…. but I am just sitting around waithing for Chas and Mary and I keep finding cool things like this interview with Bill Buford, who recently wrote of his experiences learning to be an Italian butcher in the New Yorker: “One night Dario and I and my wife and his wife at the time went …
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One More!
A friend sent me this NYT link to the so-called “Best novels of the past 25 years”. I was underwhelmed to say the least! It was full of Roth and DeLillo and had almost nobody from off the East coast. I wrote back to the group: “Huh. I’m a bit out of the mainstream of …
What I Am Reading
The latest in a very occasional series… New: Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade Odalisque by Neal Stephenson The Egg and Sperm Race by Matthew Cobb (The English title not the American one, a sort of non- fiction version of the Baroque Cycle only for biologists) Tamerlane by Justin Marozzi Not so new: East of …
Ranchettes
After hearing me rant about the proliferation of 5- acre “ranchette” subdivisions surrounding Magdalena, Mary Zeiss Stange sent me a wonderful essay she had published on the subject (in USA Today!). “Call it Homesteading 2004: You move to the country to escape the urban rat race, and a coyote eats your cat. On days when …
Just Desserts
Paul Domski sends this link to a story about the sentencing of some AR terrorists in England: “The family of brothers Chris and John Hall, who ran the business at Darley Oaks farm in rural Staffordshire, and their staff, were subject to firebomb attacks, had paint-stripper poured over their cars and bricks thrown through their …
Epidemic Updates…
The good: Bird Flu has not returned to europe on the wings of the returning migrants, contrary to doomsday scenarios. And the.. weird: Morgellan’s Disease, which sounds like bad science fiction– little fibers extending from the victims’ skin, pain, crawling sensations, psychological disturbances, with no known cause and no cure in sight. This appears to …
Dodos
Here is a good piece reviewing the movie “Flock of Dodos” that was made by a biologist turned filmmaker who tries to show that “Inteligent” design is wrong, but that pompous smugness may not be the best way to combat it. “Olson illustrates (and perhaps exaggerates) the evolutionists’ difficulties. In one of the film’s more …
Helen’s Poems
Pluvialis, who should be well- known to readers of this blog, may be better known to the world as Helen Macdonald, lecturer at Cambridge, falconer, author of this good book, and poet. I have been spending a lot of time with her poetry lately as an anecdote to some difficult work and to charge (recharge?) …
Zebra Mussels and Natural Selection
Just a note: It seems a contractor has successfully eradicated invasive zebra mussels from a quarry in Virginia using massive doses of potasium chloride—toxic to mussels (not so good for death row inmates, either). After the evident die-off, live mussels were sent down in a sack to serve as aquatic canaries, and they promptly died …
Geronimo’s Bones
An article in the Hartford Courant suggests that the Yale secret society Skull and Bones at least THINKS it has Geronimo’s bones. ” A journalist has uncovered evidence that members of Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society may have robbed Geronimo’s grave during World War I and brought the Apache warrior’s skull and other remains …