A lesser-known saying of the Buddha

"I have some friends who are considered, well, modern-day prophets, and one of them said, ‘It must be wonderful for your children to have such a conscious father—when did that happen?’ And I said, ‘I’m mindful of a quote attributed to Buddha, which is that you don’t find the pearl of enlightenment lying around on the beach. You gotta go through a lot of oysters, and you gotta scrape your knuckles and break your fingernails opening all the motherfuckers up. And then one day’ ”—he beamed and grasped the air—“ ‘there it is! The fucking pearl of enlightenment!’”

To be fair to Don Johnson, who is the subject of the New Yorker interview from which this quotation is taken, perhaps he was not ascribing all of those words to the Enlightened One.

Killing the Hydra

Following not-all-that-hotly on the heels of the revelation the sum of all positive integers is -1/12, here is another hugely implausible mathematical argument.

Badger the fox and you’ll fox the badger

The headline is from a Spectator competition to invent proverbs that sound profound but have no meaning. Here are some other ones I liked:

The overcoat of conceit will not deter the lizard of oblivion.

Life is the crossword, love is the clue.

There is no ‘I’ in ‘eye’.

Woods do not grow on trees.

Ross McKibbin loses contact with reality

Ross McKibbin writes this (in the LRB):

"It is surprising how unwilling even the partisans of the EU are to argue the case for membership.  Most voters don’t realise that we can safely drink our water, eat our food, swim in the sea, have a reasonable expectation that a building won’t fall on us, thanks to EU legislation. Damning such legislation as the work of the nanny state is simply a way for Conservative (and Ukip) politicians to escape their obligations, something the British political class has frequently done."

Does he seriously believe this? Does he think that before the UK joined the EEC, we were unable to drink our water and eat our food, and that we all lived in fear of collapsing buildings? Does he believe that that is how, say, Canadians or Japanese live today?

If that is the best the "partisans of the EU" can do, it is no wonder they are unwilling to make the argument. The problem is that British partisans of the EU on the left don't have many arguments. The whole free-trade side of things is problematic (McKibbin points out that it has not done great things for the old, tariff-protected industries that traditionally supported trades unions and the mainstream left), while the other bits (the euro, greater political union) just aren't that popular, or even very left-wing. These people support the EU for emotional reasons, because it is modern and progressive (or at least, used to be) and because the people who oppose it might be xenophobes. It's a mood and a set of prejudices - not an argument.

5 things to see

1. Competition winners in Belarus.

2. Proof that Axl Rose has a larger vocal range than Mariah Carey (or at least, a good infographic on the point).

3. Some lovely eggs. (Bower birds should go into high-end handbag design, if you ask me.)

4. A woman working as a table, with intriguing post-colonial implications.

5. Some minimalist film posters.

How the children of the world could have built Stonehenge

The trick is not to have watched the Gangnam style video, which has apparently deprived the world of nearly 5 Stonehenges. On the basis that children make up a fair amount of the viewers of the video, but require longer to build installations using monoliths, I think it's a fair assumption that children could have built at least 1 of those Stonehenges.

In fact, if you add in all the time they have spent watching Eton Style, dogs doing Gangnam style and so on, plus the time spent doing their own imitations of Psy, I'm confident that there's another Empire State Building that has been lost as well. In our household alone, Psy must have deprived the world of at least a Lego model of the Burj Khalifa and a small paper-based Wikipedia of all knowledge known to small children. On the other hand, those of you who think the last thing London needs is another one-and-a-bit Olympic parks will be wishing Psy well with his next video.

Best optical illusions of the year

I like the fact that this is just for this year - there will be more! They are pretty good.