a blind flaneur

In one of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese soldiers follow terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc (center) as they run down a road near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places. The date was June 8, 1972. President Richard Nixon once doubted the […]

Amy Winehouse led the finale at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebration in London with the anti-apartheid anthem Free Nelson Mandela. The concert raised funds for Mandela’s HIV/Aids charity 46664, which was named after his prison number during the 27 years he spent behind bars for resisting South African apartheid.
As the Seattle Times described […]

Some of my happiest times have been spent in garden sheds, waiting for the rain to stop. I’m easily distracted by any assortment of well-oiled tools, and usually whoever took the trouble to build the shed was a pretty handy carpenter. So I was impressed to learn from the Kitchen Sisters that garden […]

An auction house worker poses in front of Claude Monet’s ‘Le bassin aux nympheas.’ [Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP/IHT]
One of Claude Monet’s late paintings of waterlilies, finished at a time when he had doubts about his ability to see the colors in his palette, sold at Christie’s auction last night for £40.92 million. “Le bassin aux […]

“Does it sound like an old friend is gone?” That’s what George Carlin said about removing a compound matrilineal redundancy from his famously scandalous comedy routine, Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television. Thanks to Carlin and free speech champions like him, you can say those words on the Internet. If you are offended by […]

I’ve listened to warblers countless times over four decades of birding, but I saw only a handful of them. As a kid I was fortunate to learn the warbler songs from two naturalists gifted with perfect pitch. Even then, when I had something like normal vision, seeing warblers was a fleeting,, neck-craning, treetop experience. Once […]

I’ve never heard this metric before, although the U.S. Federal Highway Administration tracks and publishes it every month. Maybe it will become a number everyone watches nervously, like the Dow-Jones average, the Body Mass Index, or the weekend movie box office gross. What we need is a comparable measure of monthly miles walked. […]

Many thanks to Alex at augmented illusions for pointing me to Shnirele Perele by the Klezmatics. He writes:
I don’t like the “museum” approach to Klezmer music, and I think the Klezmatics are about the only band that can truly be called vessels of song for the present time. This clip is part of their […]

I miss making eye contact with others. I don’t necessarily miss seeing the range of human facial expressions. Over the years some have suggested that I am disadvantaged in business meetings because I cannot see nuanced body language. Maybe, maybe not. I’ve always trusted my ear to detect the infinite gradations of insincerity, disinterest, and […]

While I’m waiting for kale to sprout in my garden, wondering impatiently whether it was penny-foolish to plant seed from a three-year-old packet, I take heart in this news story from ScienceNOW, written by Emma Gatti (12 June 2023):
Scientists have successfully grown a date palm from a 2000-year-old seed dug up from the […]