what a strange expression, huh? Variety loved its pithy if slightly difficult to understand jargon, meant to be as concise and snappy as possible, because in show biz there's no time to hang around. everything's go, go, go! so it's all about clipped utterances and snappy turns of phrase.

"Wall Street lays an egg." Well, a zero looks sort of like an egg, so that's one way to think of it. Wall Street was suddenly out of gas. Zip. I'm suddenly reminded of how "goose egg" is another tasty euphemism for zero.

You know that Muslim mathematicians had to introduce this simple concept to "the West"? It blew their minds. I think maybe it still does. Gosh there's a symbol for nothing! Makes you think don't it! Maybe nothing is anything, or whatever.

But eggs are also a beginning, as we all know, and zero is a beginning as well. The humble number-line has to start somewhere, so it grows outward from zero, so to speak.

One of the things that's been haunting me from the last several weeks has been listening to Elon Musk, on his "Adrian Dittmann" audio ramblings (Mono got blocked by the way! probably my fault because we've been doing some two-headed shenanigans from time to time, partly to evade censorship, but yeah 'Adrian' doesn't like old Mono), bringing up zero. I don't remember what he had to say about zero (are you kidding me?) but I certainly remember just how...particularly empty that felt. I think zero haunts Elon Musk. Uh, Adrian Dittmann rather.

Well I've been haunted by zero, too. "Back to Zero", at least. We have unfinished Fate/Zero business for sure. Someone's come knocking, with serious business: Diarmuid ua Duibhne. We are really weak on this Irish lore so...studying means a lot to us now, and that's a pity because we have been struggling with terrifyingly bad traumatic issues involving study.

~Chara of Pnictogen