Words of the Prophets

I have too much time on my hands. So I listen to a lot of podcasts. On John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed, I heard an ad for "Metaphor Dice." They're a teaching aid to help kids learn to play with language, but the ad made them sound like something grown ups would use too.

So I bought a set.

They work like this. You randomly pick one red, one white and one blue cube (the French edition would be blue, white and red) shake them up, toss them and then make a statement out of the words that fall. The statement should follow the equation: "the red cube" equals "the white cube" plus "the blue cube". 

So, using some of the words in the photo above: 

"Home is a sacrosanct zoo"

or

"Apathy is an obstinate lens"

You get the idea. Once you have the statement, you play with the words and see where they take you. It's like a burpee for your brain.

One downside to this clever tool is the word choices of the man who made the dice. Many of them are negative ("ill-gotten") or creepy ("party clown") or part of an idiom I avoid ("blessing"). But the dice come with stickers that you can use to add your own words. 

Another downside sometimes is the randomness of the combinations. For example, I rolled "regret is a petulant mirror" and spent the morning cursing how stupid that was.

 

On the Other Hand

Nothing is more random than what you find just wandering around.

Give a schizophrenic a Sharpie...
Sidewalk scrawl at the corner
 of Alexander and Church Streets

... and I think this is someone's idea of a 
clever parody of ... something.

Thanks for reading!

Make the most of what's left of summer!

Karen

Bought on Yonge Street in 1998 from a
schizophrenic named Stewart