Cleave the Sparrow

by Jonathan Katz

Alan Watts, one of the Stonefish’s favorite disciples, drew this helpful distinction in 1951: Belief clings, he wrote. Faith lets go.

In 1967, British ethicist Phillipa Foot wrote that having a medically necessary abortion is like diverting a runaway trolley car. It will strike and kill five people, if you do nothing. But you can save those lives by moving the car onto an alternate track, where it will strike and kill one person.

In other words, your active participation in a small horror is preferable to your tacit acceptance of a larger one.

Back in 2019, Swedish astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson used an advanced computer model to simulate the entire history of the universe, and it produced our best estimate for the total number of planets in existence. That number is seventy quintillion. That’s a seven followed by nineteen zeroes.

But I think most of us are hoping deep down that if Jesus ever witnessed a home invasion, we’d have the Gospel of John Wick.

Crick is probably one of those goblins in Khazad-dûm, which is from Deuteronomy, I think.

I think that’s because it’s pretty easy to come up with gross-sounding stuff that everyone hates. Like fire monsters punching you in the pancreas—no one’s in favor of that.

despite what those smug-as-shit lobsters might tell you.

This is how former President John D. Rockefeller Kennedy-Onassis Hemsworth

the Third, Esquire

Our universe is 13.8 billion years old, and for most of that time, Earth didn’t exist.

For nearly all of Earth’s existence, which started around 4.5 billion years ago, there was no intelligent life at all.