Obviously it's been awhile since I updated this page. It's been a full semester, overflowing actually. Anyway, one result of my studies is the following picture of caffeine, inspired in part by the funny kitty pictures at www.lolcats.com and icanhascheezburger.com. No, it's not sophisticated humor.
I've been taking the last two weeks off. Finals are over and my teaching assistantship has ended for the summer, but I have not started work yet. It's nice to decompress a bit from the hectic year: I'm reading for pleasure, snapping some photos, and waking up late. Alas, it shall soon end.
I first wolfed down Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, after having heard of the book in the always-classy Outside. The great thing I learned is that insiders omit the definite article before Grand Canyon. It sounds irritatingly English but I guess we'll all just have to get used to it. ("Oi, oyve fallen in Grand Canyon and bashed me Uncle Ned! Tayk me to hospital!") Apparently the snakes, scorpions, spiders, and centipedes never really kill anyone there. The major killers are airplanes and the Colorado river. This book was interesting but I can tell that the young manuscript lacked the guiding hand of a loving-yet-firm editor.
Now I've just begun Alan Turing: The Enigma, and I'm struck by author Andrew Hodges's skill at writing economical prose that tells the story, both facts and mood, of the young Alan Mathison's early years. The mood is depressing: at turns lingeringly genteel, threadbare, choking, lonely, and doomed.
It was at Chatrapur, in the autumn of 1911, that their second son, the future Alan Turing, was conceived. At this obscure imperial station, a port on the eastern coast, the first cells divided, broke their symmetry, and separated head from heart. But he was not to be born in British India. His father arranged his second period of leave in 1912, and the Turings sailed en famille for England.
This passage from India was a journey into a world of crisis. Strikes, suffragettes, and near civil war in Ireland had changed political Britain. * * *
But this conception of the modern world was not shared by the Turings, who were no dreamers of the World-City. Well insulated from the twentieth century, and unfamiliar even with modern Britain, they were content to make the best of what the nineteenth had offered them. Their second son, launched into an age of conflicts with which he could become helplessly entangled, was likewise to be sheltered for twenty years from the consequences of the world crisis.
What do you make of the use of both conceived and conception above?
In April I went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to race in the Collegiate National Championships for triathlon. You can read more about it here.
You know you like them. It's like a solitaire version of Scrabble, except it's fun. Hmm. Ok, maybe they are kind of lame, but I know I like them.
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
-- Mkgnao!
-- O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writing-table. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
