Monday, April 25, 2022

April 25, 2022

I just posted my new piece on Medium, and first in almost a year, about all the anti-trans garbage being shoved through red-state legislatures (PA's has tried, but hasn't to date succeeded), and why it's imperative that Dems and allies take the gloves off and start pushing back hard against it.  (NB: The image below is a screenshot, not a link.)


 

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

April 20, 2022

One thing the meteorological vagaries of the past few weeks have driven home to me: daffodils are badass.


 

Friday, April 15, 2022

April 15, 2022

I spent the better part of two hours this afternoon at the Carnegie Science Center's "Pompeii" exhibit. It did not disappoint. (Full disclosure: The fact that one chapter of my diss was devoted to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii predisposed me to like it.)

Theatrical masks ancient and modern (the black one was not part of the exhibit)
 
Drinking vessels (I would really like one of those horn shaped glasses,
though I wonder if they make cupholders that could accommodate them)

 
 Lamps
 
 Marble versions of theatrical masks
 
 
A description of a popular seasoning of the day called garum (If you throw up
a little in your mouth reading it, I don't want to hear itbeen there, done that)

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

April 7, 2022

I finished Alfred Lansing's 1959 account of the ill-fated 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition of British explorer/adventurer Ernest Shackleton a little over a week ago. As an adventure yarn, this book is a very compelling read. As history, it almost defies belief. I'd owned the book for years, but the day it was reported that the Endurance had been found 3,000 meters down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica, I picked it up and started reading. Lansing's account, written over 60 years ago and 40 years after the events described, is based on interviews with surviving members of the expedition as well as the journals and diaries of several other members. Lansing's style is terse and journalistic -- he was an American newspaperman and freelance writer -- with a sense of drama, notably in the many cliffhanger conclusions of chapters. These qualities coupled with the incredible nature of the events described propel the narrative along such that, by the book's final section, I had trouble putting it down at night: even knowing how things came out in the end, I couldn't imagine how the men involved managed to bring that conclusion about! Having grown up sailing the Maine coast during the summers gave me a slight sense of what they went through, but even landlubbers, I think, especially those interested in history, adventure, and/or the limits of human endurance, should find Lansing's book gripping.



April 6, 2022

It's hard to overstate the absurdity of the ending punctuation of this subject line.