A new year, and a fresh start.
- The Aeneid by Virgil. Aeneas built walls and made laws. Roman Empire in a nutshell.
- The NYer of 12-30-24. English has high "codability" for sight and sound--i.e., it's easy to describe what you see and hear. Other languages do much better with smell.
- NYer of 12/9/24. Transformative experiences "provide new knowledge that previously would have been inaccessible to us, and with that knowledge our preferences, values and self-conception are fundamentally altered" Alice Gregory on I.A. Paul.
- NYer of 3/14/22. Music and the Rothko Chapel.
- NYer of 4/18/22. Edward Gibbon was four-eight, obese, and his contemporaries called him 'Mssr Pomme de terre.'
- NYer of 6/20/22. Robert King co-creator of "The Good Wife," broke in working for Roger Corman.
- A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. Libertarians are just dicks is the take away. A town in rural New Hampshire attracts both a lot of libertarians because they don't like to pay taxes and a lot of bears because they don't like to pay taxes for proper wildlife management or to obey rules that say don't feed the bears. Both humans and bears are infected with toxoplasmosis that causes poor impulse control.
- Creature From the Black Lagoon by two writers, one line artist, two colorists, and a letterer. How is it that Image, founded on the principle of creators' rights, is doing IP?
- House of the Unholy by Brubaker and Phillips. I am starting to think they're phoning it in. I've thought that about Brubaker before and am seeing it in Phillips.
- Un Lun Dun. Highly inventive in many ways, including the naming of things ("the Hex" for a gang of six magicians, "Skool" for a character composed of a collective of sea life in a diving suit, etc). Turns out to start he sidekick, which is thematically appropriate.
- NYer of 6/6/22. There's a gang of LA County Sheriffs where they get tattoos of skeletons with bushy mustaches. They're called the banditos.
- Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. People could make a difference, if they work together and do the right thing. So we are doomed. Cool things, like drilling glaciers, ships with photovoltaic sails, airships, wildlife corridors to re-wild half the plant, and carbon coins earned by carbon sequestration.
- NYer of 1/13/25. Czeslaw Milosz poem written in D.C. addressed to friend in Paris, describing a "Summer Movie.. In Central Park": "I see how the ambassador's limousine glides/Past the white masts on which various flags/Of fictitious color sway in a mild breeze."
