Happy Birthday Albert Bierstadt

Frosted Windows 330 years of St. Petersburg through Western eyes

FBI: Potential Terrorist Use of Almanacs: "Almanacs, available both in print and online, provide comprehensive information on a variety of topics, including government, geography, vital statistics, the economy, health matters, science and technology, weather trends, and tourism. Information commonly found in almanacs that may be exploited for terrorist use includes profiles of U.S. cities and states and information on geographic and structural features such as waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings, and landmarks. This information is often accompanied by photographs and maps."

SQUISHED by books: There but for fortune...

The varieties of traumatic experiences good short review of new Vollman.

When Is Violence Justified? Big Question Gets Long Answer another review of Vollman

Epiphany

Twelfth Night

Joyce--"The Dead""A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

from Robert Pogue Harrison's new "The Names of the Dead"-- his 1992 "Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation" one of my favorites: "One's initial impression of the memorial wall from a distance is that of its dramatic horizontal extension, yet as one descends along the pathway toward the highest part of the wall the anxiety of the vertical gradually wins out over that of the horizontal stretch to infinity. Joyce's image of the snow, by contrast, works the other way around. The verticality of the snow's descent gives way, by the end of the last paragraph of The Dead, to a more sublime impression of its vast horizontal extension over all of Ireland. Yet the effect in both cases is similar. The tense relationship between extension and descension gives both symbols their sublime epic reach....The epic's vocation, as well as its burden, is to contain such excess in its narrative, ideological drive toward synthesis. We have seen, if only briefly and in passing, what moral strains and pressures this put on Virgil as well as Dante when it came to representing or accounting for the fates of history's plethora of victims. In the case of the memorial wall, the excess of names is uncontainable, not because the wall cannot accommodate them--it does--but because in its mute memory of the Vietnam War, it proclaims, or seems to, that each one of its inscriptions is one too many. The excess lies in the moral doubt raised in and by each and every name. The wall, in its conception and its material presence, is pervaded with the pathos of an early, sacrificial death reminiscent of Virgil's infernal scene of "high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys / and unwed girls, and young men set upon / the pyre of death before their fathers' eyes." Yet Rome--that "eternal idea in the mind of God" which would honor or redeem these deaths--is missing."

Mirages in Finland: " On the open sea, low waves may reach into the mirage-producing air layer, where they become vertically stretched into high columns: this produces a vision of dancing columns far out to sea. "

Happy Birthdays Sandy Denny

and Kathy Sledge!!

As well as the usual Towhees

there's lots of Grackles (the "parking lot bird" says Daph) enjoying my uncooked flaxseed oatmeal in the snow

PressThink: Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "
The origins of the term 'inside baseball' are in one writer's view of sports reporting during the 1980s. He's Bill James, now a famous scholar of baseball. The arguments he made then explain why the term migrated so easily to politics. The inside, said James, is a hall of mirrors."

Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs?: "“Oh, you’re a journalist,” he noted. “What are you here for?”
“I’m interviewing Olivia Newton-John,” Smethurst replied.
“That’s nice,” the official said, impressed. “What’s the article about?”
“Breast cancer.”
When Smethurst tells me this, she pauses and adds, “I thought that last question was a little odd, but figured everything’s different now in America and it was fine.” What she didn’t know was that her assignment and travel plans, along with the chicken soup and stroll through Central Park, had been terminated the moment she confirmed she was a journalist. Fourteen hours later, she was escorted by three armed guards onto the 11 p.m. Qantas flight home."

thanks Plep for

The Oxford Book of Ballads

jack kirby/brian wilson

the vaughn lounge nice Robert Vaughn site. Enjoyed him with Steve McQueen in both "Bullitt" and "The Magnificent Seven" lately.

The Tyee: BC Drug Raids: How Big a Scandal?

my pal Antti paragliding in southern Morocco (quicktime slideshow)

I like it ROAR! (animation)

great NYC photos

Happy New Year!