The Shape of Our Rage

Gradually men rise up to confront them.
One of the bravest is
a teenage hairdresser’s apprentice.

Vidal Sassoon, the man who gave us
the Five Point Cut, the Asymmetric Bob
and Mia Farrow’s £2,500 haircut

was a street-fighting man.
“That popinjay Mosley.
Fascists preaching hate on every corner.

The same abuse that I remembered
from the 1930s,
I was too young to do anything about it.

The pictures we were seeing
from Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau
changed the shape of our rage.

I went to work at the salon in Mayfair
with a badly scratched face
and this refined client said

Good God, Vidal, you look terrible.
What happened to you?
Nothing much, I said. I just fell over a hairpin.”

From an Anti-Fascists Online report following the death of Vidal Sassoon. By Jo Bell.

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 Social Comparison Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (1977) edited by J.M. Suls and R. L. Miller, pp. 149-186. Submitted by Kate L.

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.

Liam Neeson, interviewed in the Metro, 27 January 2012. By Marika Rose.