commas are 
plainly bent    Question marks are commonly rude 
and exclamations      Accents remain in use until 
defunct by natural wastage    Hyphens serve only 
to prevent mis-conception    Italics are foreign 
and to be treated as such    Brackets encourage 
second thoughts     The full stop is a last resort.

D.J. Enright . Interplay: a kind of commonplace 
book(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
**


PUNCTUATION (a reply to Mr. Enright)

Ending a sentence without a period is pointless
Why do we need the question mark?
Mary Norris, The Grammar Detective, decided 
to tail the commas.
“   Dashes fall over their own feet  The long 
dash is afraid to speak its mind” –- tell it 
to Emily Dickinson.
I decided to staple the [brackets]
**

A VERY BRIEF WEATHER REPORT
Sunless
 ...unless.

LJP