Velocity

“How miraculous and wonderful, hauling water and carrying firewood!”—Layman Pang (740–808 CE)*

Though the handcart travels faster,

direction down is still the same.

Arrival's probability—

as it has always been—is 1.

No matter how you work the sum

(acceleration, kinetic

energy, our great momentum),

we evolved to devise the gun.

The changes in the passing scenes

don’t add up to a lack of means.

(Fools who dream of surviving Mars,

should swill their drugs in smarter bars.)

No sense wondering if you're good;

draw the water and tote your wood!

Envoi

    The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

    Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

    Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.†

*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layman_Pang

†Omar Khayyám, Persian poet, astronomer, and mathematician (1048–1131), trans. Edward FitzGerald (1859).

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

A Penny for the Old Guy

Guy Fawkes, contemporary engraving (1605)

"Remember, remember the Fifth of November, / Gunpowder, treason and plot." —traditional Guy Fawkes rhyme

I chanted this ditty as a boy,

Pulling Guy on my little wagon,

To meet his bonfire fate.

Grownups smiled at my toy.

They'd taught me the tradition.

—I was, you see, just eight!

November 5, 2024

The Russian Elephant

Four-part report of a Stalin-era Soviet delegation to a scientific conference on elephants:

1. Classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism on Elephants;

2. Russia—the Elephant’s Homeland;

3. The Soviet Elephant: The Best Elephant in the World;

4. The Belorussian Elephant—Little Brother to the Russian Elephant.

—Soviet-era joke recorded in Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (London, 1990), p. 123, cited in Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York, 2002), p. 504n.