Michael Blowhard tells a moving story of being free from cancer after surviving cancer for five years. Read, please, and raise a glass. Also on 2Blowhards, Friedrich posts on the innate sadism and nastiness of the Classical Romans. I never did quite understand why the culture that gave us the Colosseum is held up as …
Author: Steve Bodio
Some Critics’ Movie Columns
I have been following the noise over Brokeback Mountain with some amusement, knowing whatwever they say it will all make Annie Proulx money. Suffice to say that I owe her many things, not least that by teaching me to TEACH writing she also taught me much about analyzing writing and so made mine better. I …
Zoomorphic Art, Plus
(Which is a term I more or less made up just now). I love art, especially sculpture, that includes or references natural objects without exactly mimicking them. Our friend the zoologist and artist Jonathan Kingdon . has done some such work; another friend, local artist Yvonne Magener– I’ll try to get some of hers up …
A Random Twig…
… on Tree of Life. Though delicious, the monkfish may not look like you think it does. And remember, the left half is HEAD, and the creature may be three feet long… One of the best ways to entertain yourself exploring this ambitious phylogenetic site is to just let it pick a species at random.
Malaria Watch!
No, not watching out for Malaria; but, courtesy of Peculiar, a wristwatch that detects Malaria. I could have used one of those in Zimbabwe years back, as he well remembers…
More Flu- anoia
Everyone continues to lose it over H5N1. The Economist opines that the Turkish government should stop allowing villagers to raise their own chickens, apparently preferring that they confine all chicken raising to industrial breeds in the kind of industrial chicken concentration camps that are breeding factories for diseases, then SELL them to the peasants. Yeah, …
Fretmarks
I can’t believe I didn’t know anything about this blog. Its proprietor, “Pluvialis”, just shyly told me of it, though apparently she has been linking to us for a while. The title is a falconry term– the marks made on a growing feather by stress or lack of food. But though Pluvialis does indeed deal …
“What Questions Have disappeared?”
This post from Steve Sailer on an essay by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller caught my eye for several reasons. It is on questions about your child’s prospective mate that, for (PC? ) reasons, we no longer ask or even admit to thinking about. Some of the difficulty is that we legitimately resist social stereotyping– I …
Doom and Gloom: the Continuing Series
Does Iran want to hit us with a nuclear pulse and destroy all our electronics? Gloomy enough for Derbyshire!
Artificial Elephants
Perhaps the oddest things to buy I have ever seen. I saw this in one of the high- end sporting mags, the ones Libby calls “gun porn”. The ad copy is even odder: “KR reproductions are completely bug resistant and guaranteed not to crack, split or have any other problems associated with the use of …