Sunday, February 04, 2018

A God in Every Flower and Stone Even Magazine

You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution to their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic.
— Lewis Carroll, born in 1832

 This was the village where the deacon ate all the caviare at the funeral.
  ~ Chekhov, ‘In the Ravine’
“Our worst enemies are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.”

“We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism.”

New tree-planting drones can plant 100,000 trees in a single day TechSpot


Going to ground: how used coffee beans can help your garden and your health The Conversation (David L). This is all well and good, but what are urban coffee brewers supposed to do? I have no yard, and I already find it hard to dispose of things like mercury batteries and used toner cartridges responsibly (at least one local drugstore now has a cardboard box sitting out for dead batteries..).

The New York Times – All Good Magazines Go to Heaven 
 New research by The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and other partners shows that restoration and other land management improvements could provide more than a third of the emissions reductions necessary to keep global warming under 2°C. Yet hurdles remain, and one of the biggest is funding. Many investors still know little about restoration opportunities. This report is intended to bridge that information gap; it includes case studies of 14 innovative enterprises across eight countries. They cover a fascinating range of activities, from drones that shoot seeds into hardened soils to genetic research on tree species threatened with extinction…”
Australian raptors start fires to flush out prey Cosmos Australia has badass wildlife! Note the behavior was reported earlier but no one seemed to have figure out why the birds were doing that.

 Why do people in certain cities — London, New York, Paris — become radicalized, sparkingrevolutions that expand the limits of what's politically imaginable?... Little Sparta Praha V Slavia


Jean-Paul Sartre, on France during the Nazi occupation:

Everybody was going about their day like sleepwalkers, carrying their fate over their shoulder like a sling bag, toothbrush and soap in one’s pocket, just in case of an arrest. We all lived in transit, between two round-­ups, two hostage-­takings, and two misunderstandings.




The 'digital poorhouse': coders need a Hippocratic oath to protect disadvantaged people

In secondhand bookshops, he's sell the books he'd lovingly collected over the years in exchange for a pittance, and then he drank his own books, each day he drank one, some days as many as two, I'm drinking The Odyssey, the small change they gave me for it is disappearing down my throat, he'd tell himself, look how little I got for the paperback edition of Martin Amis's Money, he exchanged literature for alcohol,Robinson Crusoe became a bottle of Baileys, The Brothers Karamazov a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, the three gin and tonics he'd just ingested were The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes. He got his hands on an expensive bottle of Laguvulin whisky in exchange for the leather-bound copy of James Joyce's Ulysses that Ana had given him as a gift; if, on a given day, he sold Montaigne's essays for next to nothing, he would buy himself a Bordeaux red, trying to be coherent with what he drank; if he got rid of Madame Bovary, he had to try to find a potion similar to something Flaubert might have ingested, to be able to emulate him; in exchange for Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors he'd get a Chainti or a bottle ofpelaverga from Saluzzo, maybe. Whoever said that literature doesn't feed us, that it doesn't comfort our spirit or our soul?
— from Twist, by Harkaitz Cano

Accept what is, let go of what was, and have faith in what will be.

“This futuristic house actually gets stronger as hurricanes pass through.“

Translated from Basque by Amaia Gabantxo, Twist is published by Archipelago Books, available March 2018.


Guided Tours Are Tacky, Touristy, And The Best Way To Sightsee


Jeffrey Bloomer: "Friends offered stories of backdoor culinary tours in Istanbul down rickety staircases and through secret restaurants. I heard about guides whom you pay just to skip the line at overrun international museums but then charm you half to death anyway. And then there were many stories of guides like mine in Vermont, stewards of decidedly unexotic locations who know enough local chicanery to make every government building and local landmark feel like the seed of the next great American novel." … Read More



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