Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 69
January 31, 2011
hot flashes may mean a lower cancer risk
A new study reports that the slew of annoying symptoms many women experience at menopause — hot flashes, insomnia and mood changes, to name a few — may indicate a reduced risk for breast cancer later. Women who had the most severe hot flashes, the kind that woke them up at night and left them drenched in sweat, had the lowest risk for postmenopausal breast cancer, the study reported.
via well.blogs.nytimes.com
Filed under: Miscellany
new invisibility cloak closer to working "magic"
It's small and only works in green light but it does work. http://ow.ly/3Niau
Filed under: Miscellany Tagged: real invisibility cloak
January 30, 2011
Agatha Christie and the N-word
While Agatha Christie wrote her first Hercule Poirot book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, it was published in 1920 (NY) and 1921 (UK). I imagine the gap was because the war years interfered with an earlier date. During the war, she worked as a nurse and in a hospital pharmacy, which features in the mystery.
She was 26 when she wrote it, 30 when the book was published. It's a short novel but one that re-set the detective story. The Times Literary Supplement said "The only fault this story has is that it is almost too ingenious." The NYT Book Review said "you will be kept guessing at its solution and will most certainly never lay down this most entertaining book."
Quite true, and I was reading along, thoroughly enjoying myself until Chapter 8. That was where the N-word appeared, in passing, while describing the young adults' habit of amusing themselves by wearing costumes assembled from a dressing box, sometimes using cork on their skin (to darken it).
I tensed, I felt uncomfortable at this easy insertion of such a loaded word. Yes in Mark Twain's work, I expect it, because of its time, mid 19th c, and its setting, the American south, and the characters who speak as they would have spoken then, and with the author's awareness of the word and what it meant, of slavery and racism. (Though even expected, there isn't any one good way to deal with it.)
Agatha Christie is the most successful author ever. Only sales of the bible surpass the 4 billion copies of her books sold. And all unawares, the n-word is tossed off, never expunged, never mentioned in anything I have ever read about her or this book.
So I was tense, too, when I came across her description of a "Polish Jew" who is somehow, at the same time German. I feared as evidence piled up, that he would turn out to be the villain (because he was Jewish). Just as much, I was afraid that I might find a casual antisemitic remark and then I would have to pause in my enjoyment of the book, just as I'd paused at the N-word to think about its presence, to feel a pang and a pain.
The last Hercule Poirot book was published in 1976, the manuscript having been written decades before. The most recently written one came out in 1972 when she was in her 80′s. By then the civil rights movement was afoot. Martin Luther King Jr. had been dead for 4 years.
So I wonder why Dame Agatha Christie never thought to revise that first book just a bit, or why her publishers never approached her about it while she was still alive, asking her to edit the book so that it wouldn't have to cause any reader a personal jab of pain and unexpected consternation, or any reader's parent.
I think that Hercule Poirot, with his understanding of human beings and his sympathy for human feeling, would have favoured that edit.
Filed under: Literary Tagged: Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, unexpected racism
on the ground in Cairo
'Tomorrow, to Tahrir Again' by Yasmine El Rashidi | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books http://ow.ly/3MY0J
Filed under: Miscellany
Egypt back online, the old-fashioned way
Most people were extremely grateful to ditch their old dial-up Internet connections. But for the last couple of days, some Egyptians in the darkness of the Internet blackout, have been grateful to have it back. After over 90% of Egyptian access was shut down with its major ISPs, some have been coordinating these old-style connections through the country.
via readwriteweb.com
Everything in the web world has a work-around, as Egyptian authorities, who tried to shut down the country's internet, and succeeded for a day, have discovered. Distributing pamphlets by hand and using ham radio, protestors are also calling in twitters outside the country, using mobile phones, and connecting to international ISP's (servers) as well.
Filed under: Concerning, Uplifting Tagged: Egypt uprising
north meets south in love match of whales
Geneticist Kevin Glover was recently analyzing whale DNA when he came across a surprise—a whale hunted in the northeastern Atlantic in 2007 had the genetic blueprint of a hybrid, with an Antarctic minke mother.
via news.nationalgeographic.com
Imagine it. Literally poles apart, and at opposite times of the year, whales migrate to the equator. Yet somehow and for an as yet unknown reason, whales from the arctic and antarctic are meeting and mating.
Filed under: Miscellany
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