occasional fish

"It was then that Delirium noticed that she had absentmindedly transformed herself into a hundred and eleven perfect, tiny, multicolored fish. Each fish sang a different song. And as she put herself back together again, unable for the moment to remember whether the silver flecks went in the blue eye or the green one, she decided that a dog would be a nice thing to have. And then it occurred to her that there had been a dog around at some point, hadn't there? A nice doggie. And she went off to look for it, trailing occasional fish..." - Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Kindly Ones

Wednesday various

November 25, 2009 at 6:30 pm

These comic strip mashups are just terrific. [via]

McSweeney’s: Has Bell Invented the “Telegraph Killer”?:

For agreeing to help lift the contraption, we have been given exclusive access to what experts are already calling “a device which emits sound and is not filled with bees.”

It’s kind of a one-note joke. And while it’s obviously parodying the idea of the technology-killer (e-books killing print, mp3s killing records, etc.), it’s maybe worth noting that the telephone did play a big part in killing off the telegraph. But still, it’s pretty damn amusing. [via]

Your roof is leaking if you think I’m going to start using any of this 1950s hipster slang. [via]

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And then, of course, I blew away the other road with my machine gun.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle wanted to be a poet. [via]

And finally, M. Rickert on storytelling:

I think that to say every story has already been told is to dismiss the temperament of words, to devalue nuance and meaning. Yes, of course, if stories are summed up into one or two sentence synopsis, then I imagine they all fit into certain categories. But stories are not just a matter of summation; if they were, the summation would be enough to satisfy that need for story. In fact, every word matters. I don’t know why people are so eager to diminish stories. You don’t hear architects bemoaning that every building has already been built. Within each field of creation there is a structure that exists as the foundation of that creation. The opportunity for expansion and artistry lies within that structure and is not diminished by it.

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