29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.BBC: 100 things we didn't know this time last year
still here 13:29
Auden
...agitprop and slogans,
all the trite forms of disinformation.
Good is always like starlight and sunlight,
and poetry when it means just what it says,
and yet admits the moon's ambiguities...
Mark Jarman
Poetry Daily
28.12.05
still here 02:18
Maggot, Maggoty.
Whimsical, full of whims and fancies. Fancy tunes used to be called maggots, hence we have “Barker’s maggots,” “Cary’s maggots,” “Draper’s maggots,” etc. (Dancing Master, 1721.)
When the maggot bites. When the fancy takes us. Swift tells us that it was the opinion of certain virtuosi that the brain is filled with little worms or maggots, and that thought is produced by these worms biting the nerves. “If the bite is hexagonal it produces poetry; if circular, eloquence; if conical, politics, etc. (Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.)
Instead of maggots the Scotch say, “His head is full of bees;” the French, “Il a des rats dans la tête;” and in Holland, “He has a mouse’s nest in his head.” (See BEE.)
E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898.
Bartleby
still here 15:13
