Some good things in the world (other than sliced bread) that human beings are responsible for: playlists you make yourself and puff pastry you don’t; the Parthenon and the Borgesian Library of Babel; Google’s search-by-image option and amazon.com; the myth of Prometheus; Angostura bitters; the way bubble wrap pops; wit; Sharpie pens and the convenient way paper folds; delete functions and snooze buttons; the strings in Madonna’s “Frozen” and the synthesizer-turbulence of Tori Amos’s “Hotel”; parentheses; “The Blind Watchmaker”, “The Selfish Gene” and “The Ancestor’s Tale”; touchscreens and electric typewriters; the way “sizzle” and “meow” sound like what they refer to but “onomatopoeia” sounds like nothing except itself; cocktails and wine; Ian McEwan’s novels, Christopher Hitchens’s essays, Paul Monette’s memoirs, Quentin Crisp’s monologues and the poetry of Billy Collins; anesthetics; “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” and “Veronica Mars”; denims and T-shirts; all the different breeds of dogs and horses; science; Meryl Streep movies and Pixar animation films; the way we persist in making things despite the relentless onslaughts of entropy; the way we defiantly love in the midst of inescapable and unavoidable impermanence.