Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 87

*Happy Birthday World

Tonight we'll be dipping apples into honey to celebrate the Jewish New Year, which is also traditionally the world's birthday. On the Jewish calendar it's the year 5771, and all you have to do is add six more zeroes and you have the approximate age of the earth. Happy birthday world!

My kids started school yesterday, the days are getting noticeably shorter, the heat wave has given way to the cool nights of September. My older daughter started middle school and has a locker now. The big issue i...

*Monday Sept 6/10

she rests in beauty, originally uploaded by littlemisspatricia.


Filed under: A Monday Moment, Art & Photography, Nature & Science

*My Kind of Bomb

From The Guardian:

Poetry rained from the skies on Saturday night in Berlin as 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems by 80 poets from Germany and Chile were dropped on the city from a helicopter…It was the fifth "poetry rain" project from Chilean art collective Casagrande, which has arranged previous poetry bombing events in Santiago de Chile (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Gernika (2004) and Warsaw (2009) – all cities which, like Berlin, have suffered aerial bombings during their history.

More...

*Brokeback–The Story

From The New Yorker, October 13, 1997:

The author's first stories, twenty years ago, were all about hunting and fishing–"hook-and-bullet material"–written for a men's magazine editor who thought he couldn't publish a contributer called Annie. He suggested "something like Joe or Zack, retrievers' names," the author recalls. The compromise was initials: E.A. Proulx. The "E" somehow stuck. (The author won the Pulitzer Prize as E. Annie Proulx.) The author is now sixty-three, and "Brokeback...

*Monday Aug 30/10

雷雲, originally uploaded by 號獃.

I used babelfish to translate the Chinese description that goes with the photo. It's a bit garbled as babelfish will do, but you can get the gist:

Afternoon hot sun Gao Zhao. Has the scenery sign. Finishes already past 5:00. Nearby flushes toward the cat is spatial. Although does not have a scenery. Left side Three Gorges upper air. Actually yun measures a great cloud. If Long Juanpan fires into the horizon. Finally looks like the nuclear weapon to rupture...

*Adventures

This has been the last week I have my kids at home with me for the summer. Next week they've got camp and school starts right after Labour Day, not only for them, but for A as well. And so we took advantage of the time we had to hike here:

Crawford Lake by Whpq, Wikipedia commons

It is a a meromictic lake, which means the bottom and the top don't mix, making

this lake a prime site for archeological and geochemical studies. Using pollen analysis, reconstruction of the history of the area over...

*Workhouse Returns?

Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

(Full story here)

Filed under: Politics & Economy Tagged: workhouse diet

*Please Read This

I am going to give you a link to an article that I want you to read. I am crying as I write this post, crying because of the poignancy, urgency, and truth of it.

I'm in my early 50′s. I hang out with a lot of younger people because of my late-bloomerishness. Life has led me to have kids late, to start my career late and to take longer with it. I feel younger because of that and also because my life has gotten better with every decade. My childhood was dreadful and the further I get from it...

*The Shack by Wm. Paul Young

I finished this book yesterday. I didn't expect to finish it and I didn't expect to like it. But I did.

It's in my nature to be somewhat contrary and so when a book is hugely popular, I tend to avoid it. On top of that, my experience with books like this, ones that purport to be revelatory, is that they are usually thin, glib and without challenge. In other words they say what people want to hear and not very well.

But every time I've been to the library lately, I come across The Shack, and...

Monday Aug 16/10

, originally uploaded by JohnnyStabilizator.

This is one of those photographs that has a story in it.

Filed under: A Monday Moment, Art & Photography Tagged: a picture is worth a 1000 words