Matt here, and let me tell you how (and who): I’m a falconer and a reader with about equal enthusiasm for each pursuit, which explains my familiarity with Steve Bodio’s work. I am a Bodio fan and have been since my first days as a falconer in the mid-80s. A couple years ago I stumbled …
Cloned Dog and Afghan Intelligence
The Big Science News today is that Korean scientists have cloned a dog — to be exact, a rather handsome Afghan. This is all very interesting, but other than the anti- cloning tizzy that it has thrown Bay Area animal activists into– I’ll try to find a link– one of the interesting aspects is how …
Squid Attack
Annie Davidson sends us this elegant attacking squid from the amazing Pharyngula.
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 …