by Carl Pierer

“Yes, I would let the five people die.”

To philosophers, and I mean to include all people interested in philosophical questions, this is a pretty standard response to a pretty well-known thought experiment: The Trolley Problem. But it is not only in philosophy that you get very uncanny scenarios when trying to clarify an idea by applying it theoretically. These thought experiments play an important role in fields as diverse as physics and arts, mathematics and literature, but the most infamous ones are probably to be found in philosophy, and in ethics particularly. Not only are they notorious, but in fact they face two challenges, which easily turn into dangers should we ignore them and base our argument on them.

First of all, thought experiments have to be distinguished from metaphors, since they serve different purposes. At first sight it might seem that they are poles apart. However, Dennett writes: “If you look at the history of philosophy, you see that all the great and influential stuff has been technically full of holes but utterly memorable and vivid. They are (…) lovely thought experiments. Like Plato's cave, and Descartes's evil demon, and Hobbes' vision of the state of nature and the social contract, and even Kant's idea of the categorical imperative.” Dennett here conflates a variety of famous philosophical scenarios under the heading “thought experiments”. Yet the structure of Plato's cave is completely different from Descartes's evil demon. In Plato's case there is no new knowledge gained. It is not a hypothetical scenario of how the world might be, but rather a more literary expression of how it actually is. The philosopher's ascent from the cave is figurative and an it does not serve the purpose of drawing some conclusion from this view, but rather to embrace the general idea that this is the philosophers' condition. It is a picture, an illustration of his idea rather than a method to develop a new belief. Descartes, on the other hand, imagines an evil demon who brings about a very sophisticated illusion of reality, making us think that all our experiences are real while they are merely his creations. It is an application of radical scepticism. Once we hypothetically accept this scenario Descartes asks whether any of our pre-demonic knowledge still stands. The difference between Plato's cave and Descartes's demon is that the former is a mere illustration of an idea. The latter, in contrast, serves to provide some new insight. Therefore, I propose to distinguish between thought experiments and metaphors. The purpose of the former has to be a more rigid one than that of the latter. We use thought experiments to test what happens if we apply our theoretical ideas. Its similarity to actual experiments should not be ignored. We peruse those hypothetical results, and only if we can accept them are we ready to accept a theory.

However, more often than not, thought experiments are used the other way round. Hypothetical scenarios are invented in such a way that our theories fail to deliver what is expected of them.

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by Mara Naselli

“A foolish consistency,” Emerson famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I memorized this line in high school. It was one of those Emersonian zingers that gave me momentary purchase in my otherwise bewildered adolescent state. Nothing cohered in those days. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged. Literature might have been a consolation, but reading required a concentration I was often too depleted to muster. But that line—that line I held onto. How delightful the feel of hobgoblin—the labial b, glottal g and l, the nasal n rolling back and forth in the mouth like a marble.

I hadn’t lived long enough to understand what Emerson meant by consistency, nor did I realize hobgoblins were both dreaded and amusing, petty little troublemakers. To my ear it was the sound of imbecility—the perfect word to describe my small suburban world that alternately objectified and ignored me. Though I hardly noticed, that sprite of a line was making light of my seriousness, skipping along with its arms swinging, like a nursery rhyme: “adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It was once practically an American rite of passage to read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in high school. Its forcefulness seemed to affirm the abundance around us. We lived in new suburbs, on land that not so long before had been open fields, and before that wooded plains. Subdivisions and gleaming, glassy shopping malls sprang up with the confidence of new money—our twentieth-century Manifest Destiny. Our world was contained within brick facades and putty-colored siding on streets with names like Kensington Cross and Buckingham Place. Bright curbs, smooth black pavement—but no sidewalks, so as not to disturb the “colonial feel.” From my Middle America blossomed entitlement and palliative consumption. Our parents had arrived. A daughter of affluence was expected to display the fruits of her parents’ achievement. Short skirts, school spirit, an absurd accumulation of extracurricular activities—the only appropriate response at the time seemed to be a feminine compliance. A silence, really. I had no language yet with which to reject the dumbing effects of material comfort.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I'm in turmoil when he is there but always sorry when it is time to let him go. And why not, he is after all, such a complicated man; a beautiful man. He would have to be. After all– I have created him. Quintessential: American hero. The one, everyone hates but never quite as much as he hates himself. Still, still—certainly not as much as I, hate him. Love will do that, you know.

So, a beautiful man, my creation: gone. Gone, until, he resurfaces again suddenly. And he always has these past so many decades when the news has been and is all about dictatorships, war and the violence of subverting whole societies and I have traveled for work to places torn by war or about to be. And in this time alongside the work, and witnessing the world and watching BBC and CNN— I have written poetry and fiction. But the time for this has been limited for I am overwhelmed with visits to villages and planning and designing programs to tackle misery and poverty.

So the time I have spent with him can be stacked up as a few short chapters or even dots on the point of a pin—in relation to his and my entire lives and yet in hindsight those moments seemed to be in emotional volume disproportionately more meaningful than all the others. When he leaves, as he always does, he says: Hope to see you at some point. What point might that be? I have always asked. Those points—in the past have been scattered. Each point, in the moment, as is the point of all of this, was all that there was at that point—and breathlessly all that mattered—as in, without full stops and commas, without pauses—the time spent with him, in the margins of moleskins was always, constant and seamless. And in hindsight was always pointless.

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by Dave Maier

Drones seem to be in the news lately, with much negative commentary. Now, I can understand those brought up on classical and pop music wanting harmonic movement in their music, but it's not like drones are a crime against humanity. In any case (Emily Litella to the white courtesy phone) I haven't done any new podcasts in a while, so let's head out to the drone zone for another look.

Earlier posts in this series: here, here, here, and see also here (scroll down).

Our first set is another time capsule, mostly from the glorious 1970s.

1. Heldon – Virgin Swedish Blues (Heldon III)

Heldon is guitarist and synthesist Richard Pinhas with occasional help from others, the Continental counterpart to Robert Fripp's King Crimson. This track, from 1975 or so (check the hairstyles on the cover if there is any doubt of this), is an overt hommage to Fripp & Eno, but that distinctive guitar tells us who it really is. Some early Heldon is a bit raw for effective spatial journeying, but this one is right out there. Some of you may know Pinhas from that bizarre Lingua Franca article in which we hear how Pinhas so freaked out Philip K. Dick that the latter was moved to alert the FBI. True story!

2. Tonto's Expanding Headband – Riversong (Zero Time)

Not that Tonto (which interestingly enough means “stupid” in Italian), but TONTO: The Original New Timbral Orchestra, a titanic bank of electronics assembled by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. They – and it – are best known for their work with Stevie Wonder on a string of classic 1970s albums (e.g. Talking Book and Innervisions), but they put out some music of their own as well. I'm not convinced by some of the compositions, but this track is a stunner. Incidentally, Tonto has a new home.

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by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis

Golberg and Meis

David V. Johnson recently wrote an essay for 3 Quarks Daily titled “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” In the essay, he accuses the New Atheists of making a simplistic and ultimately unfalsifiable claim—namely, that “humanity would be better off without religion.” It is, as Johnson points out, rather difficult to prove this kind of broad counterfactual. The New Atheists (or the Undergraduate Atheists, as Johnson calls them, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) “claim to know something that cannot, in fact, be known and must be accepted on faith.”

Interestingly, Johnson is himself an atheist. But he wonders whether humanity might actually be better off with religion, even if there is no God and religion has no basis in truth. “Consider,” Johnson writes, “the tremendous boon in happiness for all of them in knowing, in the way a believer knows, that their lives and the universe are imbued with meaning, that there is a cosmic destiny in which they play a part, that they do not suffer in vain, that their death is not final but merely a transition to a better existence. This mental state is, I submit, so important to human happiness that people are willing to suffer and die for it, and do so gladly.”

Though they disagree about the purpose of religion, as atheists, Johnson and the New Atheists come from roughly the same position. They are non-believers looking out upon the vast sea of believing human beings and trying to figure out whether these false beliefs are detrimental or beneficial. In playing with the idea that false beliefs could be beneficial, Johnson brings up the work of Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), the Spanish writer whose essays and novels made him one of the most important thinkers of his time, though he isn’t read so widely today.

Johnson discusses one story in particular, “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr.” It is a powerful story, beautifully written. It is about a village priest who secretly harbors many doubts about his faith. But he throws himself into his work as a priest. The priest does such good work with the people that a young atheist from the city (Lazaro), who comes back to the village to “enlighten” the villagers, ends up becoming an “unbelieving” Catholic, just like San Manuel. Here’s how Johnson explains the story:

Like Lazaro, San Manuel doesn't believe the articles of faith. (“I believe in one God, the Father and Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …”) What he believes in, rather, is administering to the needs of the villagers, in putting on such a convincing performance of dedication to Christ that they all believe he is a saint and have their faith in the Church and in life everlasting sustained. Lazaro's “conversion,” then, is one consistent with atheism. He becomes a lay-minister of sorts under San Manuel and eventually dies a Catholic.

The moral of the story, according to Johnson: Religion is false, but the people need it because it makes them happy. The only problem with this reading of the story is that Unamuno thought no such thing. Unamuno was, in fact, contemptuous of the idea of “blind faith.” But Unamuno was also a practicing Christian when he wrote the story. There’s something funny going on here, you might think. In a sense, you’d be right.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

There are some questions we just can't shake; the nature of space and time, or the identity of the building blocks of the universe; they pester us until we answer them, and then, as if on cue, the Universe proceeds to demonstrate the inadequacy of our proposed solutions. One such question, the asking and answering of which has spurred on the progress of science for millennia, is that of the vacuum. Almost universally, the human race seems to find the concept of complete emptiness fascinating. We have fantasized about this gaping void and spoken of it often, in science, philosophy and folklore, but while in principle it is possible to postulate a complete void – the physical equivalent of the mathematical concept of zero – in practice, this perfect nothingness eludes us.

The argument can be traced back at least to (circa) 500 B.C, when Parmenides declared that a vacuum – i.e. a region of space completely devoid of matter – simply could not exist. The Greek natural philosophers debated this possibility for decades, some declaring the void to be indispensable, others finding it repugnant, until a hundred or so years later, Aristotle issued the now famous dictum ‘horror vacui', or, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum'.

Two thousand years later, when experimental science had advanced sufficiently for abstract ideas to be put to the test, the vacuum was duly investigated. Scientists like Galileo, Pascal, von Guericke and Boyle devised mechanisms to pump the air out of glass vessels, creating vacua in order that their properties could be studied, and some rather striking demonstrations ensued. There were, for instance, the Magdeburg hemispheres designed by von Guericke in 1656.

These large copper hemispheres were joined together their rims sealed with grease, and the air within pumped out so that a vacuum was created within. The hemispheres could then no longer be pulled apart, even by thirty horses, until a valve was opened and air let back in. The incredible strength with which the metal globe clung together was attributable to atmospheric pressure; in other words, the ‘weight' of air – a force we feel all the time and yet are insensible of, because in most situations, the push and pull balances each other out. A vessel devoid of air, however, exerts no outward force – it only feels the air outside bearing down on it from all sides, holding it in an invisible vice.

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by Matt McKenna

The 2014 Academy Award nominees have yet to be announced, but it is a safe bet that Peter Segal's Grudge Match won't be taking home any hardware this year. And that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the film since it isn't very good. However, there are films that are bad by accident, and then there are films that are bad by design. Grudge Match is among the latter set. Why would a filmmaker go through the trouble of purposefully creating a movie they know will be universally panned by critics in addition to not making its money back? In the case of Grudge Match, it was utterly critical for the jokes to fall flat, the plot to be predictable, and the boxing sequences to languish in order for the film to express its critique of polarized partisan politics in the United States. Through both its content and its form, Grudge Match dissects the deleterious relationship between politics, the media, and a credulous population.

Grudge Match follows the time-tested Hollywood strategy of taking a genre film concept, casting the leads as older folks, and calling the whole thing a comedy (e.g. Space Cowboys, Last Vegas, Wild Hogs, etc). Specifically, Grudge Match belongs to the boxing film genre, the leads are played by 70-year-old Robert De Niro and 67-year-old Sylvester Stallone, and the film is littered with what appear to be jokes indicating the film is intended to be viewed as a comedy. Based solely on the description above, you can probably guess the film's plot: having grown old and pathetic, two retired rival boxers with convoluted, intertwined histories are lured into one last bout by a goofball promoter preying on each character's desperate need for pride and money.

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by Bill Benzon

Tracing things back to the beginning is always a bit arbitrary. There is always something that came before, and even before that. For example, just how is it that Charlie Keil, winner of the 22nd Annual Koizumi Fumio Prize for ethnomusicology, ended up playing tuba in front of the Vermont Statehouse in the Fall of 2012? I suppose it isn't much of a stretch to get from ethnomusicology to the tuba, as both have to do with music, but the Vermont Statehouse?

It's time we take a short tour through a long story. Just for sake of perspective, let's start the tour sometime in the late early 20th Century, with the band of John Philip Sousa, the March King. He was the highest paid member of that band, which had been touring America for years. His bass drummer during the 1920s was a man named August Helmecke. Helmecke was also the highest paid member of the band.

Why, you might ask, was the bass drummer the highest paid member of the band? Simple, really. He maintained the pulse. Without the pulse, the music had no life. Helmecke was the heart of the band.

And he was Charlie Keil's first percussion teacher. Helmecke gave group lessons on Saturday mornings at Darien High School in Connecticut in the late 1940s. Every Saturday morning he'd teach the kids to hold their arms high and then down stroke vigorously, getting the whole ar and trunk into the motion. And though it would be years before Charlie would know this, many of the jazz drummers he came to admire – Papa Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and others – would go hear Sousa's band just so they could bear witness to Helmecke's mighty drumming.

That's the start. Charlie went on to learn the snare drum, orchestral percussion, and the traps set. And while he's played professionally from time to time, he ended up studying anthropology in graduate school at the University of Chicago. That's when he did a master's thesis that he published in 1966 as Urban Blues.

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by Eric Byrd

Actually there was only one, but his lectures contained such echoes – of Khodasevich, Nabokov, Brodsky – that in retrospect he seems the voice of, if not a “culture,” then at least a certain lineage of fierce and fastidious exiles who cut strange figures in the literary communities of Western Europe, and in the comedy of American campus manners. Alexander Dolinin's survey of Russian prose fiction was my first class at the University of Wisconsin. Outside: the crisp and glittery end of summer on an elm- and maple-wooded isthmus dividing two deep glacial lakes. Dolinin announced his standards in that first lecture; he was skeptical of group identity (“individual genius is all that counts”), and refused to teach verse in translation. For the next nine months I would be reading some Englished classic of Russian prose. We followed Dolinin from the faro tables and winter balls of Pushkin's Petersburg to the lustily scythed acres of Levin's estate; from the crowded Crimean pier where Chekhov's lady lost her lorgnette to the Arctic reveille of Denisovich and the zeks. The Oxford World and Penguin Classics provided only the silhouettes of Russian writers, and we were yawning undergrads in an early-morning elective, and Dolinin could not muse as he might have – but nonetheless he was able to model an intellectual sensuousness, an impassioned relation to tradition like nothing else I would encounter in the next four years.

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by Fausto Ribeiro

For years, amidst the cold and dirty cement, nothing had revealed itself to me, and I left so many hours, so many days go by in emptiness, without doing much about it. So when I finally felt the moist grass beneath my bare feet, a beam of pleasure climbed up my legs and landed at the back of my neck, tingling. The feeling almost subsided as I thought about the derision it would bring about were I to voice it, but it resisted in defiance when, with each slow step, I saw a bit more of the river: how could its color, in appearing among the tree leaves that separated it from me, be so beautiful? Hitherto, I understood that rivers were no more than paths for putrid waste, flanked by asphalt serpents over which gigantic metallic insects slouched creepingly, emitting their electric lights – red, yellow – and puffing ashes towards the sky; in the heart of such beasts lay anguished beings, encrusted, grabbing onto the wheel, honking, forcing themselves to ignore the imminence of cerebrovascular accidents. But not the Rhone: there I found myself, absurdly, in front of an idyllic valley where the waters ran quietly, and one could drink from them, and one could swim in them; small fallen branches were seen floating serenely, following their path towards the oneiric Mare Nostrum from the history books of my long gone childhood. And if under the sun its green glistened, by dawn the waters transubstantiated into pure methylene blue, and would then be confused in my memory with the swaying brushstrokes of a certain starry night, whose constellations shone magnificently, spreading as if by magic their light upon the river: divine images conceived by a sad soul, who had gone mad and died before anybody could be enraptured by his howls of utter beauty.

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by Grace Boey

Last month, I wrote about moral uncertainty and moral hedging. The discussion was fairly abstract and ultimately rather inconclusive; it’s time to examine how real people might put some sort of moral hedging into practice now if they wanted to.

First, here’s a recap (readers already acquainted with moral hedging can skip the next two paragraphs). What should you do if, despite knowing all the relevant facts about animal physiology and consciousness, you are still uncertain as to whether killing animals for food is permissible, or whether it is murder? This is moral uncertainty, as opposed to factual uncertainty. The strategy of moral hedging aims to maximize the ‘expected moral value’ of our actions under moral uncertainty. This expected moral value is the probability of an action’s being right, multiplied by the moral value of its being right if it is indeed right. This means that we shouldn’t just choose to do what we think is most probably right – we should also take the value of consequences into account.

While the idea of moral hedging seems promising, I noted that it suffers from some weaknesses. For one, there is the ‘problem of inter-theoretic value comparisons’ (PIC) – how do we compare values across theories that value things differently? Also, the theory still lacks clear guidelines that the average person can realistically apply in practice.

In this second piece, I’ll give reasons for believing that we should press on with moral hedging. I’ll also recommend a realistic guideline for acting under moral uncertainty that I believe captures the idea of moral hedging: For any choice of action that you’re morally uncertain about, consider this question: if you eventually find out that this choice is, in fact, morally wrong, what attitude would you have towards your actions? If you foresee that you’d hold yourself culpable or blameworthy for the potential wrong, then you shouldn’t perform the action now. Although this may seem obvious on first glance, this suggestion may impact more of our actions than we realize.

Why press on with moral hedging?

As previously discussed, hedging isn’t the only way we might go about coping with moral uncertainty. Moreover, PIC might appear to be a big enough theoretical challenge for some to give up on the strategy of moral hedging. In spite of this, however, I believe hedging is still the correct thing to do under moral uncertainty, and that we should apply it where we can. Here I hope to persuade my readers of the same. (Readers who already support moral hedging may want to skip to the next section).

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by Jonathan Kujawa

There is a delightful episode of Radiolab entitled “Emergence''. In it they look at the remarkably complicated structures which can emerge from large groups of remarkably dumb individuals each doing their own thing. You see this in ant colonies, flocks of birds, human cities, capitalist marketplaces, and the human brain. Remarkably, we find the same phenomenon in the (seemingly) inert world of mathematics.

You have a problem. You're planning your annual post-New Year's party and as the consummate host you know that parties are deadly dull unless you have just the right mix of friends and strangers. A core group of witty friends or interesting strangers to keep things lively is just the thing. For the moment let's say you would be equally happy to have three people at your party who are all friends or all strangers. Unfortunately, your co-host believes parties are best when well mixed. At all costs they would like to avoid a group of three friends or three strangers.

You make a bold offer to your co-host: If you get to pick the number of guests, the co-host can decide who is invited.

Does your gambit work? Can you now successfully outmaneuver your co-host by making the invitation list sufficiently long as to ensure a group of three friends or three strangers no matter who ends up on the list? And, if so, how many? Or have you made a horrible mistake in this strange high strategy battle over the most minor of stakes?

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by Tamuira Reid

“Planes have always been a theme in my life,” my father says and asks me how the essay is going. I tell him fine. It has some problems, but fine. Still trying to work out the structure. I hear him smile to fill the distance between us.

The last decade was bad for airplanes.

Hudson. Turkey. Buffalo. Tokyo.

And Air France. Twice.

MAN was killed instantly when a Boeing (INSERT MODEL HERE) Jet lost control and crashed into his house. He was asleep at the time, a hand positioned under his pillow, unfinished Sunday crossword on the nightstand. WIFE AND DAUGHTER managed to escape seconds before the plane hit. They would have to start their lives over now, start from scratch.

SEASONED PILOT, male, lands Boeing (INSERT MODEL HERE) Jet safely into the Hudson River after a BIRD STRIKE on BOTH ENGINES. All CREW and PASSENGERS were evacuated from the plane safely. No major INJURIES were reported.

In 1950 a CESSNA two-seater nose-dived in to the Pacific Ocean, just outside of San Francisco. The plane held TWO MEN; one of them was MY GRANDFATHER.

Is it possible to miss someone I've never met?

_____

Would you call my father a liar if he told you the perfect story? If he told you that at exactly 1 p.m. he fell into a fence, blinded by a white light so strong and pure it knocked his feet from under him, a math book open in the gutter, seedless grapes hanging in clusters from a vine above his head?

At exactly 1 p.m. my grandfather's plane crashed into the ocean. The velocity with which he hit the water was enough to tear the clothes from his body. Shoes too.

You always remember the grapes. They looked like tiny Christmas bulbs.

After the funeral, you paced around the back yard, the one that would become a basketball court but wasn't yet. You stepped on weeds, pressed their bodies to the ground. Tossed pebbles into the grass to watch them sink.

What words did you choose when you told your little brother about the accident? Your mind was someplace else by then. Left the body to fend for itself.

_____

2012: Discovery Channel filmmakers purposefully crash a 727 Jet into the Mexican desert in the name of passenger safety research. It was concluded that following the guidelines on the seat-back safety cards might actually increase your chances of survival.

It was also noted that real people were replaced by crash test dummies.

The Coast Guard found my grandfather's wallet at the scene of the accident. Two pictures were still tucked neatly inside; one of his children standing in front of a lopsided Christmas tree and the other of his wife in a bikini.

My father fell into the cracks of his own life but clawed back out, “tooth and nail” his mother would say. “Tooth and nail, that Johnny.” I imagine him scaling trees with his bare hands.

You were fifteen and didn't want to lose your father but you did. That's the way it worked. He was there and then he wasn't. Just like that.

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Tiny Megalomaniacs
.
being good
you take responsibility for everything
and credit for nothing,
otherwise you’re sliding down
the slippery slope at an accelerating clip
until you’re taking credit for everything
and responsibility for zip

just a short slip down that slope
you’ve already sloughed goodness
many times like snake skin
for the sake of some small gain
some little leverage, some edge, some in
elbowing out some less able
contestant in Darwin’s world
to gain what turns out to be
a plot of worthless sand
by means of tiny sins

it’s tough, discernment’s not easy
in the muddle of desire
everything you think you require is righteous
so you turn to gods that fan that fire
you whisper prayers into corners first
then, picking up a head of steam,
you’re bellowing your righteousness from peaks
as your minions mutter lies up and down mean streets
and many bubbles burst

but more often than not you don’t get that far
you settle for a provincial fiefdom
running a big firm or corner bar,
equally worthy jobs
if your heart’s in the right place
and you understand the limits of all
and know you’re in this universe
under an umbrella of chance,
lucky to be small
and know you have just a tiny part
in the making of this
curious dance
.

by Jim Culleny
12/28/2013