The Art of Maniliness is talking about Viktor Frankl today.
Tomorrow, We’ll Have Less Zucchini
Tomorrow, August 8, is Sneak Zucchini onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night. If you have more zucchini than you want, take time tomorrow to celebrate with friends, family, or strangers by giving it to them. Need a bit of motivation to eat zucchini? Try this yummy zucchini cobbler recipe. It really tastes close to apple cobbler. Ice cream helps as always.
If you happen to be in Vermont later this month, watch out for zucchini enthusiasts at the 11th Annual Vermont State Zucchini Festival. I’m told that if you leave your car windows down while walking around the festival, you may find someone has “blessed” you with vegetable gifts when you return.
Klavan on Psychological Crime Novels
From the Wall Street Journal.
Full disclosure: Of the books listed, I’ve only read Crime and Punishment.
Good Work, Y’all
Congratulations to Jimmy Davis for his work in the Worldview Church eReport, a newsletter from Breakpoint.org. He lists teh contents of the current issue on his blog, The Cruciform Life (which has a new address).
Sherry has managed to keep her head above water with How Right You Are, Jeeves. A natural, you might say.
And congratulations to Michael on the birth of Ransom Dunnington Lander. I saw a photo yesterday. What a cute kid. He says he’s going to name his second boy, Clive Staples Lander. Does your wife have anything to say about this?
Madame Guillotine
Delancey’s Place has an excerpt today about olden France and a certain deadly icon:
Guillotin’s motive was to introduce a more humanitarian form of capital punishment, and his success in that was evident from the very first use of the guillotine when “the crowds, accustomed to bloody bouts with the ax and sword, thundered in disappointment, ‘Bring back the block!’ ” Yet almost immediately, guillotine executions became Paris’s favorite form of entertainment, with families bringing picnic lunches and reveling in the carnival atmosphere that surrounded them.
The guillotine was used until the 1950s, and in a public execution in 1939 of a hated German criminal, the crowd acted as if they were at a coronation festival or maybe a rock concert. “[E]legant ladies, avid for souvenirs, rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood” of the man whom they had just watched lose his head. This comes from Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties.
Ancient Chariot Unearthed
Here’s a bit more from our archeology desk. Archeologist Daniela Agre and her team have found a complete, well-preserved chariot in Borisovo, a village in southeast Bulgaria. Several interesting things were found in the Thracian tomb, dated 1,900 years old.
Site of first Shakespeare theater found in London
Shakespeare acted himself, and staged his first plays, at a London site which is now being excavated.
The remains of a London theatre where William Shakespeare’s early plays including “Romeo And Juliet” were first performed have been discovered by archaeologists, a museum said Wednesday.
Shakespeare appeared at The Theatre in Shoreditch, east London, as an actor with a troupe called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which also performed his efforts as a playwright there.
Full story here.
Finding Atlantis, by David King
People always seem surprised to discover that institutions of higher learning tend to be raging battlegrounds of clashing egos on an epic scale.
The common stereotype of the professor is of a vague, mild-mannered oldster in an incorrectly buttoned sweater, blinking vaguely as he searches for the glasses that sit perched atop his forehead. In fact, scholars tend to be people who have all their lives been the smartest people in the room, suddenly thrust together into a single institution with a bunch of other people who’ve also always been the smartest people in the room, and resenting it. Add to this the fact that really smart people tend to grow up too busy with their interior worlds to bother with mundane exercises of basic interpersonal skills, and you’ve got the ingredients of gunpowder.
Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World tells the story of a man of extraordinary intellect and achievement who grew so enamored of his revolutionary theories that he failed in humility, university politics, and the judgment of posterity.
Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) was a Swede, the son of Gustavus Adolphus’ personal chaplain. As a young medical student he dissected a calf, in order to discover the source of a milky substance he saw in the carcass. The result was the discovery of the lymphatic system (although there is controversy as to who identified it first), and Rudbeck became a scientific celebrity. Appointed to the University of Uppsala, he oversaw the construction of a large dissection theater and a botanical garden (botany was another of his specialties). He was also much admired as a musician and singer. Continue reading Finding Atlantis, by David King
Desert Landscapes
Terry Teachout talks landscapes, Santa Fe, opera noir, and Willa Cather in these posts:
In the News
Perhaps you are fed up with silly or at least slightly amusing news articles, but I feel compelled to share a few links to funny stories this afternoon.
1. A recent Pew poll found 48% of the roughly 1000 people surveyed are tired of hearing about Mr. Obama. A third of the Democrats polled said the same.
2. “Burgeoning jellyfish populations in coastal waters around the world is proof oceans are being impacted by global warming and overfishing, Spanish experts say.”
3. Jay Leno reportedly said, “Obama’s supporters got him his usual birthday gift of gold, frankincense and myrrh.” But maybe you’re tired of hearing about that.
4. Newspaper companies are suffering “in large measure to a marked reduction” in want ads. The Classifieds just aren’t classy anymore.
5. Tips for encouraging childhood reading (or should that be “underage reading”): “Give them books to use in their play, such as car manuals with toy cars, recipe books with a toy cooker . . .”
6. In a Knoxville, Tennessee Barnes & Noble, you can get rolled or TPed if you stand still too long.