The beauty in having total creative and editorial control of an enterprise is that you can do whatever you want with it. Few things in life are quite so wonderful — or so potentially overwhelming.

And so it was that when my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies met an untimely end, I could pay homage in a way that made sense to me, through the medium at my disposal, for an audience I hoped might share some modicum of my sentimental reaction to the loss.

How is the Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies like curiosity? That’s for you to decide…

Listen to Choose to be Curious #42: #Analogy: A Tribute

Professor of language and literature Tonya Howe was one person I felt reasonably certain shared my fondness for analogies, so I dropped in on her office hours to learn more about analogies — and was reminded what fun it was to talk with her about how much the language with which we express and explore curiosity is tangled up in our ideas of femininity.

Listen to Curiosity to Go, Ep. 15: Curiosity By Any Other Name

How is one thing like another, and how best to capture and express that comparison? How — or why — can our view of something be indelibly altered by our association of it with something else? How do we make the most effective (read: constructive, positive, creative-in-all-the-best-senses) use of that power? As we choose to be curious, how does that habit influence the analogies we feel tempted to make?

I’ve learned this: an analogy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Through its sturdy soda-lime glass, with its clasp’s signature rattle, by serving up random slips of paper for scores of guests, the Big Jar has helped me see the world just a little differently. Couldn’t ask for much more from an old jar. R.I.P.  B.J.W.A.

Thanks to Sean Balick for permission to use his original composition, None.

Your Love Is Like Clean Water by SongAboutYourPost2 is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 

The World Is Like An Apple… (a mix for Test / Radio Nova March 2001) by Ewan Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Like A Pig in The Sunshine by Jorge CE is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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