Airplane Poem

Planes with their moomin faces
Creep along the sky.
That grand hum, the buzz

Of flight's friction, of jets,
Is the music of the spheres.
The chanting of monks, the drone.

The music of the spheres.

Blue

The sky is the band of the rainbow in which we always live. This is rather more true literally than it is metaphorically.

Chromosome

Wordsworth said ‘the child is father to the man.’ But he was pre-Mendel, and didn’t know any better. The true father to the man is this miniature tangle of worm-arms, this line of blotchy asterisks.

Lunar

The moon, bubblewrapped in craters.

Silvan

The big trees move with an underwater slowness in this forceful summer wind. There's a slippage of scale in the eye: the cloud slots beneath the sun, and the trees are seaweed swaying in uncontaminated waters.

Raspberry beret

The Language Log Dinosaur (as I like to think of him) makes the interesting point that 'no natural language uses the "blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound as a phoneme.' It's worth pondering why not -- for although it may be a noise too laborious to form (poking out tongue, coordinating the labial, getting the breathing right) to be able to fit easily into the flow of normal discourse, it stands very well on its own. Which is to say: 'It is un-["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound]-believable' doesn't flow well enough to be selected for communication (unlike 'un-fucking-believable'), nevertheless 'My opinion of that? ["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound]. That's my opinion' would be a completely ordinary piece of expression.

So, ["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound] is a part of speech. But wait, given that it occurs in speech (like 'I' and 'Mm!'), in what way is this not a phoneme?

Machiavellicon

Difficult to know which image of Machiavelli to prefer: this from the title page of the first (1532) edition of The Prince:

that makes him look like a Klingon, or this bust from the Palazzo Vecchio


that not only turns him into a black man, but puts his head on his shoulder the wrong way round, for that extra-diabolical, exorcist-neckworkout look.

On balance, I think the latter.