Visiopoetics

RIGHTS
+ NIGHTS
———–
PRISON

This week in misogyny: a pregnant Iowa woman was arrested for attempted feticide after falling down stairs, and pregnant inmates in Britain suffered some pretty horrendous abuse.

I don’t have a joke here, I just think this stuff is wildly under-reported in news media because most women who get mistreated as women are too ashamed to talk about it.

Sadly, I have missed my calling as a Sesame Street translator.

Click on “Russia,” and then on “Ulitsa Sezam” to hear the Sesame Street theme a la Rusky. This raises the question: why does everything sound sad in Russian? Not in the language (which is “A Fish Called Wanda” sexay), but in the preferred musical arrangements. If you listened without watching the video and you knew none of the words, you would think this was a sad song from the melody and accompaniment alone.

It also sounds suspiciously like “Antiochus,” but I can’t find an online copy with which to properly underscore the exquisite irony of this similarity.

Exhibit B that happy Russian children can make any song sound tragic. Here they are singing, “We wish you happiness.” Not, contrary to the sound of it, “You shot my dog.” Who knew?

In happier news, I think I want to move to Egypt. Look at all those bright, happy kids on Alam Simsim! Bonus points for most fun-sounding translation of Sesame Street.

Updated for late winter/early spring (yes it is so spring, or nearly — shh). Please enjoy my refreshed exhibit at the Millmont Grille, locally owned and operated behind the Barracks Road Shopping Centre.

As the clearly scrawled business card taped to a painting in this exhibit reads, art –> $ –> Haiti. Here’s how this works: you write a check to one of these lovely aid organizations for Haiti relief, and I accept that check as payment for a painting. The added incentive to engage in this behavior is, I’ll give you a discount on the listed price of the art.

This is not Kristof’s usual tone, but it’s too creative and sculpted to read in smirky silence. (1) You must read it, and (2) you must read it aloud, and (3) you must read it aloud to somebody else. If you are Nick Kristof, you must read it on the radio. If you are somebody who would actually read my blog, but your eyesight is bad, call me and I will read it to you.

ROCK
+ ROCK
———
LOCKE

To paraphrase John Locke: Sic semper tyrannis, baby.

Bras kill, a friend who is a breast cancer survivor recently told me.

No, they don’t, the American Cancer Society responded.

Actually, they save lives, Elena Bodnar expounded.

Although it is not as funny as a brilliant Ukrainian bombshell managing to plaster lingerie across multiple Nobel laureates’ faces in public, the grand irony here is how particularizing reason killed a good general intuition.

The intuition was this: the patriarchy is making me sick. The particular way in which this intuition was hypothesized was, “wearing a bra caused my cancer.” Causality is an empirical question, and the data answers that this hypothesis is false. The particular claim is completely bogus.

But that doesn’t make the intuition bad. The patriarchy is making you sick — just not in this particular way, through this particular causal path.

Nonetheless the myth persists, precisely because the intuition was correct — because the patriarchy makes us sick. Honoring the intuition that made the myth popular in the first place, is the most effective way to debunk it. But it’s not what the cancer industry will do, because they’re more interested in painting everything pink “for a cure!” than in asking why some common consumer goods are toxic.

2010-02-09 Four-Horodecki Entanglement Poet

The judges have chosen a winner in the Four-Horodecki
Entanglement Limerick Competition, which asked for a limerick to
honor the study “Quantum Entanglement,” Ryszard Horodecki, Pawel
Horodecki, Michal Horodecki and Karol Horodecki, Reviews of
Modern Physics, vol. 81, no. 2, 2009, pp. 865-942.
http://bit.ly/4ENWEo

The winner is INVESTIGATOR NAN SWIFT, who wrote:

This theory, still quasi-newfangled,
Made some brilliant minds become mangled.
Horodeckies (united!)
Now seem to have righted
Some thoughts that were badly entangled.

Here’s the offering from LIMERICK LAUREATE MARTIN EIGER:

The mathematical theory is good.
But in labs, we don’t see what we should.
Why doesn’t a quantum
Behave as we want ‘em?
If we could detect it, it would.

———————————————————-
2010-02-10 Elephant Origin Competition

Elephants inspire this month’s limerick competition. To enter,
compose an original limerick that illuminates the nature of this
report:

“A Simple and Inexpensive Molecular Method for Sexing and
Identification of the Forensic Samples of Elephant Origin,” Sandeep K.
Gupta, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Lalji Singh, Journal of Forensic Sciences,
vol. 51, no. 4, July 2006, pp. 805-7. http://bit.ly/9oMIiO

“The population of the Asian elephant is being dramatically reduced due
to poaching of the ivory from the male. As poaching occurs in remote
forests, it often takes weeks or longer for it to be discovered and it
is therefore often very difficult to determine the sex of the
decomposed body. Data suggest that in the recent past, over 2000 male
elephants have been poached in South India. We have developed a
technique based on molecular markers to determine that the carcass is
an elephant and that it is a male.”

RULES: Please make sure that: (1) your rhymes actually do; and
(2) your poem is in classic, trills-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive (if we manage to send it to
the correct address) a free, perhaps elephantine, high-res PDF
issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one
entry per entrant) to:

ELEPHANT ORIGIN LIMERICK COMPETITION
c/o marca AT chem2.harvard.edu

“If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.” - William James, The Will to Believe.

William James was not talking about Charlottesvillagers on streetcorners, but he might as well have been. Considering that we have had approximately 30 snowfalls already this winter and appear to be in for yet more this coming week, I feel compelled to do my part to help the community. From under an electric blanket by the space heater.

Alternative ice and snow removal methods that my city, which is broke, should consider after the next (impending) snowfall of Snowpocalypse 2010:

1. blowtorches
2. school cancellations plus aerial drizzling of shaved ice syrups
3. thirsty cacti
4. hot sponges
5. free plows
6. release of soul-crushing depression as a social contagion, leading salty tears to flow over impassable streets, obviating need for continual re-applications of road salt
7. time

But really if you’re elderly or disabled and need help clearing snow, call 434-970-3333. Despite being broke, Charlottesville City has people for that.

HEART
+ HEARTH
+ SAW
+ SPENT
————
WITNESS

Gil Scott-Heron is new here, breaking the ice blossoms.