Saturday, March 08, 2008

Johnny-come-latelies

At the Times, David Colman interviews Oliver Sacks, who is wearing a particularly delightful T-shirt in the picture that accompanies the article:
“I love dense things,” he said cheerfully, ticking off the densities of tungsten, iridium and platinum.

He also loves ferns and cycads, believing that plants that make a garish show of their sex organs — what we call flowers — are perhaps a bit vulgar. “I feel that flowers are Johnny-come-latelies,” he said, noting that ferns predated flowering plants by more than 200 million years.

2 comments:

  1. Everytime I try to click on your blog, I get a pop-up add for "Bible studies on-line," that makes my computer freeze up. Could that be a virus? It's very upsetting.

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  2. I'm gonna take the line "I love dense things" as a coded personal shout-out to me.

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