28 | March | 2023 | Portraits of Wildflowers

Archive for March 28th, 2023

Cloud like a ring

Back on March 12th I was driving north along Mopac when I noticed a cloud in the shape of a mostly closed ring. Exiting the expressway, I hurriedly hunted for and after several minutes found a place where I could park and get a shot of the cloud free from poles, wires, buildings, etc. I took a bunch of pictures showing the ring-shaped cloud by itself but I’ve chosen to show a more-expansive view that includes other clouds as well.

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Riddle

What can you say about an agriculturalist and a structure for climbing?

To see the answer, follow the arrows.

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What can you say about an agriculturalist and a structure for climbing?

The former is a farmer and the latter is a ladder.

If you’re curious about what inspired this riddle, it was a sentence I read a couple of hours ago in Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley’s book Superabundance: “And so, over the millennia, farming gradually displaced hunting and gathering, leaving the former as the dominant human lifestyle in many parts of the world.”

To my taste, writers should avoid “the former, the latter” because readers have to scamper back in the text to figure out what each thing is. It’s better to say straight-out what you mean, even if you have to repeat recently used words.