But Not All of the Time

Any case
in which people pursue
a single great experience or accomplishment
that occurs infrequently
or perhaps not at all –

a Holy grail,
an impossible dream,
a brilliant model,
a great white whale –

is a case of
a positively skewed distribution
in which they may be
predicted to be

unhappy
most of the time.

From the book Social Comparison Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (1977) edited by J.M. Suls and R. L. Miller. In the chapter “Pleasure and Pain of Social Comparison,” pp. 149-186. Submitted by Kate L.

Live your dash

On your tombstone
you’ve got your birth date

and the day of your decease —
and you’ve got your dash.

Live your dash.
Hold still and watch the birds.

Like the hummingbirds —
why are there so many of them?

Taken from the London Evening Standard’s review of Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, 30th March 2012. A comma has been removed after ‘tombstone’. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

But if the water becomes deeper still

Positioned in the water in an uncomfortable pose,
afflicted with a relatively high mean density,
suffering from substantially high frictional drag,
and unable to raise and lower its neck
and hence unable to adopt a synchronous gait,
we conclude that giraffes would be very poor swimmers,
and that it might be assumed that they would avoid
this activity if at all possible.

(Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis)

The Name of the Father


The first time I came home
with a hangover – I was 21
or 22 – I was in the kitchen
making a cup of tea. In those days
all I drank was Guinness – my dad
leant over to me and said:
‘Do you drink spirits?’ I said:
‘No, I don’t.’ He said:
‘Don’t.’ That’s stayed with me
all my life. I don’t drink spirits
at all. It was profound because
my father was a man of
very few words but,
when he did speak,
it was emphatic.



Taken from an interview with Liam Neeson in the Metro, 27th January 2012. Submitted by Marika Rose.

In the Air

I will not make you a slave, you
will live in my 200-story castle where unicorn
servants will feed
you doughnuts off their horns. I will
personally make you
a throne that is half platnum
and half solid gold and jewel encrested.

Thankyou again for teaching us
about meteroligy, you’re
more awesome than a monkey
wearing a tuxedo
made out of bacon
riding a cyborg unicorn
with a lightsaber for the horn
on the tip of a space shuttle
closing in on Mars,
while ingulfed in flames.

(A thank you note from a 9-year-old to a weatherman who visited his school, via the Metro, 15 March 2012. Submitted by Marika Rose)

Goodbye, few things

Top of the list is cupcakes. Does anyone
actually eat this sickly over-iced,
pseudo kitsch, toy food except perhaps
a few girly women who think having
a large shoe collection makes them maverick.

Big black pick up trucks as driven by men
whose default fabric is camouflage. These
swollen testosterone substitutes are
the automotive equivalent
of a liquorice flavoured ribbed condom.

PVC banners, those dingy oblongs
of bad computer graphics tied onto
every suburban pub, roundabout, school.
Usually advertising a singles nite
or fundraising fayre long since past, or worse
still, a carvery. Pop up anything.

The vaguely west coast stubbly check shirted
bloke who features in every phone, computer
and small car ad. You know the one
with scruffy hair and a retro t-shirt
probably designs apps that no one asked for
and fewer people need.

From The Pitiable Impossibility of Debt in the Mind of Someone Shopping, a blog post by the teddy bear Alan Measles. ‘a’ omitted from line 5, first half of the ‘swollen’ line removed and the remainder merged with the following line. Also, ‘that’ changed to ‘who’ and ‘less’ to ‘fewer’ in the last stanza. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.