Plain Honey is a hive buzzing with essays, stories, and discussions. ____________ Click on each comb, About and Pollinators to find your way around.

“Men first felt necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance” -Giambattista Vico, New Science, 241 (1744).

Who, the reader might well ask, is “babyvitruvius”? How can a long-dead architectural theorist—the mustiest, most pedantic, and unquestionably most difficult to understand of all architectural thinkers before the 20^th century—be an infant, that cuddliest (and loudest) of newborns, crawling before the readers’ astonished eyes, to greet him or her with an unfeigned, because unfeignable, freshness of vision?

I was living in Ithaca, NY when I was first introduced to The Flaming Lips. Ithaca has the privilege of steep hills, large, healthy trees, and imposing Gorges that gush with waterfalls. At the time nothing was more exciting than walking through this landscape with headphones on. Whatever is playing in your ears has a way of seeping into everything surrounding you—my heartbeat would grow heavy, and my legs would feel lighter than ever.

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Call it Frankencrane.

In the midst of Cyclone Sandy’s assault on the Eastern Seaboard, a fifty-ton crane attached to the top of One57—a building slated to be the tallest  residential building in Manhattan—partially collapsed under the storm’s powerful winds. For several days it dangled precariously over 57^th street

I wanted to set the scene briefly. In this short story, Kafka (the narrator Kafka) describes a village of mice folk who all work very hard and ‘pipe’ while they work. Josephine is the exception in this community because she sings when she pipes, she has a beautiful voice, though it is not always so clear why.

James Harden has 82 points in the first 2 games of the season. Only Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain have scored more points in a team’s first 2 games in NBA history (sic).

–ESPN stats and information

here’s to missing the point

The new NBC series Revolution imagines an apocalyptic fantasy wherein electricity simply stops working, all at once, without scientific explanation. Physics has gone haywire, and no one seems to know why. The opening scene of the first episode stages this event with no shortage of dramatic flourish.

Gone. Revoked. Forced to begin again. How the summers washed over the felt of his digit. A bit of loose change fell on the ground before his feet. Why, screaming from above, oh why, did it transform?

“A neuron like a die spilling with ant seeds go on up the granite!”