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Whaddup. Itās the flu your four-year-old brought home for spring break. Are you gonna let me in or what? Youāre hoping I leave you alone? You booked a family trip to Wolf Lodge Water Park? The deposit is nonrefundable?
Listen, I just KOāed two dozen preschoolers like complimentary chips and dip at Casa Azteca, and now I want my entrĆ©e, capisce? Vis-Ć -vis for the next week or so, this is my house. And lemme tell you something—Michelangelo had marble. Da Vinci had paint. I have fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. And in three days, your GI tract will be my magnum opus.
Even if I wanted to, which I donāt, Iām way too contagious to pass you by. Iāve literally spent a millennia evolving my DNA to inflict maximum carnage on your O-ring. The fact weāre even having this conversation means Iām already prancing through your upper respiratory system, painting the walls with flu.
What Iām saying is the chain reaction has begun. Thereās no stopping the shitstorm descending upon your world. Think of me as Franz Ferdinand, the flu.
Not a WWI buff?
Why clocks need to follow the tempo of nature.
The post A Revolution in Time appeared first on Nautilus.
by Dave Rollo
Imagine a landscape with some of the richest wildlife habitats in North America. Settlements are scarce and water is plentiful. Birds dot the skies, mammals abound on the ground, and fishes fill the rivers and lakes.
Thatās Tippecanoe County, Indiana. In 1800.
The countyās transformation over the past two centuries would make it unrecognizable to its original inhabitants. Today, much of Tippecanoe consists of flat plains of fertile soils.
The post Water Theft in the Heartland: The Case of Tippecanoe County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers? Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an āaxis of evilā intent on harming us,... Read more
Source: There Is Only One Spaceship Earth appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Callie Siskelās Two Minds is neither minimalist nor maximalist, but the spareness and efficiency speak volumesāand sometimes speak in long lines, sometimes shortāmaking an art of saying as little as possible, but crucially no less. Whatās left out presses upon what remains, and what remains is both substantial and hard as stone. Hereās the beginning of āInvitation,ā which begins with an invitation:
My initials curled inside the oval like three robins
crowding a tree hollow.
The cardstock was beveled, the envelopes lined in airy pink paper.
My father was dying
quietly like the sound of his pen lifting
then touching down again.