Annie Davidson sends us this elegant attacking squid from the amazing Pharyngula.
Category: Uncategorized
Archaeology Blogging, First Americans and more…
Reid Farmer has been sending many good papers and emails– so many in fact I have invited him to join the blog, which I hope he will next week. Meanwhile go here and here and here for some good early American stuff. (The last has a lot of links to other papers as well). Most …
“Advice for Authors”
Michael Blowhard of 2Blowhards sent me to this excellent post by Seth Godin on the perils of “making a living” writing non- fiction. A couple of quotes? “Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business”. “There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher.This isn’t true, of …
On regional writing
A friend, a younger writer, asked my opinion on when one can be allowed, so to speak, to write about a place one was not born in. Here are his questions, and some thoughts of mine on the matter, those of a Bostonian who has lived in rural New Mexico for 25 or so years.. …
So that’s how they do it..
Anyone who has ever been in the far north knows that its greatest curse is not cold but blood- sucking summer insects, in numbers that can drain a caribou or a human. So maybe it should come as no surprise that evolution has fitted some birds with their own built- in mosquito repellent. “Hector Douglas, …
“The blazon of expressed shapeliness..”
Some very nice lines on domestication from poet, critic, and philosopher Fred Turner, from his The New World: An Epic Poem (1985). “We are the holy and dangerous beast who dared to domesticate not only our plant and animal servants but also ourselves: and not for usefulness only but chiefly for beauty, the blazon of …
Baby Otters
A little blogrolling here.
Some Travel Writing
The Brits– and those who have totally embraced their internal (imperial?) Brit– have a certain sardonic yet deadpan style I admire. First, the late great master Norman Lewis, from his 1951 A Dragon Apparent, about a totally- vanished Indochina: “These Chams were aboriginal Malayo- Polynesians, the only group of that race to have accepted the …
Doom and Gloom
Here’s a good one for falconers, hound- hunters, and, well, everyone: “Des chiens, d’oyseaux, d’armes, d’amours, Pour une joye, cent doleurs”. Gace de la Vigne (“In hounds, hawks, arms, and love, for every joy a hundred sorrows”)
Are all non- native species bad?
Ron Bailey doesn’t think they necessarily are. He also deplores the fact that you aren’t supposed to talk about it. ” “That kind of information is dangerous,” scolded Jodi Cassell. Cassell, who works with the California Sea Grant Extension program, was speaking at a symposium on “Alien Species in Coastal Waters: What Are the Real …