Beautiful. Poetic. Absurd.

Thanks to jwz, I learned of www.idlewords.com (idlewords_rss).

On sunny days the spa downstairs sets them out while the spa girls in lab coats play hacky-sack. There is a bowl and a bucket, and there are two kinds of turtles - regular and mini. Usually two mini turtles are in the bowl and a half dozen assorted turtles will be in the bucket. Sometimes the bowl holds two turtles, sometimes more, but always fewer than the bucket.

Why are some of the turtles in the bowl? Why are the other turtles in the bucket? Is being in the bowl a punishment or a reward? How do you judge the turtles to decide who gets to go (must go) in the bowl, and who must stay (gets to stay) in the bucket? Is there a third, utterly reprobate set of turtles that stays in the spa and does not get to go in the sun at all? And how do you communicate to the turtles why they have wound up where they are, and what they might do to change it? The questions grow uncomfortably eschatological.

At WalMart they sometimes have little lessons in turtle carving. A turtle carver in an apron will pull a live turtle out of the turtle tank in the seafood section (the turtles already have little bar code tags twist-tied through a hole in the edge of their shells) and a bunch of shoppers watch, leaning silently on their carts, while the carver fillets the turtle into small pieces that are then (this seems particularly unfair) neatly arranged inside the top half of his shell. I was worried that the spa turtles might face a similar fate, puréed in the preparation of some turtle skin cream or other minor atrocity, but so far it seems the are strictly pets. I am afraid to count them.

http://idlewords.com/2006/07/black_letter_days.htm

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

http://idlewords.com/2006/07/from_pushkin.htm