All In One Boat
And Heading Through the Straits of Messina (Will’s blog)
Books in the Backpack
FEED- Detective Story by Imre Kertész: A Review 9/4/2010Imre Kertész was the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for fiction. Damn! Another well known and serious writer not known to me. My late life project to read one book by all Nobel Literature prize winners since I’ve been alive –1943– took another step backward after an invigorating one forward with Herta Muller’s The […]
- Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: A Review 9/1/2010William Ruddiman , one of the early paleoclimatologists —a climate scientist who studies climate in ages past– is the father of the hypothesis that bears his name: that mankind began changing the climate long before the Industrial Revolution started burbling enormous amounts of CO2 into the air. Ruddiman began to suspect it was far earlier […]
- Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich; a Review 8/20/2010Andrew Bacevich, a historian of growing repute, a writer of substantial historical and social analysis and a self identified conservative Catholic, entered the lions’ den of KPFA Berkeley lefties on Friday evening. They rewarded him with a standing ovation for his impressive analysis of the American Imperial journey and “The Path to Permanent War,” as […]
- Great Russian Heat Wave is Over 8/19/2010From Jeff Masters at Wunderblog: The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 ends A powerful cold front swept through Russia yesterday and today, finally bringing an end to the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010. Temperatures at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport hit 25°C (77°F) today, which is still 4°C (7°F) above average, but the high temperature […]
- Crime and Punishment: A Film 8/14/2010Now that we’ve added Turner Classic Movies to our Tivo download list all sorts of odd and interesting movies are popping up on our television screen. Last night, the practicing pessimist in me taking over, I clicked ‘play’ on Crime and Punishment. Let me say for starters that this was a curiously compelling ‘bad’ film. […]
- Recent Movies 8/11/2010I don’t know whether movie time has been short or time to think about them and set finger to keyboard even shorter. A couple of two week trips, without movies, cut into the current crop, though summer itself doesn’t help. The market as imagined in the moguley minds in the movie making nether world I […]
- The Great Russian Heat Wave Continues 8/7/2010The mid-term and long-term effects of climate change are looking like they’ve become short-term this summer. Burning in Russia. Drowning in Pakistan. The alarms are being rung around the world but those whose response would matter most are not able to budge themselves to yawn. * * * “One of the most remarkable weather events […]
- Ice 4x Size of Manhattan Breaks off Greenland Glacier 8/7/2010A 100-square-mile block of ice 600 feet thick has calved off one of the largest ocean-bordering glaciers in Greenland. The Arctic hasn’t lost a chunk of ice that big since 1962. “In the early morning hours of August 5, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” oceanographer Andreas […]
- Oil Spills Without Borders 8/7/2010Cleaning the sea of oil? Yep. The Gulf of Mexico? Nope. Try the Yellow Sea, China. Following a huge explosion at an oil terminal in north east China, hundreds of thousands of gallons of the black goo spilled into the sea. At first played down by the authorities, it now has a more memorable size. […]
- The Devil’s Holiday: Fire and Record Heat 8/7/2010Update below End of July and southern California becomes the devil’s holiday resort. Fires near Tehachipi; fires near Palmdale “The flames spread to backyard fences at the edge of Palmdale and plumes of smoke streamed across the city of 139,000. About 2,300 structures were threatened. Fire officials expect low humidity and high temperatures again today […]
- Detective Story by Imre Kertész: A Review 9/4/2010
