Happy Belated New Year!!!!!!!!!! or RETURNING AFTER AWHILE

I finally finished The Singularity Is Near. If even one-hundredth-thousandth of what Kurzweil imagines happens, the future, not too distant, will be quite a place to live in for hundreds of years each.

I've begun reading, writing and having fun with haiku. I just hope I don't get too serious about it and ruin it for myself. My biggest mistake was going onto Craigslist and finding the forum, haiku hotel where people enter, read and judge each other's haiku (haiku is both singular and plural).

Here's a science haiku which few people appreciated at haiku hotel:

DNA computes
on off on off on off on
switch hitting the rose

These are two more normal ones:

for sale or for trade
one serviceable haiku—
missing a foot

snow turns to rain
my umbrella opens to
syncopated rhythms

My next science read is The Stuff Of Thought by Steven Pinker which I just shoved into my backpack to tote around Clark County with me. Today, I'll go over to the Luepke Center to play cribbage for a couple of hours. Also in my backpack is Walt Whitman's America, a book I've been carrying around for months, trying to finish. It's almost too intellectually detailed to be a fun read, but it was meant to be studied more than read for enjoyment. A man called Reynolds wrote it.

It's been awhile since I've made an entry here, but I'm not dead yet, so my mind keeps turning over these eternal [infernal] problems that mortal men have. Mark Twain knew well enough, as the following words show us.

A FEW INCONSISTENCIES

"...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!" —Mark Twain