Mezze (XV)

[Language note:  That word is from Turkish, and refers to tasty Mideast treats;  the Arabic is مزة ]

More morsels -- click for the full take.

We really must keep away from politics on this site -- lest, touching pitch, we be defiled:  for no-one convinces anyone else, and the ensuing heat helps melt the ice-caps.   But the escalating weirdness of the world compels attention. 

Violins and trumpets!  Children in the streets.

Balloon men and circus gongs  and peasants selling sweets.

Tall man in a top hat, smiling  walking by.

Old dog on a hayrick, in the sun, he’s sly.

Realism about mathematics is just a part -- and not the chief part -- of Realism about Reason.   One can actually get along pretty well, from week to week, without having recourse to Algebraic Geometry.  But Reason is at the core of our being and our freedom:  and it is Reason that, in these dark days, finds itself under attack.

When someone speaks of mathematics, dismissively, as not being “about” anything, we suspect he never made it past simple arithmetic, and finds the integers pale and spectral  next to nice red apples.   And it is true, you cannot eat the number 2; but then, neither can you really take the square root of a couple of apples.

Here we see the long history ofYemeni political poetry  coming brilliantly to fruition  in a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk  of poetry,music, dance, and fist-pumping  all in one.

Alas!  frisky and adorable, the prairie dog --like his cousin the humble woodchuck -- is entirely unfamiliar with the Peanopostulates -- or in layman’s terms, with Our Friends the Integers.   Therefore they get eaten.  Gobble gobble gobble !!!  Gone!