Weather Girl’s Haiku

A wet and cold start

This morning windy. Later

rain dying away.

The BBC Breakfast weather forecast, March 2012. By Fran Isherwood.

The smoke that thunders

Plateau forests
Of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir,

Cypresses that creep
Far into the water.

Under the sun that never sets
Below the smoke that thunders.

From Rough Guide Ultimate Adventures, September 2008, referring to the Grand Canyon, the Atchafalaya Basin and the Arctic Victoria Falls. By Harriet.

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.

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?

From the London Evening Standard’s review of Herzog’s Into the Abyss. 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.

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

When you have eaten an orange

When you’ve eaten an orange you have to

go back to the shop to buy another.

Paulo Coelho describes the profitability of piracy for artists in My Thoughts on S.O.P.A.

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. By Marika Rose.