stargazer in a boat

“I want to calm down, to rest, to outlive this nonsense.”

i'm listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a "habitat restoration". when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.

This quote really got me: "The owner is a man who loves mosses, and the exercise of power. I have no doubts of his sincerity in wishing to protect them from harm, once they conformed to his landscape design.  But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the sovreignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and diminishing the possessed. If he truly loved mosses more than control, he would have left them alone, and walked each day to see them."

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

I wish you could be free in August. You can imagine that, at least! A whole month, far from the world, in the heat, the sun, the laziness, the intimacy of the body! I burst with life and desire when I think about it.

It feels like some early humans were naming things and one of them ran out of ideas.

The “Lady” in the name “ladybug” is the virgin Mary. People just cannot stop giving religious names to this bug.

That is such an interesting etymology!!!!

In French it’s “Good Lord’s Beast”

In Dutch it’s “Lieveheersbeestje”, the Good Lord’s Little Beast

I will make a beautiful life for myself no matter how long it takes. I will I will I will

May Apollo, bearer of the silver bow, strikes all the generative AI data centers with his arrows.