Lamar Howell's Weblog

On the planet Geometry lived Shapes of two kinds—Cubes and Pyramids. Cubes and Pyramids had great celebrations when they joined together for life, and when they engaged in secret math, they produced handsome little cubes and beautiful little pyramids. Sometimes a Cube tried to do secret math with another Cube and a Pyramid with another Pyramid, but it was looked upon as strange, too congruent and unmathematical by most of Geometry.

But some Cubes and Pyramids got angry by these laws of math and created a huge rhombus and d id base angles, demanding new rules. Geometry became scared of them and gave in to their demands along equilateral lines. A Cube with a Cube, a Pyramid with a Pyramid, and that became the Second Law, or New Math as some Shapes called it.

After a few revolutions around Geometry’s sun, one day some of the new pairs of Shapes starting making a novel demand. Since they were not doing math to create tiny Cubes and Pyramids anyway and they were together for the simple love of math, they didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t join any number of shapes together. The rulers who made the rules on Geometry did not have a good argument against this by then. If two Shapes, why not three?

So now, on the planet Geometry, any number or combination of Cubes and Pyramids can join together and do math, or just simple arithmetic if that is what they want. They can even make a dual Cube/Pyramid Shape, called a Transversible. So, the New Math resulted in the Higher, Evolved Math, and now math is not complicated on the world called Geometry. Everybody can do it so easily, even in groups.

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This week, Diane Sawyer did a tribute to someone who had a special anniversary to celebrate and enjoined all Americans to celebrate with her. No, it was not a war hero, an inventor, even a celebrity with an amazing marriage to talk about. No one must have died in Afghanistan that day, no Amber alert must have been sent out, no soul in Japan suffering radiation poisoning, no blind Chinese person betrayed by our government, no one shot with an Eric Holder automatic gun. No, nothing worthy of our sympathy, rage, or admiration. Oh, yes, there was one: Ellen Degeneres’ sterling accomplishment. It turned out to be the fifteenth anniversary of her coming out and pronouncing her lesbianism on primetime television. The feature story had her all dressed up in her man-suits, painted up for her J C Penny sponsorship shots, plucking our heartstrings and tearing us up with her squeaky admissions. In case you missed it, in five years Diane will do a twentieth anniversary piece. Ellen, a true American hero.

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EMERGENCY?

A tornado is an act of God
A cyclone, a hurricane or monsoon
A tidal wave and tsunami
You name it. What is not covered
by insurance is laid in God’s lap
Sunspots, renegade asteroids,
the San Andreas is God’s fault too.
Does God just hiccup or burp
and sometimes throw up on us
out of some cosmic vendetta?
He lets evil go on, we charge,
and suffering too,
And we think he is bluffing,
that we have a full deck
and he has no clue
or that he sits up there all deadpan
and overlooks me and you.
Listen, justice is ours to show
and vengeance his at the end of the day
Mercy is our lot and love the measure
He did all he could do with his voice
and commands, his uplifted right hand
his courage as a man
when personal disaster fell
He knows it full well
The tornado-spun lies
The hurricane of accusations
The convulsing earth choking with blood
The soot-black power outage of God’s grief
The overwhelming waves of garden prayer
The tsunami weight of water-logged beams
Emergency?
You and I are his emergency. Our fast-sinking souls
the chaotic refuse-filled rooms of our thoughts
Our proud independence to stand atop the rubble
and shake our fists in his face.
Oh, lets kneel down!
crunching the aluminum cans
and rattling leftovers of self-made lives
and bend low to smell the stench of
man-without-God waste that we walk and repose in.
Then we can find salvation.

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