Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Judith's LiveJournal:

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Monday, March 12th, 2012
4:21 pm	# 7 The Complete Ice Age (ed Brian Fagan) How Climate Change shaped the World. Fagan is an archaeologist. The current Ice Age set in about 2.5 million years ago, when the northward drft of Tasmania and South America left Antarctica isolated with the Southern Ocean currents swirling unimpeded all around it, when North and South America finally joined together, severing the equatorial ocean currents. Fagan and his contributors cover how Agassiz and other early scholars recognised the tracks of glaciers left as U-shaped valleys, moraines and dropped erratic boulders in areas now ice-free; how the ice and climate shaped animal and human evolution -- early humans coming and going as the ice advanced and retreated, then the amazingly speedy evolution of modern human civilisation from 10,000 years ago, as our present interglacial stabilised into predictable seasons. He notes the notion that the Neolithic surge of land-clearance at the invention of agriculture probably raised CO2 levels sufficiently to see off any tendency for the climate to tip back into ice-age. Then he turns to the present situation: just how alarmingly fast and hard current fossil fuel burning is forcing up atmospheric greenhouse gas levels; the past record showing that catastrophic warming with sea-level rises of 20 metres or more seem to happen fast, over as little as a 5 year span -- though freezing over is a slow process, as each summer partially melts away ice build-up. He finishes on what seems now the obligatory note of (forced?) optimism: if only sapient human society would make up its mind to pull itself together, apply rational global perspective and the modern technology available... (Comment on this)
3:50 pm	#3-6: Medieval times -- Illuminations, marginalia, Arthuriana #3 Beasts: Factual and Fantastic (Elizabeth Morrison) #4 Images in the Margins (Margot McIlwain Nishimura) #5 Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts (Celia Fisher) All published by The British Library Our take-home reading from the BL's recent Royal Illuminated Manuscripts exhibition. Small but lavishly illustrated, which is what the subject needs. It is the little incidentals that charm me: the twisted beastie heads, the little background landscape and city scenes behind the saints and angels. Fisher's Flowers reads like a thesis out-take: she outlines how the use of flowers, and styles of illumination, changed and developed over the centuries. Wonderful how recognisable most of the flowers are, often with moths, snails and insect life creeping among them. The other two books each identify a few significant types -- eg, wild animals, domestic animals, hunting and hunted, religious animals, heraldic animals, imagined monsters -- with a bit of descriptive information, but most of the space, rightly, given over to producing the illuminations selected for reproduction. Not much to say about them: if only I had the time, eyesight, and a sunny cloister with adjacent 'millefiori' herbal knot garden to sit and try doing my own little illuminations. #6: The Medieval Quest for Arthur (Robert Rouse and Cory Rushton, Tempus Books) Not about Arthur himself, but exploring how the idea of Arthur was used by successive medieval and Tudor kings and others, particularly to legitimize their rule, and how the times and purposes it was used for changed the idea of Arthur. From this perspective, the Winchester 'Round Table' comes out as a key and fascinating artifact. Indeed, questions of the reality of Arthur are just one angle -- the significance of the legend is as much or more about the context and motivations of how and why his stories are told and twisted. Picked up by JN at the BL Illuminations exhibition. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:38 pm	#2 Emperor of the West, Hywel Williams On Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire. The terms 'magisterial' and 'tour de force' spring to mind. I'd heard of Charlemagne, of course, even visited the remains of his palace at Aachen. Williams shows Charlemagne's rule as a social phase-change: from contending post-Roman barbarian tribes to the modern concept of nation-states forged through the feudal kingships of the medieval world. Williams starts with family background: rivalries and feuds of the preceding Merovingian dynasty, and how Pippin and Charles Martel, the first of the Carolingians, were able to take over. (Other hobbit names such as Drogo and Fredegar crop up, suggesting that Tolkien's 'lands of the West' may have been based, in his mind, on the Carolingian golden age. So do Chilperic and Childeric.) Other striking chapters are about Charlemagne's dealings with Rome, whose Popes recognised him as their best protection from other contending tribal kings and so declared him and his heirs 'Holy Roman Emperor' -- establishing the 'divine right of kings' as a Christian notion. Williams covers how Charlemagne extended his rule, enlarging his original 'Francia' homeland to cover Saxony, Thuringia, much of Italy, down to the Pyrenees; how his rule was administered through vassal kings and local grandees; the economics of running the developing kingdom; cultural flourishing. I'd not previously remembered that the English Alfred the Great and Charlemagne were contemporaries, with Alfred clearly modelling his rule on the great king across the Channel. Overall, Williams makes a convincing case that Charlemagne pretty much invented the lines on which medieval Europe -- feudal Christendom -- developed until the post-Black Death Renaissance took up capitalism. JN picked up this fat paperback browsing near South Kensington tube, on the way home from checking out 'Private Eye at 50 exhibition' at the V&A. I dipped into it because I'd come out sans reading -- not my period, far too recent -- expecting to be fairly bored, but found it well worth while finishing. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
3:20 pm	Life: white light of viral spring 1) Virus: it seems like every time I venture out from 'working at home' seclusion, some passing rhinovirus ambushes me. Thank heavens for Lemsip -- I used to be of the old-fashioned 'modern medicine can cure a cold in seven days -- leave it alone to run its course and it will hang about for a week' school. Then a couple of seasons ago, the bunged-up headachiness was bad enough that I resorted to this modern Lemsip stuff. Now I'm a convert: it suppresses the symptoms sufficiently that you stay at least semi-functional, and I think may actually shorten the length of time it hangs about. But I still mourn the disappearance of Galloways Irish Moss -- proper-tasting cough syrup. 2) Spring: starry magnolia opening up in our front garden, above a mass of pink and intense blue lungwort, with assorted buzzy bees. Frogspawn. So this weekend: seed-sowing. A patch of radishes at the allotment. At home, parsnips in cardboard toilet rolls (plant out the whole thing so no root disturbance; four varieties of tomatoes in heated propagator in the greenhouse; brussels sprouts; morning glories (heavenly blue, black knight -- for window boxes). 3) White lights: we have LED reading/working lights -- modern, minimum energy. Clip onto the bedside bookshelves, and ditto by my TV-watching, knit-and-sew chair. Found at our local Asda Living, £12 each. A very cool, crisp light -- a very narrow beam, that doesn't light up the room at large, but seems to provide efficient light to work by. Another step in shrinking our carbon feetprint. The Dec-March quarterly gas bill arrived last week, showing that we used little more than half the gas energy as the same quarter last year -- the difference between last year's severely cold outside temperatures and this winter's generally mild conditions. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:00 pm	#1 Urban Knits, Simone Werle (www.prestel.com) A photobook. Service station and pumps covered in bright patchwork, bollards wearing bright 'toadstool' caps, Strings of crocheted flowers and motifs strung around trees, fences, bicycle parking stands. Park benches wearing delicate snowflake doilies. Street sculptures given cosy wraps to keep them warm. Crocheted dragons and lizards sprawling over the ground, spilling out of old sheds. Craft as subversion, gifting colourful -- and assertively feminine -- personality onto impersonal urban spaces. Source-book for spreading the contagion. I think I might start with a bit of local tree-dressing, using water-proof plastic bag 'plarn', in the wonderful colours that throw-away bags come in. (Acquired this at Dulwich Gallery, which we visited on the very last day of the Canadian Landscapes exhibition: long queue through the permanent collection, then a very worthwhile introduction to how Canadian artists worked out how to see the Great Lakes and other wild landscapes -- through a post-Impressionist lens. Interesting parallels and contrasts with the Australian 'Heidelberg school', whose members also had to learn to see and represent the Australian light, atmosphere and landscape -- but came to it some 50 years earlier, so applied an Impressionist lens.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 5th, 2012
3:40 pm	#45 The Beginners Guide to Australian Aboriginal Art the symbols, their meanings and some Dreamtime stories, by R Lewis (Gecko Books 2009) There are certain basics I know: first is that different Aboriginal cultures have quite different art styles, with different symbols and meanings. A second is that parallels between Aboriginal myths and stories and those of Middle Eastern cultures (ancient Egypt, Bible) are pretty much accidental. Sure, you could write an interesting enough pamphlet or tome exploring such parallels or resemblances -- for instance, why are is the constellation of the Pleiades called the 'Seven Sisters' in both Greek and Aboriginal cultures, and how many others? But it don't call it a 'guide to Aboriginal art'! Slim orange pamphlet picked up in the Aboriginal Art shop at Katherine, NT. Back cover blurb notes that R Lewis worked in the Fremantle Aboriginal Art shop for some years. I'm inclined to bin this, rather than pass on the dis-information to someone who might believe the farrago. And that's the last of my 'Books read in 2011' -- within spitting distance of the target 50. Now, on with the 2012 reading... (Comment on this)
3:22 pm	#44 Here on Earth: an argument for hope, by Tim Flannery (2010) Flannery's previous book was 'The Future Eaters', about how we're destroying the planetary life support systems that keep us alive -- atmospheric carbon balance, ecosystems and biodiversity. But messages of doom, social research suggests, just make people switch off (attention, not electrical devices), heads in sand, hope it will all just go away... This one is explores the prospect that we humans might be smart enough to change our ways to create a 'sustainable' future, and how this might work. Alfred Russell Wallace emerges as Flannery's first hero: his understanding of natural selection and evolution was more ecological than Darwin's -- a precursor for the 'gaia' theory developed by Lovelock and Margulis, of life on Earth evolving as a 'biosphere' that works through complex links not just among organisms, but feeding through into the planetary systems of atmosphere and geology. These days, the 'gaia' perspective is broadly accepted, supported by more and more evidence. Flannery's take is that we now need to think of the human role as evolving into a 'human planetary super-organism', harnessing our species' intelligence to steward current and future ecosystems and biosphere. The fascination is in the detail of the examples and stories he pulls together to illustrate both ways we go wrong, and ways we get things right -- including use of religious taboos and myths to protect places and species, and pass on ecological values. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
6:13 pm	#43 The Wildlife of our Bodies, by Rob Dunn Predators, parasites and partners that shape who we are today Many aspects of civilisation work as 'culture versus nature', conquering and excluding the chaos and 'dirt' of the wild natural world. None more so than modern medicine and hygiene, all sterile white and shining. Dunn's thesis, though, is that the health pendulum needs to swing back, in at least some respects, to accepting that we humans are part of nature -- walking ecosystems. "What are the consequences of removing the species our bodies evolved to inter-act with?" is his question -- how does evolutionary biology affect modern health. Several of Dunn's examples I'd already read about in New Scientist -- auto-immune diseases and allergies, diabetes, increasing because children kept away from 'dirt' don't expose their immune systems to the external challenges they've evolved for (including parasitic worms), and so our own systems turn to internal warfare against our selves. I knew of the idea that the appendix harbours 'good bacteria' as a folk notion, but hadn't seen the science evidence Dunn marshals on just how this works as a bacteria farm. Dunn also probes the psychological impacts: for instance, is xenophobia rooted in an instinctive strategy for reducing dangers of strangers bringing new diseases and infections. He looks not just at the way that fear and aggression reflexes evolved for a world in which leopards, hyenas, cave bears found us scant-haired monkeys good tucker -- but considers how modern cities could be planned and constructed as better habitats for the 'wild' traits and needs that are still strong elements of human psychological and physical nature: green roofs, 'sky-farming' and vertical farms as ways to integrate the nature we need alongside advanced modern life. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2012
10:44 am	# 41, 42: Michael Pollan -- we are what we eat? The Omnivore's Dilemma: the search for a perfect for a perfect meal in a fast-food world, by Michael Pollan (2006) The Botany of Desire: a plant's eye view of the world, by Michael Pollan (2001) Pollan was touted around the media when Omnivore came out, talking about 10 rules for good eating. The two I remember are: "Eat food, not food-like substances", and "Don't eat stuff your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food". He was called things like 'pre-eminent writer on food for our times', using food to explore human nature, culture and our relationship with the natural world. That is, food as both provisioning and cultural ecosystem service. Omnivore is the tale of three meals -- tracing how what goes onto the plate is produced. To get to grips with the first, sourced from big-brand industrial-agriculture through to a fast-food hamburger chain, Pollan buys a calf and visits it at its vast feed-lot, then abattoir. He follows 'commodity corn' through from monoculture farm to factory -- where it is almost magically transformed into an astounding variety of foodstuffs based on ubiquitous industrial ingredients, particularly 'high-fructose corn syrup'. What I found the shocking revelation about this McDinner was that, Pollan points out, it was basically just two ingredients: corn and soy (plus an extraordinary array of artificial chemicals). These are what feed the McNugget chicken and burger beef, are the oils that make up most of the calories in the potato fries, and the dressing for the 'healthy salad' option. A lot of gasoline, for trucking around and processing, also goes into it. Highly subsidised 'commodity corn', Pollan argues, is what feeds America's obesity epidemic. The second meal is of supermarket 'big organic' food: balancing a tightrope of compromises between principles and commercial demands for big-scale, constant supply line production. For the meat, Pollan visits Polyface Farm (Connecticut), where Joel Salatin calls himself a 'grass farmer' -- managing verdant acres as an ecosystem ( Read more... ) For his third meal, his perfect meal, Pollan aims to grow, hunt or forage the ingredients himself -- and invites those who help him with the hunting and foraging to the dinner. For this meal, every ingredient is an adventure, a story -- the meal is a nexus of relationships with places and people, not just what's on the plate. ( Read more... ) Botany of Desire explores how plants have shaped history and cultures, controlling us as much as we control them -- a reciprocal, social-ecological relationship. He takes four plants, associating each with a human desire: sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control. For sweetness, it's apples -- Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) spitting pips out across the wild forest frontier as the American Dionysus: his apples were rough and tart, for cider rather than for healthy rosy-cheeked kiddies to keep the doctor away. For beauty, it's the tulip -- the turban flower, which fired that 18th century economic bubble and collapse -- and what seems an almost universal human attraction to flowers, as if we were bees drawn by colour and scent (except in parts of Africa, according to Jack Goody's 'The culture of Flowers'). For intoxication, it's marijuana: the lure of forbidden plants, and the 'gates of consciousness' as religious experience. "With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn't a people on Earth who doesn't use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been." For control, it's the potato: exploited as cheap bulk carbohydrate to feed lumpen-proletariat work-forces, the Irish famine as exemplar of the vulnerability of monoculture to blight, and now being further industrialised through GM bio-technology. These aren't polemics, but subtle explorations on the human condition that take food and plants as their starting point -- what keeps us alive, and its implications for the meaning of life. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
7:15 pm	Writer's Block: Fairytale Endings Boredom (Comment on this)
7:11 pm	Teasels Friday was first workday of the year at the Maysie Community Garden I run at the end of our little street. As part of my 'get things under control' new year resolution, I've sorted out a schedule of work dates for the whole year, and e-mailed them around. Not unexpectedly, it was just me this time -- I did about an hour and a half of cutting back, weeding and tidying, which covered about a quarter of the garden. Dug up foxgloves that had self-seeded over-enthusiastically across the paths and too close to other plants, ditto rose campion -- passed some on to a Turkish chap with little English who stopped by as I was doing it -- non-verbal communication worked fine for him to look appealing, me to offer the plants and tell him their names, and him to smile in thanks; the rest went into our next-door front garden.Cut back about half the elegantly architectural teasel cadavers -- gave some of their seed-heads to a black lass who stopped to ask what the plant was, and how she could get it to grow in her garden. I cut the rest up for decorative dried seed-heads, and put them upside down in a basin for seeds to drop out, to be packeted up for the Seed Swap (12 Feb, see below. Teasels are one of those plants on the borderline between 'weed' and 'useful': they're a prickly, thistle-y plant. Their seed-heads were used to comb out wool and other fibres for spinning. In flower, they attract hoverflies and butterlies; their winter seed-heads attract goldfinches. You'll have gathered that I favour them, and want to see more of them growing around the place, to keep our local goldfinches coming to visit. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
6:52 pm	# 40 -- Weeds (Richard Mabey, 2010) Weeds: how vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature Mabey writes about what the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment calls 'cultural ecosystem services'. AS my colleague John Hopkins put it: "The other ecosystem services are what keep us alive -- the cultural services are what keep us human. That is: the ways we use nature to enjoy, appreciate and understand the world we live in and how we should live in it. The first Mabey book I acquired was Food for Free: what 'weeds' are good to eat -- how to recognise them, harvest and prepare them. So it is about the intersection of 'cultural' with 'provisioning' ecosystem services, and very useful to have on my cookbook shelf. We also have Mabey's encyclopedic Flora Britannica, which brings together botanical science with folklore and stories about all the various plants that grow wild in this country, including all the local common names they go by -- two different ways of understanding and thinking about nature. Weeds is as much about social transgression, repression and control as it is about plants. Mabey's on the side of wildness, creativity, diversity -- not just tolerating but celebrating and enjoying them. Mabey's hugely quotable. "The development of cultivation was perhaps the single most crucial event in forming our notions of nature. From that point on, the natural world could be divided into two conceptually different camps: those conatined, managed and bred for the benefit of humans, and those which are 'wild'... Weeds occur when this compartmentalisation breaks down. The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs wild." "What we ignore... is that many of them may be holding the bruised parts of the planet from falling apart." (Comment on this)
6:22 pm	Life... 1) Haringey Seed Swap -- Sunday 12 February 2-5pm, at Chances, 399 High Rd N17. I organise it -- on basis that all that needs to be organised is book a date and venue, publicise it, line up someone to run refreshments... Then it all comes together on the day: fingers crossed the number of people bringing seeds roughly balances with people taking seeds away, and people will help each other if you ask them to. Do drop in if you're in the area. 2) Long list of Things To Do: it does include finishing off LJing my 'books read during 2011' pile (and two read this year so far') 3) Elaborate 'New Year Resolutions' list, under three headings: New resolutions; Try Again; and Keep it Up. 'Do not yield to computerphobia / allergy' is on the Try Again list. 4) Have finished off a green fluff (Kidsilk) V-neck jumper. Panicked about running out of wool and bought extra balls, so have enough left over for wrist-warmers and a scarf. Gorgeous clear green hue -- I'd been looking out for it for yonks, but fashion seems to run shy of greens. The wool is so fine that I need to wear my glasses to actually see the stitches - but mainly I knit by feel, and only need the glasses to sort out something going wrong, or when I change to a new stitch pattern. The jumper itself is plain stocking stitch, with the bands in a fairly simple perforated rib. But I'm using a lacy undulating rib on the wrist-warmers, and will use it for the scarf too. (Comment on this)
5:30 pm	#39 The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge (Penguin,2005) : How they live and why they matter For a while after reading this, I kept looking up the family trees that form its core. To appreciate trees properly, says Tudge, it helps to understand them -- their evolutionary and ecological relationships and 'social lives' with each other, with the insects and birds that pollinate them, spread their seeds and live in them, with wider environment -- making the soil that sustains them, and with us. It's a love-song to trees as much as a science book. Some examples: would you have thought that ash trees, olives, jacaranda and teak all sit in the same family (Order Lamiales) best known for thyme, mint and similar aromatic kitchen herbs, along with African violets? That cucumbers are related to oak trees? It's fairly well-known that bamboos and sugar cane are giant grasses. But who'd have thought that trees tend to be the giant relatives in the same families as all the various little plants, rather than distinct 'tree families' -- well okay, anyone who studied proper botany, rather than just picking it up, would know it. Then there's the section on which trees live where, and why: tracking the DNA clock to date when different branches of tree families diverged provides evidence of continental drift -- Gondwanan tree families such as the Araucaria (monkey puzzles, the recently re-discovered Wollemi pine and 13 in New Caledonia). But the tropical rainforest trees of South America include few Gondwanans -- they seem mostly to have come in from North America before those two continents actually met up, suggesting the existence of now vanished land-bridges and island chains, or to be relatively recent arrivals from Africa, well past the Gondwanan break-up, presumably from seeds carried by tides, stray birds and the cross-ocean winds that still drop Saharan sands to fertilise the Amazon basin. This copy picked up in Lyme Regis's sprawling Sanctuary second-hand bookshop. We also have Tudge's more recent 'Consider the Birds', with a similar evolutionary family tree of those modern feathered dinosaurs as its core. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 13th, 2012
7:08 pm	# 38 -- Jingo, by Terry Pratchett A key point in evolution of Vimes from a just a hard-bitten world-wearied police procedural stereotype struck lucky, to a hard-bitten archetype of keeping the peace. There are the little crimes of the streets that keep the busies busy -- and then there's that big patriotic crime of mass murder called war. What makes Vetinari a good tyrant is that, like Macchiavelli and Clausewitz, and the Discworld's Tacticus, he deplores war as a clumsy and pointless failure of policy. This is, I think, the book in which we first encounter Vetinari's prolific pet genius Leonard of Quirm, and in which the model butler Willikins is found to have tough hidden talents. Reading about Willikins reminds me of the early days after UK's 2010 general election, when I was puzzled by commentators talking of Lib-Dem deputy PM Clegg as a mere butler to the toffish Tory PM Cameron. Surely everyone knows that it's always the butler who is the all competent fixer when the chips are down (Jeeves, Admirable Crichton) while his toffish boss is a mere Woosterish buffoon. Alas, not this time, it seems - and the Burlington boys can't be dismissed as lovably harmless buffoons. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 9th, 2012
6:05 pm	# 37 -- The Hidden Landscape: a Journey into the geological past, by Richard Fortey Fabulous: a gentle stroll through the British landscape with a geological master storyteller, starting at top right (north west), where the rocks are oldest, twisted Lewisian gneisses and Torridonian sediments, that date back to 2.9bn years ago, the Pre-Cambrian Proterozoic*. They're of a piece with Newfoundland, the Appalachians and Norway -- all once part of a great Caledonides mountain chain, on the far shore of the Iapetus Ocean from what is now southern Britain. The rocks get younger as you stroll southwards. Fortey tells the story through small fossils he's hunted down, many of them trilobites, and through encounters with local landscape features, to put the dizzying million year cataclysms, slow sifting of sediments, and shunting dance of the continents and vanished oceans into human perspective. Fortey appears in David Attenborough's 'First Life' TV series, two grand old men joking together as they hunted down a fantastic variety of trilobites in the northern Africa. Other great geological books I've read over the past few years : Fortey's Trilobite!; Simon Winchester's 'The Map that Changed the World' about Joseph Smith's pioneering British geological map and how he worked out the geology that Fortey explores here. Voyage of the Great Southern Ark, or Land Beyond Time, by Reg Morrison -- a geological history of the Australian continent -- similar approach to Fortey, but Morrison is a photographer, so this is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table work of mind-blowing geological synthesis. Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin -- evolutionary anatomy, on how the detail of tiny bones shows tetrapod lines of evolution from the Devonian fish that first crawled out onto dry land (tetrapods include mammals, reptiles and those feathered flying dinosaurs we call birds, and amphibians) - did you know the tiny hammer/anvil/stirrups bones in our ears originated as jawbones?; Emerald Planet, David Beerling -- how plant life has interacted with the elements to create and change Earth's atmosphere and climate, and so steered the evolution of life on Earth. These should all be reviewed somewhere back in my LJ. *These are youngsters compared to my home country in western Australia where, as Fortey notes in passing, the flat granite plateau of the Yilgarn craton dates back some 3.9bn years. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
11:34 am	#36 Haiku, The British Museum (ed David Cobb) Prints and paintings from the BM's Japanese collection, reproduced alongside appropriate haiku, which are shown in English translation, Japanese characters, and phonetic transcription of the Japanese words. Arranged by seasons. Cobb's introduction gives a brief history of haiku as a petic form, and sets out the 'formal characteristics: brevity and compression, seasonal feeling, and a 'cutting word' (kireji) at the end of any of the three lines. He notes that the Japanese concept of a syllable doesn't fit European languages -- so some flexibility can be applied to the 17 syllable rule. I find both Japanese art and the haiku form reliably satisfying, and regularly commit the latter: see Numbatlog Haiku My latest: In the winter-bare Apple-tree, the sparrow-hawk’s golden eye: A fierce-glowing small sun. (Comment on this)
11:06 am	# 35 Make Do and Mend: Keeping family and home afloat on war rations Reproductions of official Second World War instruction leaflets. I neglected to acquire this when we visited Churchill's wartime command bunker under Downing Street a couple of years back, but acquired this copy when we visited Blenheim Palace, Churchill's family pile and birthplace, last summer. Blenheim is a splendid monument to hero-worship of the 18th century John Churchill, created Duke of Marlborough by a grateful Queen Anne for his famous victories, and to the 20th century descendant and war-time premier, Winston. Skimming the impassioned encomia to the all-conquering General John, and admiring his magnificent mausoleum in the chapel, he and his Duchess seemed to me akin to the David Beckham and Posh of his day -- perhaps some advance in civilisation that the current idolised game is football, that ritualised and stylised substitute for bloody combat, rather than war itself. Jolly practical little book on the 'how-to' of re-using and repairing clothes and household textiles, particularly in these neo-austerity times. Its charm though lies in the original illustrations and typography, the nostalgic war-time look. Reading it through, there's a fair bit of repetition among the collected pamphlets, not a problem if you just dip into it or look up ways to patch, darn or re-model a problem article. To be filed with the rest of my sewing and dressmaking library. (Comment on this)
10:42 am	# 34: Su-doku Killer Killer is my current favourite number-game. With this book. I started tracking how long each puzzle takes me. + For their '2 clock -- 20 minute' rated puzzles, I got 100% solved, in times ranging from 6-10 minutes. + For their 3-clock/30 min rated games: solved 13, buggered up 7 (so about 60% success), with times 12-15 minutes for those I solved. + For their 4-clock / 40 min games: solved 11, buggered up 7, in times 10-20 mins. + For the fiendish 5 clock / 50 min rated puzzles: 7 solved, 1 buggered up, in times 13-30 mins. Three puzzles at bed-time seems a good sensible ration -- enough mental stretch-and-bend to be satisfying. Doing too many, I see the success rate drop off, and the bugger-up rate and time taken increase. Of course, this doesn't mean I always or even usually stop at the sensible ration. These things are addictive to the puzzle-solving monkey-brain. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
2:36 pm	# 33 Micro Trends, by Mark J Penn (with E Kinney Zalesne) Surprisingly interesting and engaging: Penn does political polling (including advice to Clinton, Blair). His main point is that there is not a monolithic public, but a diversity of 'micro-publics' and competing micro-trends, with some consideration of market opportunities these create. Each chapter picks out an interesting increasing trend. Dipping at random... 'Commuter couples' -- partners who live apart, possibly in different cities, states or countries, keeping in touch by phone/skype, text and on-line, seeing each other for weekends and holidays. 'High School Moguls': teenagers who start up a successful business -- some of the most notable on-line, eg Facebook: problem -- laws intended to protect minors below the age of legal responsibility stop them being able to sign commercial contracts and (legally) run their business... Worth hanging on to, for the nonce... (4 Comments |Comment on this)