The Lives of a Cell (1974) is a collection of science journalism essays by Lewis Thomas, a book that had a profound effect on me. One of his essays in particular stayed with me. It was about the mythological beasts that we create, that persist like the unicorns that inhabit our grandaughter’s fabulous world.
[Read more…] about Mycelium Cell-Cellphotos
Timeless Yesterdays and Now.
Yesterday morning, I shaved off my pandemic beard. It was a sunny day with a slight breeze so I took myself to the garden and trimmed it before wet shaving it clean. Not that you care to know such stuff but there it is, I did it.
And yesterday afternoon, I noticed new boreholes in our weeping willow. You know, the kinds of holes you’d assume were woodworm if you found them in your antique table. I sawed off a slice from a branch I’d pruned and paint-poisoned a couple of years ago.
[Read more…] about Timeless Yesterdays and Now.C Ton Century
C: If you were in Rome, you’d find that C used to be a hundred. You and I knew that anyway but until today I had no idea that the Latin for 99 was undecentum which might occasionally be written as IC rather than the more standard XCIX. Useful trivia for a pub quiz perhaps?
Read moreBusiness, Rambler Maintains
A problem with writing about business travel is that sometimes you can’t name the parties, Rambler maintains. Such trips are maintained to be solely for business. But experiencing new cultures always exposes new things to see and it challenges a rambler to find the new ways needed to see them.
Rambler maintains that these ramblings solely represent the rambler’s biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual people, places and events and does not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of other ramblers. Rambler maintains, to remind and warn you, that these ramblings may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual people, places and events or experiences of this or any other rambler.
[Read more…] about Business, Rambler MaintainsSuffering Tourists
We spent a very pleasant ten days over Christmas in Lanzerote in 2017. There weren’t too many tourists though the number grew noticeably as the New Year approached.
At one point, we rented a car and took in a day of excursion north from our hotel in Playa Blanca. We visited lichen coloured but otherwise bare volcanic terrains formed less than three centuries ago. We drove past La Corona that erupted 20,000 years ago. We looked out from Mirador del Rio over to the island of La Graciosa which von Humboldt reputedly called ‘Hell’ when he visited in 1799. Hell wasn’t just about volcanic fires and brimstone, it was a name for a place at the bottom of the earth, somewhere unimaginably far away like Timbuktu in Mali or Tatouine in Tunisia. It has been said that stories of pirates and treasure on La Graciosa from the 1760s were the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. Ah yes, Sir Walter Raleigh was mentioned in the Piracy Museum at Teguise; the English pirate Walter Raleigh.
Total Failure and PTSD
There’s a small collection I like to keep beside the bed, things to dip into when the news of the world depresses me. One of the items is My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir (2014); a depressing yet brave collection. These are stories about a soldier from a family of soldiering trying to hold onto his humanity. Brian Turner has written a lot about his PTSD without really addressing it directly. I’m very pleased that we have his signature on the copy beside me.