Winter haiku

Bicycle morning
Racing under a streetlight
My shadow passes.

photo by mookio

Rivers: an old thought about human geography

Perfect !!
Originally uploaded by antifa

"Hard would it be for one mortal to tell all the names of these [rivers],
but everyone everywhere knows the river he happens to live by."
-Hesiod (ca 700 B.C.) , Theogony, lines 369-370

Photo by antifa

On The Ground

8:36pm: reading
Originally uploaded by Laurel Fan

Every year around this time some pleople make a list of the most overworked words and phrases. A few years ago one was "on the ground," especially "the situation on the ground" in Iraq or Afghanistan, but also "boots on the ground," "reporters on the ground," etc. Christopher Borrelli complained "what else would troops be doing, hovering?"

I sympathize, but today I remet an old friend, Mark Twain's Roughing It, published in 1872, and in his Preferatory I came across this phrase "no books were written by persons who were on the ground in person..." Clearly the same meaning.

I have since found the phrase (through the very wonderful twin websites, Making Of America) in an article that appeared in American Whig Review in 1845. It was clearly describing a military siuation.

So the phrase may be overused, but it is venerable, at least.

Awful Library Books

Weeding...Deacquisition.... No librarian likes to do it, but we have to. Books this marginal make it less painful.

Hallelujah redux

I know I posted a recording of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah once before, but my gosh, how much beauty is too much? What I would love is to hear K.D. Lang sing with Rhiannon of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. A Beatles song. An Alka-seltzer commercial. Anything.

Digging the Middle East 2: Thieves of Baghdad

As a youngster in New York City, Matthew Bogdanos expected to go into his family's restaurant business. Then, on a whim one day, he tried to enlist in the Marines. The recruiter took one look at his test scores and said: no. He was going to enroll in college and the Marines would then be happy to accept him to the Officer's program

So Bogdanos became the first in his family to attend college. One result was that when 9/11 happened he was a prosecuting attorney in New York, as well as an Marines Reserve officer. Off he went to Afghanistan, among other places.

When the U.S. troops took Iraq and the museum in Baghdad was infamously looted, Bogdanos convinced his superiors that he - a lawyer/warrior with extensive knowledge of classical art and literature - was the perfect man to lead the team to get the stolen art back. And that is the main story of Thieves of Baghdad.

Like everything else in the Middle East, the theft was more complicated than it looked. For example, Bogdanos learned that many of the items were not really stolen. Some were taken by museum staff and others to protect them from the invading Americans. So he had to add diplomat to his job description: convincing Iraqis that the U.S. forces didn't intend to steal the relics for American museums.

The book is fascinating. I just opened at random and found this discussion between Bogdanos and a Lieutenant Colonel he liked:

"Matthew, would you like to join an experimental multiagency counterterrorism unit General Harrell is forming?"
"What is it?" I replied.
"I can't tell you. It's focal point." (meaning a security clearance above top secret, and -- like 99.99 percent of the people -- I didn't have that clearance).
"What will it do?"
"I can't tell you that either."
"You can't tell me where it'll operate either, can you?"
"Nope."
"Sounds good. I'm in."

A commercial announcement

David Malki does a wonderfully strange comic strip on the web called Wondermark. He repurposes Victorian graphic art with very strange captions. I wrote about it once before on my other blog.

However, Malki is now offering free copies of his new book, Clever Tricks To Stave Off Death to ten bloggers who write about Wondermark in November, so here is my shameless attempt to grub a book.

It took me a long time to find this cartoon, which is one of my favorites.