Wooly lemmings

Douglas Adams had a few words to say about sheep:

...It was cold and windy, which was normal.
It started to rain, which was particularly normal.

A spacecraft landed, which was not.

There was nobody around to see it except for some spectacularly stupid quadraped who hadn't the faintest idea what to make of it, or whether they were meant to make anything of it, or eat it, or what. So tthey did what they did to everything, which was to run away from and try to hide under each other, which never worked.

So Long, and thanks for all the fish, chapter 1

A little later on, the protagonist takes a stab at telephathy, which can't be mind-reading, which would presuppose the existence of a mind:

...He was surprsied to find he could feel the sheep being startled by the sun that morning, and the morning before and being startled by a clump of trees the day before that. He could go further and further back, but it got dull because all it consisted of was sheep being startled by things they'd been startled by the day before.

Ibid., chapter 7

What brought that to mind is, well, this:
450 sheep leapt to their deaths in Turkey, for no obvious reason.

I just hope this is never used as an argument against evolution.

Nesting

The thing with parentheses has been going on for a long time.

And it's not limited to the post-sig poetry, tagged on to perfectly bland email messages because the words have to come out somewhere and email is better than laundry lists, albeit only marginally.

There is an issue with nested parenthetical comments in daily speech and writing. (The 1K emails sent per month; this testifies to the paperless (but not necessarily energy-saving (and what about the idea of putting solar panels on the roofs of all of California's cars?)) office.)

There is That Thing With Lisp, back in the early eighties. Having (a?) Lisp was what the coolest people did. They had the best Fortune-file printouts, too, and they didn't mind my quiche. And don't get me started about Prolog and Concurrent Prolog (God created the world in seven lines of Concurrent Prolog. And the last one was End()))))))).)

But the source is earlier. Salinger. Seymour, an introduction.

"An unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses; like this (((()))). ...I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged- buckle-legged-omens of my state of mind and body at this writing. Professionally speaking which is the only way I've ever really enjoyed speaking up (and, just to ingratiate myself still less, I speak nine lanugauges, incessantly, four of them stone-dead [...]"

I think I fell in love with the Buddy Glass (not Seymour. He's nowhere near far enough into the autism spectrum for me) at that point, a passion that has peaked and slumped, sine curve-like, forever since. It's up again, now.

Not Seymour. He's dead, of course. But he's also deified, sanctified, beatified, and married to Muriel (she of the nailpolish). Buddy is accessible, or at least, accessible to anyone sitting on a large enough stack of books. And he makes multilingual, erudite puns, marking a verbal boundary (building a paranthetical line) between those who get it and The Rest Of Them. At fourteen, it was unbeatable.

A quarter-century later, I'm still looking for updates on that blog (Seymour, An Introduction, is as bloglike as you can get without a computer).

I find myself reclining on a nest built and padded with the straw-like remains of the paranthetical bouquet he placed at my feet. Soft. Round. And the seeds that dropped out of the flowers make the nest prettier, I think.

(((())))

Work

I'm writing from under a pile of paper which is, so help me, taller than I am.

There is stuff to be discovered here, things of importance to some people (good guyz and bad, alike). There are items of importance, things that matter and hinge on one of these piles. The other is so inconsequential as to produce only yawns. Much of both is illegible, all is rather urgent, urgent enough to make it unlikely that I'll lie in a hammock in the back yard to knit and watch the glorious summer sky, night or day, for a while. Even if I do buy a hammock... ...which is on my todo list.

On the other hand, I may break some personal and world records, here, in terms of speed and accuracy, not to mention ability to decipher impossible handwriting. Translation as a telepathic discipline, somewhere between channeling and prophecy, scrawls becoming significance, fueled by coffee.

It is a summer of discovery, for me - what I do when the workflow is infinite, how exciting it still is for me to plunge my tin dipper into the stream.