No one can be serious all the time, not even me, so this post will consist of a couple of silly riddles, a cute animal picture, and a poem.
Question: What is a metaphor?
Answer: It’s for all those times when only a meta will do.
Question: What is a catastrophe?
Answer: A catastrophe is what you have to pay after the catastro.
As far as I know, those are original. They popped into my head while I was driving, but I might have heard them decades ago and they just decided to swim up to the surface of my consciousness. I’m sure there’s a website where you could solve the question.
Continuing my non-serious theme, here’s the cute animal picture. Can you identify the animal?
It’s a wild chinchilla. I took the photo in Machu Pichu. According to Wikipedia, they are crepuscular mammals, which I suppose means that they move around mainly at dusk. I snapped him around 11 a.m., so this guy was up very early. He was sitting in a gap in the ruins caused by an earthquake, about 15 ft. (5 meters) away, and didn’t seem to mind a bunch of tourists oohing and ahhing over him. The Incas are world famous for their large irregular stone construction techniques, but they also used coursed stone, with equal sized blocks, for some important buildings, though as you can see here, it is not as stable. The buildings made of irregular fitted blocks have not shifted at all.
This is still a fairly short post, so I will bulk it up with a poem from my archives. The poem could be considered serious, but it’s short.
Your Poised Hand
1
These clothes my former lover made
Fit even better as they fade.
2
There’s frequently a lot of dust
in what we think is solid sand.
In finding out you never trust
your eye or how it feels in hand.
To quench such curiosity,
fling it to the wind! You’ll see
the powder, born in falling grit,
billow, and abandon it.
Then you’ll know exactly just
how much rock and how much dust
were in that pile of so-called sand,
lately lying in your poised hand.
3
Exactly what you had will then
be known, and never known again.
The clothes she made are wearing thin.
© 2009 Edmund Pickett
(This poem may be copied or forwarded, as long as
you retain the copyright notice and author’s name.)
Tags: chinchilla, poem, riddles, Your Poised Hand