Two hives went into Dave's orchard corner this spring, and Keith, who has assessed and tested and dismantled every single thing on that farm, has assessed the bees exactly once and elected, for the first time in his life, to leave a thing entirely alone. This is genuinely without precedent. Keith tests everything. He has eaten a latch, a pocket square, a set of water heater instructions, and the better part of Dave's left wellington. He climbs what cannot be climbed and opens what cannot be opened and investigates the world with a relentless prehensile curiosity that has cost Dave three hundred and eighty-seven pounds in gates. There is no object in his domain he has not, at some point, put his lips to in the spirit of enquiry. He walked up to the hives on the first day. Dave watched from the yard with the specific dread of a man who has seen this goat approach things before. Keith stood in front of the nearest hive. He watched the entrance, the constant stream of bees coming and going, the low working hum of forty thousand individuals about their business. He brought his nose to within a sensible distance. He held there for a while, doing whatever calculation it is that goes on behind those rectangular eyes. And then he stepped back, turned, and walked away to the bramble, and he has not gone near the hives since. Dave's log: "He left the bees. I don't know what passed between Keith and the bees. Whatever it was, the bees won the negotiation without appearing to negotiate, which is the only time anything on this farm has managed it. I have not added a column. I am simply relieved." There is a kind of intelligence that tests everything to find its limit. And there is a rarer kind that meets a thing humming with quiet collective purpose and recognises, without needing to be stung, that here at last is something better left to get on with its work. Keith has both. The bees are fine. The bees were always going to be fine. Even Keith knows where the line is, and the line, it turns out, is forty thousand of anything, all agreeing.

Baby has gotten good at identifying “dada” but still struggling with surrealism, cubism, even baroque.

how it started how it's going

Thanks for the fine example and integrity, @RepThomasMassie . Here's a piece on the Individual, America, and brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. joshurban.substack.com/p/the… #Massie #America #Writing #Thinkpiece

Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Schrödinger: Nice.

It's 1985, bottom of the 18th inning, game on the line, and Atlanta's relief pitcher, a career .060 hitter with no prior home runs, did the unthinkable. It's not called the "Rick Camp Game" for nothing!⚾️😲

“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it.” — Charles Bukowski

This is what AI was made for. John Travolta is lost on every movie set 😂 Credit: This AInt Cannon

If "Saturday Night Fever" was released in 1987 instead of 1977...

In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was a decorated Soviet officer who made a small, private joke about Stalin in a letter. The state opened it, read it, and treated it as a crime. Within weeks he was arrested and stripped of rank. He was fed into the camps, and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. The camps were designed to teach one lesson: say nothing, remember nothing, become nothing. He shoveled frozen concrete until his hands split and bled. Years later, Solzhenitsyn would write, “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.” It sounds insane until you understand what he meant. Prison showed him the truth of the regime in its purest form. After his release, the punishment did not end. He lived under constant surveillance, moving from place to place, knowing that writing a single page could mean death. So he did not write. He memorized. Whole chapters of The Gulag Archipelago lived only in his head. Friends hid scraps of text. Wives memorized passages. For years the book existed only in human memory, as fragile and dangerous as a secret prayer. When it was finally published, it did not argue that Soviet communism had gone too far. It showed that this was exactly where it led. Solzhenitsyn had learned that systems built on lies survive only if people agree to repeat them, and that the simplest refusal… to stop saying what you know is false… is the first and most dangerous act of resistance.

"In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed." ~ C.S. Lewis Gethsemane 🎨 Carl Bloch (1873)

“The man on the middle cross said I could come.” Easter week. Watch it. And watch it again. And then chase after Jesus.