The Biggest Problem With the World is...

The biggest problem with the world is that it already existed when I was born.

The Most Annoying Typo, and Tino Martinez

There are a couple words I regularly spell incorrectly while typing, due to some quirk involving the way my brain fires my fingers at my keyboard. One of those words: into, which I regularly, and annoyingly, spell "inot." 

Every time I do this I "grr" silently to myself, and, while correcting the error, see the the "inot," and instantly—due to yet another brain misfire, this one involving an erratic form of mirror-image dyslexia, apparently—think of the name "Tino," which then makes me think of former New York Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez, who won four World Series with the Yankees between 1996 and 2000.

Which then makes me even more annoyed.

Photo: Comfort Food

I swear I smell my old childhood home and my mom in that photo.

My Childhood is Hiding in This Image

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Face Music

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"The Song of the Battery Hen"

The last post was very green. This one is more orange.

The Song of the Battery Hen

We can't grumble about accommodation:
we have a new concrete floor that's
always dry, four walls that are
painted white, and a sheet-iron roof
the rain drums on. A fan blows warm air
beneath our feet to disperse the smell
of chicken shit and, on dull days
fluorescent lightening sees us.

You can tell me: if you come by
the north door, I am in the twelfth pen
on the left hand side of the third row
from the floor; and in that pen
I am usually the middle one of three.
But even without directions, you'd 
discover me. I have the same orange-red
comb, yellow beak and auburn
feathers, but as the door opens and you
hear above the electric fan a kind of
one word wail, I am the one 
who sounds loudest in my head.

Listen. Outside this house there's an
orchard with small moss-green apple
trees; beyond that, two fields of
cabbages; then on the far side of
the road, a broiler house. Listen:
one cockerel grows out of there, as 
tall and proud as the first of the hour of the sun.
Sometimes I stop cackling with the others
to listen, and wonder if he hears me.

The next time you come here, look for me.
Notice the way I sound inside my head.
God made us all differently,
And blessed us with this expensive home.

~ Edwin Brock

Illustrated Leaf Morphology

Gah - me like:

There are more at the link, including a graphic on the many types of leaf margin.

Marco Polo, and the Missed Olympic Opportunity

If we had made marco polo an Olympic sport when the Olympics went to China - it would have been a joke with a 700-YEAR SETUP.

Disappointed, people, disappointed.

#jokefail

New Words: Mithigan

Mithigan: A mythical thate in the mythical United Thates of America.

This has been another exciting edition of "New Words." You are welcome.

(This, you may find it hard to believe, is part of a series. Hit "new words" in the tags below the post to see more. Original post, with rules, here.)

Little Australia's Religious News: Lent

The 2013 Lent season looks like it's going to be a real dud. 

Anyone know when the playoffs start?

This has been "Little Australia's Religious News." You are welcome.

6-year-old Newtown Victim Shot 11 Times Has Open Coffin Funeral

Warning: While I haven't included them here, there are very graphic descriptions of what bullets did to this little boy in this article.

Noah Pozner, 6, was one of the 20 child victims in the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. All the dead were shot between three and 11 times. Tiny Noah took 11 bullets. His mother, Veronique, insisted on an open coffin, Naomi Zeveloff reported in the Jewish Daily Forward.

[...]

When the governor of Connecticut arrived, she brought him to see Noah in the open casket. “If there is ever a piece of legislation that comes across his desk, I needed it to be real for him.” The governor wept.