Undaunted by the evident lack of enthusiasm for my last puzzle I like great men before me endeavor to persevere so here’s a new puzzle, feel free to ignore the clever theme answers and tear in to the grammar errors or just plain wrong cluing*. Most importantly have fun!!!
Conversation at Glibs HQ when Brett told us he needed help with the links:
jesse: I will say that I do a lot for you Brett. I spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. but I have been very very good to you, Brett. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but I have been very very good to Brett.
Brett: Yes you are absolutely right. Not only. 100%, but actually 1000%. I’m very grateful to you for that because the you are doing quite a lot for me.
So, I’m thinking it’s pretty clear I’m going to get a little quid pro quo for doing the links today. What do you guys think?
Sloopy linked an article about HK’s current turmoil which mentioned an unconfirmed viral video of a protester being shot in the chest this morning. That’s been confirmed (TW: video from multiple angles at multiple speeds autoplay after the link)
If you’re an Amazon Prime member today is the day to pick up this month’s freebies in their First Reads program for books and Twitch Prime Loot for games.
Yes, as the title says this is part 2 of the series. Yes, there was a part 1, not that anyone remembers… I blame excessive alcohol consumption round these parts. No, reading part 1 is not required, the content is independent, being mostly a picture thing. Originally it was just one post, but it seemed a bit big, so I decided to split it. So let’s get to it.
Bucharest can be a city of contrasts, like every other large city to be fair. New and old, rich and poor, pretty and ugly – mostly ugly, all mingle. The jumble can be more pronounced than in other places as the development was a bit haphazard, although I am not one who likes uniformity and dreams of streets where all buildings are almost identical. I like a bit of mishmash, or eclectic as I like to say.
Bucharest is split in 6 sectors, some better than others. I live in Sector 1, aka the best sector. It has most of the older and nicer areas of the city, has by far the most parks and green spaces and fewest brutalist apartment buildings. Plus the most tax money per capita in the budget, which meant a lot was stolen as it was easy to make the sector look better than the others and still have plenty left over for the old Swiss bank account.
You can see a good part of the history of the city if you know where to look. But it is not always easy, it was so thoroughly changed during the glorious years of communism that not much remain. You do not get the same sense of age like in other old cities, like Rome or Paris. Of course, being from the 1500s it is overall a lot younger. Just not that young.
Back in the day, the day being 1900, some people called it Little Paris, and some locals still do. I mean… whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night I guess. This, of course, was not due necessarily to significant resemblance between the cities, although we have an Arc de Triumph and late 19th century architecture was French inspired. It had more to do with the local economically successful crowd being great fans of French culture. This started after the revolution of 1848, when a bunch went to Paris into exile, and continued, to the point that French was the default language in polite society. Romanian was for the hoi polloi. Romania considered itself a “francophone country”. While the local higher education was burgeoning, a lot of people still went abroad for education, Germany for technical stuff and France for the liberal arts. But most of the old Bucharest is gone or rundown and swallowed by the ugly new.
Many of the Paris educated gentry often came back after a few years having conveniently forgot the Romanian language. The satirists of the day called it going to Paris an ox and returning a cow. Some of the uneducated tried to emulate the French speakers, but ended up altering Romanian words to what they though sounded French – a phrase was coined for this in Romanian – furculision – based on the Romanian word for table fork – furculița, frenchiefied.
This was somewhat paralleled in post-communist Romania by people who left to work – often menial jobs – abroad and returned with similar language amnesia. As many early leavers went to Italy – it was easier for them there, as Romanians did not have work permits for EU countries, but Italians can be a bit… flexible in the application of the law and there was plenty of work to be found “under the table”, cash money no taxes. The language was easy to pick up for Romanians, who before that only spoke bad Romanian. So after a few years of back breaking work in old Italy, people came back with some cash – by local standards – and a degree of snobbishness which led to similar forgetfulness of Romanian words, to the point in which the Italian phrase “come si dice” entered Romanian vernacular as irony and/or sarcasm.
The turning the words French bit was transformed in turning words English, the new lingua franca if you will. The most famous example of this was a former president who tried to say in English that the Dacians were a branch of the Thracians. In order to pluralize the Romanian words for Dacian, dac and Thracian, trac he simply added an s to the end and said “the dacs come from the tracs”, which came out as “the ducks come from the trucks” and much hilarity ensued, mainly due to the fact that he was the worst thing that could happen to post-communist Romania and people had little else to do than laugh.
Bucharest was rapidly industrialized and populated with the worker necessary to build to socialist multi-laterally developed utopia during communism. The building took the form of hideous brutalist architecture, in endless apartment blocks, crowded, badly insulated, and overall quite unpleasant. There are boulevards where there is a wall of buildings without any gaps between, probably made to channel crowds in controllable fashion. These were the houses of the factory workers. The communist apparatchiks, of course, did not live there. They took over the villas of the previously wealthy or middle class. It is hard work building equality, they deserved a better living standard then the masses. Some animals more equal than others, you see.
The previous rich and middle class were unceremoniously kicked out of their homes, along with many of the poor. Because, besides the party bigwig homes, there needed to be space for the shitty apartment buildings. The proles needed abodes as well. And to do that you needed to tear down the old buildings. Quite indiscriminately.
The neighborhood I live in is what I like to call liminal, because it is on the border between two different areas and also I like using the word liminal. Liminal… It does not even matter if I am using it correctly, so don’t bother commenting. If you were to build a triangle around my building, on one side is the beginning of an old wealthy area. This was one of the wealthiest since before communism, where the well off lived in nice and quite large houses on leafy streets. A lot of these were preserved to this day.
On the second side of the triangle is a front of communist apartment blocks, rising like a huge wall. Since communism, they had some polystyrene insulation added and a usually bad paint job.
On the third there are the old style, not too fancy houses that the pre-communist lower middle class lived in. These are generally single story or at most a couple of levels. Some still have the look of rural Romanian houses. These were the ones that were to be torn down should the communist dream have continued.
Now I have the chance to see what modern society alters. The expensive old villas and the communist blocks will not change any time soon, although every piece of land in those neighborhoods is being built with deluxe apartments.
What is changing is the area of the old not-so-fancy houses that escaped communist building schemes. They are, one by one, bit by bit, torn down and rebuilt. I assume it would also be accurate to say funeral by funeral, as many inhabitants are elderly who do not want to sell the house, or tear it down to rebuild, as they lived their entire life in it. So, mostly after they die, the heirs do something about it. Sell or rebuild or whatever.
The result of the modern building spurt is, to be diplomatic about it, quite eclectic. A lot of houses and building were built in Bucharest in the last 10-15 years, for people who became wealthy enough to escape the communist apartments. The plots of land were generally small and everyone built whatever they felt like, so there is no coherent model. This is good and bad, depending on whether you like uniformity.
Haphazard building led to a great contrast. Old houses, some up kept some not, with a random new house or small apartment building, stuck in the tiny spaces. The future … it remains to be seen. Or not, depending on the breaks. Also for some reason there seem to be a lot of magnolias in this city… And on that note
The Monday before baseball playoffs start and the only sports action is the Yinzers vs the Bungles? Those Yinzers are bad, but I’m starting to think the Bungles are Miami Dolphins-bad. Well, the NHL season starts tomorrow, so these dead days won’t be back for some time now.
Oh wait, ManUre and Arsenal played to a 1-1 tie, leaving the Red Devils in tenth and behind such heavyweights as Crystal Palace and Bournemouth. Heady days at Old Trafford, I gotta say.
Happy Birthday to our 39th President
The marginally-above-average-looking idiot Brie Larson was born on this day. So were: embarrassingly-bad PM Theresa May, funny man Zach Galifanakis, steroid aficionado Mark McGwire, baseball legend Rod Carew, the lovely Julie Andrews, master of disguise George Peppard, hero to home brewers Jimmy Carter, and outlaw Bonnie Parker. Well that was better than yesterday. Also, the more I read what Brie Larson says, the more convinced I am that she’s a performance artist. Because nobody could be that dumb and yet remember her lines.
I guess I’ll have to ponder on that another time. Because now I need to finish getting you guys…the links!
What a dick. Also, I always get a kick out of articles like this where the phrase “they might have also used it for __________, researchers say” pops up with regularity. RANT: These researchers have no fucking idea what that giant dick-rock was used for. The have no idea if a “cult” really carved it. And they have no idea what it means for humanity.
Good thing there are no rocks here to impede pedestrians.
I can’t possibly imagine this working. But I’ve seen crazier shit. The “mistake of fact” claim the defense has made doesn’t really wash. “Your honor, I was so fucked up that when I busted into the other person’s apartment, I thought there was a man sitting in mine eating ice cream, so I felt I was in imminent danger and unloaded on him.” Yeah, not sure that’s gonna fly.
This is a story that we need Swissy to weigh in on. His updates during the earlier rounds of protests were illuminating. Hopefully as the date approaches, and it devolves into the inevitable shitshow, he will do the same.
This marvelous human being, who I’ll call Erin Skakel, is potentially teaching the children of at least one Glib, but more on that later. In addition to redacting her name, and the names of the neighborhood groups to which she posted (the ones of which I am aware, anyway), I have also redacted her image, replacing it with what I believe to be the original Rosie the Riveter poster art from WW2. I deliberately chose that image because her profile pic is one of her cosplaying Rosie. I find it ironic that the accompanying slogan on the original was “we can do it,” when Skakel’s modus vivendi is anything but self-reliance. Rather the Blanche DuBois sort, our girl, always relying on the kindness of strangers.
That FaceBook post is one of the best examples of writing you will ever see. Seriously. What appears on first glance to be a disjointed stream of conscious rant is revealed upon further examination as a masterpiece of compact, effective prose. Skakel recently posted that paragraph accompanied by a picture (not included, you perverts) of human shins sorely afflicted with a large and severe patch of irritation. Her targets were at least two FaceBook groups for a formerly dowdy Richmond area which recently became trendy and saw its property values skyrocket. Neighborhoods whose lawns are dotted with signs for progressive causes and candidates.
“anyone know the most inexpensive ways to see a doc”
Such an innocent and straightforward request. How could you be suspicious of that, Tonio? How? Brain overheating from too many layers of tinfoil? THC-induced psychosis, perhaps? The poor woman is just trying to see a doctor, for goodness sake.
It fails the reasonable person test that she can’t call around, or surf around on the internet and find that shiznat out. She’s an adult with a college degree and holds down a nominally professional job. Her stated request is for a referral to the cheapest treatment alternative.
“I’m used to just making an appt”
I kept skimming over this clause, filtering it out as “random, self-absorbed, chick blather,” but something about it made me keep coming back to it until it struck me that this was a tell; that she had inadvertently dropped a piece of information which caused everything else to drop into place.
Used to just making an appointment, like she has done some research and found out that the cheapest way to get medical treatment involves getting to a clinic at opening hour (or earlier, because there is always a line), getting on the list and waiting around until your name is called. In the case of the private charity clinic there is paperwork and means-testing and a sliding fee scale for general medical services; I’m unsure about the fee structure of the government health clinic.
So, you see, Skakel doesn’t just want to receive medical treatment, but to do so in a doctor’s office with an appointment like she’s used to instead of waiting around with sick, poor people for what will probably be a long time.
Anyone taking an interest in Skakel’s plight and having internet access could quickly discover that the walk-in clinic at the chain pharmacy will cost you $59.00. Again, she’s a college graduate; she has the internet. She presumably has friends. She could figure that out if she wanted to, and if that was her actual intention. She’s signalling that she doesn’t have the money she needs to go to the doctor. But there’s that looming vacay which she drops to give a sense of urgency to her plight. It doesn’t matter how off-putting it is to certain members of her target audience to be asked to subsidize her vacay, money being fungible and all.
So… I’m a teacher.
Teachers are sacrosanct. Skakel knows that. She leads with that. It’s the first sentence of her post, which is supposed to be the most important part of your message in any sort of pitch. It’s also a warning to not judge her; she knows that would be enforced by the countless right-thinkful people in the neighborhood and that any pushback would only make her seem more sympathetic to the credulous people who are likely to be moved by her tale of woe.
I […] have gotten what I thought was poison ivy but… I’m not sure is getting better or that’s what it is.
Normal people who are looking to earn money quickly often turn to informal unskilled labor such as cleaning and yardwork. But Skakel obviously fails at yard work, and due to the placement of the injuries, is currently unsuited for on-your-knees labor such as scrubbing or weeding. Plus she may not be getting better so it would be cruel to even suggest she perform manual labor while sick. Also, bonus points to her for making that sentence do double-duty both as an expanation of the root cause of her current crisis, and as a gym pass for why she can’t be expected to do, you know, actual physical labor with those gross oozy patches on her shins.
It’s the pervasive sense of entitlement I find most offensive about Skakel and those like her. This attitude is becoming increasingly prevalant in society. On a larger scale this becomes something like the chimeral “living wage.” In both cases there is the pervasive sense that if a person works they should be able to afford a certain standard of living, certain amenities, regardless of other decisions they have made.
I won’t delve deeply into the argle-bargle about Skakel accidentally opting out of her health insurance. It’s just not believable on so many levels. My hypothesis is that she thought her medical expenses would be flat and predictable, opted out of her insurance, and had just enough deducted to cover her monthly meds. But, whatever. Here’s what she didn’t do once she figured out that she’d fucked up – act responsibly.
A responsible person would have set aside money each month to cover out-of-pocket office visits. A responsible person would have gotten a part-time job at the beginning of summer break to earn money to cover unforeseen medical expenses, and perhaps been able to use that money to pay for a vacay once she had health insurance again, but not before. A responsible person would have… I’m preaching to the choir here, people.
I grew up in an apartment complex heavily populated by teachers. Everyone knew that the unmarried women teachers who wanted to get ahead would share an apartment with another girl, hold down a summer job as a waitress, or with parks and rec, etc. If you lived simply you could afford to live alone and hang out by the pool instead of going on a nice vacation. Your choice. The assumption that she is entitled to a vacay, come hell or high water, is baked into everything she writes.
Even though this is an opinion piece, as an author primarily of fiction I cannot help but resolve conflict once it has been established. Be brave, dear readers, as the plight of our damsel in distress is about to be revealed.
Caloo, callay! It appears that our plucky heroine did indeed get her vacation. And how nice of her to check in on us all after the big thunderstorm that rolled through and downed a bunch of trees.
I’m one of those barely make it month to month “ers”
Come again? Doesn’t sound like it to me, hon. Sounds like you are living a quite nice lifestyle since you have the money for vacay and gym classes. Skakel lives in the city of Richmond but teaches in one of the nearby counties. The location of the class she wants to take is in the opposite direction from the county in which she teaches. Suspect that “accountability partner” will end up doing most of the driving.
Thanks to everyone for slogging through a long rant with no laugh lines, tentacles or sex. So here’s a little something that will appeal to most of you.
Quilinco sits deep in Guatemala’s western highlands, in an overwhelmingly agrarian region where poverty is high and child malnutrition rates hover around 70%. The region also boasts some of Guatemala’s highest migration rates to the United States. Local farmers say climate change is making it increasingly difficult to get by and is one of the factors pushing people to head north.
But Quilinco has also benefited from a U.S.-funded program to help farmers adapt and improve their food security. It’s a place where one agricultural aid project’s impact — and the stakes of cutting such aid, as the Trump administration did this past spring — can be seen firsthand.
To get there, I rode a bus for five hours from Guatemala City and then got a ride in a pickup truck for another hour. The truck bounced up a dusty dirt road that wound up the mountains, through pine trees and a patchwork of little fields of corn and broccoli.
Virtually everyone in the town makes a living as a farmer, planting corn in the summer for subsistence. In winter, many also plant vegetables such as snow peas and potatoes for export to the United States.
Farmers and scientists say climate change has been making agriculture more difficult. This year, the problem has been drought. Rain patterns have been more unpredictable, and storms have been stronger. Two years ago, a rare spring hailstorm shredded García Ramos’ corn plants, and he lost the entire crop. In other years, hurricanes have left him with nothing
Columbia: A plan agreed upon by Columbia and eight other Latin American countries to convert their economies to run on 70% renewable energy. This is twice that of the EU. No mention of mass starvation or economic migration in the article.
The Trump administration signed an asylum agreement with Honduras that could force asylum-seekers to seek protection in one of the most dangerous countries in the world instead of the United States, the latest agreement with a Central American country aimed at curbing migration at the southern border.
The U.S. signed the asylum agreement with Honduras’ foreign minister of affairs, a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security said during a news teleconference Wednesday afternoon.
The accord would allow the U.S. to send asylum-seekers from the southern border to Honduras to seek relief in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
The fellow to the right looks like a banker, stockbroker, maybe a corporate executive of some type, doesn’t he? A solid, stable, reliable, boring guy, one you’d never find pulling off anything dangerous or exciting.
What he was, in fact, was something completely different. This character is Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the most groundbreaking scientists of the early 20th century, a pioneer in dinosaur paleontology, possibly one of the inspirations for the character of Indiana Jones, and a considerable badass in several different ways.
His Maculate Origin
Roy Chapman Andrews was born to Charles and Cora Chapman Andrews in 1884 in an unassuming house on an unassuming street in the unassuming town of Beloit, Wisconsin. He spent a good part of his youth wandering the hills and fields around Beloit, becoming a crack shot, a careful amateur naturalist and a taxidermist. It was his skill at that latter avocation that leveraged him into Beloit College and in part paid for that education.
He graduated that institution in the year of 1906, with a degree in English and classes in archaeology and evolution added to the mix. He was determined to move into the larger world. And so, on leaving Beloit College, the young Andrews made his way to New York City, where he determined that he would enter employment at The American Museum of Natural History. To that end he arranged to speak to the Museum’s Director, one Dr. Bumpus, who in the course of the interview dashed the young Andrews’ hopes – almost, as Andrews himself describes in his autobiography Under A Lucky Star – A Lifetime of Adventure:
At last he said, regretfully, that there wasn’t a position of any kind open in the Museum. My heart dropped into my shoes. Finally I blurted out, “I’m not asking for a position. I just want to work here. You have to have someone to clean the floors. Couldn’t I do that?” “But,” he said, “a man with a college education doesn’t want to clean floors!” “No,” I said, “not just any floors. But the Museum floors are different. I’ll clean them and love it, if you’ll let me.” [i]
He did indeed end up starting his career mopping floors. But young Andrews was destined for greater things, as his subsequent career proved beyond anyone’s capacity to doubt.
His One-Man War Adventures
For a man who is best remembered today for his adventures in various deserts pursuing dinosaur bones, it is surprising to some that Andrews first earned his adventuring stripes chasing snakes, lizards and whales.
Scarcely had he entered his employment at the American Museum of Natural History than the young Andrews found himself packed off aboard the USS Albatross to the East Indies, where he collected various reptile specimens and watched marine mammals at play. This led to an interest in whales, and soon Andrews was in British Columbia at a whaling station, where he went to sea on the schooner Adventuress to try to obtain a bowhead whale skeleton for the Museum. In this Andrews was uncharacteristically unsuccessful, but he did obtain some sterling film footage of seals, the best that had ever been available to the American public at that point.
But careering around the ocean in whaling vessels quickly grew boring for Andrews; something more exotic was in order. In 1914 he had married Yvette Borup, and in 1916, with his new wife along for the adventure, Andrews led an expedition across China’s southern and western provinces, cataloging the flora and fauna of that area.
It was in 1920, however, that the plans Andrews’ most well-known adventures began to take shape.
Bear in mind that the automobile was still kind of a brand-new thing in the early 1920s. But Andrews wasn’t afraid of breaking new ground in more than just looking for fossils, so her determined to take a fleet of Dodge automobiles west out of Peking and into the Mongolian deserts, there to seek fossils. The automobiles and personnel were assembled, and in 1921 the group set out.
Mongolia in those days wasn’t the most stable of places; armed bandits were everywhere, and so were corrupt provincial police, little better than bandits themselves. But the fossil pickings were rich. Andrews’ expedition uncovered fossils of indricotheres, a giant hornless rhino four times as heavy as an elephant, and the rhino-sized hoofed carnivore that was named after him, Andrewsarchus.
Human fossils were also a goal, as Andrews adhered to the then-popular “Out of Asia” theory of human origins, which posited that mankind’s ancient ancestors arose in Asia, but while fossils of the creature now known as Homo erectus were found in China in 1923 (then described as Pithecanthropus or “Peking Man”) Andrews’ group was not destined to find any early human remains. In fact, in 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart found the first fossil of an australopithecine in South Africa, the “Taung child” later classified as Australopithecus africanus. It is not known whether this discover dissuaded Andrews from the “Out of Asia” theory.
Andrews in Mongolia, on his horse Kublai Khan.
Andrews’ adventures in Mongolia were not entirely peaceable. On one occasion he and a partner were driving down a desert valley when they were ambushed by bandits. The bandits fired several shots at Andrews’ automobile, but as befitting a man with a big brass pair, the heroic explorer from Beloit just wasn’t having any of it. As Andrews himself described it, he and his partner drove into a canyon, grabbed rifles and set up to ambush their ambushers:
Soon our potential murderers started to climb down the cliff, evidently bent on finishing off what they had begun. But we weren’t having any. Charlie picked one fellow silhouetted against the sky. I lined my sights on another in front. Bang, bang went our rifles. Charlie’s client sat down suddenly and rolled over. Mine did a magnificent swan dive right off the cliff. The other three ducked back among the rocks. It must have been a bit of a surprise to them. [ii]
Apparently, Andrews was a fan of Savage rifles. From the horseback photo here, it appears Andrews favored the 99 Savage lever guns, which gives me another reason to add one to my collection. In another photo he appears with what looks like a Model 20 Savage lying on a rock nearby. I have not yet found a photo that clearly shows the revolver he routinely carried, although he describes it as a .38. That covers a lot of ground, six-gun wise.
It was on July 23rd, 1923, that Andrews and his team made the discovery that he is best remembered for today. On that fateful day, one of the party uncovered several oval objects in Cretaceous strata and went back to camp joking about having found dinosaur eggs. Andrews returned to the site and determined that yes, these were indeed fossilized dinosaur eggs – the first ever found. Initially thought to be from the common Cretaceous ceratopsian Protoceratops, the eggs were many years later found to belong to a species of oviraptor. But dinosaur eggs they were, the very first; Andrews wrote about that day:
Dino Eggs!
Then our indifference suddenly evaporated. It was certain they really were eggs. Three of them were exposed and evidently had broken out of the sandstone ledge beside which they lay. Other shell fragments were partially embedded in the rock and just under the shelf we could see the ends of two more eggs. [iii]
In 1927, the first rounds of the Chinese Civil War began, wherein the Kuomintang-led government was battling for control of the country against Chinese communists. We all know now how that turned out, but at the time it was beginning to be very dicey indeed for a band of American dinosaur hunters. After some wrangling with bureaucrats and much difficulty in getting specimens released for export – and after one incident wherein Andrews and colleagues fled down a gravel road in their automobile with machine-gun bullets cracking past their ears, escaping only after a Chinese officer directed them to drive down the ditch to escape the worst of the fire. After this even Andrews had had enough. He described the aftermath of their narrow escape thusly:
It was a difficult job to navigate over the plowed ground, but somehow we got to the gate of Peking and into the city. The experience affected each of us differently. I had been so busy driving that there was no time to be scared; or at least not to give in to the feeling. I had got the other fellows into the jam and had to get them out. But once back in Peking I felt awfully weak and sick. One of the other men who was staying with me had been perfectly cool throughout the entire performance and afterward. At two o’clock the next morning he went into violent hysterics. I had a beautiful time getting him back to normal. [iv]
His Golden Years
Andrews, with his habitual holstered revolver.
Andrews returned to the United States in 1930. In 1934, he ascended to the Director’s chair in the Museum of Natural History, where he had begun his employment mopping floors. He had chronicled many of his adventures prior to this, but on his retirement to California (which was not nearly as nutty a place then as it is today) in 1942, he began writing in earnest, churning out memoirs and tales of adventure which were all the more gripping because he really lived them. His published works include:
Monographs of the Pacific Cetacea (1914–16)
Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera (1916)
Camps and Trails in China (1918)
Across Mongolian Plains (1921)
On The Trail of Ancient Man (1926)
Ends of the Earth (1929)
The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932)
This Business of Exploring (1935)
Exploring with Andrews (1938)
This Amazing Planet (1939)
Under a Lucky Star (1943)
Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945)
An Explorer Comes Home (1947)
My Favorite Stories of the Great Outdoors Editor (1950)
Quest in the Desert (1950)
Heart of Asia: True Tales of the Far East (1951)
Nature’s Way: How Nature Takes Care of Her Own (1951)
All About Dinosaurs (1953)
All About Whales (1954)
Beyond Adventure: The Lives of Three Explorers (1954)
Quest of the Snow Leopard (1955)
All About Strange Beasts of the Past (1956)
In the Days of the Dinosaurs (1959)
If time allows you to read only one, make it his Under A Lucky Star.
Roy Chapman Andrews passed away on March 11, 1960 and was buried in his hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin. He left behind him a legacy of adventure that few could match. Today’s batch of scientists seem poor stuff by comparison to the gun-toting, hellraising, fearless Roy Chapman Andrews.
[i] Andrews, Roy Chapman. Under a Lucky Star – A Lifetime of Adventure. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Not photographed: a Nebraska defender within 10 yards of the play
Damn you, Mack Brown. Kick the extra point. KICK THE FUCKING EXTRA POINT AND TAKE YOUR CHANCES IN OVERTIME!!!!! Elsewhere, Bama cruised, TTUN won their rivalry game, Minnesoooooda has rowed to boat to 4-0 (but both them and Michigan State stay behind aTm in the polls after they powered themselves to a close win over juggernaut Arkansas), USC (West) continues to disappoint, and Ohio State curb-stomped the shit out of Nebraska. And that was just on Saturday! On Sunday, the Browns actually looked good, the Patriots continue to get every break in the world, the Chefs escaped Detroit, and the Saints-Cowboys played an entertaining game.
The MLB Playoffs are set, with the NL Wild Card game coming tomorrow and the AL version on Wednesday. My predictions: the Brewers and Athletics will win. Once that happens or doesn’t, I’ll lay out my divisional picks. Not that anybody cares.
Why the long face, Eric? Its your birthday!
Underrated actor Eric Stoltz was born on this day. He shares it with such luminaries as: band leader Buddy Rich, flamboyant writer Truman Capote, brilliant author Elie Wiesel, annoying actress Fran Drescher, and a person who allegedly makes music named Trey Anastasio.
That’s it. That’s the whole list today. And it sucked. Step up your game, September 30th. And start with what we hope is an enjoyable installment of…the links!
Fuck you, MTA! I’ll smile at whoever I want!
You like the First Amendment? Well that’s a shame if you live in New York City. Seriously, they can go eat a bag of dicks. Not one dick. Not two dicks. But an entire plastic, single-use 55 gallon trash bag filed to overflowing with dicks. And then they can eat some more.
This guy appears to have handled just about everything right. Which is probably why he’s being charged. The only mistake he made was in not just having his wife call 911 right after they got off the phone with their lawyer. Interesting to see how this plays out.
Monday: Animal continues his Profiles in Toxic Masculinity series and Tonio draws us a Portrait of a Grifter.
Tuesday: Pie tours us around Bucharest (he’ll make you yokels sophisticated Europeans yet,) Hyperbole has a crossword for us and Ozymandias presents Chapter 9 of his on-going series.
Wednesday: I terrorize the collective will with a new Hat and Hair, but the night slot is a new cartoon by CPRM.
Thursday: Baked Penquin gives us another glimpse into the mind of Secret Nazi President and Chafed has the night slot with the provocatively titled What to Expect When You Are Expecting Death.
Friday: The noon slot is just sitting there open right now, slutty and inviting. Slatternly, even. And the second half of the Tonio doubleheader, with Chapter 10 of The Glibening takes over the night.
Saturday and Sunday are smooth and blank for now, two luscious eggs of possibility…
Usually when the skies are empty, I figure it’s just a whim of orbital mechanics. But it’s very unusual to see things this quiet two weeks in a row. So to pad things out I’m going to incorporate a controversial construction. The obvious bit is the alignment with the moon being between the Earth and the sun. This happens every month and is a generally energizing thing (though less so than the equally common Sun-Earth-Moon arrangement. The extremely rare Earth-Sun-Moon alignment portends the extinction of all life on the planet). So to save us from tedium, we’re going to look at a quasi-alignment, thus:
Mars should be angry, Venus should be female, and Saturn should be grumpy, but w/e.
See how neither Jupiter nor Saturn quite lines up, but they both almost do, and in equal but opposite ways? That last bit is what transforms it from “random shit I just made up” to (debatably) “confirmed astrological science.” Now these equal and oppositional forces don’t negate each other (otherwise they wouldn’t be present to be read) but rather you combine them as vector multiplication (see Math = SCIENCE!) and generate a new influence in the direction of the cross-product. When you combine that with the male/female dynamic embodied by Mars/Venus, the surface-level interpretation is “Government enacts new population control measure.” And surface-level analysis is all you’re going to get from me today, the brain is pretty worn out from not sleeping right for two weeks. So expect GND, increased funding for contraception/abortion, reducing parent subsidies and anything else that inhibits the conception of new humans.
Libra’s got a whole passel of goodness, not only grabbing the typical inner planets (for love and luck) but also the moon (for that extra bit of good fortune). What they don’t have is Mars, so while everything is going your way, don’t fuck it up by being too aggressive. On that note, Mars is in Virgo, so expect unjustified aggression and various bits of cuntery.
The cards say the week is going to start poorly, but finish much better, with you avoiding a major mishap.
Libra: 4 of Coins reversed – delay, suspense, opposition
Scorpio: 7 of Wands reversed – Perplexity, embarrassments, anxiety
Sagittarius: Queen of Cups reversed – Either a good woman, or a woman who appears distinguished but is not to be trusted, perversity, vice, depravity, dishonor
Capricorn: 3 of Swords reversed – Error, loss, distraction, confusion
Aquarius: 3 of Coins – Trade, skilled labor, renown, glory
Pisces: Page of Cups – Message, application, reflection, study, fair young man who will render service
