.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Why Women are Stripey

To find a poem that would live happily inside a bacterium—and would enable the professor to teach his microbial student to try its hand at a stanza that could be decoded—Bök combed through eight trillion ciphers and decided on this:

Any style of life / is prim

And the organism, which emits a red luminescence, always writes back:

The faery is rosy / of glow
- Christian Bok, "The Xenotext"

8 comments:

FreeThinke said...

Our high school cafeteria
Gives solace to bacteria.
Staph infections propagate
On virtually every plate.
The place provides a great domain
For toxins known to cause ptomaine
Cold and flu germs fill the air
Waiting to pounce everywhere
And we have much cause to fear
A-mo-e-bic diarrhea,


Thersites said...

...the latter fear is more apropos in South America.

FreeThinke said...

A dissertation on bacterium
Could induce tremens delerium

The bearded youth's stile staccato
Seemed a bit too aggrivato

Until the happy moment that
He focused on the calico cat.

Gert said...

It used to be called mosaicism rather than stripy, I think. Women are essentially mosaics.

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/genetics/medgen/chromo/mosaics.html

There was that story of a mother who was accused of benefit fraud because DNA maternity tests ‘proved’ she wasn’t related to her own children! Turned out to be a case of chimerism, as further tests showed.

Epigenetics, the idea gene expression may be dependent on the past behaviour of progenitors (genomic imprinting), is a little scary.

FreeThinke said...

"...the latter fear is more apropos in South America."

Alas! Amoebic dysentery
Thanks much to Will and Orville
Has spread its fevered misery
From India to Allville

It's always been in Africa
And Asia and points south
It's spread through impure water,
From digestive tract to mouth

It's also now venereal
Thanks to Rock 'n Roll
Where drug use makes ethereal
The gross, out-of-control

Behavior of the hedonist
Who'd decency reject
And acts the role of arsonist
To all he should respect

And so it's universal
This malady once tropical
Of Progress a reversal
A health crisis sadly topical.


~ L'auteur Inconnue

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

First I'd ever heard of it. Chimeria's are, IMO, really scarey. Glad I didn't have a twin!

FreeThinke said...

The dream I had when still a lad
Was for a girl with skin of plaid

The lovely dream was broken sadly
In manner I can't suffer gladly

For I got stuck with one all stripey
Who's made my disposition gripey!


|;-)>

Thersites said...

Touche, mon ami!