“Film is one of the three universal languages. The other two: mathematics and music.” — Frank Capra (1897-1991)
An interesting bio-paradox from the world’s premier papyrocentric purveyor of progressive performativity:
Vast stretches of roadside have been transformed. Where there were thick clumps of grass, there are low-growing wildflowers such as black medic, birds-foot trefoil and red clover. The verges are cut two or three times a year, not 12, saving the council tens of thousands of pounds. Butterflies and other invertebrates have returned in their droves. […]
The process is simple: cut infrequently, ideally, just twice a year in spring and then late summer once plants have bloomed and seeded; remove the clippings to gradually reduce the fertility of the soil and prevent a buildup of mulch; repeat, wait, and enjoy the resurgent wildlife and flowers. […]
“As fertility declines in a soil, biodiversity increases. At first that seems a little counterintuitive because you imagine the more you pour into a soil, the more plants that can grow. That’s not how it works in the natural system. In more fertile systems, a few species dominate and they swamp and smother everything else.”
Grass cuttings are almost always left where they fall along the thousands of miles of road verges that are maintained by law in the UK. Over time, the resulting mulch increases the fertility of the soil, meaning the grass grows with increasing vigour and needs to be cut more frequently. The cut and collect method breaks the cycle. — On the verge: a quiet roadside revolution is boosting wildflowers, The Guardian, 14iii2020
“Será tan breve que ya he terminado,” — Salvador Dalí, Con la frase “Ja soc aquí”, Dalí abrió una surrealista conferencia de Prensa, El País, 25×1980
Salvador Dalí […] once gave the world’s shortest speech – six seconds in duration. He said, “I will be so brief I have already finished,” and he sat down. — Edward O. Wilson
Previously pre-posted
• A Seriously Sizzling Series of Super-Saucy Salvadisms — more good quotes by Salvador Dalí
“Watching television is like taking black spray-paint to your third eye.” — Bill Hicks
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum
The title of this incendiary intervention is a tribute to the famous Variety headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix”. However, I mean “pixels” by “pix”, not “pictures”.
«Il vino è la luce del sole tenuta insieme dall’acqua.» — Galileo (1564-1642)
“Wine is sunlight held together by water.” — Galileo
The Great Beast writes:
I witnessed a remarkable sight on the road to Chabanjong, which was here a paka rasta (that is, a road made by engineers as opposed to kacha rasta, a track made by habit or at most by very primitive methods) wide enough for carts to pass. I had squatted near the middle of the road as being the least damp and leech-infested spot available and got a pipe going by keeping the bowl under my waterproof. I lazily watched a leech wriggling up a blade of tall grass about fifteen inches high and smiled superiorily at its fatuity — though when I come to think of it, my own expedition was morally parallel; but the leech was not such a fool as I thought. Arrived at the top, it began to set the stalk swinging to and fro; after a few seconds it suddenly let go and flew clean across the road. The intelligence of and ingenuity of the creature struck me as astonishing. — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (1929), ch. 52
“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” — Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1927), ch. 15, “The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics”
“Bells are like cats and mirrors — they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.” — Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)
• «Планета есть колыбель разума, но нельзя вечно жить в колыбели.» — Константин Эдуардович Циолковский (1911)
• “Planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
The first thing to meet our eyes [on a Himalayan expedition in 1902] was what, suppose we had landed in the country of Brobdignag, only more, so, might have been the lace handkerchief of a Super-Glumdalclitch left out to dry. It was a glittering veil of brilliance of the hillside; but closer inspection, instead of destroying the illusion, made one exclaim with increased enthusiasm.
The curtain had been formed by crystalline deposits from a hot spring (38.3° centigrade). The incrustation is exquisitely white and exquisitely geometrical in every detail. The burden of the cynicism of my six and twenty years fell from me like a dream. I trod the shining slopes; they rustled under my feet rather as snow does in certain conditions. (The sound is strangely exhilarating.) It is a voluptuous flattery like the murmurous applause of a refined multitude, with the instinctive ecstatic reverence of a man conscious of his unworthiness entering paradise. At the top of the curtain is the basin from which it proceeds, the largest of several similar formations. It is some thirty-one feet in diameter, an almost perfect circle. The depth in the middle is little over two feet. It is a bath for Venus herself.
I had to summon my consciousness of godhead before venturing to invade it. The water steams delicately with sulphurous emanations, yet the odour is subtly delicious. Knowles, the doctor, and I spent more than an hour and a half reposing in its velvet warmth, in the intoxicating dry mountain air, caressed by the splendour of the sun. I experienced all the ecstasy of the pilgrim who has come to the end of his hardships. I felt as if I had been washed clean of all the fatigues of the journey. In point of fact, I had arrived, despite myself, at perfect physical condition. I had realized from the first that the proper preparation for a journey of this sort is to get as fat as possible before starting, and stay as fat as possible as long as possible. I was now in the condition in which Pfannl had been at Srinagar. I could have gone forty-eight hours without turning a hair. — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (1929)
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 