Sunday Miscellany: Post-Rapture Edition

Well, I didn't get taken up, so I guess I'm going to Hell. This surprises no one.

Things I have learned this week:

"To Anacreon in Heaven" is actually pretty hard to sing, much harder than "The Star Spangled Banner." Seriously, Francis Scott Key, what the hell?

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World War One is still claiming victims on the former battlefields of France, to the point where some farmers have to have armor on the undersides of their equipment. Seriously, there are full-time bomb disposal workers who do nothing but remove WWI ordnance. Mustard gas: it still sucks after a hundred years.

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Monogenetic volcanoes are short-lived, and don't reactivate after they've gone dormant.

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Maryland has battlefields from two civil wars.

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I'm no gardener; just ask the bowl of thyme dessicating on my front porch. Plants tend to die in my custody. However, I really like formal gardens, and, as a fan, I really like boxwood. I love hedge mazes. But the thing of it is, the smell of boxwood is particularly evocative to me. I once tried to express it to someone like this: there's a garden somewhere at the end of the universe where time stands still, stopped at a hot, drowsy summer afternoon for all eternity, and it smells of boxwood.

When even your mother looks at you like you're nuts, you tend to keep these observations to yourself afterwards.

But today I found out that Oliver Wendell Holmes had similar feelings about the smell of boxwood, that it is "the fragrance of eternity" and “it is one of the odors that carries us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past: if ever we lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there was box growing on it.”

Ha! So at least if I am crazy, I am crazy in good company. Maybe it's like that gene that makes cilantro taste like soap? One gene makes cilantro inedible, another makes the smell of boxwood trigger temporal hallucinations? I dunno.