I found out yesterday that yesterday is (was) Ampersand Day, also known as Jour d'&. I wish I had known sooner. I am very fond of the & and would have liked to have done something special to mark the event. I'm not sure what. Cake definitely. Hats, maybe. Replacing all punctuation with &s is a possibility.

Me, teacher! Call on me!

The BBC, in a 'news from the Empire' report, claims Delhi's temperature showed - 43.5C. Why did it feel hotter?

Stupid answer #1: Because they reported in in Celsius, and Americans don't have a clue, so if you say 43.5C is hot (actually a fraction over 110°F), we believe it. Stupid answer #2: It was hotter–the official measuring device broke at 43.5C. Stupid answer #3: Because of all the well-coiffed people standing around holding microphones and emitting superheated hot air reporting on the unusually hot weather. Answer #4 (and the answer I'm going with) is 'humidity.' If I hear one more weathadoodle say the humidex 'feels like' temperature is 76° when the actual temperature is 75° while dancing around like an excited puppy or toddler who needs to go to the bathroom, I am taking said weathadoodle off to the vet to ensure they never reproduce.

Pleasant surprise.

We subscribe to The New Yorker. More accurately, my wife subscribes to The New Yorker, which she generously lets me read when I want. Mostly, I don't, more through inattention than lack of desire. When I do 'read,' I look at Shouts and Murmurs and cartoons.

In spite of writing poetry myself (and sometimes short stories), I never read the poetry or fiction in the magazine. No reason–just don't. But on Monday, after writing a poem about the cover, I was browsing and saw a poem. For some reason, I said to myself Self, you should read this poem.

Self did. Self (the reading self) was laugh-out-loud highly entertained, then (the writing self) hugely depressed, and then (senior self) had mixed feelings, as the author (Rita Dove) is almost my age, and still writing kick-butt poetry. So she is a model, an inspiration, but at the same time reminding me that I've got a long way to go if I want to be anything more than an 'aspiring poet-humorist.'

If you want to read the poem, and don't have access to The New Yorker, you can read Just Kidding courtesy of The Metropolitan.

The consciousness report.

Suddenly, consciousness is a big thing, it seems. But scientists don't seem to be using their full wattage on it. Some examples:

Well, duh.

Popular Mechanics: We May Be Surrounded by Trillions of Conscious Beings, Research Suggests—And They Aren’t Human.

Even I know there are fewer than nine billion people on earth, so the second half of that headline is..., well, let's be kind and say 'unnecessary.'

If I was being unkind I would have said 'stupid.'

Either way, nine billion consciousnesses subtracted from trillions leaves a whole lotta consciousness left over.

Stop making me do your math homework for you, Popular Mechanics!

Echo chambers, solipsism, and that way lies madness.

Scientific American raises an interesting conundrum: How Do I Know I’m Not the Only Conscious Being in the Universe?

Well, strikes me if I'm reading something I didn't write, and it's logical, organized, and all that other good stuff, there should be some consciousness behind it. Or maybe the writer was using a 'reflexive I,' meaning the writer I, not the reader I, and throwing his barbaric yawp out into the void for no particular reason. Tricky.

Yeah, but what about scientists?

More consciousness, this courtesy of Science Daily: Scientists are seriously asking if bees and ChatGPT are conscious.

Seriously, Like, seriously? Really? What are you, fifteen? But we can be serious, too. Bees: yes. A.I.: heck, no. When A.I. (or scientists, for that matter) can do an elaborate dance that tells the rest of the hive where a large supply of pollen is, then we'll talk.

And fine tuning the discussion, is it the individual bee that has consciousness, or is the colony (sometimes called a charm)?

While we're on the subject of critters,

or, dogs v. cats.

Keeping that thought alive (i.e., while I still have it), I wonder if scientific consciousness speculation extends to domestic animals like dogs and cats? I have never lived with dogs, but I have lived with cats. I wish I could be as conscious as my cats, as self aware. They understand. They may not act upon their understanding, but surprisingly, they do react often.

But the thought that prompted this line of thought: it is commonly accepted wisdom that dogs age seven years for each year we age.

How do we know? Are scientists researching the claim? Did some dog roll over, and in return for having his tummy scratched, spill the beans on the age thing? Are there dog calendars, and if so, how many months are the 52 days divided into, and do they have something as dumb as February?

But here's the real question—do we have any equivalent for felines, that is, cat years? Or did the cats strike a deal with God where they didn't get their own age system, but instead they got eight extra lives?

Whatever happened to?

zero inbox
rice cookers
Barney & Friends

an incomplete chronicle.

or, just about the time Rosy-Fingered Dawn was thinking about getting up and going to work.

tree across the street

I've mentioned the oak tree before (yeah, yeah, a quarter million leaves, six stories tall, branches, blather, blather) but I suddenly realized that in the time I've been looking at it, the tree has added 20 rings, but the trunk doesn't seem to be any thicker. It's sad that the only way I could get to see those rings is to chop the tree down. It's also sad that the tree is too big to move (not that I want to). It's amazing the strides tree-folk made in moving progressively larger trees, but this one ain't going nowhere. Only dendrologists are going to be able to see its real story, and they probably won't bother. Makes me sad.

ultraviolet and infrared

Ultraviolet and infrared light are the invisible stepchildren of the visible spectrum of light. They're relegated to the ends of the visible spectrum, requiring special devices to illuminate things like internal organs and white clothing at dances. But I'm guessing that right now as I lie here (lie then, sit now) there is ultraviolet and infrared all around me, and if so, are there creatures of some sort navigating around in the invisible light? That would be some song–'By the light/of the infrared moon...' Are infrared and ultraviolet 'on' all the time, or do they follow the rules set up for the 'visible' spectrum, only 'visible' when the visible spectrum is visible (there's a semantic rabbit hole I'm not going down—what do you call the visible spectrum when you can't see it?).
But I'm also wondering if infrared and ultraviolet are really at the end of the spectrum, or if there's maybe something beyond them, let's call them infraviolet and ultrared, for lack of an imagination, that we can't perceive because they're so far out there. Are they there? If so, why? Are they good for anything? Are there any scientists on the case?

light

A totally different thought mess. If light is either a particle or a wave, does it cause turbulence when it passes through air? Can it be a particle and a wave at the same time? Is light really there if it doesn't bounce off a surface or is seen by some kind of receptor? If there's sound waves in a brightly lit room, do the waves ever distort each other?

shopping carts

You know, shopping carts are little marvels of engineering (except when one of the front wheels goes cattywampus and starts wriggling all over the place, unable to hold a straight line). The carts themselves are marvelous, but whoever thought of the whole mechanism in the back, with the back of the cart swiveling up so another cart could be pushed into it, making for efficient stacking, and building in a little fragile items/toddler carrier that could fold out of the way was pure genius. Another unsung hero in the march of civilization.

rain

Less a thought and more of an observation: it's raining out. No lightning or thunder—more like a small squall or rain splatting against the house. I bet it'll be gone soon.
Yep. I was right.

teeth

Of all the animals I can think of (right now, mostly only cats and dogs) why are humans the only ones that have this particular configuration of teeth? I know, carnivores need tearing teeth, and herbivores need cutting and chewing teeth, and we're both, but our teeth seem to be a mishmash of not very efficient devices. The incisors, supposedly our tearing teeth, are flat on the business end. The canines? What do they do? Why 32? And what are wisdom teeth all about? Are there any other animals, besides maybe the great apes, that have this particular configuration? (Are humans included in the 'great ape' category? And if not, are we still great?)

This, of course, does not capture the entirety of what I was thinking in that half-hour. There were lots of little disconnected pieces (not that these pieces are particularly connected), and there's probably at least one big rumination (from the same root as ruminant [see the section on 'teeth,' above]) that slipped out of the harness and ran back into the forest in my head.

Also, of course, these are not the sequences in which these thoughts got thought (thoughted? thunk? ruminated upon?). I tried to group related thoughts, and I'm sure some individual bits escaped, in spite of my constantly thinking 'oh, that's good—remember that!' No, there was a giant mosh pit up there, each thought almost seeming to ride its own synapse, delighted to be bumping and wrestling to hang on to its space, irrespective of how close it was or wasn't to other thoughts that supported the narrative. 'Narratives are your problem,' they taunted me. 'Don't bother us when we're partying. Just be thankful we're here. If you're good we'll let you watch.'