Beautiful Things #82 and #83: Fruits and Vegetables
Your mom tells you to eat them, the food pyramid tells you to eat them, they are delicious and nutritious. But did you know they are also beautiful? They make structure and color out of water, sunshine, and dirt. How sweet is that? And speaking of sweet, they are one of the few things on this list that can be beautiful to all the senses.
Another reason fruits and vegetables are beautiful is because they are useful. Forget aesthetics, beauty for beauty’s sake, these industrious flora are hardworking and essential to our survival. They are like little red, green, and yellow superheroes, sacrificing their lives so that others may live. How noble, how selfless, how… beautiful?
Beautiful Thing #50: Language
While language is but a portion of the elegant and complex system that is Communication (#324), it is quirky, lovable, and fascinating enough to merit it’s own number and blogpost. Congrats, Language, you’re #50.
Sure, the fact we take it for granted despite it’s virtues and industry gives it that beautiful Cinderella quality, but language is also beautiful for the way it combines two seemingly opposite qualities: it is man-made and at the same time, it is alive.
Try giving Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a read. Just for a page, if you can read the whole thing… mine hat I doff to thee. After straining every nueron in your brain to descipher this text which is supposedly written in English, it’s hard deny that language is a perfect example of evolution.
Like a DNA strand, Language is made up of tiny bits of information strung together. Taken together, those bits of consonants and vowels make up and idea, a couplet, a sonnet, a love song. And like DNA those bits can recombine to form an infinite amount of permutations: different breeds and species of expressed thought.
Beautiful thing # 82: Sharks!
Yes, that’s right, Sharks. Oh stop it, I know that thinking sharks are beautiful because the are so deadly has so been done. I am simply saying that they are beautiful creatures. Most of them, anyhow. There are so many species, there are bound to a few ugly relatives disgracing the family reunion picture, but overall, sharks are neat to look at.
True, most fish are. In general, fish are shiny, pretty, and dumb as rocks (like some female pop stars I know) but sharks are different. They are not shiny. They’re all dressed up for the party in a kick-ass suit. They are not tall and thin either, like most fish. They are more like underwater jet-fighters which are also beautiful/deadly/cool.
So when a shark is swimming by using his very beautiful sense of smell to detect his prey from miles away, it strikes awe just like those screaming jet fighters. But silent. Silent but deadly. I’m sorry, I had to. Go sharks. Go Jets. West Side Story rumble tonight.
Beautiful Thing # 17 The Web
I know that someday, I will be able to tell my slack-jawed grandchildren that, when Grampy was a kid, there was no internet. This will be a lie, of course, because Al Gore created it before I was born, but if you ask me, there was no internet before AOL.
Now, dear scroller, the world wide web lies open to all (except to people trying to watch YouTube in Turkey), a vast playground/library/singles bar that simultaneously gives people a voice, while wiping it out with sheer volume of white noise.
The WWW is a teriffic monster. A hulk of electricity, ones, zeros, and the MySpace profiles and wikipedia entries they represent. Omniscient (thanks Wikipedia) and Omnipresent (thanks GoogleEarth), the Web is the demigod of our age and we all worship for hours each day.
A Small Tribute to Beautiful Things 