proper manky | Page 3

Corazón y Hueso

Not done listening. Too good.

Daniel Melingo is like listening to Tom Waits, Paolo Conte or Nick Cave singing tango. Like a modern Roberto Goyeneche.

On Corazón y Hueso he runs the gamut from a surreal song about an orchestra of animals in which he is joined by a children’s choir, to a sarcastic waltz (La novia), to a milonga triste (Ritos en la sombra), to a gorgeous rendition of Federico García Lorca’s poem (El paso de la siguiriya), to borderline free jazz arrangements (Ritos en la sombra, Lucio el anarquista).

With his gruff voice, Melingo doesn’t offer a sanitized version of tango, but gives it raw and earthy, straight from the streets and full of blues (i.e. canyengue), and mixes tango with other styles and instruments like the clarinet, bass, harmonica, bagpipes, guitarras sucias etc. The CD contains all the lyrics in Spanish and brief summaries, but not the entire songs, in French and English. Melingo’s lunfardo dialect is strong and occasionally hard for me to understand and there’s enough slang in the lyrics to throw me off here and there but, thanks to the included extensive glosario lunfardo, the gist is pretty clear.

The themes on this album include a(n):

lament to a woman who left
prisoner suffering homosexual abuse
tattoo that serves as a reminder of a prison term
sad ending on the lawless streets of Buenos Aires
poet tormented by a song named Negrito
ode to Buenos Aires slang
poet turning his own verses into people and talking to them
clean, hard-working anarchist

Source: Federico Garcia Lorca, Poem of the Deep Song (Spanish Edition)

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Voodoo Mystery

Here’s a news story about a mystery story that became mystery and then turned into a messy story.

Apparently, the German publishing house S. Fischer will shortly release a book called “Der Sturm” (The Storm) by Per Johansson written in the style of popular Scandinavian crime fiction. The book revolves around the particularly bestial murder of a German journalist and editor in chief of a major newspaper.

What makes this particular publication so intriguing is that a German daily, Die Welt, did some in-depth sleuthing and found that the apparent author Per Johansson does not really exist. This despite the fact that the book’s cover features a photo of the ‘author’ and describes him as living in Berlin and working as a web designer. It also lists the name of a woman who ostensibly translated the book from Swedish to German. Until recently, the S. Fisher publishing house even carried a fictitious bio for Per Johansson on its web site. That bio has since been replaced but is still preserved in the publisher’s 2012 Autumn “Rights Guide” along with blurbs from Håkan Nesser and Orhan Pamuk of all people. (see screenshot below). The publisher of the book has since conceded that the author is indeed a pseudonym for an “author duo.”

Even stranger still, Die Welt found a number of similarities between the murder victim in the book and Frank Schirrmacher, an influential author, literary critic and co-publisher of one of the most widely read German newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), where he is responsible for the culture, science and other sections.

Die Welt also suspected that the author of the book is in fact Thomas Steinfeld, the culture editor of the FAZ’s rival Süddeutsche Zeitung, who also happens to be a former employee of Schirrmacher.

Steinfeld, in the meantime, has released a statement in which he outs himself as one the book’s co-authors yet insists that the book is not a roman à clef and that any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental in this fictional account. Schirrmacher himself would only say that he “does not read Swedish mystery novels.”

However, there are a number of media reports outlining the various similarities that seem anything but coincidental. These include that the victim wears an almost homonymous brand of shoes, has blond, curly hair, is about 50 years old, and has published articles on networks, robots and gene technology as well as book about the future and capitalism. All this, evidently matches characteristics of Frank Schirrmacher.

There are many layers of intrigue in all this about the German cultural scene, where Schirrmacher is a controversial and occasionally divisive figure. It’s not clear if this strange case of voodoo literature is a case of envy and revenge or a sophisticated marketing ploy or a bit of both. Needless to say, the German media is currently having a field day with this juicy story.

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The Last Detective

Done reading.

By Peter Lovesey. Published 20 years ago. Start of the Peter Diamond series (not the economist). Some good literary elements, varying points of view, well-written dialogue, interesting characters (including the singularly murderable victim), and nice sense of place in rooting the story in Bath. A few interesting allusions to Jane Austin, a one-time resident of the city. There’s a recurring luddite theme eschewing new forensic technologies in favor of old-fashioned gum shoe work – hence the title – which feels a bit out-dated by now.

The narrative structure and plot development befitting a first-time author was a bit surprising given that Lovesey had been an already experienced mystery writer by the time of writing this book. There’s a strange break in the narrative flow about two thirds through when the plot speeds up significantly after a major dispute. While there was some tension brewing prior to that, the event still struck me as somewhat artificial and provided unnecessary ‘botheration’ (a word used in the book). The resolution of the case also stretched plausibility.

All in all, a quite reasonable procedural, never really dull, but also not exactly rousing. In sections, it was a bit long-winded and I found myself a few times, to use an expression from the book, “stuck there like a lupin waiting for a bee.”

I did like some of the Britishcisms that provided intermittent entertainment.

Weir in the River Avon near Bath’s picturesque Pulteney Bridge.
Its perilous current plays a role in the book.

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And Everything Is Going Fine

I finally saw the Spaulding Gray documentary I had mentioned before. Soderbergh does a great job in slicing and dicing archival footage of Gray’s performances for what essentially amounts to a “new” monologue about his life as a whole. The documentary stays pure Gray, no other new footage (e.g. interviews) is used.

But what tangled mess Gray’s psyche was! I saw movies of a few of his monologues years ago and, yes, they were twisted and autobiographical and wildly imaginative, but I had no idea just how autobiographical they actually were. Gray’s childhood may almost rival Augusten Burroughs’.

As he says in the documentary, his basic approach to the monologues was “poetic journalism,” i.e. reality filtered through his imagination. His public solo performances turned into swinging and flying psychopathological trapeze acts without safety nets. They were cathartic events in which he tried to come to grips with the psychological issues that plagued him.

Three things really stayed with me from the documentary: one, the incredible craftsmanship that went into the monologue performances. What comes across as him just showing up on stage and telling stories off-the-cuff, were instead very carefully developed and structured stories. Two, the frail looking images of Gray at the end of his life after having suffered severe hip and brain injuries from a car accident in Ireland. He never was the same again. In one shot he calls himself, when he was at his most helpless and needed constant care, a “half-dead spectator.” The third thing is just such a sad leitmotif in his life. The relationship, or lack thereof, he had with his mostly uncaring and unbalanced, if not psychotic, mother who also committed suicide clearly traumatized him. The documentary shows that he longed for some form of “mothering” for the rest of his life. At some point, he mentions that wherever he is, he always tries to ground himself by his physical location to the sea. “The sea,” he says, “is the mother.” Of course, given his apparent suicide by ‘sliding’ into the East River, this turned out be oddly ironic and prophetic. However, in the movie there is no reference of the suicide. Instead it ends with a series of photos of Gray as a young boy – the final photo is of him in the arms of his mother.

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Going Places

Dahon in tow …

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Female Curiosity

As previously mentioned here, I had been looking forward to the Mars landing of the Curiosity rover and managed to watch it live on CNN.com last night.

Once the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) entered the Martian atmosphere it was exciting to monitor the seven-minute plunge to the surface of the planet along with scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I knew the rover had its own twitter account, but I didn’t know that Curiosity is female. The NASA officials kept referring to the rover with the 3rd person singular female pronoun; e.g. “She had a perfect landing.” Maybe that’s because of the teenage girl who won the naming contest for the rover or the three women who communicate on behalf of the rover via @MarsCuriosity? Regardless, a nice touch and a small nod to improving stereotypes, biases and other cultural beliefs about women in science and technology.

The slideshow contains some screenshots I took that show:

NASA scientists monitoring the MSL’s landing
MSL entering the Martian atmosphere protected by a heat shield; its progress is shown by the white trail above the horizon line
supersonic parachute deploying to slow down the spacecraft
MSL rapidly losing speed
Rocket-powered sky-crane emerging
Sky Crane lowering rover to ground via steel cables
Images transmitted by rover shortly after landing

Slideshow:

Fullscreen:

As a side note, Intel’s wholly-owned Wind River subsidiary wrote the software that guided the U.S. space agency’s Mars Science Laboratory to its bulls-eye landing on Mars. Wind River’s VxWorks provides the core operating system of the spacecraft’s control system.

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Unclubbable

Quotes from a writer remembering Gore Vidal in the WaPo:

Consider his lacerating self-assessment: “I’m exactly as I appear,” he once said. “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

At restaurants, Vidal always picked up the bill, explaining that this was to remind him that he wasn’t wealthy: “Rich people never pay,” he said.

Having fallen out of favor with the Kennedys, having figured on Nixon’s enemies list and now having been declared persona non grata by the Reagans, Vidal said he had scored a hat trick. But clearly he was annoyed that he was always, as the British say, “unclubbable.”

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Octopus

Done reading. (But really shouldn’t have!)

Matt Taibbi recently recommended this book written by Guy Lawson, a fellow Rolling Stone contributor.

Octopus is an incredible dark comedy with one of the craziest true-life ironic twists you can possibly imagine.

That sounded intriguing enough. Taibbi likes the way Lawson describes the deeply corrupt netherworld of endless, relentless insider trading. This environment apparently warped the mind of the hedge fund manager and Ponzi schemer whose downfall the book covers – to the point where he could be “perhaps the biggest dupe in the history of con artistry.”

Kirkus called the book:

An eye-opening window onto Wall Street’s destructive culture of unchecked hubris and a harrowing thrill ride into the unraveling mind of a desperate operator.

Ok. Well, it turns out, all of the above is pretty accurate. The book is indeed a portrait of a “society populated with the peculiar mix of the devious, the dangerous, and the deluded.” The stories of soul-sucking deceit in this book do make Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, by comparison, seem pretty understated and outright believable.

Octopus is about Sam Israel, a member of a wealthy Louisiana family, who bilked sophisticated investors out of a reported $450-million. Israel’s con game went on for years but he eventually grew increasingly desperate to recoup years of losses and by 2005 his jig was up. How the bullshitter was bullshitted is a long and unfortunately tedious story.

Lawson turns Israel into such easy prey that it’s hard to fathom anyone ever took this nut job seriously. The author goes to great pains to explain how a con man like Israel could be beaten at his own game and even laboriously outlines the whole choreography of the con: telling the tale, putting the mark on the send, taking off the touch, the blow-off, putting in the fix. Yet, the cons and conspiracy theories Israel fell for are too transparently idiotic and have such crazy-ass byzantine complexity (at least as told in this book) to take much of the book’s cautionary tale about Wall Street as a gigantic criminal operation seriously. In that sense, the book sadly undermines its own cause.

However, with scenes like the one in the bizarre mansion Israel rented from Donald Trump, or in the hedge fund’s HQ in a Connecticut boathouse, or on the bridge from which Israel attempted a fake suicide, Taibbi will probably be proven right: someone soon is going to make Octopus into a movie. My money is on Paul Giamatti as Sam Israel.

As a book, though, this is not much more than an inflated, medicore magazine article.

Quotes:

“He mastered the most American of all performing arts: self-invention.”
“You’re not going to learn how to shave by practicing on my beard.”
“Lying naked in his bed in the Trump house watching SpongeBob SquarePants, Sam Israel confided to one of Bayou’s employees that he was going through a liquidity crisis” (#understatementofthedecade)

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West Coast Blues

Done reading.

The French cartoonist Jacques Tardi’s excellent graphic novel adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s crime thriller beautifully captures the noir aesthetic of the book. Given the title, it also comes with several excellent cool jazz references: Bob Brookmeyer (Truckin’!), Tal Farlow, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, Shelly Manne etc. Even though west coast jazz is often associated with sun and surf, the relaxed tempos and lighter tone of some of the blues referenced here fits the mood of noir fiction perfectly. Sort of like Miles Davis’ soundtrack for Elevator to the Gallows.

Below is the opening page which poignantly illustrates some of the similarities between comics and film. The sequence of frames on this page is straight out of film school: long shot to establish the scene, medium shot, close-up – and voilà, we’re drawn into the story.

The second page continues to illustrate the cinematographic quality and cool, noir mood. Plus some fine pince sans rire humor.

Below is a frame from a sequence where the main character is assaulted by two thugs while swimming in the ocean. This is how he ends up defending himself. The whole sequence is brilliantly drawn. I couldn’t describe it much better than was done here.

A graphic brain splattering scene:

There’s some quirky, almost existentialist humor in the book. Here’s my favorite panel, almost an example of flash fiction:

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Is Life Worth Living?

Well, it depends on the liver …

I was reminded of this old homonymic quip while reading the smart opening paragraph in a book review for Artur Domosławksi’s “Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life:”

Journalists are the livers of society, organs that break down the myriad poisons of war, revolution, and labyrinthine legal complexity for a body politic. They are also the livers in another sense—their professional function is to go out and live, to experience, explain, bear witness, and provide insight.

I’ve long been a fan of Kapuściński, warts and all. And apparently Domosławski corroborates what many reviewers and critics have noted since his death—that his books are riddled with historical mistakes, distortions, exaggerations, lies, and secondhand stories presented as facts.

But as I wrote before, I still tend to think of RK as a brilliant, flawed and slightly nutty, if not tragic, character, who did his thing in however odd ways, compromised himself where he thought he needed in order to maximize his opportunities for pretty wild adventures (e.g. be permitted to travel). Reading about those adventures, however fictitious, has always given me a special thrill.

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No One Sends Mail to the Mailman

I quite liked the Mexican movie Cartas a Elena.

It’s a melodramatic picture with gentle and moving parts. Story about a mailman in Chihuahua. Or, perhaps more generally, about the act of deliverance. With a dose of magical realism. The old people in the sierra tarahumara, to whom the mailman delivers the mail on foot, are mostly illiterate so they need their mail read to them and require help getting their own letters written down. Unfortunately, they keep getting nothing but bad and painful news from loved ones living in the US.

The mailman has a long-lost son who never writes until finally one day he seemingly receives a letter from his son, believes he has been forgiven, and dies suddenly but happily. As it turns out, the letter has been written by a young boy, who the mailman had adopted earlier. The boy is so saddened by the bad (or lack of) news for those around him, that he decides to use his imagination and make the letters appear more positive and optimistic. The old people end up being much happier and begin to prefer being fooled by the boy rather than having to cope with the steady stream of hardship in the actual letters.

There’s much more to it, in a fairy tale kind of way. There’s some lovely storytelling in this movie – and beautiful scenery. Some of the acting is a bit over the top and appeals perhaps more to soap operatic sensibilities but generally works very well here. A few scenes are over the top of that top and require moments of severe patience but they are fairly limited.

There are some beautiful panoramic shots in the movie of the barranca del cobre (Copper Canyon), a canyon system in the Sierra Madre larger and deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Many years ago I had a good friend CG, the badass drummer for the Sun City Girls, who sadly passed away 5 years ago. He was the one who first told me stories about the canyon and the Tarahumara runners. He had read “The Peyote Dance“by Antonin Artaud, one of the most amazing pieces of drug literature ever written. CG would retell all those stories to me in excited monologues that would also include mysterious facts about Haitian voodoo drumming. At some point, I found a book by the anthropologist John Kennedy on the “Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre” full of fascinating accounts of beer brewing, running matches, and dealings with Catholic missionaries. I knew I would have to visit one day.

A few years later, my friend JCK and I finally travelled via the Chihuahua al Pacifico train from Los Mochis in Sinaloa to Creel in Chihuahua at the top of the barranca del cobre. From there we (hitch)hiked down to the old, dusty mining town of Batopilas at the bottom of one of the canyons. We saw a decomposing body in the ruins of the old Jesuit mission in Satevo (a stop on the Camino Real), saw airstrips for opium poppy transhipments, endured bloody cockfights, and played pool games with pistola toting cartelitos in a local dive.

The landscape in the movie was instantly familiar to me. The scene below, I believe, was taken near the popular lookout in Divisadero. Good movie, nice memories.

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Systems Engineering

Systems engineering focuses on the many interdependencies of various elements in complex systems. Below is an interesting illustration. Lean practitioners will recognize the importance of “hidden processes.”

On an old episode of “This American Life,” a program produced by Chicago Public Radio and hosted by Ira Glass, Jim Bodman, chairman and CEO of Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Company in Chicago, related this story about the company’s move to a new production facility.

“In 1970 the company built a state-of-the- art plant on Chicago’s north side. This plant replaced the old site on the south side of the city. The old site was a maze of buildings on one block, acquired over seventy years as the company grew.

As Bodman tells the story the new production site was state-of-the-art, stainless steel, with perfect refrigeration capability and a shiny clean building where the company produced their popular natural, old-world hickory-smoked sausage. But something unexpected happened when the company started producing their sausages in the new facility. They simply weren’t as good. They tasted okay, but they didn’t have the same snap when you bit into them and the color was wrong: slightly pink instead of the trademark bright red.

What was wrong? The employees and managers worked to find the flaw. The ingredients were the same—the same spices, same production process. They thought maybe the temperature in the smokehouse was wrong. Maybe the water on the north side of Chicago was different than the water on the south side. For a year and a half they wracked their brains, but nothing checked out as the culprit.

One night, in a local bar, a bunch of the production guys were talking about an employee who had been with the company for years: Irving. Irving was the kind of guy who knew everyone in the facility and even had nicknames for everybody. Irving’s job was to deliver the sausages on racks from a cold storage room to the smokehouse. In the old facility Irving would weave his way through a maze of hanging bins, past the boiler room, past the tanks where they cooked the corned beef, finally up an elevator to the smokehouse where the sausages were cooked.

Suddenly a light bulb went off. There was no Irving. Irving hadn’t made the trip to the new facility—he didn’t want to commute across town. As a result, the sausages didn’t make the half-hour trip through the network of hallways where (as it turned out) they would get slightly warm before they were cooked. In the new facility the sausages were kept in a cold room until they were cooked in the smokehouse right next door. Irving’s trip was the “secret ingredient” that made the sausages red and snappy.
The company’s final solution was to build a new room next to the smokehouse where they could emulate the old conditions—graduallywarming the sausages before they were smoked. They had to create a physical space that simulated Irving.

Here was an example of a sometimes “hidden” process in action. The company had done everything right, built their dream factory where they thought everything was perfect. But something totally unanticipated, unplanned for—and unexamined—had conspired to change the product. Sometimes, even when you’re successful, you don’t know why.

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The Customer Is a Clueless King

In an article in the NYT covering the first day of the Apple-Samsung court case over smartphone patents, I came across these two paragraphs:

One other witness from Apple, Philip Schiller, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, briefly took the stand before the court adjourned for the day. He was asked about influences on the company’s products.

“We don’t use any customer input in the new product process,” Mr. Schiller said. “We never go and ask the customer, ‘What feature do you want in the next product?’ It’s not the customer’s job to know. We accumulate that information ourselves.”

That last quote is something software developers, designers, and anyone else tasked with gathering customer requirements should really take to heart. Yes, the customer is always king, but that doesn’t mean that the king can coherently articulate what he wants. To please the king, sometimes it takes a bit of ‘benevolent tyranny.’

This reminded me of a well-known TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell on “Choice, happiness, and spaghetti sauce” in which he essentially makes the point that people don’t really know what they want when the thing they want doesn’t yet exist.

In that talk, Gladwell also mentions this lovely, apparently Yiddish, saying: “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” I assume this does not mean the sauce, but the plant in the soil. Regardless, horseradish is, especially to a worm, an irritant and so this is to say the worm can’t dream of a life free of the pain it has always known.

Which I guess is the same point as above.

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July 2012 Oddments

Sundry items of interest dredged up from the profundity of the interwebs during the month of July:

Economics

Mexico is the world’s largest per capita consumer (127 gallons per year) of bottled water. [link]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that “employment services,” which includes temporary labor, will remain among the fastest growing sectors through 2020. In 1989 only 1 in 43 manufacturing jobs were temporary. By 2006, 1 in 11 were. [link]
College-educated Americans are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women are growing less likely to marry at all. Unmarried mothers are now the majority of new moms under 30 and they don’t vote much. [link]
Families paid for college on average $20,902 in 2011-2012, which is down from $24,097 in 2009-2010. Parents are paying less and grants and scholarships are covering less, but student loans and work are on the rise. The most common cost-saving measures include living at home or adding a roommate, reducing spending by parents and students, students working more hours and families shifting from four-year public schools to less expensive two-year public schools. [link]
A Stanford computer scientist has predicted that within 50 years there will be only 10 universities remaining in the world. That’s probably exaggerated, but clearly the pressure is on. [link]
In the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion. [link]
Contrary to its grimy image, Detroit is playing host to a renaissance in urban agriculture with more than 1500 farms within the city limits ranging from vacant lots to a seven-acre spread on the West Side planted by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. [link]
The history of economics can be viewed rather like the regular sequence in the Peanuts cartoon strip, whereby Lucy snatches the football away every time that Charlie Brown tries to kick it. Just when economists have reached a consensus, events in the real world proved them wrong. [link]

Society

It says something about America today that emergency personnel now pride themselves in coping with mass shootings. [link]
The Brady Campaign’s list of mass shootings in America since just 2005 is 62 pages long. A disclaimer states that the list “is not comprehensive.” [link]
In the US, not surprisingly, the South is more violent than the rest of the country, by some distance. All of the U.S. regions have higher average rates of death from assault than any of 24 OECD countries. The Northeast, the least violent region in the US, still comes relatively close to the upper end of the most violent countries in the OECD group. Depressingly, Blacks die from assault at more than three times the U.S. average, and between ten and twenty times OECD rates. [link]
For the first time, women from all 204 national Olympic committees will be competing in the Summer Olympics. Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Qatar had been the final holdouts. The 529-member American delegation featured more women, 268, than men, 261. Roughly 45 percent of the 10,500 athletes taking part in the London Games will be female. All 26 sports on the Olympic program will feature female competitors. Boxing will feature female competitors in three weight classes. [link]
According to United Nations projections, the world’s population — now 7 billion — will rise to 9.3 billion by 2050 — the equivalent of adding another India and China to the world. This an optimistic scenario assumes the worldwide average birthrate, now 2.5 children per woman, will decline to 2.1. About 80% of the world’s civil conflicts since the 1970s have occurred in countries with young, fast-growing populations, known as youth bulges. Of the 2 billion or more people who will be added to the planet by 2050, 97% are expected to be born in Africa, Asia and Latin America, led by the poorest, most volatile countries. [link]
Finnish facts: Finland is now the last eurozone country to hold a triple-A credit rating. Finns drink nearly 12kg of roasted coffee ground per person per year. Finland actually has 187,888 lakes, that’s roughly one lake for every 26 people. [link]

Health

A report in the journal of the German Medical Association suggests that the side effects of some drugs, and the discomfort of certain medical procedures, may be inadvertently intensified by doctors and nurses trying to keep patients fully informed about the possible complications of a proposed treatment. The culprit behind this phenomenon is the so-called nocebo effect, a patient’s pessimistic belief and expectation that a drug will produce negative consequences. [link]
A small group of patients with HIV in France have been able to stop taking Aids drugs without any resurgence of the virus in their bodies. They were all given antiretroviral drugs to control the virus soon after becoming infected with HIV, but then stopped after about three years. The existence of people who do not become ill even though they are infected with HIV – the so-called “HIV controllers” – is already known. However, what is encouraging with the French group is that medical intervention seems to have brought about similar results. [link]
A review of studies covering over two million people found that, compared to regular daytime workers, shift workers had a 24% higher risk for coronary events, a 23% higher risk for heart attack, and a 5% higher risk for stroke. Night shift workers had the highest risk for coronary events (41%). [link]
Worldwide, there are about 6,000 mammal species, each with its own unique milk, but Americans get at least 97 percent of all their dairy products from cows (the rest is mostly from goats and sheep). Abroad, various foreigners drink the milk of the camel, the yak, the water buffalo, the reindeer, the elk, and a few other animals. Camel’s milk contains insulin and can improve quality of life for diabetics. [link]

Nature & Environment

The guillemot, a black and white bird of the northern seas, is apparently monogamous but regularly unfaithful. [link]
The extinction rate of species today is alarmingly high with some 30 % of amphibians, 21 % of birds and 25 % of mammal species at risk. The fight against desertification is also being lost, with the percentage of degraded land area rising from 15 % in 1991 to 24 % in 2008. [link]
Scientists have bioengineered the world’s first artificial jellyfish made from heart cells of rats and silicone, with the heart cells giving it pumping action and the silicone an elastic structure that enabled motion. Scientists then covered the membrane with a protein arranged in the same pattern as a jellyfish’s muscle assembly. An electric zap brought the jellyfish alive. By better understanding muscular pumps, scientists hope that this “silicone cyborg” may one day lead to new therapeutic devices, such as pacemakers, made from organic substances. [link] [video]
To many people “vanilla” is synonymous with “plain” or “boring”, but real vanilla, which comes from orchids of the genus Vanilla that are native to Southeast Mexico and Guatemala, is the second most expensive spice after saffron. Not surprisingly, by one estimate, 97% of the vanilla used today is artificial, usually derived from wood fibers. With the discovery of hand pollination, vanilla cultivation spread beyond its native soils, with Indonesia and Madagascar now accounting for over 50% of global production. [link]
The surface of Greenland’s massive ice sheet has seen unprecedented melting this month that took place over a larger area than has been detected in three decades of satellite observation. Melting even occurred at Greenland’s coldest and highest place, Summit station. The thawed ice area jumped from 40% of the ice sheet to 97% in just four days from 8 July. [link]
An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan recently broke away from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland. It’s not clear that this “calving event” is a consequence of the increased atmospheric warming that’s been taking place over Greenland in recent decades, but it’s certainly more likely to take place as a consequence of that warming. The Petermann glacier’s margins have now retreated to a point not seen in the last 150 years. [link]
The arctic wilderness is facing pollution threats as oil and gas companies are moving in while the ice is melting far faster than predicted. Global temperatures have risen 0.7C since 1951. In Greenland, the average temperature has gone up by 1.5C. Its ice cap is losing an estimated 200bn tonnes a year as a result and global powers are beginning to look to the region also for minerals, fish, sea routes and tourist potential. The consequences for the planet will be grim. Without the white brilliance of the ice to reflect sunlight back into space, it will warm even more. [link]
Shark mating behavior is so violent that it often leaves a female with her skin raw or bleeding. Female nurse sharks will stay in shallow water with their reproductive openings pressed firmly to the sea floor. Otherwise they risk falling prey to roaming bands of males who will take turns inserting their claspers into her. A litter of fifty pups will have anything from two to seven fathers. A number of shark species even practice oophagy, or uterine cannibalism. Sand tiger fetuses eat each other in uteri. A female sand tiger gives birth to a baby that’s already a meter long and an experienced killer. Speaking of killing, there were 75 verified shark attacks (or encounters, as marine biologists prefer) world-wide last year, and 12 fatalities. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. [link]
As I already suspected, careless laziness is a way to help a family prosper. [link]

Language

Language extinction is happening faster than species extinction (1 per 14 days). Over half of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken on the planet may disappear by the end of the century. Eighty percent of the endangered languages are African. Eighty percent of the world’s population now speak just 1.1% of its languages. [link]
German word of the month: Vermorgung. Lit. ‘morningization’, aka procrastination. [link]

Odds and Ends

Ernest Hemingway’s first cat, Snowball, was given to him by a ship’s captain and was six-toed. His former home in Key West, Florida, currently houses nearly a hundred descendants of Snowball, about half of whom are polydactyl — an inadvertent lab for inbred genetic mutation. [link] Also: [link]
Tango originated in the working class districts of Buenos Aires in the late 19th Century, but it has also conquered Finland. A five-day festival has been going for nearly 30 years and attracts over 100,000 tango-mad Finns. The Finnish version is slower and simpler – melodies taken from old Finnish and Russian waltzes are weaved throughout. The accordion replaces the Argentine bandoneon. The dance is also different. No fancy flicks of the legs from the women but the Finns dance closer, bodies pressed firmly together. [link]
Parsley loves garlic, and their marriage rarely fails to be a happy one. Very finely chopped parsley combined with very finely chopped raw garlic is known in French cuisine as persillade. Add some finely grated lemon zest to the basic persillade mix and you get the Italian gremolata. [link]

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Dos Fonsecas

Enjoyed a Fonseca Cubano Limitado Robusto today. Supposed to have a very ‘Cuban-like’ character. Made from a blend of Nicaraguan and Dominican Cuban seed longfiller tobaccos in a dark Honduran Cuban seed wrapper.

Burned very even and had good, spicy flavor. I didn’t pick up the subtleties of leather, chocolate, coffee, or whatever someone more refined might detect but the taste was pretty round and balanced. The 5×52 size is nice, perfect for a one-hour break. I will say it was a bit strong for me, at least compared to the ones I’ve been smoking lately. But it did grow on me in the last third.

Free association: as I kept looking at the wrapper, I was reminded of one of my favorite books, Bufo and Spallanzani by Rubem Fonseca. A romping mystery with some bizarre twists and turns, talk of toxic toads, quotes of Flaubert, and a stunning ending.

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