WhimsyLand

Have you ever read or heard a simple fact that you'd read or heard countless times, and stopped and considered what it meant and that you would only think you understood what it meant, that you would never actually ever grasp it?  Our galaxy is home to 200-400 billion stars, a few of them with solar systems, most without.  That means that every person on earth could have 30 stars to call their own.  Our galaxy is large beyond comprehension.  To get from one side to the other at the speed of light would take 100,000 years.  To get an idea how long that is, consider that Homo sapiens first colonized Eurasia and Oceania only 40,000 years ago, that recorded history in any sense is less than 10,000 years old.  Most scientists believe that we will never travel outside our galaxy.  Ever.  (we may be able to deploy quantum state separation or folded space or other wild phenomena to communicate or send small inorganic objects somewhere, but even that is doubtful).  The center of our galaxy is believed to contain a supermassive black hole that has already consumed millions, perhaps billions, of stars.  Of the hundreds of billions of stars that still remain, billions of them  hold planets within their gravitational grip.  Of these planets, millions of them could be have the properties (distance from their star, mass, composition) amenable to supporting life.  A couple of weeks ago I saw the Milky Way in a moonless sky and was considering the unthinkably vast nature of our galaxy.  Then the fact hit me:  there are another 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

What started me thinking about this was an attempt to acquaint myself with websites other than my own.  I started with my former blogroll and branched out and branched out.  I know there are more websites than I could visit in a lifetime, but every one seems so accessible, so immediate, that the illusion persists. 

The Gallery of Regrettable Food chronicles the history of unwise culinary choices and ludicrous cookbooks, like "When It's Strictly Stag", which recommends pistachio cordials to match the ties, coffee cups and salad of the 50's guy guests.  A gaggle of tiki-handled cups sits beside a casserole pan of beans that provide the leguminous base for a dozen erect hotdogs.  Fuck This Website is hosted by a photographer who made up stickers with the word "Fuck" in various sizes, applied them to dozens of signs around the city, and shot pics of the effect.  The resulting coffee table book made it to #6 on the LA Times Bestsellers List.  This site explains the rules of "Strip Chess".  How to kill termites with armies of nematodes.  Elephant polo in Thailand.  It's endless, really.

Luckily, the right part of my brain is still a poet.  It's trying to find new metaphors for the moon.  It knows that love is also unkennable.