Jim > Recent Status Updates

"....I remember my father telling us Sarah was marrying a Yankee." Gaspard smiled. "We were delighted for her. But then, there were no more calls, no more letters. Ever again...."

During the Black Hawk War of 1832, he (Lincoln) served for three months in the Illinois militia, but the only action he saw, he said later, consisted of "a good many bloody struggles with mosquitoes."

After World War II, the United States "lost China" because the US policymakers at the highest levels were "soft on Communism."
Not so.
China, a proud and ancient civilization, was not America's to lose...

A white-skinned creature stood between two tall birch trunks. He was man-shaped and light-eyed. His hair was the tangled undergrowth of the forest. He cast no shadow.

......shivah is the holiest of holies. Because the Talmud says when you mourn the dead you get ten Jewish men who come to the home of the deceased....and you sit and pray, and you hold services, and you light the yorzeit candles, and you recite the kaddish...

Rebecca's Rangers, the media called them. Her Hell's Angels. Her soldiers of the sun. They varied from superpatriots to petty criminals...

"I beat the Russians every time," Napoleon complained,"but that does not get me anywhere." September (1812) cooled into October; soon the Russian winter would come. Finally...he surrendered to the bitter decision: to go back, emptyhanded...What victory could ever wipe out the shame of this defeat?

Khrushchev's aim was to hide the buildup in Cuba until after the American elections ( in 1962 ), when he planned to attend the UN General Assembly and see Kennedy. He would then reveal the existence of the Cuban missile base and extract concessions from the president over Berlin and Cuba. As historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali concluded, borrowing from JFK, it was "one hell of a gamble."

"....The route over which the Grand Army was hurrying to Smolensk was strewn with frozen corpses. But the snow had soon covered them like an immense shroud, and little mounds, like the tombs of the ancients, showed us only faint traces of our buried comrades in arms."

She stood perhaps ten paces behind him near a yellow pine sapling. She was a large, sharp-faced black dog, standing statue-still, watching him...

"....A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?..."

A waitress came by and Reacher ordered his go-to breakfast, which was coffee plus a short stack of pancakes with eggs, bacon, and maple syrup. The coffee arrived first. Black, fresh, hot, and strong. Pretty good.

"....You are of course free to leave the Complex, free to go anywhere...but before you use your new freedom to rush into town, let me remind you: ' There is no such thing as a free lunch.' You are better off for the time being where you are; the food may not be fancy but will continue hot and on time."

They came through the red granite country north of Llano. Mountains of red and pink granite. The valleys were starred with Mexican hat and gayfeather waving in tall magenta rods, bluebonnets by the acre. It was flowering time in the hill country. New grass for the horses, tender growth for the whitetail deer...

"....Have you ever made love to an android before?"
"No," he said, taking off his shirt and tie.
" I understand--they tell me--it's convincing if you don't think too much about it. But if you think too much, if you reflect on what you're doing--then you can't go on. For, ahem, physiological reasons."
Bending, he kissed her bare shoulder.

"On June second,1932, Jerry's father, Mitchell Siegel, was found facedown in the back of his small haberdashery as a puddle of blood seeped toward the door. There were two bullets in his chest, and all the money was gone from his cash register. Now think of the impact on his youngest son, Jerry....When Superman first appeared, he didn't have X-ray vision or all the neat superpowers.. But y'know what power he did h

Private Farley of the Middlesex saw a flash, felt the blast, but...heard no "bang" as a close one landed just ahead. He was untouched, but the four men running with him all went down. Three lay motionless on the sand; the fourth...pleaded,"Help me, help me."
Farley ran on. After all, those were the orders....The memory of that voice pleading for help would still haunt his conscience forty years later.

It was an extraordinary achievement of modern warfare. Between October 13 and 25 (1950) the intelligence staffs of MacArthur's armies failed to discern the slightest evidence of the movement of 130,000 soldiers and porters. A combination of superb fieldcraft and camouflage by the Chinese, with their lack of use of any of the conventional means of detecting modern military movement-wireless traffic, mechanized

"Never again will I have such a feeling as Mongolia gave me. The broad sweeps of dun colored gravel merging into a vague horizon; the ancient trails once traveled by Genghis Khan's wild raiders; the violent contrast of motor cars beside majestic camels fresh from the marching sands of the Gobi! All this thrilled me to the core."--Roy Chapman Andrews

I had ruined everything. All the things I had said, things that seemed so clever at the time, were in fact the worst things a fool could say. Even now she was inside, breathing a sigh of relief to finally be rid of me.
But she had smiled. Had laughed.

Then he saw Kvothe's eyes. They had deepened to a green so dark they were nearly black. This is who I came to see, Chronicler thought to himself, this is the man who counseled kings and walked old roads with nothing but his wit to guide him.

When Linnaeus's son and successor died in 1783, his mother and sisters decided to sell the great collection--specimens, cabinets, books, letters, and manuscripts--to the highest bidder. The remains of Linnaeus's intellectual life were purchased by James Edward Smith, a young English naturalist...for the incredible bargain price (even by eighteenth- century standards) of just over a thousand pounds.

So, on the night of March fifteenth (1917), Nicholas II signed the abdication brought to him by the Duma delegates. "In agreement with the Imperial Duma, we have thought it good to abdicate from the throne of the Russian State, and to lay down the supreme power...." The Czar ended the document "May the Lord God help Russia!"

But the film of Jurassic Park has gutted Crichton's
book and inverted his interesting centerpiece about chaos theory to Hollywood's most conventional... pap. We feel this loss most keenly in the reconstruction of Ian Malcolm as the antithesis of his character in the book. He still presents himself as a devotee of chaos theory...but...he is given the oldest diatribe...that we must not tinker in God's realm.

"None of us really started out to secede from the Union--when we called it Radio Free Vermont it was just because that's what you call such a thing. It was the newspapers that started in on secession. We were just--making a fuss. Sure, I suppose independence might be the logical extension of what we've been saying about bigness..."