He had an uncanny feeling that he would wind up at the cannery, and on the odd chance that he would turn up in the chancery, he laid down his treasures in heaven. His debts he sent to hello operator, get me Memphis on the line. 

Something that is perfectly legal today in our forwarded society, but was frowned upon in the unforgivable ignorance of the past, is to blame our woes on the bible. But still, you cannot criticize the bible. You will die the next day in a freak accident. It’s been proven — make the experiment, if you’re man or woman enough. If you lose, who’s going to mourn one less enemy to our way of life, except your family, who by the way have also been eradicated?

But let us speak of lighter things. Of dry ice, of Legs Diamond, air reduction, bromine.

There is a hypothesis that the word naptha is connected with the name of the Indo-Iranian god Apam Napat, which occurs in Vedic and in Avestic; the name means “grandson of (the) waters”, and the Vedas describes him as emerging from water golden and shining “with bright rays”, perhaps inspired by a burning seepage of natural gas.

The Upper Gonads, also known as the Ovaries of Cyprinus

The plurality of the Upper Gonads is two. To the south you have the Balls of Peen and north across a strait is Saint Mary’s Muffin. 

The current through the strait feeds fertile spawning grounds,visible from space.

The ancient geographers were ignorant of these islands, although Ptolemy may have referred to them in a contested passage in the Almagest: “Both of these gametes are haploids”.

The gonads are to be confused with the Orkneys, visited by Pytheas of Massilia in 322 BC. The Roman geographer Pomponius Mela called those islands Orcades, as did Tacitus in 98 AD, claiming that his father-in-law Agricola had “discovered and subjugated the Orcades hitherto unknown” (although both Mela and Pliny had previously referred to the islands). Entomologists usually interpret the element orc- as a Pictish tribal name meaning “young pig”. Speakers of Old Irish referred to the islands as Insi Orc “islands of the young pigs”. These are not the Upper Gonads. 

The name “Orcas” is a shortened form of Horcasitas, or Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo, the Viceroy of Mexico who sent an exploration expedition under Francisco de Eliza to the Pacific Northwest in 1791. During the voyage, Eliza explored part of the San Juan Islands. He did not apply the name Orcas specifically to Orcas Island, but rather to part of the archipelago. In 1847, Henry Kellett assigned the name Orcas to Orcas Island during his reorganization of the British Admiralty charts.

Thou art to me more sweet 

than a thousand milligrams of synthetic sucrose

thou art to me more noble

than all the defrocked priests in Babylon

thou art to me more normal

than all the split infinities ever to collapse in this world or the next

thou art to me more natural

than  the bible

Sgt. Preston and Anne of Green Gables

Battling their way out of Lord Flogg’s fog in the Londinium Tower, Batman and Alfred, in a cab, and Robin in the Batmobile, head for Ffogg’s estate to rescue Batgirl. Ffogg and Lady Peasoup, discovering their lethal fog pellets are too stale to finish off Batgirl, go for a fresh supply and learn that Batman has entered the grounds. At the dungeon, Ffogg pushes Batman down the steps and throws the fresh gas pellets after him. Robin, meanwhile, has been bitten by a deadly bee, and Lady Peasoup instructs Prudence to take him to the girl’s dorm to die while they all go to the Tower of Londinium. Dispersing the lethal fog with Anti-Lethal Fog Batspray, Batman files away at Batgirl’s chains, and Ffogg, realizing he’s pressed for time, makes final plans for escape to Argentuela in a private plane.

We all remember the legend of the naming of the artichoke. How Artemis was choked by baby Jesus, and from her eyeballs sprang the plant we in English call artichoke, and in Swahili is called Thumbelina’s Thistle.

It was too late for a clever retort.
It was too late for a clever retort.

Take it as a given that the Harried Ainu have more words for entropy than we have words for the Hairy Ainiu.

And given that if they spoke as clearly as do you and I, they wouldn’t have such a miserable existence, 

Then let me recite one episode from the transcripts collected by D. , one of the first western theologists to try to straighten out the heathens. 

We were pennies from heaven on our honeymoon. I put a drop in the tank at Leadville. A dollar on the horses in Black Diamond. I almost caught Morton’s halitosis as I was getting too big for my britches.

Was the season of the crickets in the hard drive.

Michael Gilleland
Laudator Temporis Acti

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 115 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):
What sound, what scent has been wafted to me, unseen,
from gods, from mortals, or from both together?

Ennius, Annals 451 Skutsch (tr. E.H. Warmington):
And the trumpet in terrible tones taratantara blared.

Titinius, fragment 20 Ribbeck:
Meanwhile a stinking breeze assaults the nose.

Vergil, Aeneid 3.228:
An awful sound amid foul stench.

Dante, Inferno 21.139 (tr. John D. Sinclair):
And he made a trumpet of his rear.

William Shakespeare, King John 5.2.117:
What lusty trumpet thus doth summon us?

John Milton, Paradise Lost 1.236-237
A singéd bottom all involved
With stench and smoke.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Orpheus,” lines 35-37:
What wondrous sound is that, mournful and faint,
But more melodious than the murmuring wind
Which through the columns of a temple glides?