Our universe never ceases to bring us new sources of wonder and amusement, from actual proof that doppelgängers exist to the many, many weird objects found throughout history.
In ‘Seed Stories,’ Photographer Thierry Ardouin Unveils the Stunning Diversity of Plants Colossal
Photographer Spends Two Years Building Enormous Wet Plate Camera and Turning Bus Into DarkroomMyModernMet
Lava balloons 🎈
Imagine glowing, hissing, steaming balls of floating rock up to three metres across emerging from the depths of the ocean – these are lava balloons.
TOP GUN: MAVERICK: TOM CRUISE DELIVERS THE GOODS.
My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com
NY Times Op-Ed: 400 Years Ago, They Would Be Witches. Today, They Can Be Your Spiritual Coach.
New York Times Op-Ed: Uvalde Needs Our Prayers, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year))
The four-bedroom brick cottage, built in the 1930s, is a classic farmhouse with a wraparound verandah and wide eaves. Sitting on a one-hectare parcel of land amid verdant paddocks dotted with dairy cows, it's the picture of bucolic mayland bliss.
Report by German Parliament Expert Committee Finds No Evidence that Lockdowns did Anything.*
Not just in Germany: “An analysis of studies of the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality has just been released by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University, and their conclusion is depressing. ‘Our study finds that lockdowns had little to no effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality,’ they wrote. ‘However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects.'”
* Oh, they did something alright: More teens in mental crisis boarded in hospital ERs during pandemic
English speakers typically write hahaha to express laughter in an online message. They'll also use LMAO and LMFAO. In Nigeria, there's LWKM and LWKMD which means "Laugh wan kill me" and "Laugh wan kill me die."
The language website Preply has put together a compendium of the ways people laugh in 25 other languages, including Portuguese (kkkkk and rsrsrs), Spanish (jajaja), and Ukrainain (ахахахах).
Woman Captures Hilarious Moment a Turtle Climbs Log and Causes Other Turtles To Fall My Modern Met
Space telescope spots unexpected starquakes CNN
Chicken farmers in Thailand swap antibiotics for cannabis, claim chickens have better meat Malay Mail
Harvard Scientists Have Developed a Revolutionary New Treatment for Diabetes SciTech Daily
Beloved Kid's Author Kate DiCamillo On Getting 473 Rejection Letters
`A Writer Who Never Let Down His Style'
“I write / to astonish myself.”
Geoffrey Hill’s audacity (Section XXIII, The Orchards of Syon) came to mind while reading David Myers’ tribute to Wilfrid Sheed, dead this week at age eighty. Sheed’s novels, especially Max Jamison and The Hack, were witty and very funny, though my favorite among his books may have been his last, The House that George Built(2007), a love song to Tin Pan Alley. It might have borne the title of his 1993 volume about baseball, My Life as a Fan.
Sheed was by disposition a quiet enthusiast who earned his late happiness the hard way, in the wake of polio, depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol. He was no creampuff. He wrote for the best of Johnsonian reasons – he was a pro, and in the sixties and seventies his byline was ubiquitous – but he also seemed to be having a marvelous time. Savor this gem about Norman Mailer from Essays in Disguise (1990):
“’Do not understand me too quickly,’ he says. Good grief, little danger of that.”
Or this from The Good Word and Other Words(1978):
“Of Ezra Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that decently be said is that his colleagues admire him. There is no special reason for anyone else to.”
Not every good writer is great. If Sheed was minor he shared at least one quality with the greats – memorability. The Mailer quip I’ve remembered for decades, longer than any eruption by Mailer. Myers’ concluding sentences likewise sound lasting:
“If you never permit your style to flag, if you never lower your standards for the parts of speech, you might even endure the worst of patches.
“There in a single nugget-like idea is the reason that Wilfrid Sheed deserves to be remembered. He was a writer who never let down his style.”
Sheed’s style, as the examples quoted suggest, was as honed, balanced and efficient as a Bowie knife. He was not flashy, his language never attention-gettingly recondite or slang-ridden. He had the gag-man’s gift for brevity and speed but seldom played the wise guy. Style, Myers suggests, is not filigree but language suffused with a writer’s sensibility. That’s real astonishment. In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker (1953), A.J. Liebling formulates the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse, and I fancy Sheed might have joined me:
“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”
