Category Archives: POETIC NONSENSE

Poetry by Lawrence R. Spencer. Poetic nonsense by Lawrence R. Spencer and others. Haiku poems by Lawrence R. Spencer.

KURT VONNEGUT: BREAKFAST OF HONESTY

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One of my literary heroes is Kurt Vonnegut.  He was one of the primary inspirations for my first book, “The Oz Factors“, which was modeled after the literature created by this  American “revolutionary” (which means he told the truth, rather than pandering to cultural lies and criminal activities called “American culture” and “American history”.  More importantly, as a human being he was caring, intelligent, kind, egalitarian, spiritually aware and didn’t take any bullshit from governments or religions.  Here is a short video of Kurt Vonnegut reading from his book “Breakfast of Champions“.

Here is an interview with Kurt on PBS at the age of 83, commenting on America and the failure experiment of the Human Race:

Learn more about the life and books of Kurt Vonnegut:

(November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was a 20th-century American writer. His works such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction.  Vonnegut’s first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,”appeared in the February 11, 1950, edition of Collier’s  (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959.Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat’s Cradle (which in 1971 earned him a Master’s Degree) to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device. These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973).   Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut’s recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author’s character. (Wikipedia.org)

THE CREATOR IS A BEETLE (OR A STAR)

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80-beetles

The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane Is famous for having repeatedly said thatthe Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles, for the simple reason that there are just so many varieties of beetles on Earth.” (He also noted that the Creator also was “endowed with a passion for  stars” – again, because there are just so darn many of them.)

Stephen Jay Gould added to this by noting:

“God is most likely to take trouble over reproducing his own image, and his 400,000 attempts at the perfect beetle contrast with his slipshod creation of man. When we meet the Almighty face to face he will resemble a beetle (or a star).”

The Coleoptera /koʊliːˈɒptərə/ order of insects is commonly called beetles. The word “coleoptera” is from the Greek κολεός,koleos, meaning “sheath”; and πτερόν, pteron, meaning “wing”, thus “sheathed wing. The Coleoptera include more species than any other order, constituting almost 25% of all known types of animal life-forms. About 40% of all described insect species are beetles (about 400,000 species), and new species are discovered frequently. Some estimates put the total number of species, described and undescribed, at as high as 100 million, but a figure of one million is more widely accepted.   ————–

stars

According to astronomers, there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, stretching out

into a region of space 13.8 billion light-years away from us in all directions. And so, if you multiply the number of stars in our galaxy by the number of galaxies in the Universe, you get approximately 1024 stars. That’s a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros.  That’s a septillion stars. But there could be more than that.

It’s been calculated that the observable Universe is a bubble of space 47 billion years in all directions. This is a minimum value, the Universe could be much bigger – it’s just that we can’t ever detect those stars because they’re outside the observable Universe. It’s even possible that the Universe is infinite, stretching on forever, with an infinite amount of stars. So add a couple more zeros. Maybe an infinite number of zeroes.  That’s a lot of stars in the Universe.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/102630/how-many-stars-are-there-in-the-universe/#ixzz2uK83T2IZ