Grab the Nearest Book...

[clan_destine]

The third was bigger than the others, which most likely meant that he was leader of the pack, thought the Hunter. He bore neither long stick nor short, but three of an intermediate length. Soundless as death itself, the Hunter hurled her weight upon this pack leader. even s she bore him to earth, she thrust her good, right forepaw around his head, hooked her big claws into the flesh over the jaw, then jerked sharply back and to the right.

The Hunter growled deep satisfaction at the snapping of the neck. Then she spun upon her haunches and bounded back into the brush-grown copse, leaving the other two-legs shouting behind her. Many of the little black sticks were hurled after her, but only one of the hastily aimed missiles fleshed, and that one only split the tip of her ear before hissing on to rattle among the tree trunks.

Milo could not suppress a groan as Dik Esmih dabbed a bit of homespun cloth at the hot blood gushing from the claw-torn cheek.

"Let be, Dik, let be," he gasped. "That cat is not only canny, she's strong as a horse. She broke my neck like a dry twig, but it will knit quickly enough. Just leave me here."

Milo lay still, feeling the pains of regeneration of bone and tissue already commencing. He was aware that Dik and one other squatted nearby, unwilling to leave him hurt and alone in this cold and dangerous place.

"They're good men," he thought, "all of them. I'm glad it was me that that wily flea factory chose as victim, and not one of them. In thirty minutes, those tears in my cheek will be fading scars and even the vertebrae will be sound again in an hour or less. But if she'd jumped one of them, we'd be bearing a well-dead Linsee or Esmith back to camp."

- The Clan of the Cats - Robert Adams

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Diana Tregarde sighed, propped her chin on her right hand, and leaned on the countertop. Of all the jobs I could have taken, working in an occult supply store is not one I'd have chosen on my own. I like my profile low, thank you very much. Too many people know I'm into the Craft as it is. This just boosts my visibility. She stared out the window and tried not to feel like some poor GI in a bunker, waiting for the next scream of "Incoming!"

I hate being exposed like this. But I owe Annie... She flexed her shoulders, forced herself to relax. Your paranoia is showing, Tregarde. There's no reason to be this gun-shy. It's not that bad. This isn't like the Bible Belt, where I'd get crosses burned on my lawn for being a witch. And most people I run into here are either gonna take me for a flake, or a phony. Besides, I've learned my lessons about staying invisible but doing my job. Nobody's going to have to show me again, especially not the hard way. She finally laughed at herself for being so nervous. After all, what could possibly happen to me two blocks off Forty-second Street?

Then again...

She sighed again. The noon rush was over at Bell, Book, and Candle; now -- afternoon doldrums.

Children of the Night - Mercedes Lackey

 

[chris2c4u]

In the distance, a man in a bright vermilion cagoule is running towards me, picking up pace as his thermal boots grip the ice. He is a teacher from New Zealand, and his name is Craig. I blink my eyes dry and try to focus intently on the tightly gripped fingers of his right hand. When he arrives at a spot approximately twenty two yards away from me, he leaps high into the air and releases the object in his hand at speed in my direction. It is a cricket ball. I am holding a bat. I am doing what any right-thinking Englishman should be doing at times of hardship and adversity: I am playing cricket. The silence is absolute because, of course, it is rank bad manners to carry on chattering once the bowler has begun his run-up.

Well, of course, it wasn't a real cricket bat. It was an oar. And the wicket was really a purple rucksack. But the ball was real enough - trust a Kiwi to pack a cricket ball in his luggage on a trip to Antarctica. The match was New Zealand v. The Rest of the World, and I was opening the batting for The Rest of the World - the only time in my life that's ever going to happen. Craig's first ball kept low and skidded harmlessly past the purple nylon of my off stump. Cricket balls don't actually bounce a great deal on ice, in case you're interested. No? Oh, very well then. Back to the match. His second ball did much the same; but the third was on target. Ijabbed hastily down on it, and it squirted down to long leg for what looked like an easy two. As I turned for the second run, however, I beheld an extraordinary sight: the long*leg fielder was being attacked by a gigantic seabird. It was an enormous skua, all beak and talons, and it had evidently arrived at the erroneous conclusion that the ball was a big, succulent red egg. Fielder and ball were locked in a whirling dance of brown feathers and Day-Glo nylon.

Now, there are those who would argue that sport should always follow a clear-cut moral code. In the late eighties, for instance, the football team I support, Everton, was banned from European competition because of the violent activities of certain Liverpool sup*porters. Nick Hornby, a better man than I, delivered a well-argued homily in Fever Pitch to the effect that any decent, upstanding member of the human race could only concur with the decision. I, on the other hand, couldn't help feeling that it was a monstrous injustice. And so it is with no little embarrassment that I must confess, here and now, that whereas others saw a man being attacked by a giant bird - a fellow human being in distress, let's face it - I saw only the opportunity to steal a third run. And what's more, what was even better, to turn a streaky inside edge into an all-run four.

Penguins Stopped Play, Harry Thompson.

 

[MaiusImperium]

Smashing book Chris! It's on my shelf aching to be read, looking forward to it

Nearer to the truth than most people imagined. Unknown Pleasures was reviewed in Sounds under the headline 'Death Disco'. The reviewer wrote a short story around the album; his opinion was that if one was contemplating suicide, Joy Division was guaranteed to push you over the edge. Initially, I disliked Unknown Pleasures. This may have been owing to my jealousy at being gradually ousted from the 'tightening circle', or a genuine apprehension about the morbid dirges. As I become familiar with the lyrics, I worried that Ian was retreating to the depression of his teenage years. He had been inordinately kind to me during my pregnancy and yet these lyrics had been written at the same time.

'But I remember when we were young'- Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth. After pondering over the words to 'New Dawn Fades', I broached the subject with Ian, trying to make him conform that they were only lyrics and bore no resemblance to his true feelings. It was a one-sided conversation. He refused to confirm or deny any of the points raised and he walked out of the house. I was left questioning myself instead, but did not feel close enough to anyone else to voice myfears. Would he really have married me knowing that he still intended to kill himself in his early twenties? Why father a child when you have no intention of being there to see her grow up? Had I been so oblivious to his unhappiness that he had been forced to write about it?

Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division - Deborah Curtis

 

[Maid of Marvels]

While you two were oohing and ahhing over penguins and other things Antarctic, I was perusing this:

On Sunday afternoon, 1 October 1882, the artists Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Louise Abbéma, the composer Richard Wagner, and the king of Bavaria were among two thousand curious invitees reported to have crowded into the small, Left Bank apartment of the young writer Jules Lévy, over a period of four hours, to view the exhibition bizarrely entitled Arts incohérents. The young journalist and writer Félicien Champsaur chronicled this unusual event:

If you didn't see it, you haven't seen anything. It was extraordinary. Ferdinandus enjoyed enormous success with a painting in relief, Le Facteur rural [The Rural Postman]. It really was painting in relief, because the mailman's shoe, a real shoe that had very visibly been worn, vigorously thrust back, protruded from the canvas... Miss Chabot, a dancer at the Opéra, told me that she had exhibited a landscape on the sole of her ballet slipper. It's so small that I didn't see it.

The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 - Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, editors

It's just... yum. *sighs*

 

[trysail]

Taj Mahal, Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire


"Power soon went to the head of Maham Anga's son, Adham Khan. In the words of Abul Fazl he became increasingly 'intoxicated by youth and prosperity,' and 'the cap of his pride was blown away by the wind of arrogance.' He withheld treasure due to the emperor from captured cities and attempted to keep for himself the choicest inhabitants of captured harems. Then, one hot May afternoon in 1562, the chronicles record that he coolly walked with his guards into the imperial palace at Agra, where a rival minister was giving public audience. As the minister, the husband of another of Akbar's wet nurses, rose to greet him, Adham gestured to one of his henchmen to knife him. Sword in hand, Adham made for the adjoining harem where Akbar was asleep, but a eunuch slammed the door shut and bolted it from the inside. Nineteen-year old Akbar, now wide-awake, emerged from a side door, rushed toward Adham and smashed his fist into his face. (Akbar's chroniclers boasted that it looked as if he had been hit with a mace.) Akbar ordered Adham's still unconscious body to be thrown from the palace wall, which was more than thirty feet high, but the first fall did not kill him. Akbar had him hauled back up by his hair and flung him down again, this time headfirst. Thus, in Abul Fazl's words, 'his neck was broken and his brains destroyed. In this way the bloodthirsty profligate underwent retribution.' Akbar had emerged from behind the veil with a vengeance."

-Diana and Michael Preston
Taj Mahal, Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire
New York, 2007.


From the dust jacket blurb:
"While Galileo suffered under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the Thirty Years War ruined Europe, and the Pilgrims struggled to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, its flawless symmetry and gleaming presence have for centuries dazzled everyone who has seen it."

This is an enjoyable account of both the story behind the Taj and of the conquest of Hindustan by the Moghuls.

 

[chris2c4u]

Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handkerchief to stir memories in the air.

If you only knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfume as other men's souls on music.

Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.

In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.

In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship's cabin, cradled by the harbor's imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.

On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic's blue infinity; on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of cocoanuts.

Long, long, let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.

Charles Baudelaire, A Hemisphere in Your Hair, from Paris Spleen.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Nobody's reading anything??

It was a nice day.

All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.

The angel of the Eastern Gate put his wings over his head to shield himself from the first drops.

"I'm sorry," he said politely. "What was it you were saying?"

"I said, that one went down like a lead balloon," said the serpent.

"Oh. Yes," said the angel, whose name was Aziraphale.

"I think it was a bit of an overreaction, to be honest," said the serpent. "I mean, first offense and everything. I can't see what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil, anyway."

"It must be bad," reasoned Aziraphale, in the slightly concerned tones of one who can't see it either, and is worrying about it, "otherwise you wouldn't have been involved."

"They just said, Get up there and make some trouble," said the serpent, whose name was Crawly, although he was thinking of changing it now. Crawly, he'd decided, was not him.

Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

 

[trysail]

Marie Antoinette: The Journey


"At ten o'clock Commissioner Manuel told the royal family that the Princesse de Lamballe had survived. He was wrong. It was the Marquise de Tourzel who was miraculously acquitted in front of the tribunal of revolutionaries, while Pauline was spirited away to safety by a mysterious English Good Samaritan. A different destiny was reserved for the Princesse. Brought before the tribunal, she refused to denounce the King and Queen. The Princesse, who had once been too sensitive to bear the tribulations of ordinary life, found in herself the strength to answer with awesome composure: ' I have nothing to reply, dying a little earlier or a little later is a matter of indifference to me. I am prepared to make the sacrifice of my life.' So she was directed to the exit for the Abbaye prison- actually a code for execution. Once outside, in the courtyard of La Force, according to the testimony of a Madame Bault who worked there, 'several blows of a hammer on the head laid her low and then they fell on her.'

Afterwords terrible stories were told of the fate of the Princesse de Lamballe; that she had been violated, alive or dead, that her breasts and private parts had been hacked off or, in another variant of savagery, her heart had been cooked and eaten. These stories were heard by many people in Paris at the time, the frequent use of the words 'fearful indignities... of a nature not to be related' and 'private infamies' as well as 'disembowelment' covering many possibilities.

Unquestionably the Princesse's head was cut off and mounted on a pike. Her naked body was also ripped open and her innards taken out, to be mounted on another pike. The corpse and the two grisly trophies were then paraded through Paris. The young Comte de Beaujolais, son of the Duc d'Orleans, who was doing his lessons at the Palais-Royal, was horrifed to see the head of 'Tante' pass by, accompanied by her lacerated body. Along the way the head was thrust into the lap of the apprentice wax modeller Marie Grosholz [the original Madame Tussaud]. She was obliged to make a cast with the 'savage murderers' standing over her although, having been art teacher to Madame Elizabeth, Marie had known the Princesse and her hands trembled almost too much for her to work.

It was now the firm intention of the crowd, fired up with wine and more wine to take the head of the Princesse de Lamballe to the Temple so that the 'Infamous Antoinette' could bestow a last kiss on those sweet lips she had loved. This makes another story plausible; that a visit was paid to a barber along the way for the Princesse's hair to be dressed. For the Princesse's original coiffure could hardly have survived the assault of the hammers outside La Force, even if she had managed to preserve it during her fortnight inside. By the time the head on its pike appeared bobbing up and down outside the dining room of the Tower, the famous blonde curls were floating prettily as they had done in life, even if the face was waxen white. As a result the head was instantly recognizable."

-Antonia Fraser
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
New York, 2001.


The next time someone observes, "Life isn't fair," or you're feeling sorry for yourself, think of poor Marie Antoinette. Born a Habsburg princess, her life ended after years of abuse and humiliation at the hands of a mob of savages. At the end, she was forced to change clothes and perform her bathroom functions in full view of her prison guards, prior to being carted to the guillotine. For her, death (really, a lynching) was a blessing. Contrary to popular belief, she did not originate the phrase and probably never said, "Let them eat cake" in response to reports of starvation in Paris.

Antonia Fraser's biography is riveting, well-researched and written. Marie Antoinette was made the scapegoat and focus of the whole French Revolution.

From the Epilogue:
"The use of an animal or bird, who has the ills of the community heaped upon it before being driven out, has a long history in civilizations around the world. The name derived from the goat of the early Jews, described in Leviticus, presented alive before the Lord 'to make an atonement with Him' and then 'let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.' But there were many similar procedures in other societies, some of them involving women or children, or disabled people, nearly all of them ending in some unpleasant ritual death for the 'scapegoats,' who were stoned or hurled from a cliff, as a result of which the community was supposed to be purged of sins, or otherwise plague and pestilence."

 

[chris2c4u]

For the time of year

AUGUST
I have found only two satisfying places in the world in August-the Bodleian Library and a little reedy, willowy pond, where you may enjoy the month perfectly, sitting and being friendly with moorhen and kingfisher and snake, except in the slowly recurring intervals when you catch a tench and cast only mildly envious eyes upon its cool, olive sides. Through the willows I see the hot air quiver in crystal ripples like the points of swords, and sometimes I see a crimson cyclist on a gate. Thus is "fantastic summer's heat" divine. For in August it is right to be cool and at the same time to enjoy the sight and perfume of heat out of doors. In June and July the frosts and east winds of May are so near in memory that they give a satisfaction to the sensation of heat. In September frosts and east winds return. August, in short, is the month of Nature's perfect poise, and I should like to see it represented in painting by a Junonian woman, immobile, passionless, and happy in a cool- leaved wood, and looking neither forward not back- ward, but within.
Far off I see a forest-covered hill that says "Peace" with a great, quiet voice. From the pool and towards the hill runs a shining road, with some of its curves visible for miles, which I have not followed and dare not follow, because it seems to lead to the Happy Fields.

Between the pool and the road is a house built squarely of white stone. A tiled roof, where the light is always mellow as sunset in the various hues that sometimes mix and make old gold, slopes from the many-angled chimneys and juts out beyond and below the wall of the house. In that shadowy pocket of the eaves the martins build, and on a day of diamond air their shadows are as rivulets upon the white wall. Four large windows frame a cool and velvety and impenetrable gloom. Between them stand four still cypresses.

A footpath skirts the pool, and on one side tall grasses rise up, on the other thorns and still more grasses, heavy with flowers and the weight of birds. The grasses almost meet across the path, and a little way ahead mix in a mist through which the white- throat and the dragon-fly climb or descend continually. The little green worlds below the meeting grasses are full of the music of bright insects and the glow of flowers. The long stems ascend in the most perfect grace; pale green, cool, and pleasant to the touch, stately and apparently full of strength, with a certain benignity of shape that is pleasant to the eye and mind. Branched, feathered, and tufted heads of flower top the tall grass, and in the clear air each filament divides itself from the rest as the locks of the river- moss divide on the water's flow. All bend in trembling curves with their own fullness, and the butter- flies crown them from time to time. When wind plays with the perfectly level surface .of the grasses their colours close in and part and knit arabesques in the path of the light sand martins. Sometimes the mailed insects creep along the pennons of the grass leaves to sun themselves, other insects visit the forget- me-nots in the pool. Every plant has its miniature dryad.
Nearer, and sometimes in the water, the branched meadow-sweet mingles the foam of its blossom and the profuse verdure of its leaves with willow herb, blue brooklime, white cresses, and the dark purple figwort.

A mellow red, like that of autumn oaks or hawthorn at the first touch of spring, tinges the meadow-sweet. The disposition of its flowers is so exquisite that they seem to have been moulded to the shape of some delicate hand: every bud takes part in the effect. The lithe meanders of the stems are contrasted with the intricacy of the goose-grass and the contortion of the forget-me-nots. Both in the midst of the long stalk and in the plume of flowers the branching is so fine and the curves rely so intimately upon one another that a simple copy on paper is cool and pensive after the vanity of cultivated curiousness. Hardly anywhere is there a visible shadow; at most there is a strange tempering of pure light that throws a delicate bloom upon the cattle and the birds, and a kind of seriousness upon the face or flower within its influence. A dark insect of clear wings alights upon the new hawkweed flower, and sits probing deliciously in its deep heart ; but, although the petals are in the midst of grasses and under thorns, the fly perches unshadowed, and throws no shade beyond a moistening of the flower's gold. The close purple flowers of the vetches are scarcely duller in the recesses, where the plant begins to climb, than at the summit where the buds bear a fine down. The fish gleam deep in the pool. The dark ivy shines in the innermost parts of the wood.

But these are merely the things that I see beside the pool, and here, more than anywhere else. The things that are seen are the least important. For they are but the fragments of the things that are embroidered on the hem of a great garment, which gathers the clouds and mountains in its folds; and in the hair of the wearer hang the stars, braided and whorled in patterns too intricate for our eyes. The Junonian woman is a little ivory image of the figure which I think of by the pool. She is older than the pool and the craggy oak at its edge, as old as the stars. But to-day she has taken upon herself the likeness of one who is a girl for lightness and joy, a woman for wisdom, a goddess for calm. Last month she seemed to laugh and dance. Next month she will seem to have grey in her hair. To-day she is perfect.

Edward Thomas, "August," From The Heart of England.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Welcome to August
and
wishing everyone
Happy Lugnasadh!!


THE SHADOW HOUSE OF LUGH
Ethna Carbery

Dream-fair, besides dream waters, it stands alone:
A winged thought of Lugh made its corner stone:
A desire of his heart raised its walls on high,
And set its crystal windows to flaunt the sky.

Its doors of the white bronze are many and bright,
With wonderous carven pillars for his Love’s delight,
And its roof of the blue wings, the speckled red,
Is a flaming arc of beauty above her head.

Like a mountain through mist Lugh towers high,
The fiery-forked lightning is the glance of his eye,
His countenance is noble as the Sun-god’s face—
The proudest chieftain he of a proud De Danaan race.

He bides there in peace now, his wars are all done—
He gave his hand to Balor when the death gate was won,
And for the strife-scarred heroes who wander in the shade,
His door lieth open, and the rich feast is laid.

He hath no vexing memory of blood in slanting rain,
Of green spears in hedges on a battle plain;
But through the haunted quiet his Love’s silver words
Blow round him swift as wing-beats of enchanted birds.

A grey haunted wind is blowing in the hall,
And stirring through the shadowy spears upon the wall,
The drinking-horn goes round from shadowy lip to lip—
And about the golden methers shadowy fingers slip.

The Star of Beauty, she who queens it there;
Diademed, and wondrous long, her yellows hair.
Her eyes are twin-moons in a rose-sweet face,
And the fragrance of her presence fills all the place.

He plays for her pleasure on his harp’s gold wire
The laughter-tune that leaps along in trills of fire;
She hears the dancing feet of Sidhe where a white moon gleams,
And all her world is joy in the House of Dreams.

He plays for her soothing the Slumber-song:
Fine and faint as any dream it glides along:
She sleeps until the magic of his kiss shall rouse;
And all her world is quiet in the Shadow-house.

His days glide to night, and his nights glide to day:
With circling of the amber mead, and feasting gay;
In the yellow of her hair his dreams lie curled,
And her arms make the rim of his rainbow world.​

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

Arctic exploration keeps summer heat at bay

"Even more inexplicable was the fact that not only had Ross decided not to sail further to determine if the mountains were indeed impenetrable, but no one else on either ship had seen the mountains. The answer was quite simple. They were not there. The Crocker Mountains existed only in Ross's imagination. He had suffered his most serious mirage."

Martin W. Sandler
Resolute
The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen's Ghost Ship

 

[Donalddeutsch]

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows,

This is from the book named above, but no spoilers going with the original idea of this thread of the 28th page, 10th sentence.

"Lies", Harry bellowed, and through the window he saw the next-door neighbor, who had paused to restart his lawn mower, look up nervously.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowlings

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Okay, it's not a book and I didn't read it today, but it's a fun article from the NY Times:

Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: July 24, 2007​

Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in rats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward rats has softened considerably, into something resembling ... a less extreme form of revulsion.

O.K., I still don’t like rats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a rat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear rats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, rat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague, and they are ravenous Remys every one of them, feasting on our grains and meats, chewing our ratatouille and destroying as much as a third of global food supplies each year. “Over the past century alone,” writes Robert Sullivan in “Rats,” his magisterial history of the urban pest, “rats have been responsible for the death of more than 10 million people.”

Yet our ratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, rats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as rats in the alley have taken. Rats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the rat genome may soon allow the rat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too.

And though rats have yet to produce an Albert Camus or design a better mouse trap, a host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.

Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.” They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”

There are more than 120 species of rat in the world, but only two have become serious human pests: the black rat notorious for its role in spreading plague, and the larger brown rat, also called the Norway rat because it was mistakenly thought to have entered Europe through Norway. The Norway rat has largely displaced the black rat as prime urban vermin, and it’s the rat you see in trash cans, parks and on subway platforms. The so-called fancy rats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway rat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.

Scientists began using albino Norway rats for research sometime around the turn of the 19th century, and though the rats have been inbred into homogeneous strains with names like Wistar and Sprague-Dawley, they retain enough street credibility that when a scientist recently released a group of lab rats into a wilderness-type habitat and filmed their reactions, the rodents soon began acting like wild rats. They explored every crevice as rats can do so fluidly, by collapsing their rubbery skeleton down to the width of their snout. They found everything edible in the vicinity, and, though they’d been reared in metal enclosures, they began digging, digging, digging, stopping only to check out the opposite sex and maybe waggle an ear.

Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.

In another recent study, Jonathon D. Crystal, a psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, and his colleague Allison Foote were astonished to discover that rats display evidence of metacognition: they know what they know and what they don’t know. Metacognition, a talent previously detected only in primates, is best exemplified by the experience of students scanning the questions on a final exam and having a pretty good sense of what their grade is likely to be. In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.

For each trial, the rat could, after hearing the tone, opt to either take the test and press the short or long lever, or poke its nose through a side of the chamber designated the, “I don’t know” option, at which point it would get a tiny snack. During the trials, the rats made clear they knew their audio limits. The closer the tones were to either 2 or 8 seconds, the likelier the rats were to express confidence in their judgment by indicating they wanted to take the lever test and earn their full-course dinner. But as the tones edged into the ambiguous realms of 4 seconds, the rats began opting ever more often for modest but reliable morsels of the clueless option.

Rats do not lie, and, when the stakes are this high, neither do they gamble.

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

Poolside reading

"He saw her looking in the mirror at him, holding the lipstick to her mouth, and saw her move the kimono enough to cover the breast."

Elmore Leonard
Up In Honey's Room

 

[chris2c4u]

The friends are trying to see whether a book on conversations in English for German tourists visiting Britain (this book was written in the early twentieth century) would of any use.

George raised his hat, and said "Good-morning."

The man did not even turn round. He struck me from the first as a disagreeable man. He grunted something which might have been "Good-morning," or might not, and went on with his work.

George said: "I have been recommended to your shop by my friend, Mr. X."

In response, the man should have said: "Mr. X. is a most worthy gentleman; it will give me the greatest pleasure to serve any friend of his."

What he did say was: "Don't know him; never heard of him."

This was disconcerting. The book gave three or four methods of buying boots; George had carefully selected the one centred round "Mr. X," as being of all the most courtly. You talked a good deal with the shopkeeper about this "Mr. X," and then, when by this means friendship and understanding had been established, you slid naturally and gracefully into the immediate object of your coming, namely, your desire for boots, "cheap and good." This gross, material man cared, apparently, nothing for the niceties of retail dealing. It was necessary with such an one to come to business with brutal directness. George abandoned "Mr. X," and turning back to a previous page, took a sentence at random. It was not a happy selection; it was a speech that would have been superfluous made to any bootmaker. Under the present circumstances, threatened and stifled as we were on every side by boots, it possessed the dignity of positive imbecilitiy. It ran:- "One has told me that you have here boots for sale."

For the first time the man put down his hammer and chisel, and looked at us. He spoke slowly, in a thick and husky voice. He said:

"What d'ye think I keep boots for - to smell 'em?"

He was one of those men that begin quietly and grow more angry as they proceed, their wrongs apparently working within them like yeast.

"What d'ye think I am," he continued, "a boot collector? What d'ye think I'm running this shop for - my health? D'ye think I love the boots, and can't bear to part with a pair? D'ye think I hang 'em about here to look at 'em? Ain't there enough of 'em? Where d'ye think you are - in an international exhibition of boots? What d'ye think these boots are - a historical collection? Did you ever hear of a man keeping a boot shop and not selling boots? D'ye think I decorate the shop with 'em to make it look pretty? What d'ye take me for - a prize idiot?"

I have always maintained that these conversation books are never of any real use. What we wanted was some English equivalent for the well-known German idiom: "Behalten Sie Ihr Haar auf."

Nothing of the sort was to be found in the book from beginning to end. However, I will do George the credit to admit he chose the very best sentence that was to be found therein and applied it. He said:.

"I will come again, when, perhaps, you will have some more boots to show me. Till then, adieu!"

Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome K Jerome.

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

"In the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing, and no one, to tell Mary Sheil what living in Persia was going to be like."

Katie Hickman
Daughters of Britannia
The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Are you enjoying the book, Nibbles? I didn't read it but listened to it over several weeks on BBC7 radio. I really looked forward to each new episode. Amazing women.

 

[Celeshag]

Four militia divisions were almost completely annihilated before the seige of Leningrad had even begun.



STALINGRAD

Anthny Beevor

 

[jordans_sub]

had it been a trick? had he terrified her for his amusement?​

Lady Beware.....jo beverley

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

one book leads to another

Yes, Maid, I am enjoying it, very much. I only wish there was more and that some of the lives were visited in greater depth. I love it when a recently published book sends me on an antique book hunt, hopefully, I will be able to locate some of Hickman's sources.

Thank goodness for ABEbooks.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

One of my fave sources for unusual books is alibris.com BUT there's a wonderful website that's been going for years: A Celebration of Woman Writers where I found SEVERAL books to read online. Among them were "Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia" by Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe Sheil, "My Three Years in Manipur and Escape from the Recent Mutiny" by Ethel St. Clair Grimwood.

I've given you a link to the main page but you can access the list of what's available by scrolling down. Brilliant site. I hope you enjoy it.

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

"Cora Pearl proved, if anyone proved, that conventional beauty was not the only means of attraction. Perhaps her piquancy, her exotic accent, her toughness, her independence, even her outrageous behaviour, proved as seductive as her perfect figure."

Joanna Richardson
The Courtesans
The Demi-Monde in 19th Century France

 

[Maid of Marvels]

The year is 2002. It is fourteen years since Thrusday almost pegged out at the 1988 Croquet SuperHoop, and life is beginning to get back to normal...

The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde

 

[dragoon001914]

There is the smell of tar and sweaty feet.

All Quiet on the Western Front -By: Erich Maria Remarque