The Eisenberg Constant

Eugene Egner's The Eisenberg Constant is a short story about a man who has paid to live in a fixed loop of time, and who is experiencing some bugs in his home installation. The story is quite simple: he waits three days until a technician can make a house call to troubleshoot the problems. It's also complicated --- since he is familiar with his fixed one-week loop, while he waits he wanders around, noting differences from the usual functionality and trying to stay sane and coherent, while time jumps and judders around him. It's a delightfully Philip K. Dick-ian story, which doesn't loop itself in the usual manner of time travel stories... after all, the apparatus is experiencing bugs!

I rate this story as suitable for a transoceanic plane ride and the accompanying musings about trusting your life to a piece of complicated machinery which completely encases your body for long periods of time.


This post's theme word is insalubrious, "detrimental to health". A survey of fictional literature produces the composite idea that time travel is insalubrious.

Alien husks

The ways in which the inhuman and transitory artificial environments of airports are decorated always suggest strange alien decision-making processes. What effect is the art supposed to have? To hold passengers' attention while they wait? To brighten their days? To give them something to contemplate other than the unusual fluid dynamics upon which heavier-than-air flight relies?

Mimi Bardagjy's sculptures call to mind alien husks, the discarded shells of deep-sea creatures, or abandoned multi-creature egg casings. They are lit in a clinical way that makes them seem creepy.

Close examination shows (and the description confirms) that the ridges and indentations are human-finger sized, so that the entire thing is like a tube of putty gripped in an impossibly-many-fingered fist.

They are creepy and delightful.


This post's theme word is calyculus, "a cup-shaped structure." Behold these discarded ceramic calyculuses!