A new page on Writer’s Co-op is a biweekly show case of short pieces submitted in response to prompts. Submissions from anybody with a serious interest in writing are welcome. I needed only 12 pages to print all seven pieces from Show Case #1 in a large font, and I am glad to have read them.
Author: Mellow Curmudgeon
My blog touches on many things, often with humor and/or haiku. I have been a scientist; an engineer; an Alzheimer’s caregiver.
Two on Mortality in 3-5-3
~ Mortality #1 ~
Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
~ Mortality #2 ~
Let’s live life
with defiant joy,
all the way.
Let’s live life
with defiant joy,
all the way.
Carpe Diem Haiku Kai … #1850 dried grass
“Dried grass” in the challenge comes from Basho’s last haiku, written as he was dying. My response imagines him rallying to console his grieving companions.
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– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Layer Upon Layer
Smooth outer layer.
We see rough inner layer
when the light changes.
~ ~ ~ ~
Layers nest like Russian dolls,
when science shows us atoms.
Layers ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #283
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– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
To Age Gracefully … or Not
While Freud’s quarrelsome trio was speculative and oversimplified, he was onto something: “the” mind may be a loose association of multiple partial minds (I’ll call them “miniminds”) that jostle for conscious attention and sometimes squabble. Here is a comic misadventure due to one of my own miniminds that segues to another minimind’s way to treat toenail fungus. BTW, it’s all true.
The REAL Thin Blue Line
While defending the US Capitol on 2021-01-06, police officer Mike Fanone was dragged down its steps, beaten, zapped with a taser, and nearly killed. Apologists for mob rule (provided the mob is white) were soon rebranding the rioters as tourists who were merely rowdy. Now Fanone is defending the truth at great personal cost.
Summer Compromise
The grass in my lawn is eager to grow into a shaggy mess, so I cannot always postpone mowing until some other plants in the lawn have set seed. But I can do the next best thing and get almost another week from some blooms, plus photos and a 3-5-3 haiku.
Daylily & Chicory & Nat King Cole
Photographing wildflowers in my yard inspired new lyrics for a song about a couple “too young” to be in love. While the original sweet lyrics came true for some couples, I did not marry young. I still like that song’s lovely music and calm questioning of what “they” say, so I am glad to have lyrics that fit my situation. Wish I could sing.
Optimists, Some w/o Neurons
Being rooted makes plants easier to photograph than animals, but plants do twitch with the breeze and ruin careful compositions. Cautiously optimistic, I shoot repeatedly and hope a few images catch the air’s calm moments. This post’s haiku and images suggest that sometimes optimists win.
Henley’s Indomitable Trees
One of the few nineteenth century poems that move me is Invictus by William Ernest Henley. The poem’s spirit of unflinching defiance can be expressed in more contemporary ways. (Henley’s way is still good.) After one very contemporary way inspired by trees, we end with a quick riff on forms and freedom in poetry.
Trust, But Verify
Ronald Reagan’s remark about arms control is not an oxymoron, as I learned while coping with the discovery that my phone-friendly blog was not so friendly after all. Able to handle mobile calls with a simple flip phone (and unable to type with my thumbs), I had seen no reason to have a smartphone and had trusted the WordPress previewer to warn me if a blog post would look bad there. But then I bought a smartphone.
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– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Until recently, I used a desktop computer for all my online activities. I surrendered to modernity in 2021-05 and bought a smartphone with a stylus that would make hunt-and-peck typing tolerable in short stints. Now I use the new phone about 1% of my time online and have backup for coping with hazards like extended power outages.
Aware that many people do use their phones the way I use my desktop, I am careful to preview my blog posts as they would look on a phone. Previews cannot be perfectly accurate, but I leave some pixels of wiggle room whenever I want everything in a line of text on my desktop to appear as a single line on the narrower screen of a phone. The WP previewer displays a plausible phone rendering, and I change my draft as needed to make posts look OK on both desktop and phone.
Wanting to get used to my new phone w/o accidentally buying junk or installing malware, I installed my usual browser (Firefox) and browsed some familiar sites, including this blog. Oops. The fonts actually used were much larger than what I expected from the WP previews. My posts were awash in weird line breaks and required absurdly much scrolling.
© Evgenii Komissarov | 123RF Stock Photo
I tried the popular Chrome browser and found that it also rendered text much too big. After much thrashing around, I stumbled onto a simple way to make many of my posts look almost the same on my actual phone as they do in the WP phone preview. Many, yes. All, no. Here is a screenshot of part of a recent post as viewed in phone mode on WP from my desktop:
Here is the corresponding screenshot as viewed on the actual phone:
Yuck. After comparing the screenshots, I revised the post to avoid rogue line breaks (and demystify how to access my blog’s widgets) on a phone. Tentatively, I trusted the WP phone preview on my desktop. When the revision seemed ready to go live, I switched to the phone, tweaked the revision (by hunt-and-peck typing) as needed to work on the actual phone, and only then hit the [Update] button. Likewise with the [Publish] button for this post. Trust, but verify.
Is there anybody else who uses a desktop (or tablet) and has been blindsided by a clash between how things should look on a phone and how they do look? Here is the simple partial fix I stumbled upon. Us dinosaurs gotta stick together.
The [Appearance] item appears most of the way down in the menu on the left side of WP site pages. The click sequence
[Appearance]
[Customize]
[Fonts]
gave me a chance to change font sizes used to display posts.
Both [Headings] and [Base Fonts] had defaulted to [Normal] size. I set them to [Small]. While this might make text too small in some browsers on some desktops, I am sure that anybody using a desktop has already gotten used to pressing Ctrl-Plus or Ctrl-Minus as needed.
Two Slim Chances
While I have never visited the Galapagos Islands, I treasure a framed print of a photo taken there by Laura Zito, who captured a bright red crab against glistening wet black rock. What chance have I to see something close to home that looks much like that? Very slim. But still
Better Than No Chance at All
Helicopter seed
lands on shiny new asphalt.
No chance to grow here.
I walk away, then go back.
I move it to damp bare dirt.
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– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Sharing
Slow shutter needed.
Daffodil and tulip share
early morning light.
~ ~ ~ ~
There is enough for us all,
if we take less than we want.
I considered posting my photo wordlessly, with the post’s title as a hint that I have something beyond a nice image in mind. Too subtle. Compulsively explicit, I wrote a haiku. Then I expanded the haiku to a tanka.
I hesitated. The tanka’s last 2 lines might be too preachy. Then I read the Gandhi quote in a great collection of images and quotes: Our Beautiful, Broken World (curated by Mitch Teemley).
Thanks, Mitch. The time for subtlety is long gone.
Beyond Measuring the Earth
Geometry began with practical measurements over moderate distances. Boundaries of Egyptian farmers’ fields had to be restored after the Nile’s annual floods. A taut rope between two posts marked where an edge of the base of a pyramid would be laid. And so on. This prosaic technology inspired ancient Greeks to create something weird and wonderful.
People like Pythagoras and Euclid reimagined the pyramid builders’ rope as perfectly straight (not sagging a little), so thin that it had no thickness at all, and extending forever beyond the posts. Crazy. They called it a “line” and found that they could reason about such things, proving new statements by deductions from what they already knew.
Those ancient geometers discovered much that was true and good and beautiful in the imagined world of points and lines, and a few of them took the first tentative steps toward using their discoveries to help answer questions about the experienced world of posts and ropes and much else. Eratosthenes kept the promise made by “geo”+”metry” when he measured the circumference of planet Earth, even tho it was impractical to try to wrap a tape measure around it.
Modern STEM is rooted in ancient geometry (among other things), and a long hard slog has progressed from measuring the Earth to understanding it. Our understanding is not perfect and never will be, but maybe it is good enough to help us save the Earth. From us. I hope we can rise to that challenge, and that I have risen to this one:
Geometry ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #269
Image Sources
- The colorful frame around the image is upsized from my much smaller diagram for Bhaskara’s elegant proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem. The resulting fuzziness of the points and line segments is a reminder that we cannot experience the ideal perfection of geometric shapes. But we can refer to the shapes when we tell each other stories about what we experience! (Tho often hard to read w/o wrangling equations, scientific theories are among the best stories we can tell.) The colors of the line segments tie the image to the theorem’s bottom line w/o using letters that would clutter the diagram:
a² + b² = c²
- The Blue Marble image overlaid on the diagram was downloaded from NASA Visible Earth: The Blue Marble. Making NASA’s image cost a lot more than making mine. That’s OK. It was money well spent.
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– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Perpendicular: Upright or Uptight?
Calling 90 degrees a “right” angle is a little misleading. Yes, spatial coordinates should usually be based on perpendicular lines. But 90 degrees is often just one angle among many, and perpendicular may not be right for the job.
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Perpendicular ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #269
The ceiling should be perpendicular to the wall
(and the wall to the floor).
Even the klutz who built my house got it right.
The right angle for slicing a pizza depends on
how many slices are needed.
© sabelnik | 123RF Stock Photo
Willing to count a circle as a “line” perpendicular to any chosen straight line thru the center? (I am.) If so, then spatial coordinates should almost always (not just usually) be based on perpendicular lines. Want to navigate on a really big pizza? Use polar coordinates.
Haiga with Several Time Scales
Haiku poems commonly deal with events on short time scales. In a split second, the frog jumps into the pond. In minutes, the sunset fades. In days, the cherry blossoms fall. How about decades? How about millennia? They can show up too, along with the split second that a camera’s shutter is open.
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Sunlit Moment
Mums are good silk fakes.
Rock is real and will outlast
both mums and viewer.
I dithered over whether to respond to
Scale ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #268
with the material above. With small differences in format, it was posted 2020-04-17. Tho usually reluctant to repeat myself, I’ve noticed that bloggers I respect sometimes do repost things they feel are still relevant. I’ve also noticed that 11 months is quite a while on a cyberspace time scale.
Oh well. It’s rare that I settle on a combination of angle and settings that I really like before the light fades or shifts. Seize the moment.
Cautious Optimism
«Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick someone else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator.»
~ Raphael Warnock (newly elected US Senator from Georgia) in his victory speech on 2021-01-05
Mellow Curmudgeon 
