Poor Peacocks

What’s Russia without Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shostakovich et al.,

France sans Stendhal, Victor Hugo (Helas!), Bizet, and Proust,

Finland minus Sibelius,

Poland with no Chopin,

England, no Shakespeare,

Ireland short Yeats, Wilde, Swift,

Nicaragua sin Rubén Darío?

You get the drift?

America absent Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong,

Might not feel all that great for long.

Add your own congregation to this list,

With geniuses to extemporize its gist.

Stripped of their plumes, the nations

Are poor peacocks gazing slack-beaked into the rain,

Which drown . . . no, that’s a turkey tale!

Better than fake mythology are reflective names.

Tyrants and politicians'll be forgotten in a while;

Words, art, and music won't go out of style.

Hoi polloi get jiggy in the common way, meanwhile.

Their hopes are hopeless, for their taste is vile.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

The Funnel Weaver

There is a funnel-weaving spider on my deck,

which reappears each year to build its ragged web,

although whether it is the same one I can't tell.

Perhaps an ancestral procession of such beasts?

Lurking in its tunnel, it takes a peek at me

sometimes with its eight eyes when I chance to appear.

Araneomorphae, it’s thought, evolved two hundred

million years ago and have been weaving funnels

all that time. I came much more recently myself,

but look on this arachnid pal fraternally,

which has so long known how to stave off entropy

's ever-present threat. Martingales,* though, should never

bet against thermodynamics’ Second Law, an

astrophysicist says.† So quit while I'm ahead?

*See Roger Mansuy, "The Origins of the Word ‘Martingale.’" Electronic Journal for History of Probability and Statistics 5, no. 1 (June 2009). Originally, it referred to a  betting strategy popular in 18th-century France. Cf. Jacques Rozier’s 2001 film Fifi Martingale, starring the lovely Lili Vonderfeld as Fifi.

†Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015), recognized "for his ground-breaking work on black hole entropy, which launched the field of black hole thermodynamics."

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Imitations (cont'd): "Einstein Hair"

Tempted to let my hair grow like Einstein's—

Not pretending to any scientific emulation,

But simply because it's more convenient

And might even look better—

I find that I have a genetic condition

Called Uncombable Hair Syndrome (UHS),

Cheveux incoiffables (in French), or "spun-glass hair":

"While sometimes observed with other disorders,

it is believed [to be] an isolated disease."†

There's no treatment, just use soft brushes and gentle conditioners.

I guess I'll do as I please!

Heinrich Hoffman's "Struwwelpeter"(1845/61)

† Ü. Basmanav, F. Buket; Cau, Laura; Tafazzoli, Aylar; et al. (December 2016). "Mutations in Three Genes Encoding Proteins Involved in Hair Shaft Formation Cause Uncombable Hair Syndrome". American Journal of Human Genetics. 99 (6): 1292–1304.

Tuesday, July 15, 2025