The Kurdish Peshmerga from Iraqi Kurdistan are gathering in the southern Turkish province of Sanliurfa, south of the ancient city once known simply as Urfa, less than forty miles north of the border, looking south, and southeast, where a Kurdish Syrian town is besieged by an ancient enemy with a new face, one seen on …
Tag: Travel
A Familiar Place…
The road runs straight south from the ancient city of Sanliurfa in Turkey (actually “Urfa”– the title is a post- Ataturk designation) to a border, or, in our fraught times, perhaps, a BORDER, like our southern one. The land is almost flat, dry, but productive since the dam on the Euphrates, which drowned may old …
Train not in vain
The next posts will be on the last few fascinating if tiring days– Amtrak sleeper, a civilized way to ride; Kansas City, a good friend, some med workups, unique museums, BARBECUE; back to the Spur and water battle… Here is my snug little sleeping box, just big enough for my stuff. Pretty good for sleeping …
Understandable Error, Matt!
I don’t know about a banana (see Matt’s comments below) but most Americans would see a double rifle from England, with its barrels arranged side by side, as a shotgun. We have not quite NEVER built a double rifle here but I would be surprised if we had built over 100 in the last century. …
Rifle quiz
Pure fun for scholars of guns and readers of travel and adventure tales: how many things can you find in common on these little carbines? Oh, I will add one invisible addition for the bolt: The first question is for tecchies; the second for readers and travelers: how many books and writers and scientists and… …
Links, Pix, & Assorted Phenomena…
Lauren’s Aquiling is up and running again and, at least until her book on her year among the Kazakhs is out, the best place for exotic falconry and adventure tales… There is some pretty funny and often grotesque animal photography up at Nature Wants to Eat You. HT Annie Davidson, who also sent this video …
“Endemics”
Writer Tom McIntyre has been in Argentina, not just shooting doves but hunting birds behind pointing dogs and fishing. What caught my attention (and what he, an informed naturalist- hunter, knows well) was the unique identity of some of his quarry. Europeans often name local species after familiar things, but folk taxonomy is unreliable. South …
PLF 2: Letters from Geoffrey Household
Sadly, I never corresponded with Patrick Leigh Fermor, but I did for many years with the adventurous old “suspense” story writer Geoffrey Household (as so many perceptive critics wrote, he was so much more than that, including a naturalist, a regionalist, and a chronicler of the same old lost Europe that Leigh Fermor also celebrated). …
Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915- 2011 RIP
Too burnt on obit- writing to write a proper tribute to one of my (and Betsy Huntington’s; she left me all my early first editions; and Q’s) favorite writers and examples of a life well- lived. But readers and nomads everywhere should observe a silent moment: Patrick Leigh Fermor has died at 96 in England. …
Far Away and Long Ago: Family with Megafauna
Just for fun: a shelf in the library has accumulated a bunch of photos with this theme, dating from the thirties (Betsy Huntington) to just eleven years ago (me). Here are a few. First, Betsy, at four, with her mother, at the Pyramids: Second, Libby on an elephant, in the early seventies, at TIGERtops (see …