Flossophy Friday July 5

July 5, 2019

Happy Interdependence Day, Fellow Firecrackers,

Staff has been unable to put a lid on it after the phenomenal reader response to the Silent Letters link on Wikipedia. Talk about deafening! Thank You! People are still talking about it, at least some of them.

Reader Reply of the Week is delivered by Chris Cox in beautiful downtown Richmond. Entre nous, s'il vous plaît. (He was undercover during the transmittal.)

Plain as sunshine, especially for an undercover-type dude. Here it is, brilliantly rendered in two tones of disappearing ink:

It’s packed with silent letters, so who cares if the message doesn’t live up to the medium? But never mind us, you be the judge. (It’s not that hard to decipher, people!)

In other news, your house can eat your brain. Faster than a five o’clock shadow. It’s the "silent, taxable scar tissue of renovation." (Karl Marx, if memory serves.) Anyway, the scourge reforms the medulla oblongata into a medulla rotunda, which isn’t 100% bad, but then it oozes like a silent unnamed paint color into the hippocampus and takes up residence like a bundler from the other political "party."

Let’s hurdle over the bad parts because we don’t want to be a downer, so here’s the simple nine-step recovery antidote:

1.] Rehang all your artwork.

2.] Install some new old toilets from an architectural salvage warehouse on the other side of the river.

3.] Sort and re-shelve all your books, arranging by height*.

(Help us out here! Making stuff up is hard. We just need six more.)

Fictionary Friday: Words You Need. Whether you know it or not.

Somnolize (somm noll eyez) Noun: To honor by napping.

In a sentence: In the giant tent at the rain-drenched parade, tens of people somnolized The Declaration of Interdependence and then went home to rehang all their pictures.

Wikipedia Friday Favorite:
In honor of the intersection of curiosity and logarithmically expanding human knowledge, we offer a weekly favorite obscure Wikipedia page. This week, bouncing off our "Home Sweet Home" theme, we offer recipes for an arresting staircase that might serve your flights of fancy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs

Fizzdom Friday: from our collection of favorite quotes.

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution." – Marcel Duchamp

Friday Fluff:

In addition to savoring the Declaration of Independence on July 4, we find favor in adopting (as our own) the musings of a flight attendant who shared, with pre-9/11 candor, her certainty regarding the absolute best few hours to fly in the course of any calendar year.

Take off at about 8:30 pm on July Fourth, flying from east to west across the continental United States, and in the elastic dusk that stretches across the time zones—Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific—you will witness celebratory fireworks filling the sky below from every small town and county seat and metropolis and you will fly straight into the heart of all the silent letters in all the languages that got us here.

Write if you (do) or (do not) want to be on that flight.

Jonathan
www.jonathanmarcus.org

* Readers of Everything Is Happening At Once know this is Fake News.

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