Bill Murray's Blog, page 63
March 29, 2018
New 10 City Skylines Quiz
A second installment to compliment last week’s version. See how many you can guess. Answers at the end. Yes, some are impossible.
IMPORTANT: You can click to enlarge them for a better look, but there will be a caption at the bottom that gives you the answer. Careful.
Good luck.
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Answers:
1. Kyiv, Ukraine
2. La Paz, Bolivia
3. Gangtok, Sikkim, India
4. Rome, Italy and Vatican City
5. Hong Kong
6. Dar es Salaam, Brunei
7. Salzburg, Austria
8. Riga, Latvia
9. Valetta, Malta
10. Quito, Ecuador
There are 1153 more photos in the Cities and Urban Life Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
March 27, 2018
Quotes: Auctioning Mugabe
“on my trip to Harare, three weeks after a coup deposed Mugabe in November 2017, I had seen no pictures of the man. Once mandated in state buildings, they had been taken down swiftly after the coup. A teacher I met described the scene in her school on the day of his resignation. “One teacher came to the staff room and said, ‘Auctioning, auctioning, anybody want a picture of Mugabe?’ and someone put up his hand and said, ‘Fifty cents, I’ll give you 50 cents!’ and then he said, ‘OK, I’ve got 50 cents, anyone else?’ and someone else said, ‘Ten cents’ and he said, ‘Sold to the guy with 10 cents!’ ””
– from After the Strongman by Karan Mahajan in the New Republic.
March 24, 2018
Quotes: At the Edge of the Sea
“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
Rachel Carson from Under the Sea Wind, as quoted in a New Yorker tribute by Jill Lapore. Photo is Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada. Click to enlarge.
March 23, 2018
Weekend Reading
Some suggestions for your leisure time this weekend: on Twitter this week, I have a series of HDR photos, like this photo from the Hoi An, Vietnam market. That’s @BMurrayWriter.
To start, a bit of positive news this week, from George Monbiot:
Hello friends. I'm back home and walking (slowly). I'm told the operation went well. My care was exemplary throughout, and everyone who treated me was lovely. Long live the #NHS!
— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) March 21, 2018
Monbiot is author most recently of Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. To get an idea of his general worldview, watch this YouTube video called How Did We Get into This Mess from a book talk with John Lanchester.
Now, gathering clouds:
Incoming National Security Advisor John Bolton wrote an article in 2015 with the headline To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran. He thought then that “only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.” Here is a piece he wrote in the National Review last summer called How to Get Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Colum Lynch and Elias Groll write at Foreign Policy, “Bolton has explicitly called for a preemptive strike on North Korea, advocates bombing to force regime change in Iran, and wants an open-ended military presence in Afghanistan. He has also called for a much more confrontational stance against China, including stationing U.S. troops in Taiwan.”
At the same time, CNBC reports that Incoming Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “has … expressed disdain for a 2015 nuclear deal aimed at limiting the country’s (Iran’s) nuclear energy program … (saying) I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
An evangelical Christian, Pompeo is “a longtime die-hard opponent of the Islamic Republic, who has for years advocated for a policy of regime change in Tehran,” says CNBC.
It may be a long, hot summer. This morning, moderate punditry is busy trying to convince itself that this team won’t be a disaster. One thing to look forward to: McMaster’s book.
And then there is this:
China’s “Social Credit System” Will Rate How Valuable You Are as a Human by Dom Galeon and Brad Bergan at Futurism
And perhaps a sign of a different set of worries to come: Pakistan Is Racing to Combat the World’s First Extensively Drug-Resistant Typhoid Outbreak by Meher Ahmad at Scientific American
But enough gloom.
Learning about whaling and visiting the defunct Við Áir whaling station in the Faroe Islands for Out in the Cold instructed me about the whalers’ life, about which I knew nothing. The last whalers by Lyndsie Bourgon at Aeon.com describes the winding down of a brutal way of making a living.
And a few more worthwhile articles:
Cows with character: How much can we read into animal behavior by Jennie Erin Smith at the Times Literary Supplement
Grown Men Reading ‘Nancy’ by Dash Shaw on the NYRB blog
Kidnapped Royalty Become Pawns in Iran’s Deadly Plot by Robert W. Worth in the New York Times
In books this week, Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism by Kristen Ghodsee in due in the house via Prime tomorrow. It’s kind of specialized, granted, but it’s an area of interest to me. I spent a fair amount of time riding the rails around the newly-freed East Bloc in the early 1990s.
This bit of the description got the book into my shopping cart: “Just as the communist ideal has become permanently tainted by its association with the worst excesses of twentieth-century Eastern European regimes, today the democratic ideal is increasingly sullied by its links to the ravages of neoliberalism.” Can’t argue with that.
Here in southern Appalachia we had day-long snowfall at midweek and now we look for springlike conditions over the weekend. Wherever you are, go and have some fun this weekend. Cheers for now.
March 22, 2018
Ten City Skylines
See how many you can guess. Answers at the end.
IMPORTANT: You can click to enlarge them for a better look, but there will be a caption at the bottom that gives you the answer. Careful.
Good luck:
Answers:
1. Sydney, Australia
2. Singapore
3. Antananarivo, Madagascar
4. Muscat, Oman
5. Istanbul, Turkey
6. Windhoek, Namibia
7. Havana, Cuba
8. Rome, Italy
9. Tórshavn, Faroe Islands
10. Reykjavik, Iceland
It’s true: some were easy enough, others were hard and a couple were pretty much impossible.
If you had fun with this leave a note and we can do this once in a while. Because there are 1153 more photos in the Cities and Urban Life Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
March 21, 2018
Dramatic Rift This Week
In geology, a rift is a tearing apart of the earth’s surface due to tectonic activity. Here are two photos of a rift, a physical tear in the earth, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at Þingvellir National Park, Iceland, where the North American and Eurasian Plates are moving apart. We visited and talked about Þingvellir in Out in the Cold. If you’ll remind me, I’ll excerpt that portion of the book in a separate post.
There have been dramatic happenings in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley over the last several days. Last week, the split you can see in the reports below wasn’t there:
Quotes: Internet Problems
“The defining fact of digital life is that the internet was created in the libertarian frenzy of the 1990s. As we privatized the net, releasing it from the hands of the government agencies that cultivated it, we suspended our inherited civic instincts. Instead of treating the web like the financial system or aviation or agriculture, we refrained from creating the robust rules that would ensure safety and enforce our constitutional values.”
Franklin Foer writing in The Atlantic.
March 20, 2018
Equinox in Ecuador
Happy Vernal Equinox, the day of the year when the sun is directly over the equator. Its direct rays are northbound, coming to warm the northern hemisphere for our local summer.
Balancing an egg on the equinox, when the sun is directly overhead, is supposed to demonstrate the temporary lack of the Coriolis effect. That this is true is thoroughly debunked around the internet. In March of 1997, though, while on the equator in Ecuador, I saw it done. Was this man just good at balancing things? Was it a trick egg? You decide. I’m believing my lying eyes. Regardless, a bit of good fun.
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