Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 89

Monday July 26/10

Madeira: Sunset at Quinta das Colmeias, originally uploaded by Mr.Enjoy.


Filed under: Uncategorized

*A Reliable Wife

I was quite impressed with A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. And so I was surprised when I looked it up on Amazon to see that it averaged only 3 stars. I was even more curious when I saw that the average was divided about evenly between people who loved it and people who hated it.

I think the love/hate reaction can best be summarized by the first few lines describing the novel in Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post (quoted from the Amazon site linked above:)

Set in 1907 Wisconsin...

*Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Over the last few days, I've been completely absorbed in reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. It's one of my favourite kinds of stories: a love story between older people. And it's nearly perfect.

Major Pettigrew, the widowed protoganist whose point of view the third person narrator follows, is a 68 year old retired army officer living in an English village. He is moral, sometimes moralistic, upright, more mellow as an old man than he was as a young father, reticent yet...

Monday July 19/10

Country Canadiana, originally uploaded by fiddlingduncan.

A late Monday moment, but I made it with 3 1/2 hours to go.

Filed under: A Monday Moment, Art & Photography, Canada

*Life and Fate

Soviet authorities told author Vasily Grossman that Life and Fate would be published…in 250 years (or 300, depending on the account). They were off by a couple of centuries. It was published in English a mere 25 years after it was finished in 1960 (or 1959). It was re-released in paperback in 2006 and gets a 5 star rating on Amazon.

It is a big book, an epic novel that is an honest account of the second world war under Stalin. Such honesty, even in 1960, was intolerable.

I've imagined what...

*Wander-Ponder

On the last cool day before the heat wave, I went for a long walk that included the new bike path that runs parallel to the railroad tracks along Dundas St West. The wildflowers and old factories made me regret the lack of camera, so I went back again today with it in hand. Here are the highlights (click photos to enlarge):

The start of the bike path

Black-eyed susans and red admiral butterfly

one of the old factories

this speaks for itself

Oiled clothing factory

In the 1897 Sears Robuck...

*Monday July 12/10

_MG_1677 Pileated Woodpecker, originally uploaded by terrence.peck.

These woodpeckers are about the size of a crow. In our neighbourhood, you might see a hairy woodpecker or a downy woodpecker, but not a pileated woodpecker which requires great big dead trees, as their main food consists of the carpenter ants that reside there. All of this information is courtesy of A, who knows something about everything, especially flora and fauna. Now I want to know why, to get rid of our carpenter ant ...

*How Fast is Ereading?

The answer, according to a recent study by Jakob Nielsen, is not as fast as a book, nor as comfortable.

He tested 24 subjects with a printed story, a Kindle, an Ipad, and a PC, taking care to ensure that other factors (such as different literacy levels) didn't come into play. At the end of the story, the Kindle and Ipad experience was similar. Subjects hated the PC, but read the print version the fastest of all, finding it the most relaxing.

Full results here.

This is timely because, during my ...

*Heat

It's been skunky hot in Toronto for 4 days and though we have 2 a/c units we haven't put them in the windows. That may sound crazy or noble but it's neither. The a/c would block the 2 biggest windows so we couldn't open them at night, which cools the house down more than otherwise.

When I say hot, I am talking temperatures of 34 C (93F). At 10:00 am it's already 30 (86). This is how we've coped: doing as little as possible. In the afternoon, late afternoon on FIFA days (I have a child...

*Armpit Psychology

Scientific American reports on several experiments to determine preferences (and eww grosses) of body odour.

My favourite is the study of vegetarian vs meat-eating men conducted by Charles University of Prague anthropologists Jan Havlicek and Pavlina Lenochova. Ranging in age from nineteen to thirty-one, the 17 male students in the study were put on different diets for two weeks, one exclusively vegetarian, the other increasingly red meat based. Great care was taken to exclude other factors.

...