Any reader of this blog knows I am wary about China. So when I read an essay called “The Chinese are our Friends” in the November Esquire (not available online) I had to read it. It was not as weak a case as I supposed, and the author, Thomas P. M. Barnett, was neither a …
The 1918 Flu Pandemic…
…was a bird flu that jumped, just like H5N1. Author Gina Kolata also wrote Flu, THE book on the pandemic. Get your Tamiflu– its coming, sooner or later.
Carnival of Derbs
John Derbyshire has written many quotable and irascible things lately. In this essay he suggests a rough but possibly realistic exit strategy in Iraq– arm the Kurds, our only friends; give guarantees to the Turks; screw the rest. (Sorry, John, for a rather blunt but I think accurate summary). Who knows but that, with the …
George Leonard Herter
In this post at his NatureBlog, Chas evokes the eccentric ghost of George Leonard Herter, pioneer in outdoor catalogs, inspiration to our youth, author of both The Bull Cook and George the Housewife, and holder of … odd opinions. Those quoted in NatureBlog are relatively conventional. George the Housewife can be described as a male …
Alternate Histories
I have been having some interesting conversations with Chas on novels of alternate history– you know, the ones where a slight change in events results in, eventually, a very different world. He sent me this link to an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying discussion (do read it, perhaps skipping the Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Freud et al– …
Talibanning pigeons, 1996
In my continuing series on banning various animals, we come to one of the most notorious (though if our high- tech society decides to do it the results may be even worse). In December of 1996, under the presidency of Amir Bin Maluf, the Taliban issued 16 edicts. Most were the usual ones that made …
Tynan
I forgot two odd things about Tynan below. Though a noted libertine, he was a student of C. S. Lewis at Oxford, and appreciated him all his life– words from Lewis were read over his grave. And he wrote one of the best books on bullfighting ever written on the practice for the non- aficionado, …
Writhing in Apathy?
I tease Larissa (another attendant of the wedding below) about whether anyone her age has yet earned the right to use a phrase coined in his diaries by the brilliant English theater critic and writer Kenneth Tynan when he was dying of emphysema in his fifties– but no matter. “Writhing” is a brilliantly funny ongoing …
Back to Reality
I’m back from a long and wonderful weekend attending and celebrating the wedding of my stepson, Jackson Frishman, to his sweetheart Nikki Mazzia. The crew was a unique mix of Eastern Orthodox, St. John’s College (Santa Fe campus), river rats, Magdalenians, and… more. Not just a few bloggers either; Odious AND Peculiar, usually separated by …
Seeing Is Believing
My first impression of New Orleans, circa summer of 1986: This is a dirty city. I was sixteen, traveling with my friend Ricky, who was half a generation my senior and my falconry mentor. He warned me about the place. “No good looking women, either.” We were still half an hour’s drive from our destination, …