“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide
While wordifying our wounds
Thoughts congeal when bleeding
As the gathered crowd communes
The time for action is in deeding
Shared with dVerse – verbing
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Transcripts glow like neon; skill hides in a shadowy hall.
Grade-point halos polish myths, yet within the basics stall.
GPAs float like helium, tied to nothing firm,
while rounding to the hundred is now a mystery term.
Shuffling a system to drift through a soft parade of A’s,
a cargo cult of “equity” that’s built from empty praise.
Dressed up best on paper has now become the story sold,
but beyond all that glitters here, cannot become the gold.
Inspired by this article at The Argument about how schools are fudging grades for students, for a number of different reasons, with the result of a decline in the standard of education.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
2 a.m.
and that cat
is crying again
fed just thirty minutes ago
apparently
not enough
my brain is soggy
my feet are slurring
another spoonful
in the bowl
and back to bed
into lucid dreams
and erratic thinking
the universe is revealed
to me
of course
we’ve got it
all wrong
the universe
is inside out
and the earth
is all around
the edges
and the centre
of the universe
is in the middle
time and space
behave differently
as you go closer
towards the centre
under the earth
there is nothing
but hell
the more we move
towards the middle
the closer to god
we get
having this
almost fully formed
and ready to submit
to science
the cat cries again
at the end of the bed
for fuck’s sake!
A true story, as we nursed our old, sick cat back to health a couple of weeks ago, making sure that he ate whenever he wanted.
Shared with dVerse Poetics – irreverence
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Ah, teenagers!
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
From a safe, soft couch with the television on,
they blessed the wreckage with the sign of the cross;
Typed “thoughts and prayers”, hit post, job done,
they smelled no smoke, yet claimed the loss.
No call, no knocking with casseroles in hand,
just pixelated pity floating through their feeds;
Drowning in a sea they’ll never understand,
while they toss empty hope out as glorious deeds.
Inspired by Joe Nichols Substack write ‘Thoughts and Prayers, You Pitiful Bastards‘ (maybe requires subscription)
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Inspired by a David Elikwu newsletter, which included this little story:
In 2015, we discovered aliens again.
A group of astronomers at Parkes Observatory in Australia noticed these brief, intense, and seemingly random bursts of radio information; mysterious signals that seemed to be coming from the further reaches of space. They called them “perytons”.
For months, the team worked to identify the source. It could be neutron stars colliding. Black holes merging. Or potentially, hopefully, signals from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Emily Petroff was determined to solve it. But she’d noticed something odd. The perytons only appeared during working hours. Australian working hours. Never at night. Never on weekends. Always during the day when staff were in the building.
She eventually realised that every time they detected a signal, the telescope had been pointed in the rough direction of the staff break room.
After deep investigation, she discovered the truth. The alien signals weren’t coming from deep space. They were coming from staff heating lunch in the microwave.
The microwave happened to operate at 2.4 GHz, close enough to frequencies the telescope could pick up.
Even though microwaves famously work within Faraday chambers, anytime someone impatiently opened the door before the timer finished, the magnetron was still running, sending a burst of radiation that the telescope dutifully recorded as a cosmic event.
Despite months of investigation, with sophisticated equipment and some of the world’s best astronomical experts, they were all undone by a microwave twenty metres away in the kitchen.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Inspired and mostly re-arranged words from this post at Tiny Hearts
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Do you leap from bed
and into the ring?
Are you light on your feet,
bouncing off the ropes,
in the box seat?
Or is the inner critic
a crooked referee
and a white flag cynic?
Knockout or submission,
pinned in a sleeper hold
or full-nelson position.
In the corner, quietly sweating
will those rubber arms rise
to face the arena’s setting?
Tonight’s main event:
Me vs. Tomorrow, no disqualifications.
Step forward with intent
and meet your obligations.
Are you ready to face the day?
Inspired by a David Elikwu newsletter.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
