babies are so cute we could eat them! maybe because brain circuitry for parenting evolved from systems used to regulate hunger (in ants, at least)?
Gouverneur Morris (his name, not his title), the guy who wrote the Preamble to the US Constitution (and one of the few delegates who spoke out against slavery!), died “after he had caused himself internal injuries and an infection while using a piece of whale baleen as a catheter in an attempt to clear a blockage in his urinary tract.”
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this corset stay as the appropriate implement for shoving up… well. Mistakes have perhaps been made.
…at least before he decided to sound himself to death with whalebone, he helped draw up the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 (the original design for the Manhattan street grid)1, which was described as encompassing the "republican predilection for control and balance ... [and] distrust of nature". Maybe you should’ve distrusted nature a bit more, my dude.
life is busy and i’m tired most of the time
Sleep deprivation impairs precision of waggle dance signaling in honey bees, and definitely hurts my communication skills, too.
Denying cockroaches sleep kills them - and yeah, eventually us. and causes memory loss (again, in cockroaches and presumably us)
heck, we all get so desperate to catch up on sleep when we’ve been short on it. Mosquitos experience sleep rebound. Hibernators come out of hibernation sleep-deprived.
otoh, perchance to dream
portia spiders dream (or at least experience REM sleep) - we know because spiderlings are transparent so we can see their retinal tubes moving behind their immobile lenses!
octopuses twitch colors (beautiful video) when they [dream?]
cousins, man. we have so much in common. (“I’m related to my lawn, and not by marriage.”2)
(ps bumblebees can learn to read simple “Morse code”)
Johnnieruth by Becky Birtha (a girl discovering girls)
The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain (oh the cleverness of me!)
a bunch I enjoyed from Dover’s Great American Short Stories anthology (which also had some great ones I’ve probably mentioned here before and won’t re-list now):
A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett (protecting something wild and real)
A New England Nun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (protecting our solitude and dominion over ourselves)
The Real Thing by Henry James (sometimes the fake is realer than the real, plus awkwardness and entitlement)
The Lost Phoebe by Theodore Dreiser (love and grief)
Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald (jealousy; cattiness; mistakes were made)
Hands by Yuly Daniel (written under his pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak) (guilt and death)
(I read a different translation, in Brian James Baer’s Short Stories in Russian: New Penguin Parallel Text)
But The One On The Right by Dorothy Parker - a little inner monologue about a dinner party and the people we want to speak with vs the one we don’t
Johnny One-Eye by Damon Runyan (kitty love)
ps check out Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, which includes these fantastic stories that I haven’t been able to find online (among others):
Spilled Salt by Barbara Neely
Muz and the Sphere of Memory by Xam Wilson Cartier
China by Charles Johnson
“I recognize the lion by its claw.” - Bernoulli, when he received an anonymous solution to the brachistochrone problem that turned out to be Isaac Newton (via Vicki Boykis via TW)
“I often write from remorse.” - Ruth Ozeki (via George Saunders)
“…the neutrality of major global waterways…, a deliberately manufactured situation that modern Americans inherited without remembering or understanding that it was artificial, and like everything artificial, needed to be maintained.” - Lucian Staiano-Daniels, The Straits Are Not OK
“When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall.” (Camp Century)
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