Category: comics

Refrigerator Magnets 028 Seascape

The graceful lines of fluid-dynamic living beings and the media in which they live and breathe and move.
The graceful lines of fluid-dynamic lives;
The media in which they live and breathe;
The movements of their very bodies soar
and glide; So very little effort spent;

how does flying feel
machines do not impart it
only in our dreams

[blank renku] Paul Guernsey © 2020

Refrigerator Magnets 024 Baby Grand

Should we have ever bought the baby grand?
We'd go to visit at the mall. Each week
or so, we'd stroll into the music store
and think how much it needed to be ours.
Eventually, we paid the hefty price,
and into debt we went to have that piece
of wood, that lovely naked oaken gloss
with ringing strings delivered to our home.
We sold it in a year or two, but for
a while it was our own, and brought us joy,
if not a lot of music actual.
But dreams grow large when pretty, shiny
things enthrust themselves into your life.
Perhaps it wasn't worth the cost, Perhaps.
But now, the baby grand is metaphor
for Big Mistake, or Big Blue Sky idea
that makes no Earthly sense, but gathers speed
unto itself and beckons us to join
its sensual, entrancing naked dance.
Perhaps? "...perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub" [1]
So what, if every dream is too unreal?
To be, or not to be? The question still
remains, for without dreams, there is no life,
no life that's worth the salty sweat of time.

Paul Guernsey © 2019

[1] Borrowed without permission, but at least with attribution here, from Hamlet’s famous, “To be, or not to be?” soliloquy, by William Shakespeare [2], published 1603.

[2] Shakespeare also wrote blank verse. [3]

[3] The entire play, Hamlet is blank verse. [4]

[4] Including the soliloquy.

Refrigerator magnets 023 Bunsen Burner

But why does Bunsen get all the credit? What about Desega and Farady?

Bunsen burner, device for combining a flammable gas with controlled amounts of air before ignition; it produces a hotter flame than would be possible using the ambient air and gas alone. Named for 

  • Robert Bunsen, the German chemist who introduced it in 1855
  • (from a design by Peter Desdega, who likely modified
  • an earlier design by Michael Faraday), …

Encyclopaedia Britannica