Today could have been the 81st day of our walk from Manchester to Rome. We could have been at the highest point on our trek (2,469 m) on the shortest night of the year north of the equator. We should have reached and crossed the Great St Bernard Pass.
[Read more…] about Our Day 81 – Not AnswersAnchoritism
Beaks and Travel
I was sitting alone in a cold, damp bed-and-breakfast type bedroom in November 1995. It was a dreich Scottish night in Aberdeen and I started to read The Beak of the Finch (1995). It remains a stand-out science read and one of the most influential books I’ve enjoyed. The room was cold enough that I felt the need to wrap myself in blankets pulled off the bed, wishing I was like the Tierra del Fuegans who needed no clothes. Darwin was a great diversion when I was undecided; besides being cold, I couldn’t be sure if I was humiliated or amused.
‘The mind is our beak, and the human mind is ever more variable than the brain’ wrote Jonathan Weiner in The Beak of the Finch.
[Read more…] about Beaks and TravelSports Service
The numbers 7, 34, 46 and 93 probably don’t mean much to you. They represent four of my favourite motorcycle racing champions who carried those numbers for most of their wins. Texan Kevin Schwantz only won the world championship once and though he carried 34 the rest of the time and it’s been retired in his honour, he chose to use #1 for the 1994 season. Who?
Ignobility Index
We heard the siren call of the seals this afternoon. Pod, rookery or harem, there were upwards of a dozen of the pinnipeds basking in the diffuse light on rocks exposed by a very low tide.
It was befitting of Bloom’s Day to see the seals in Sandycove where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round’ was his description of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Could this have been inspired by the Sandycove ancestors of these seals?
Plenty of Times 1
How many times do you use? What time phrases suits you? I’ll be with you in a heartbeat. It’ll be done in three shakes of a lamb’s tail. Only six sleeps to your birthday. The empire lasted five generations.
‘Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.’; an old joke is a new tease for grandchildren. Does time really advance like the arrow or is that an illusion? Isn’t it interesting how spacetime can bend with gravity as does the trajectory of the arrow over distances longer than are common in olympic archery?
K SerraSara
I like the illusion of free will. That’s not to say that I suffer from the delusion of it. I’m not a solipsist nor am I totally convinced that reality exists. I base that uncertainty on some hallucinations I experienced, the most recent were in a hotel room in Venezuela. My brain overheated with a fever from pneumonia and my perception was that the objects in the room changed shape and perspectives. Or perhaps my brain malfunctioned and failed to re-create the reality I am used to.
Bathroom Tableau. Dublin Bus. Demolition Exposure. Grey Reflections.