Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintillian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."

A.S.B. stands for "Associated Student Body".

^"I think it was Auden who whined, 'Marriage is rarely bliss,'..."^

from "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics" by W.H. Auden

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

^"...that should be enough to bring bliss equal to Buddha's Emptiness."^

Śūnyatā, in Buddhism, translated into English as emptiness, voidness, openness, spaciousness, thusness, is a Buddhist concept which has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. In Mahayana Buddhism, it often refers to the absence of inherent essence in all phenomena. In Theravada Buddhism, suññatā often refers to the not-self nature of the five aggregates of experience and the six sense spheres. Suññatā is also often used to refer to a meditative state or experience.

^"I am not talking about inside-out space giraffes / debating Tensor-vector-scalar gravity..."^

Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS), developed by Jacob Bekenstein, is a relativistic generalization of Mordehai Milgrom's MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) paradigm.

The main features of TeVeS can be summarized as follows:
- As it is derived from the action principle, TeVeS respects conservation laws;
- In the weak-field approximation of the spherically symmetric, static solution, TeVeS reproduces the      
  MOND acceleration formula;
- TeVeS avoids the problems of earlier attempts to generalize MOND, such as superluminal propagation;
- As it is a relativistic theory it can accommodate gravitational lensing.

The theory is based on the following ingredients:
- A unit vector field;
- A dynamical scalar field;
- A nondynamical scalar field;
- A matter Lagrangian constructed using an alternate metric;
- An arbitrary dimensionless function.

^"...Socrates gurgling hemlock / On his dusty prison cot..."^

Socrates was ultimately sentenced to death by drinking a hemlock-based liquid.

^"...Giggling as he glimpsed a dikast's deformed ****;"^

Dikastes was a legal office in ancient Greece that signified, in the broadest sense, a judge or juror, but more particularly denotes the Attic functionary of the democratic period, who, with his colleagues, was constitutionally empowered to try to pass judgment upon all causes and questions that the laws and customs of his country found to warrant judicial investigation.

^"Nietzsche tenured for philology / At Basel;"^

Nietzsche received a remarkable offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate. Despite the fact that the offer came at a time when he was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted. To this day, Nietzsche is still among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record.

^"Nietzsche feverishly etching / Fick diese scheiße! in a Jena clinic;"^

"Fick diese scheiße!" is German for "**** this ****!"

On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similar letter and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition.

^"...Saratov / Circa 1942;"^

During World War II, Saratov was a station on the North-South Volzhskaya Rokada, a specially designated military railroad providing troops, ammunition and supplies to Stalingrad.

This poem is in terza rima, the form Dante used in his Divine Comedy.

The epigraph to E.M. Forster's (1879-1970) novel Howard's End  is "Only connect...". His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy is aptly summed up by this phrase.

"Legend has it that once, at a dismally inept amateur boxing match in Hull, Philip Larkin turned to his neighbour with the words "Only connect." In its way, this is typical of Larkin. Not only that he should thus introduce a hallowed Forsterian nostrum into a coarse context, but also that he should yearn for aggression and directness."

^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster
^Chambers, Harry. "An Enormous Yes: In Memoriam Philip Larkin (1922-1985)".

"When Robert Frost became the first poet to read in the program of a presidential inauguration in 1961, he was already well regarded in the capital: he read and dined at the White House; the Attorney General assisted his successful campaign to release Ezra Pound, who was under indictment for treason, from St. Elizabeth's Hospital; he was offered the Consultant in Poetry position by the Library of Congress; and the United States Senate passed a resolution naming Frost 'America's great poet-philosopher.' In the words of the poet William Meredith, the decision to include Frost in the inauguration 'focused attention on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture.' Kennedy's decision to include Frost, however, was more likely a personal gesture to the poet, who was responsible for much of the momentum early in the President's campaign."

^The full article is here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20540

Full Film of Kennedy's Inaugural Ceremony:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdG1kcEAsX0

"still unstoried, artless, unenhanced" is most of the second-to-last line of the poem he ended up reciting at Kennedy's inauguration, "The Gift Outright".

*I'm going to continue you this...but I've got a block for some reason...*

"The Abaco Barb is an endangered strain of the Spanish Barb horse breed found on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas. The Abaco Barb is said to be descended from horses that were shipwrecked on the island during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean. The population of wild Abaco Barbs that run free on Great Abaco once numbered over 200 horses. The Abaco Barb is found in different colors than the European/African Barb, including pinto (including the relatively uncommon splashed white), roan, chestnut, black and other colors. They range between 1.32 to 1.47 m (13.0 to 14.2 h)."

"The Abaco Islands lie in the northern Bahamas and comprise the main islands of Great Abaco and Little Abaco, together with the smaller Wood Cay, Elbow Cay, Lubbers Quarters Cay, Green Turtle Cay, Great Guana Cay, Castaway Cay, Man-o-War Cay, Stranger's Cay, Umbrella Cay, Walker's Cay, Little Grand Cay, and Moore's Island. Administratively, the Abaco Islands constitute five of the 31 Districts of the Bahamas: North Abaco, Central Abaco, South Abaco, Moore's Island, and Hope Town. Towns in the islands include Marsh Harbour, Hope Town, Treasure Cay, Coopers Town, and Cornishtown."

"In August 1973, shortly after the Bahamas became independent, the Abaco Independence Movement was formed as a political party whose stated aim was self-determination for the Abaco Islands within a federal Bahamas. In October 1973, AIM published a newsletter to launch it's campagn for 'self-determination through legal and peaceful political action'. AIM proposed that all Crown land on Abaco would be placed in a land trust. Each citizen would receive a one acre home lot from the trust plus shares giving them an income from land sales and leases. The land trust would enter into a joint venture to develop a 60 sq mile free trade zone. When AIM was formed by Chuck Hall and Bert Williams, they contacted an American financier named Michael Oliver, who through his libertarian Phoenix Foundation agreed to support AIM financially. The Phoenix Foundation had previously sought to establish a libertarian enclave in the South Pacific, the Republic of Minerva. AIM's first convention, held on February 23 1974, was addressed by John Hospers, the Libertarian Party's 1972 US presidential candidate. Hospers was later refused entry to the Bahamas. The maverick British MP Colin Campbell Mitchell also visited Abaco to offer support."

"Michael Oliver (born 1930) is a Lithuanian immigrant of Jewish descent, Las Vegas real estate millionaire, and political activist. He was the founder of the micronation project the Republic of Minerva, a failed attempt to create a sovereign state in the South Pacific in 1972. In the following decades, Oliver and his Phoenix Foundation were also involved in similar projects on the Bahamian island of Abaco and in Vanuatu with the New Hebrides Autonomy Movement (MANH) which was done by financing an insurrection. He also published a manifesto of his libertarian beliefs. Oliver is prohibited to enter in Vanuatu and his nation-building projects seem to be on hiatus."

"Mitchell Livingston WerBell III, (1918–1983), was an OSS operative, soldier of fortune, paramilitary trainer, firearms engineer, and arms dealer.In 1972 WerBell was approached by the Abaco Independence Movement (AIM) from the Abaco Islands, a region of the Bahamas, who were worried about the direction the Bahamas were taking and were considering other options, such as independence or remaining a separate Commonwealth nation under the Crown in case of the Bahamas gaining independence (which they did in 1973). AIM was funded by the Phoenix Foundation, a group which aims to help build truly free micronations. The AIM collapsed into internal bickering before a coup by Werbell could be carried out."

^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barb_horse
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacos
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaco_Independence_Movement
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oliver_(real_estate)
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_WerBell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rps4jk4LvIo&feature;=player_embedded