The usual scheme at safari camps is, you go on game drives at sunup and sundown, when the animals are active. Last time in Kenya we got into a bit of a competition to see who could frame wildlife in a rising or setting sun. Click ’em to make them bigger.
Mike Pompeo is no longer Secretary of State. That’s enough for this week. That’s plenty.
Have a guess what large, cold, former-Communist Eurasian country this quote comes from:
“Different statements about someone being afraid of someone else are absolutely nonsense.”
Here is a link to a collection of color photos from (I believe) 1912, taken in the Republic of Georgia. It seems that a photographer named Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky “perfected a complex early method of color photography that required three separate images of each scene to be shot, with color filters placed over the lens. When the three black-and-white photos were sandwiched together and had red, green, and blue light shone through them, a color image could be projected.”
They’re from an article at the RFERL.org website. Here’s one of the photos:
See also a few more up-to-date photos in the Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, taken on my visit in 2006.
A chilly, gray, overcast Saturday in January in Georgia, USA. We never really descend into the depths of a prolonged, dark winter here in Georgia, and on the morning rounds with our dogs this morning I heard birdsong. It won’t be long here, say, six weeks, until the seasons begin to change.
I remember thinking last spring, as the virus began to close our worlds around us, that the rest of the natural world went on as ever, that the pandemic was a strictly human problem. May we all begin to rejoin the rest of the natural world now, a year on.
And speaking of human problems, while I have you: I’ve encountered some items over morning coffee I really must share. The first two things are about Trump Administration personnel:
Thing #1: Nobody will be more delighted to see Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go than … everybody in the rest of the world. A Google search took half a second to return five million confirmations:
Thing #2: The President’s little trick of using “Acting” cabinet heads to avoid confirmation by the Senate resulted in acting secretaries like Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller. Here, an excerpt from a press gaggle on 14 January. Ladies and gentlemen, the Trump Department of Defense at work:
Read the whole thing here.
And Thing number 2-1/2, not deserving of a full number of its own, sums up of the general gravitas and august nature of the outgoing regime. It’s a headline in this morning’s Washington Post:
Further to yesterday’s post, Good Morning Scotland, here’s more Scotland in snow, from Ailish Sinclair’s lovely blog.
Scotland woke to a lovely morning today, 14 January, 2021. Here, the Campsie Fells, central Scotland, photo by Melanie Scott via The Scotsman.
I’ve written three self-published books (this one and this one and this one), I’m proud of them and I’d love it if you bought them, and I wish all my fellow authors, self-published or published by diminishing-by-the-day publishing houses, all success. I support you.
A cooperative spirit, I think, may be how we get through this up-in-the-air transitional period in publishing. Alas, there is the question of authors whose egos run well out in front of them. There are two or three specifically that I can think of tonight, and why wouldn’t it be fun to go ahead and call them out?
In my yet-to-be-read stack sits The Economists’ Hour by Benyamin Appelbaum. I understand it to be a study by a journalist of the rise of market-favoring economists since the 1970s, their embrace by policy makers, and the resultant mayhem.
Fair enough. A topic that interests me enough to buy it, and we’ll see how it turns out as a read. What grates is a blurb on the back of the book jacket by Tyler Cowen, who is an economics professor at George Mason University, someone who has become well-known over the last decade through hard work, prolific online output and savvy use of new media.
George Mason University is a libertarian bastion and a Koch brothers-funded favorite, which is a required negative mention in all the lefty press. Nevertheless I applaud Mr. Cowen’s accomplishments, hard and sustained work on his online presence, and the interesting stuff he has turned up.
Just this one thing: There is an unfortunate contagion among people who have an established audience. They seem to want to make it all about them. This is not just a product of the internet.
Mr. Cowen in a moment. First the prime example of all-about-me-ism, the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, who wrote compelling books early in his career. Alas, for some time now our former hero has been all about himself.
Friedman has been prolific. His early work, in particular From Beirut to Jerusalem, before he went off on his world-is-flat neo-lib jag, compels admiration. He was there. Did that.
But it’s hard to read Friedman’s NYT review of Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir without cringing. The first seven paragraphs, before any consideration of the book, before anything else, are steadfastly Friedman about Friedman.
I’ve written about this kind of hubris before as regards another author I otherwise admire, Robert Kaplan, author of a 2005 book that was seminal for me, Balkan Ghosts, in an article I called Big, Important Writers Embarrassing Themselves).
Back to Tyler Cowen. He blurbed Appelbaum’s book this way:
“I very much enjoyed reading The Economist’s Hour, an entertaining and well-written look at how market-oriented ideas rose from the acedemy and transformed nations. I do not agree with each and every perspective but found this a valuable and highly recommendable book, which I devoured in a single sitting.”
Takeaway here: Cowen is such a polymath that he can digest a 332 page book in a single sitting. It’s not so much about the book. It’s about Cowen’s reading prowess.
I’ve been reading about the two year old Chinese-built Addis-Djibouti train line lately. It’s a train journey we’d hoped to make this past spring before the virus intervened, and I’m hopeful we can come back and fill in that trip later.
Although northern Ethiopia is going through a terrible period just now, it’s such a photogenic country, I really recommend it to anyone with a camera and a sense of adventure. Warm people, good food, exotic everywhere you look, what’s not to like?
Here’s Addis Ababa a few years ago. More Addis photos in the Ethiopia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
