Masterpiece



Brother Francis produced the blueprint. “The highwayman was kind enough to leave this in my keeping, Holy Father. He – he mistook it for a copy of the illumination which I was bringing as a gift.”
“You did not correct his mistake?”
Brother Francis blushed. “I’m ashamed to admit, Holy Father –”
“This, then, is the original relic you found in the crypt?”
“Yes –”
The Pope’s smile became wry. “So, then – the bandit thought your work was the treasure itself? Ah – even a robber can have a keen eye for art, yes? Monsignor Aguerra told us of the beauty of your commemoration. What a pity that it was stolen.”
“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted fifteen years.”
“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this, might he not?”
Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
B: Home base to team leader, is the Fox in the Cage? Over!
C: Negative! The Chickens are in Lockdown and the Alert Level is Green!
B: Send Scorpion Two and Yodeling Moose to Deliver the Package!
C: Affirmative! Operation Stale Cookie is under way. The Banjo Lessons are en route!
B: Copy that! Have Nauseous Squirrel check the Bed for Spiders! Over!
C: Painting the Mule red now! Over!
B: Be sure to leave room for Dessert! Copy that?
C: Roger! Will they Apply Ointment to the Affected Area?
B: Negative! First we need to Shampoo the Monkey! Over!
A: You and Cliff have a really strange code.
B: Code?
For more of the same type of storylines, check out The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
The <div> tag is empty until the end of <script> where theString gets inserted into myTable. Tags & data for the table rows & columns get appended to theString at every “+=”. The table data <td> is nothing more than the product of the two factors x and y, the column and row indexes respectively.
I choose to juggle this year and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
That goal will serve to organize and measure the best of my energies & skills. That challenge is one that I am willing to accept, one I am unwilling to postpone, one which I intend to win. -thank you John F. Kennedy
Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.
The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.
That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.
health • impact • joy • love
vocation • wealth • wisdom
WORDS are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
–LORD BYRON
Today we are blessed with, and can appreciate, millions of colors. Before the cones of our retina could distinguish between #EFFing blue and pink #FEE, who could say those colors existed at all?
We are organs of a larger organism. It knows us, although we do not know it. I’m a vessel of whatever that larger organism is, its instrument, rather than the source of the scenes. So a lot of what I do is try to get out of the way. That’s the way I work on my writing.
Life’s Work by David Milch (2022)