Prairie Mary and The Alpha E have both sent me this NYT interview with Jim Harrison, structured around (what else?– but nice to see in the NYT) a quail hunt and a meal, and plenty of organic cigarettes as well. Jim is an actual working artist and an exemplar of the life well- lived. I …
Month: January 2007
Tetrapod Zoology
Our favorite zoological blogger, Darren Naish, has moved to a new site at Science Blogs. Go there, bookmark him, and read his first post (on avian vampires). Congratulations, Darren!
Writing Life
Please: read Michael Blowhard’s devastating critique of the lit biz in general and the NYTBR specifically. A lot of folks have their knickers in a twist; I think he just NAILS it.
As Others See Us..
Pluvialis— who has been mysteriously absent from the blogosphere– sent me an unintentionally hilarious review of the Wilder Places edition of T. H. White’s The Goshawk. This was a series of ‘forgotten classics” I edited and introduced– sorry, I can’t find any link to that edition. Anyway, though he attempted to be kind, the reviewer …
More A. R.
Some exceedingly creepy rhetoric from PETA’s own site: their official policy on pets: “This selfish desire to possess animals and receive love from them causes immeasurable suffering, which results from manipulating their breeding, selling or giving them away casually, and depriving them of the opportunity to engage in their natural behavior. Their lives are restricted …
A. R. Updates
With any luck, Animal Rights groups may have overplayed their hands. First,go to the infamous “83 animals in a dumpster” trial, better known perhaps as “PETA Kills Animals”. This link is to day three, when some of the most devastating evidence begins to appear, but go to days one and two also. Some day three …
Ban, Ban, Ban-n-Ban. Ban.
If we asked Reid to paste up all the nutty news from California, he wouldn’t be writing much else. Since I’m not writing much else lately myself, I’ll wing this one at you. “Los Angeles and L.A. County authorities are studying whether to bar hydrogenated vegetable oils as an ingredient in restaurant menu items,” according …
Colonial Iron Furnace
Matt sent this piece about an early Colonial iron furnace found near the James River in Virginia that is thought to date to 1619. He asked if I could provide some context for this find. This venture was an offshoot of the original Jamestown colony, the first successful British colony in North America, that was …
What Reid is Reading
We haven’t done this in a while! The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky. Account by an anthropologist of his life and times spent with the Eveny, a reindeer herding native people in Siberia. On Steve’s recommendation. Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Historical novel set in 1620s Spain and sequel to his earlier “Captain Alatriste.” …
The Laki Eruption
The BBC has an interesting story about a forgotten natural disaster in Great Britain. In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted, and belched clouds of toxic gas (mostly sulphur dioxide) that blew over Britain and much of Western Europe. The clouds must have lasted for weeks, and researchers in the UK have recently estimated …