Passing thoughts

This afternoon on Stanford campus I passed the Somebody Earthquake Engineering Building. There's a joke waiting to happen. Then I walked to a church where Mrs. R was about to sing in a choral concert, thinking this was also a joke waiting to happen. Surely the same applies to orphanages, though I can't recall ever having seen one. A cursory google for the Bay Area yields mostly links for a movie company and historical references. Maybe society's needs have altered somewhat in this age of better medicine (esp for childbirth), later childbearing, ferility problems, and safe abortions on the one hand and more virulent drugs and new societal pressures (and openness about them) on the other.

On the subject of morbid irony, here's a passage from a New Yorker article on the earthquake in Kashmir:

Half a mile up, a section of the gorge wall had collapsed. Small tombstones protruded at odd angles from a mound of dirt. A bloated corpse wrapped in a black shroud lay on top of the mound.
Apparently, the person had been killed by a falling graveyard.

ObQuibble, the rhythm of those lines seems a tad monotonous. Though perhaps that adds matter-of-factness for greater contrast.