Is that a palimpsest in your pocket or are you just happy to see millenia?

Seven hundred years ago recycling was just as much a rage as the practice is now.  One day a monk cut up some old papyrus scraps and dutifully copied his prayer book into the reconstituted volume. One hundred years ago in Constantinople (“Been a long time gone, Constantinople; Now it’s Turkish Delight on a moonlit night“), a book hound from Denmark found the prayer book in a Constantinople library and noticed that there was, beneath the prayer book,  scribed another book whose inks had been scraped off to give the next calligraphic squatter room to work with.

The preexisting tome was a book or two written by Greek Brainiac Archimedes, where he examined ways to calculate the area and volume of  objects like eggs because sooner or later someone was going to have to be able to render items of that sort through a 3D digital format.  As a lark, Archimedes also kicked around notions of actual infinity without using a net to stop gravity from weighing in on a theorem or two.

The man was so fast he could turn out the lights and get under the covers before the room got dark, and then explain the mathematical paradigm behind the phenomenon.  Archimedes was still such a bad mammah-jammah at the age of 75 that a Roman soldier felt threatened enough to run him through with a big pointy nasty sword.  Over drawings of spheres in the sand.  There aint no easy thug life in integral calculus -a’ight?

But I digress.  There the text stood, in plain (more or less) sight for many score decades.  Just kicking dust around on the shelves, as it were.

How many wonders hidden in plain sight are just under the radar in whatever spectrum we use to stimulate our visual cortex?

For a live-time demonstration of the principle of the artifact hidden in plain sight, consider the evolution of democratic chess before our very eyes.  When the pawns create and leverage their own guild then a new wind’s blowing in, don’t ‘cha know.  This entire development of chess pieces having the capacity to challenge the player’s strategy seems to The Good Doctor as yet another example of Reverse LewisCarrollian Particularly Peculiar Particle Quantum Physics, a meta-theory suggesting that things are in fact becoming curiouser and curiouser.

Another item of evidence may be found in the presentation made at the recent AAAS Chicago conference, where attendees were told that Weird Alien Life May Exist Among Us Now!  Even though most of the suggested living spaces for this ’shadow life’ include toxic arsenic lakes and deep sea hydrothermal vents, I will refrain from connecting them to any number of vapid rabid right wingnut lipflappers.  Why should The Good Doctor have all the fun, after all?

Still now, even one month past the Notional Presidency of our much dis-loved Emperor Chimpus Maximus, his Flying Monkey Minions try to out Dada the politics of the White King and Queen in ‘Through the Looking-Glass ‘.  Their application of the ‘Cheshire Cat’ defensive strategy (in which they would fervently hope they might disappear from public scrutiny, leaving naught but their enigmatic smile as any evidence they had even been on the premises eviscerating International Treaties, the lives and careers of covert operatives and hapless schmoes, much less the Constitution), has perhaps fallen short as as a one stop shop provider for legal alibis for Rove, Meirs, Fredo and the others as they ask us to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Again, the actions of the aforementioned minions being another example of Things Hidden In Plain Sight (Site?), still there are other items, closer to the human condition, left hidden in plain sight.  such as
these sets of dentures found in the London Subway.

One is led to ponder what might have been; were they destined to be delivered to a war torn region to promote bicuspid peace and encourage good will, especially between a shy yet precocious whistling genius (Maybe like a Tuva Little Stevie Wonder) and an awkward though dedicated upper palate denture specialist and therapist, who can give Tuva Stevie what he’s been looking for: the operation that will allow his jaw crippled testy ol’ pa the chance to whistle just once more.

Or some poor sod realized what he was making cold calls hour after hour, and made them DIY performance art. The hybrid vigor of mis matched dental work . . . brrr; a chill just walked o’er my bones . . . perhaps a lovely picture of the evening will comfort me as I lull to sleep . .

ahhh . . . much better.

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