Jim > Recent Status Updates

Summer work.
You swear it will never end until one day, one hot day in September Father will head out in the morning and harness Jim and Stacker to the hayrick and look at us and say, "Pile on, we're going to the lake."
Then you know it's fall.

"Someone, I can't remember who, said that the devil's greatest trick was convincing people he didn't exist. The Soviet Union might not have been the devil, although there are people who'd say it was, but the trick is probably just the same."

"....As they were digging, something was unleashed in that mine. A horrible disease carried by stinging insects. Giant wasps...The only way to stop them from escaping was to firebomb the mine with the workers still down there and bury it afterward."

"It looks like sandy times ahead," he said. ""Call, you got too much of the prophet in you. You're always trying to lead us into deserts."
"Well, there's water there," Call said. "I seen it. If we can get them close enough that they can smell it, they'll go. How far do you think a cow can smell water?"
"Not no eighty miles," Augustus said.

"Is Ogallala near here?"
"Twenty miles," the old man said. "I'm Cholo. Come to the house. You must be hungry."
July didn't argue. He had almost forgotten that people sat at tables, in houses, to eat....

Dog Face struggled for breath, a pool of blood beneath his legs. Yet he wasn't dead. Lorena...could still hear him moan and gurgle for breath. She wished he would die--it shouldn't take so long just to die.

Augustus pitched a ten-dollar gold piece on the bar and as the young man took it, suddenly reached out, grabbed his head and smashed his face into the bar,....Then he quickly drew his big Colt, and when the bartender raised his head, his broken nose gushing blood onto his white shirtfront, he found himself looking right into the barrel of a very big gun.
"... I think we'll require a little respect."

It was ridiculous. This appearance should be a piece of cake. There would be no Aalaag. Nor would there be any reason for human police, and no reason at all for the Castel to be under any kind of surveillance for someone playing the role of Pilgrim.

The sky had become a black wall. A living, undulating, screeching wall of feathers and claws and beaks that was descending on them like a nightmare.
The first crow struck Baat. Quick and sharp as an oyster blade, a deep slash that ripped his scalp away.

Someone had popped the lid off a clay barrel of balche. A clean bowl-shaped seashell was being dipped in the barrel, filled with the milky alcoholic drink, and passed around. Laughter and low peaceful talk filled the air, the sound of a crew who had worked a hard day under the sun and were being rewarded for it.

TR (Teddy Roosevelt) stood for expansion. But to keep charging up the hill, he knew Americans would need to manage those resources carefully....Conservation was a matter of survival. A matter of well-regulated, efficient plundering.

Most of the Russians... went into battle believing that Finland...had started the war and that the Finnish masses would welcome them as liberators. That illusion was one of the first things to die; the Finnish masses were never glimpsed, and some of the most ruthless ski guerrillas were loggers and pulp-factory workmen who had voted Communist in the last elections.

"But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one tongue overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable."

But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one tongue overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable.

.... I liked Austin because it always let me be myself. It's really the secret to why Austin is so cool; all you have to be in Austin is you, and Austin appreciates it when you are.

....there's no such thing as a happy ending. The songs, books, and movies with "happy endings" all stop at the moment of triumph. They don't tell the whole story. Only the old tragedies tell the truth. Beowulf triumphs over Grendel and his mother, only to fall fighting a dragon. Gilgamesh loses his best friend. Achilles, too. Everyone dies in Hamlet. This is the whole truth.

Looking down the length of the table, he (Morkere) addressed the barons, "In the past, Northern England ruled all of this island. The king of Northumbria was the most powerful man in all England. ..It is only recently, within the past hundred years or so, that our great lands were subjected to the rule of the Southern weaklings from Wessex."

In the United States, certain Christian groups, such as the Church of God with Signs Following, handle rattlesnakes and copperheads as a celebration of their own faith. About a hundred people died from this in the twentieth century. Many still practice this....

"But your real enemy has always been the fevers, hasn't it?"
"Disease demoralizes everyone."
"More armies have been conquered by plague than artillery."
"The mal de Siam lingers because our men are weak."
"And your doctors are baffled?"
"Our doctors are dead."

Feeding wild animals, as we know, is the quickest path to conflict. The promise of food motivates normally human-shy animals to take a risk. The risk-taking is rewarded, and the behavior escalates. Shyness becomes fearlessness, and fearlessness becomes aggression.

With Communism no longer viable, the default rallying cry for an autocratic Russian leader is nationalism. Putin, with his staged military parades and frequent invocation of past heroics, sounds that trumpet repeatedly. He wants citizens to believe that only he can restore his country to its rightful position in world affairs. If that means playing a little rough, so be it.

The woman leaned forward in her chair, focused the milky eyes on his face. "You black," she said.
"Yes, ma'am. May I sit down?"
"What kind of foolishness you bringing up in here? A black police man out of Atlanta? That'll be the day."

....the snarls became squeals of pain and then faded into silence. A few minutes later they passed the bloody corpse of a twenty-five-foot-long lizard-like creature with eight legs and a massive jaw full of dagger teeth. It was dotted with wounds from arrows and spears.
"Apparently the Phiadorians' confidence in their abilities was not overstated," the Doctor said mildly....

I looked up at the top of my old bookshelves. There, dusty and unread for years, were all the animal books of my childhood. I'd loved these books...But I hated them too. Because they never had happy endings. Tarka the otter was killed by hounds. The falcons died of pesticide poisoning. A man with a spade beat to death the otter in "Ring of Bright Water"....

".....And, to tell you the truth, this Berlin you have these days is not my favorite place."
"Oh, it's Hitler's city now. The other day I bought a mama doll for my grandchild but when you pressed the doll's stomach it didn't say 'Mama,' it said 'Heil Hitler.'

"The sun has used up all the hydrogen in its core. It's starting to burn itself up, and when it does, it will expand and--" he stumbled over the word.
"It's going to swallow us up," her brother said. "I read it in a book. The sun will just explode, all the way out to Mars..."

from "Daisy, in the Sun" by Connie Willis

I could only see in straight lines, but Charlie's world was nonlinear. I could see faraway stars...but it wasn't nearly as practical as Charlie's ability to see over hills and around corners. Charlie, sitting on the deck, could "see" a deer herd on the other side of the hill. He not only knew they were deer but he knew how many there were, because each individual had a slightly different scent.

By April 4, 1841, he ( President William Henry Harrison) was dead of pneumonia. He had been president for just one month, and with him died Fillmore's greatest hope in the fight against Freemasonry.

Emily is being bullied, I wrote.
She is, Mother said. Like I was.
She is you, I said.
She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story.