Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for July 07, 2013

Megalomaniac butterflies sort of have it coming.

I think that under the doctrine of A Just War Alice is not culpable for the death of the megalomaniacal butterfly. Let not your conscience be troubled, Alice!

so pretty but, so sick.

A BUTTERFLY? Sure, you squish a moth every time, but a BUTTERFLY? That’s shocking.

No one ever suspects the butterfly!

It’s really odd that some folks will believe stories about the “butterfly effect” and not about “global warming”. Sort of like: being willing to swallow a camel but chocking on a gnat!

I tried to post this before, but it got messed up. Here it is again. The point is that Thompson has used the phrase “what rough beast”, and I’m quite sure he’s thinking of the end of this poem, which is one of the best poems of the modern period: Enjoy:+William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)THE SECOND COMING+Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.+Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;A shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itWind shadows of the indignant desert birds.+The darkness drops again but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Fun fact: The butterfly got its name since it was originally supposed to be called a “flutter-by”. Somehow, the two first letters/sounds got reversed, so we now call the creature a butterfly.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.”

So true!

Ray Bradbury wrote about a different “butterfly effect” in “A Sound of Thunder”. A man time-traveled into prehistory and stepped on a butterfly, and it altered the course of time.

The 7th panel, the guilty look. But if a butterfly talked that way to me,, I would probably squish it too.

To borrow an ending from a poem on a different subject*:

“‘It gives me sharp and shooting pains to listen to such drool!’ So I lifted up my foot and squashed the [CENSORED] little fool.”

*_How to treat elves_ by Morris Bishop

Thanks for reminding me of Bisphop — it’s been a while since I read anything of his. He was a serious scholar of French literature, and he brought Vladimir Nabokov to teach at Cornell. Here’s another poem of his:

Pop bottles pop-bottlesIn pop shops;The pop-bottles Pop bottlesPoor Pop drops.+When Pop drops pop-bottles,Pop-bottles plop!Pop-bottle-tops topple!Pop mops slop!+Stop! Pop’ll drop bottle!Stop, Pop, stop!When Pop bottles pop-bottles,Pop-bottles pop!