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Tio_Narratore said:
...Infant Innocence
-A.E. Housman

The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
It has been eaten by the bear.

Bears, sharks, and caves can be fatal if not dealt with carefully...
Click to expand...



[ Polar bears are, of course, simply grizzly bears adapted to the Arctic environment ]

"...the polar bear is the only predator that will actively track down and eat a human being. The following two photos were sent to me by someone in Alaska…a polar bear that was waiting for a man to return to his truck..."
-Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/fast-runner-4.jpg

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/fast-runner-1.jpg
 
"Shakespeare felt an intense excitement in which theatrical performance and sexual arousal were braided together."


Stephen Greenblatt
Will in the Word
How Shakespeare became Shakespeare
 
"The Faeries had fashioned a dress made of the soft leaves and vines that never withered, never dried, and felt delicate and sensual against her skin."

Seduced by Magic

Cheyenne McCray
 

Why The World Grew Cooler

"Although at first sight it might seem incredible, the Azolla Event alone was probably enough to account for the rapid cooling that brought the Eocene to an end. There is enough carbon locked in the pickled tissue of Azolla at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to have reduced the CO2 content of the world atmosphere— enough to put a stop to the 'greenhouse world' that had prevailed through the millions of years of the Eocene.

The second leading idea has to do with the chemistry of the air and rocks, and the movement of the landmass of India, which finally made contact with the south coast of Eurasia about 40 million years ago and carried on moving.

But there is one further important complication that was explained in the early twentieth century by the Yugoslav ( now Croatian ) mathematician Milutin Milanković, a bold thinker and one of the few to offer unwavering support to the equally bold Alfred Wegener. It had long been known ( indeed, ever since Johannes Kepler in the early seventeenth century ) that the Earth's orbit around the sun is not circular but elliptical. It was also known that the shape of the orbit changes over periods of about ninety-six thousand years: sometimes the orbit is almost circular, and sometimes it is more elongated. In addition, the Earth is tilted relative to the sun, and the angle of tilt varies periodically. Finally, as the Earth spins, it wobbles, like a spinning top, which is known as precession. These three kinds of change affect the climate, said Milanković, because they affect the Earth's distance from the sun and the angle at which the sun's rays strike the Earth. Add the three effects together, he said, and you are likely to find the Earth will get warmer and then colder at intervals of roughly one hundred thousand years. This effect is superimposed on the general temperature of the Earth, which, as we have seen, is determined largely by the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; by the layout of the continents and hence the flow of ocean currents; and by the amount of ice and hence albedo.

In periods that are generally warm— like the Eocene— the Milanković cycles of relative warmth and relative coolness don't affect things very much. But by the time of the Pleistocene, starting about 2 million years ago, the Earth had been cooling steadily for many millions of years for the reasons we have seen and largely through the rise of the Tibetan plateau. It was so cold during the Pleistocene that the cool phase of the Milanković cycles would have been enough to trigger an Ice Age. Indeed, as the prediction has it, Ice Ages should occur at roughly one hundred thousand year intervals. That means that since the start of the Pleistocene, the world should have experienced about twenty Ice Ages. The geological record says that this is precisely what has happened. The latest Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago. At present, the world is between Ice Ages, and we will have to wait and see how things will pan out over the next millions of years, as the continents continue to shuffle around and the ocean currents come and go. These things are so complicated that in detail, over time, they are impossible to predict.

But to return to our main theme. Add the rise of Tibet to the death of the Arctic ferns and we have all the mechanisms we need in order to explain why the tropical days of the Eocene came to an end, and why the world has been cooling ever since."


-Colin Tudge
The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor
New York, New York 2009.


The emergence of a complete fossilized skeleton, originally found in Germany's Messel Pit, that had spent the last thirty-five years in the hands of a private collector into the hands of scientists led to this fascinating account and theory of evolution. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius

 
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"In our own time, for example, hikers are often advised to try to repel bears they encounter in the wild with the same sorts of behavior, with the arm and stick waving being recommended as a way of exaggerating the humans' height."

Barbara Ehrenreich
Dancing in the Streets
A History of Collective Joy

If it isn't those damn bears again...
 
"The inside screen door opened into the kitchen, which could be added to the list of things that made Danny Baciagalupo anxious."

Last Night In Twisted River
John Irving
 
So how was it, OnH?

And while I'm not currently reading (gasp) I have been listening and skimming.

I've been getting a Victorian material related email bulletin for several years - the site owner being Lee Jackson. Well, the latest news is that his newest novel is online.

For those who like Victorian times, especially involving murder with a twist, take a gander here: Diary of a Murder by Lee Jackson. Enjoy!
 
These persons enter few if any friendship circles with their neighbors and remain living in the lower class neighbourhoods only as a means of saving toward the acquisition of better housing elswhere.

Joshua A. Fishman, Bilingualism in the Barrio
 
Maid of Marvels said:
So how was it, OnH?

And while I'm not currently reading (gasp) I have been listening and skimming.

I've been getting a Victorian material related email bulletin for several years - the site owner being Lee Jackson. Well, the latest news is that his newest novel is online.

For those who like Victorian times, especially involving murder with a twist, take a gander here: Diary of a Murder by Lee Jackson. Enjoy!
Click to expand...

To be honest I do not know as I have not read it, I just got it a few days before I posted that and it happened to be on the desk, but I have liked everything else he wrote so I am fairly sure it is good.
 

"There was, of course, one somewhat unusual note in Moses' introduction of Ickes. 'There have been times,' Moses said, 'when in contemplating our Washington partner, I have been tempted to go back for inspiration to the letter which Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote to Lord Chesterfield about the famous dictionary which the great scholar announced that he had finished with comparatively little assistance. I have always considered this letter to be one of the finest pieces of polite vituperation in the annals of English literature.' But no reporter thought to analyze the letter and see its application to Roosevelt and Ickes. Ickes even wrote in his diary that he was quite pleased by the introduction.

If the Old Curmudgeon had attended Yale and had taken Chauncey Brewster Tinker's course on "Johnson and His Circle,' his pleasure might have been somewhat diluted.

Professor Tinker had delighted in telling his students— including Robert Moses, president of Yale's version of Samuel Johnson's Kit Cat Club— the story behind the great scholar's letter. Setting out on the task of compiling his great dictionary, the scholar had appealed for the financial assistance he desperately needed to Lord Chesterfield, who had encouraged him to expect it, but had then rudely rebuffed him. When, however, after seven years of privation and hardship, the work was completed and acclaimed, Chestefield had attempted to represent himself as Dr. Johnson's 'patron' and thus take some of the credit for it. It was then that Dr. Johnson wrote to him: 'Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help?' He added: 'I hope it is no very cynical asperity to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself."


-Robert A. Caro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall of New York
New York, New York 1974.


Before Bob Caro's best-selling and widely acclaimed biographical trilogy of Lyndon Johnson, his biography of a now-largely forgotten giant in New York City's history was also a best-seller and was the "breakthrough" book that established Caro's reputation and career. Occasionally mentioned in the same breath as Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., Strachey's Queen Victoria and Ellman's James Joyce, the book is a fascinating account of both a man's life and fifty years of New York City history.

Moses became everything he originally set out to fight; eventually his behavior became indistinguishable from that of his enemies: "the end justifies the means." He became a consummate Machiavellian and martinet.


P.S., See, no bears !


 
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I blame Raymond Chandler. I blame him for writing too well.

Here's the thing with Chandler. He had a problem with women. Vamps, victims and vixens are the only roles he provided for us. And his perennial popularity has guaranteed that his twisted view of women would remain the template whenever the hard-boiled boys hatched a new tale of the mean streets. For years, we've been stuck in this gruesome girlie groove because of one man's screwed-up sexuality. (If you feel bold and foolhardy enough to disagree with my characterization of Chandler's perverse views on womankind, I refer you to the page-long diatribe against blondes in The Long Goodbye. It begins on page 89 in my edition. Oh, never mind. Just read anything the man wrote with a female character in it... )

from the foreward by Val McDermid

A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir - edited by Megan Abbott
 
Desde que se fijó la boda para el 12 de enero se mandaron comprar doscientos pollos a los que se les practicó la operación y se pusieron a engordar de inmediato.

(Laura Esquivel: Como agua para chocolate)
 
Sometimes the path is cut deep between banks; it's old, much older than the houses and roads, the pastures and arable fields around it. Old paths through the forest. At times they leave the path and walk along a lane a while before finding a new path westward, reconnecting to a network that Owen begins to visualise criss-crossing this island, behind, underneath, intersecting yet apart from all the monuments and machinery of civilisation.

Tim Pears, "Landed."
 
So... have been reading the book you sent me the other day and there is a similar one reviewed at the back. Course I understood why you sent me "A Hell of a Woman" but now I'm curious - did you get yourself: "Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir" (Old, Bold, Uncontrolled) at the same time?

Dick Adler from the Chicago Tribune says this: "...all are the kind of stuff that makes Miss Marple look like a Girl Scout."

I've got cookies, little boy. (now you know why I've always loved Pete)
*waggles eyebrows and nods sagely
 

"With the possible exception of the peculiarly assonant 'Hillary,' no name is so indelibly associated with the world's highest mountain as that of George Mallory. He is 'Mallory of Everest,' as the title of one of the many biographies has it. Everest is 'Mallory's mountain,' Sir Edmund Hillary once generously said, and few of the thousand-some odd people who have followed Hillary and Tenzing to the top since 1953 would disagree. So strong is the claim that in retrospect the choice of Mallory in 1921 seems inevitable, the necessary prelude to one man's date with destiny. In fact it was surprising in several respects. Mallory had no Himalayan experience whatsoever, and his Alpine record, while perfectly respectable, was hardly remarkable. A competent rather than a brilliant or innovative climber, he had yet to fulfill his mountaineering potential. Moreover, he had a rebellious, countercultural disposition that ill suited the high-Tory style of the expedition. Howard-Bury disliked him, as did Arthur Hinks, the brilliant and formidable secretary of the Royal Geographical Society who was to dominate the proceedings of the Everest Committee for the next twenty years. But Mallory had an undeniable air about him that inspired the Alpine Club's confidence, and whatever his limitations or abilities as a climber, certainly he came to grips with Everest as no other human ever has. He was the central, tragic protagonist of what Younghusband called the 'epic of Everest' and the first ( and still most compelling ) celebrity of Himalayan mountaineering."


-Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
New Haven, Connecticut 2008.


Isserman and Weaver are history professors (!) at Hamilton College and the University of Rochester, respectively. It's not a subject one would ordinarily expect from a couple of academics but the story and the prose are enjoyable. I like the fact that for a survey this vast, the authors chose to relate the origins and early history of mountaineering; thus, I've been treated to an account of the earliest days, from Paccard and Balmont's first ascent of Mt. Blanc to Whymper to Swiss graveyards filled with the bodies of ardent young Englishmen and on to the geology and topography of the top of the world. As Chamonix and the Alps are some of my old stomping grounds, this section was pleasantly familiar.

 
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He considered his smile to be the deal-clincher. He'd practiced it in front of the bathroom mirror and convinced himself he looked like Cary Grant, when in reality he looked more like a constipated ferret.

Damn Near Dead, ed. Duane Swierczynski.
 


"Custer now felt he had no choice. The Seventh had been chosen as the attack force, and Terry's orders had directed him to 'proceed up the Rosebud in pursuit of the Indians.' If Custer knew how to do one thing, it was pursue an enemy. A day of invaluable reconnaissance— and much-needed rest for the men, horses, and mules— would have to be scratched.

*****​
"Charley Reynolds spoke up, saying this was the biggest bunch of Indians he had ever seen. Then Boyer repeated his warning to Custer: 'I have been with these Indians for thirty years and this is the largest village I have ever known of,' he said. Custer wasn't worried much about the size of the Indian camp; striking before it scattered was his overriding concern. Custer and everyone else on the campaign wanted to avoid a long chase after many small bands that would take the entire summer, perhaps longer."

*****​
"They stripped the bodies and scalped some of them, though most of the soldiers had hair too short for the effort. Then, as the men of the village threw themselves on their ponies and rode south toward the bluecoats standing on the high point near the river, the women, boys, and old men who had waited on their ponies out of range arrived to help kill the wounded and begin the important task of mutilation. Many warriors had died, but far more wasichus lay dead along this ridge. There were skulls to crush, eyes to tear out, muscles and tendons to sever, limbs to hack off, and heads to separate from bodies. These soldiers would not move through the next world in comfort."​
​
​


-James Donovan
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn, the Last Great Battle of the American West
New York, New York 2008.


I am not alone in my long fascination with the Battle of The Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell's 1984 Son Of The Morning Star was my first encounter with a detailed account of the event and its protagonists. That was followed by Dee Brown's 1970 Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Robert M. Utley's 1993 The Lance And The Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull and Steven E. Ambrose's 1975 Crazy Horse And Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. There is a rumor that Nathaniel Philbrick has a book in the works on the subject— Philbrick has yet to disappoint.

A Terrible Glory is eminently readable, nicely illustrated ( I don't recall having seen photographs of the Crow scouts White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Curly and Goes Ahead or of the noted mountain man/scout Mitch Boyer or the Arikara interpreter Frederic Gerard heretofore ) and Donovan related several events leading up to the dénouement that were new to me.

 
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There are departures in good batting mechanics that many players make, especially when trying to hit the long ball intentionally.
 

"The other two chromosomes, called X and Y, are different in that they are not always inherited from both parents. And not everybody has both of them. Females have two X-chromosomes and men have one X-chromosome and one Y-chromosome. In the official notation of genetics, women are XX and men are XY. However, despite what I have come to appreciate that most people believe, the X-chromosome has nothing directly to do with sex. Women are not women because they possess two X-chromosomes— the truth is far more interesting. Women are female because they don't have a Y-chromosome. How can that be?

Looked at under the microscope, the X and Y chromosomes look quite different. Both are the same shape, like tiny threads, but the X-chromosome is about five times as long. The differences between X and Y don't stop there. Thanks to the output of the Human Genome Project we now have the DNA sequence for both chromsomes. The larger X-chromosome is very like the other forty-four chromosomes. It carries about 1,000 genes which control a range of different cellular activities. The Y-chromosome, on the other hand, is a genetic wreck with only twenty-seven genes that appear to be working properly. The rest of the chromosome is made up of long stretches of so-called 'junk' DNA. This is the DNA that, unlike genes that do things, has no known function. It is just there. The evolutionary implications for this tremendous difference between X- and Y-chromosomes are fascinating, but not especially relevant here. What does matter is that just one of the twenty-seven active genes on the Y-chromosome, the sex gene, is what makes males.

For the first six weeks of life, there is no visible difference between male and female embryos. At about that time, the sex gene on the Y-chromosome switches on. This sends a signal to a whole series of other genes situated on other chromosomes, which, between them, actively divert embryonic development away from female and towards male. Embryos that don't have a Y-chromosome just carry on along the normal female development pathway and are born girls. The X-chromosome has nothing to do with it. Men truly are genetically modified women.

The mechanism for deciding sex which humans have inherited from their distant mammalian ancestors creates the second of our guides to our genetic origins. Men carry both an X-chromosome and a Y-chromosome in all of their cells— except mature sperm. Sperm occur in two different genetic forms, indistinguishable under the microscope and in their swimming capabilities. Stem cells in the male testis are dividing furiously to keep up the supply of sperm and like the other cells in the body have the XY combination of sex chromosomes. At the final division, the cell divides one last time but the resulting sperm only get one of the sex chromosomes, not both. Half of the sperm receive an X-chromosome from this division while the other half get a Y-chromosome. The sex of the child entirely depends on which sort of sperm wins the race to the egg. If it's got an X-chromosome then the egg, which already has one X-chromosome, becomes XX after fertilization, develops as a female embryo and is born a girl. If, on the other hand, the winning sperm contains a Y-chromosome, the fertilized egg becomes XY and develops into a boy. The simple conclusion is this: Y-chromosomes get passed down the male line from father to son.

Looking backwards, if you are a man, you got your Y-chromosome from your father, who got it from his father. Who got it from his father. Sounds familiar? It is the mirror image of the inheritance pattern for mitochondrial DNA. The Y-chromosome is the perfect complement to mDNA, telling the history of men."


-Bryan Sykes
Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland
New York, New York 2006.


Having survived nearly three centuries of almost continuous attack by Vikings from Norway and Denmark, the Saxon dynasty of Alfred eventually succumbed to the Vikings from France. The resistance had lasted from the day in the summer of 789 when the King's sheriff was murdered on the Dorset coast, to the death of the last of Harold's huscarls on an autumn afternoon 277 years later. In the 940 years since the Norman Conquest many have tried to invade the Isles, but none has succeeded.
 
"And no Arab is likely to forget the canned 'mutton' from Communist China which turned out to be dog meat."

- Victor Lasky; The Ugly Russian (1965)
 

The first language ruling of the modern French State took place in 1539. At the time, the French crown was still busy vying for power with members of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Looking for ways to chip away at the Church's influence, King François I ( 1515-47 ) passed the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, which stated that French would be the language of France's tribunals— not Latin, the language of the Church. The same ordinance made French mandatory in all administrative documents, although that rule wasn't widely applied until the French Revolution.

The French poet François de Malherbe ( 1555-1628 ) had a decisive influence on the French language because he managed to impose the idea of a "norm." Malherbe convinced a group of followers that France's class of "honest" men— meaning people of "value" like aristocrats, clerics, and artists— should employ language that was clear, precise, uncorrupted, and followed rules of bon usage ( correct use ). In 1634 Cardinal Richelieu ( 1585-1642 ) gave his protection to some of Malherbe's followers. The next year, Richelieu created the Académie Française, whose founding goal was to give "undebatable rules to our language, to make it pure, eloquent, and capable of addressing the arts and sciences."​


-Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong ( why we love France but not the French )
Naperville, Illinois 2003.



French and the French are enigmatic to me; they and their language are fascinating yet incomprehensible. I was fortunate to have had a native French speaker as a childhood teacher; that gave me what little pronunciation ability I possess. Voyaging, climbing and skiing in the French isles and Alps necessitated an adult revisitation of the language I never really learned. To my eternal chagrin and embarrassment, I remain phrasebook- and dictionary-dependent whilst envying my fluent relatives.

Other than the aural horror of the Brooklyn/New York accent, I reckon there are not many more offensive sounds in nature than an American butchering French.

 
"Which was just the way Janie liked it."

Ooo, sounds raunchy huh?

It's not, she talking about how her boyfriend doesnt talk about her mom.

><

Gone, by Lisa Mcmann
 
Let's give this a shot

Hmmmm, mine might be a little dry for this board....

"Among the methods of unarmed combat used by the warrior in a subsidiary manner, the same chroniclers mention the art of suppleness, or jujutsu."

Secrets of the Samurai: The Martial Arts of Feudal Japan by Oscar Ratti & Adele Westbrook

... yeah. That'll send people flocking to that book...
 

... human nature desires quick results, there is a particular zest in making money quickly, and remoter gains are discounted by the average man at a very high rate. The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll. Furthermore, an investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money— a futher reason for the higher return from the pastime to a given stock of intelligence and resources. Finally it is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Wordly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.​


-John Maynard Keynes
Chapter 12, "The State of Long-Term Expectation"
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
Harbinger Edition
New York, New York 1964.



The last line of the above quotation is oft-cited and well-known in the investment management world. Professional money managers have little to gain by deviating widely from the index benchmarks by which they are graded. It's simply too risky from both personal and business perspectives.

Maynard Keynes' prose is archaic and difficult to the modern ear. For that reason alone, there are many more who refer to Keynes than have actually read him.

Noted for his investment acumen, Keynes was all but bankrupted by the stock market crash of 1929-1931. Unlike many, he subsequently recouped his losses and then some.

 
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