Bill Murray's Blog, page 77
October 16, 2017
Totality
I enjoyed reading this person’s review of the recent total eclipse this morning. She (I guess it’s a she) and I seem to think alike. It appears we shared a sort of vague disquiet watching the cosmos get out of kilter.
Here is a bit of what she wrote:
The moon will never be the same; its dark side cannot be unseen. Gone is the being of pure light flying gently across the heavens. It is a corpse, a dead thing, the dusty remains of old Theia horrifically attached to its sister planet by a withering gravitational umbilical cord.
Compared with my own review of an eclipse in Out in the Cold:
Once it is revealed you are frightened to have seen that it is so. You have registered somewhere deep under the skin another alien, raw thing; the comforting life-giving sun was just five minutes ago an orange ring of flame surrounded by darkness, a fanged personality, no tulips and honeybees.
(Go and read more of that excerpt from Out in the Cold here.)
October 13, 2017
Weekend Reading
Here is a selection of fine reading material on which to muse this weekend:
The Fate of Earth by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker
Russia’s House of Shadows by Joshua Yaffa in The New Yorker
A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas by Adam Rutherford in The Atlantic
Here’s What Would Happen If Donald Trump Nuked North Korea by Greg Fish at Rantt.com
Citizens of anywhere by Matthew Valencia at 1843magazine.com
Ça va un peu by Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, reviewing Congo: The Epic History of a People by David van Reybrouck
Quotes:
‘Remember that it is we who torment, we who make difficulties for ourselves – that is, our opinions do. What, for instance, does it mean to be insulted? Stand by a rock and insult it, and what have you accomplished? If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective?’
Second century Stoic philosopher Epictetus with advice for the online age, as quoted by Massimo Pigliucci at Aeon.co.
October 12, 2017
Quotes: On Blakenall Heath
This place was the inevitable byproduct – waste product, even – of market forces, and the price that more prosperous parts of the country had secretly accepted as worth paying for the many other benefits that capitalism delivered to them. The problem was systemic.
Giles Fraser in The Guardian
October 9, 2017
“World’s Most Useless Airport” Finally Ready
St. Helena Island opens to fly-in visitors this week.
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Photo from the Guardian. See more photos of one of the world’s most remote places in the St. Helena Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
October 6, 2017
Weekend Reading
Don’t neglect your reading now, you hear? And here are a few suggestions for some fine weekend reading:
A River of Tears by Nancy Macdonald in Maclean’s
The Volcano that Shrouded the Earth by Gillen D’Arcy Wood at Nautilus.com
The best books for Rethinking Economics at Five Books
The Chinese World Order by Andrew J. Nathan at the New York Review of Books
All Beans, No Tomatoes by Rachel Pieh Jones at thesmartset.com
October 5, 2017
Flight Over Pyongyang
Assuming this is legit, and it appears to be – the Hotel of Doom seems to be out there in the distance – it’s most interesting. Pyongyang appears to have all the modern amenities … and almost no traffic.
September 29, 2017
Live Tweeting World War Two
Animals from London Zoo are being evacuated to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire. 3 evacuee elephants & 3 giant pandas arrived today by train. pic.twitter.com/1QIJ8W51sB
— WW2 Tweets from 1939 (@RealTimeWWII) September 29, 2017
A man who works at the Museum of London named Alwyn Collinson is live-Tweeting (for the next six years!) events as they happened on this date in 1939. Here is his Twitter feed.
Weekend Reading
Here are a few wild and exotic titles to help you head off on a bold reading safari this weekend.
Trollhättan by Andrew Brown in Granta
My Drowning (And Other Inconveniences) by Tim Cahill at Outside Online
Kurds Need A Street: A (Classical) Liberal Case for Kurdistan by Jonah Cohen in Quillette
If It Keeps on Raining by Micah Fields in Oxford American
The Coming Software Apocalypse by James Somers at TheAtlantic.com
The effects of a single terrorist nuclear bomb by Matthew Bunn at thebulletin.org
