AN OBJECT LESSON IN TEMPERANCE

UEL ARAMCHEK

A marble statue of an angel hovered over the lagoon, with no physical connection to the Earth below. Water poured forth from an amphora in her motionless hands, spilling endlessly down. “From this point, the potentiality of all creation spills forth. New species of microscopic life come into being and disappear in moments. Only a fraction of a fraction can survive, but every few centuries, one endures, and begins to spread through the waters of the world.”

The Fountain of Youth. And in fucking Florida, no less.

A BRIEF TOUCHBASE

UEL ARAMCHEK

His business ‘card’ was a cube: six faces, six names, six numbers.

"There's more of me inside, just in case," he explained. "Break it open if you can't find who you're looking for."

ON EARWIGS

UEL ARAMCHEK

There is a commonly circulated urban legend concerning earwigs that their name is a reference to a particularly horrifying type of parasitism: that they propagate by burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal, then tunnel their way into the brain’s gray matter where they lay their eggs.

In modernity, most discover this myth by encountering a statement of its negation. Nearly every text concerning earwigs includes, somewhere in the first few sentences, language similar to this: “Despite their nomenclature, earwigs do not actually propagate by burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal to lay their eggs, though this is a commonly circulated urban legend.”

THE MYRMECOLEON EFFECT

UEL ARAMCHEK

The antlion is unique among modern animalia in that its evolution resulted not from a mutation within its genetic code, but rather, within the spelling of its name. Sometime during the legendary translation of the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek for Ptolemy II, an old Hebrew variant of 'lion' used in the Book of Job was warped into the bizarre word 'myrmecoleon,' a portmanteau of the terms for 'ant' and 'lion.'

PALIMPSEST

UEL ARAMCHEK

"Before paper was easy to come by, scrolls and books would be rinsed of their ink so that their pages could be reused when the original copies no longer had an audience.” A dash of lampblack bitters left a squid trail through his whiskey and vermouth. "Even after their removal, however, the molecules of ink would continue to cluster in a similar geometric manner. Because of this, most of the information was retained in the ink itself long after it had been wrung from the text.

CAVITATION

UEL ARAMCHEK

"The skull is the primary organ responsible for producing dreams," she explained. "As any neurologist can tell you, it contains far more complex marrow than any other bone in the human body.”

"Really? Given how thin the bone is, I wouldn't think that there would be any- oh." Is that seriously what she meant?

MAGIC WINDOW

UEL ARAMCHEK

Geogaddi, Boards of Canada’s sophomore album, was engineered so as to last for exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds. Their fixation on the repetition sixes is clear throughout its content, right down to the title of track sixteen: “The Devil is in the Details.” Even the cover art is composed entirely of six-sided figures, a seemingly endless kaleidonoid procession of hexagons within hexagons. When the LP suddenly emerged in 2002, it debuted at a collection of six churches worldwide, in a ritual of unknown intent.

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