Into what is the universe expanding?

Our universe
is all of space-time,
and space-time
is all of our universe.
Our language,
with the possible exception of mathematics,
is rooted in space-time,
and we have
no language
for that-which-is-not-space-time.
There is no what
that the universe is expanding into
because what,
where
and when
are properties of space-time,
not that-which-is-not-space-time.

So where does that leave us?

Unfortunately,
it leaves us with Wittgenstein:
What can be said at all
can be said clearly,
and what we cannot talk about
we must pass over
in silence.

From a submission by Jim Ford of Watford to the Guardian’s Notes and Queries column, 13th April 2011. Submitted by Ailsa Holland.

Spectrum

Blue with a hint of your mother.
Unsure-whether-boy-or-girl baby room color.
What I’m sure was once nice wallpaper
before you stained it with your nicotine.

Red as the cute boy to my right’s hoodie.
My dentist’s office orange. I still remember
his dandruff slowly wafting into my gaping jaw.
Jesus Christ, what is with you and green?

Shark invested water blue. Sorry for
spazzing earlier, I had a seizure. Dark red.
Now I’m just getting freaked out.
Nothing looks like a proper color any more.

Maybe a half hour before the first stars start
showing up in the night sky … that awful color,
that forever remains a reminder that grandma
needs to be cut off after the third glass.

It’s pink, but not totally pink,
but it’s purple, but not totally purple.
We are a collaborative ice-cream cone.
The best color in the freakin’ world.

(Comments in a survey about identifying colours)

Grundy remarked let slip

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A spam comment posted to my content strategy blog SmyWord on 13 April 2010. The links are removed but the blue colour of the links left in. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Over Vegas

Far above the bored, scuffling, T-Shirt
and cellulite wearing masses flown in
from trailer parks across the nation,
ten-story video signs project
images of dancing chorus lines,
rhinestone-studded; of strippers with plain faces,
their makeup having been ladled on
with a bricklayer’s trowel to distract onlookers
from that fact; and of seemingly never
ending traveling shots of cafeteria
cuisine. These electronic billboards, run
by computer servers filling concrete
catacombs beneath the hotel casinos,
also occasionally announce the LIVE!
ON STAGE! appearance of what look like
knuckle-dragging brutes bumbled in from
the Pleistocene via a time warp.

At gutter level, meticulously
unkempt somebodies lumber in and out
of the darkened mouths of caves, which are
the doorways of momentarily trendy
nightclubs. Nearby, an imitation
volcano erupts. Light from the fake lava
plays on tattoos, once popular among
pier corner whores but which now adorn
the delicate ankles of long-limbed women
with million dollar smiles spread across
dime-store faces. 




Level with the gutter runs
an asphalt Boulevard over which rides
the latest in high technology
metallurgical skill and, after market,
pimped-up shrines to the owners’ vanity
and insecurity. A crystal angel
sparkles as it swings from the rear-view
mirror of one modern convertible,
just stopped at a red light. Chrome-framed mud flaps
shine behind the rear wheels of a pickup truck
as it passes, its retreating back window
plastered with the white decal of a Christian
icon surrounded by a delicate
wreath of roses.

Traveling north, the
Boulevard becomes a Main Street as it turns
into yesterday’s downtown. More neon
cascades down the sides of dirty walls, red
and yellow light splashing the windows
of the Greyhound bus station across the street.
Turning east, a crumbling side street shortly
passes first a Bronx modern city hall,
smug and prim in its paternalism;
then, the rotting remains of retail ventures;
paint peeled apartment flophouses; and,
finally, a fence festooned with hubcaps.
Farther on, cracker box houses—their windows
and doors wrought iron barred—traipse down a slovenly
slope, the value of the lots on which they slouch
officiously inflated by the local
property appraiser. A fluorescent glow
haunts the sidewalk outside a corner
Laundromat, in whose ghostly glimmer stand
the emaciated and the bovine.
Expensive headers gracing the butt-end
of automotive wrecks shriek by. The street
soon propagates a rat’s maze of walled-up drives,
lanes and circles. Within those cement bulwarks
erected to a fastidious paranoia
and a paucity of police presence,
lie neighborhoods of tract housing: two thousand
square feet of uniform, building-code-commanded,
Spanish-styled homes sitting on two thousand
one hundred square feet of desert dirt,
goose-stepping off into the darkness.

Welcome to fatuous Las Vegas!

Someone called Steven posted this comment (#203) on The Big Picture photo blog, 12 March 2010, in response to aerial photographs of New York City and Las Vegas. I added a few missing hyphens. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.