I don’t.

As I often do on a quiet Friday afternoon, I was leafing through a copy of Verzekerd magazine, when, predictably, I came across an interesting article. Researchers at the Dutch Center for Insurance Statistics report that Fridays that fall on the thirteenth day of the month are actually safer than other days.

“I find it hard to believe that it is because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home,” reported Alex Hoen, “but statistically speaking, driving is a little bit safer on Friday thirteenth.”

As Rex Stout noted, “There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up, and the kind you make up.” I’m not sure which flavor the Dutch analysts used, but it doesn’t matter; there’s no point in applying any scientific method to superstition.

And speaking of love, I’ve always appreciated George Bernard Shaw’s perspective.

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

If that’s not amore, then I don’t know what is!

Imagine that, a pencil sharpener! In 2009!

I couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to be the same model I used in elementary school decades ago. I took it apart to examine the pencil shavings. The shredded wood was old, odorless, and very different than the smell of freshly-hewn trees I still remember from my distant youth.

The moral of this story is that this story has no moral. Pencil sharpeners have nothing to do with music, unless they’re used to make grindy sounds. Mills appears to be one of those staid institutions cautiously testing the waters of twentieth-century music, which may or may not be why no one there seems to appreciate a perfectly good pencil sharpener in a dedicated alcove.

Al uses “bigal” in his email address; that’s where the miscommunication started. His employer reported that this epithet led to an embarrassing exchange with a client, who asked if he might meet with “bi[sexual] gal” with whom he’d been corresponding over the Internet.

I forget how that story ends, but that’s irrelevant: a good story needs no conclusion.

Like several million other photographers, I was impressed by Frank’s book, The Americans. I still am; it’s still solid after fifty years. After learning how the publication was made, though, I’m looking at it in a different light.

Frank ran seven hundred and sixty-seven rolls of film through his camera to make some twenty-seven thousand photographs for The Americans. He used eighty-three of them; couldn’t anyone make a publishable photograph once in every three hundred and twenty-five exposures? I’m thinking of my distant associate Koko, a gorilla whose fine self-portrait graced the cover of National Geographic magazine.

After thinking about numbers for a while, I realized that I was viewing the work in the context of the photographic culture I embraced as a teenager. Great photographers don’t crop; the corollary is that really great photographers needn’t edit much. Like a number of other teenaged observations, those weren’t very smart, or relevant.

A million apes with a million Leicas and seven hundred and sixty-seven million rolls of film couldn’t have made The Americans. The book exists because of Frank’s vision as both a photographer and an editor; whether he used a dozen or seven hundred and sixty-seven rolls of film to come up with the final work is irrelevant.

Having said that, I think works of art are like Bismark’s sausages; it’s best if one doesn’t know how they’re made.

And so, I was chuffed to discover that a single human hair can support three kilograms of weight. I don’t know much about physics or engineering, but I suspect that I could make a very strong fishing line by weaving my long hairs together. That could be very handy on my upcoming trip to Oregon; I haven’t caught many fish that weighed over three kilograms.

I doubt that I’ll ever test my theory, since I can a hundred meters of environmentally-destructive monofilament fishing line for a dollar or two.

“I threw a huge party a couple of months ago,” she explained, “and some scumbag walked off with my favorite Flaundaire frying pan.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, “but it still seems that handcuffs are a bit excessive.”

“You wouldn’t say that if someone stole one of your favorite implements,” she replied.

I didn’t want to know any more about the handcuffs, so I changed the subject.

Handcuffs in the kitchen?!