history

Funny: If ancient Rome had the Internet…

Last week I finally read The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, by Mark Kurlansky. My dad gave it to me while we were in Vegas last month but I didn’t get to seriously dig into it because I’ve been a bit swamped at work lately. Kurlansky is a wonderful writer and this is the third of his books that I’ve read. The Big Oyster is every bit as fascinating as Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and Salt: A World History. Most of my friends roll their eyes at me when I tell them this, but it’s true. Since I’m from Rhode Island, I have always sort of thought of oysters as second-class bivalves, bastard, grotesque step-brothers of my beloved littleneck clams. Now I have a new respect for them and even slurped a raw one tonight — we had dinner at The Palm with my girlfriend’s parents.

[click to continue...]

Wow. I (finally) just finished reading Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Crazy stuff. I liked it. It’s a smidge on the textbook-side, but he’s an entertaining enough writer — and the topic is so incredible — that you don’t ever get bored during its 380-ish pages. The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was pretty much the first “world-wide” event. It was the first real “news item” that happened after the advent of global communications (the telegraph).

Winchester examines the legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island Krakatoa, which was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogotá and Washington, D.C. went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island’s destruction were heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all — in view of today’s new political climate — the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims, one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.

This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to get you completely engrossed in plate tectonics, genome theories, and the Brownian motion of subatomic particles. I’m not a very good test subject, actually, because I tend to find these types of things amazing and fun even when presented in incredibly bland tomes on them, but I have to tell you that even if you aren’t even barely interested in glaciers or the lipids that comprise your cell walls, this book will enthrall you.

I also just recently finished “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. This book, too, was just so damn fun to read. A bit morbid, to be sure, but Roach approaches everything with a bent towards comedy and I enjoyed it.

And lastly I should mention that my girlfriend and I managed to catch March of the Penguins on Friday night. If it doesn’t win an Academy Award — or two or three or four — I will be astonished.

On Jonathan Edwards’ Resolutions and Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanacks

[click to continue...]

I’ve seen this linked in several places recently, but it’s such a great story I wanted to link it here too.

The villa probably belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar and one of the rulers of the Roman republic. In AD79, a century after his death, it was buried under 30 metres of volcanic debris by the same Vesuvius eruption that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum.
In 1738, it was rediscovered and the excavators removed statues and objets d’art. In the process, they threw away many lumps of what they took to be coal or charcoal. It was not until 1752 when they discovered the villa’s library - neatly lined with 1800 rolls of papyrus - that they realised the discarded material had been books.
It remains the only intact library to have survived from the ancient world …

I finished reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel this afternoon. It is a wonderful book.
[click to continue...]

<random notes>
My blog’s first birthday was this month, but I’ve been maintaining web sites continuously since early in 1993. One of my original sites was simply a collection of Hemingway essays that I posted on line in lieu of writing a term paper. At one point I managed to publish almost every writing assignment I had ever had. I was also the original webmaster for Florida Crew, the University of Florida’s rowing team. Sometime at the very end of 1999 I found a blog - I can’t even remember which one now (maybe Zannah’s?) - and got the itch to start one myself. The entire Hemingway collection has been unavailable for almost six months now, but this weekend I found a few free minutes and re-posted as much of it as possible.
</random notes>

You’re right, Bryan, that is only SIX. The Seventh Wonder of the World, and the only one still remaining, is the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Jason sends word that the Taj Mahal is not, in fact, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Wonders are: the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. I sit corrected.