March 4, 2017
“This is not what normal birding is like”
That night, after hours of human pushing and oxen pulling, the jeep is freed. And with more pushing and pulling, it is rolled backward, and pop-started. But it cannot make it up the now rain-slicked mountain rock, though the driver tries for a terrifying 20 minutes with all the equipment and group again loaded inside. There is a Cuban military outpost a ways back down; the group makes its way there in the downpour, in the dark, and begs a patch of concrete floor to sleep on in a dwelling containing what Gallagher will refer to for the rest of the trip and maybe the rest of his life as The Worst Toilet in the World.
B is for Boxers & Babies
Astrid adopts her new baby human. Nikki and her baby human Kai have known each other longer and are more demonstrative. If you liked those, please enjoy this compilation of boxers and their baby humans.
Second Life Photography
A book of discoveries like an unlooked-for comet blazing in the empyrean
A Journey Round My Room by Xavier de Maistre (1871 [1794]; 152pp.): "No longer will I keep my book in obscurity. Behold it, gentlemen; read it! I have undertaken and performed a forty-two days' journey round my room. The interesting observations I have made, and the constant pleasure I have experienced all along the road, made me wish to publish my travels." (As mentioned in "The Aleph" [PDF] by Jorge Luis Borges and previously on AskMe: True tales of adventure and Unknown book about a man who decided to be a tourist in his own home.)
Garfield, set in a scene of the Sabertooth Tiger Volcano Hell Dimension
"Most of the stories in His 9 Lives are light-hearted comics about Garfield's past incarnations throughout history (for example, as a cave cat or a viking). But in "Primal Self" — which features art by Jim Clements, Gary Barker, and Larry Fentz — things go off the deep end without warning. I read "Primal Self" when I was seven, and it messed me up for a solid week." Holy crap, this is the most terrifying Garfield strip ever published. If you need something to lighten you up* after that, here's a playlist of the animated version of His 9 Lives**, which doesn't include "Primal Self," two others. The noir Garfield's Babes and Bullets was it's own short special, and for a final bonus, here's Garfield's Feline Fantasies, for another "alternate universes/lives" Garfield video. [more inside]
“The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.”
Carson McCullers at 100: A Century of American Suffering [The Guardian] “Where truth fails, fiction flourishes. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, who would have turned 100 years old on Sunday, distilled all of these consternations, enabling in literature the self-reckoning that had been avoided in reality. Set in a southern mill town much like her own Columbus, Georgia, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter [wiki] traces the hapless lives of five townspeople, all of whom are inexplicably drawn to a deaf-mute named John Singer. There is the young Mick Kelly, a teenage girl who dreams of making it big; Biff Bannon, the middle-class owner of a local cafe; Jake Blount, the most overtly political character and Dr Benedict Copeland, the town’s African American doctor who rails against the inequities of a racist society, but is helpless against them. As they all interact with Singer, they fail to notice his pain or that he is mourning a loss of his own: the banishment of his friend Spiros Antonapoulos to an insane asylum.” [more inside]
"it's a rather astonishing message which might do the trick"
100 years ago this week, the Zimmermann telegram went public. In January 1917 the German government invited Mexico to attack the United States, and suggested Japan play a role. While Mexico demurred, Britain's signals intelligence office caught and decrypted the coded message, then gave it to American diplomats, who soon published it in newspapers. Several weeks later Arthur Zimmermann, Germany's State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, publicly confirmed the telegram's authorship and contents.
In a few months, based on the telegram and other issues, president Wilson took America into World War One. [more inside]
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