December 2018 Over the past few months I've been doing a lot of reading in one of my favorite areas: paleontology. No, I'm not dying to get geared up for a field assignment, I let other people walk the talk -- e.g. Richard Fortey pelted by chill downpours in Scotland as he examines Precambrian schists. I feel enormously grateful that their discomfort yields interesting copy I can read sprawled on the bed in my jammies. [...]
November 2018 Mary Berry is without doubt an English National Treasure. She's been on the scene for donkey's years, she's written more than 75 cookbooks and now she's the doyenne of UK cookery shows. "Mary Berry's Everyday," "Mary Berry's Absolute Favorites," "Mary Berry's Country House Secrets," "Mary Berry's Foolproof Cooking," "Classic Mary Berry" ... Goodness sake, a girl can hardly keep up with her. Her role as judge on "The Great British Bakeoff" rocketed her [...]
November 2018 I've pilfered the title of a work of medieval mysticism for this post because it captures exactly what I want to talk about: what we don't know and how much of our native state is formed by that absence of knowing, of understanding, of certainty. Curiously enough, awareness of that state requires mental excavation because we overlay it with the certainties we use to make ourselves competent creatures in our daily lives. It would [...]
November 2018 My introduction to the writing of Sacheverell Sitwell came through one of his least typical works, to wit: Southern Baroque Art: Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain in the 17th & 18th Centuries. It's an astonishing production for a young man under the age of 25, written between 1921 and 1922 and published in 1924. Happily a Kindle version is available so I snapped it up and worked my way through it in [...]
November 2018 My first visit to Hofuf came early in my sojourn in Saudi Arabia. I got commandeered to assist with a group tour to the city a few months after my arrival in Dhahran in 2010. The trip itself is hardly worth relating, but it gave me an introduction to the Al Hasa region and to Hofuf, its main city. I recognized even at that early stage of experience in the country that [...]
November 2018 Chiang Mai has so many temples the mind fairly boggles at their number and the frequency with which one encounters them while going about town. This plethora is especially true of the Old City, where everybody ends up going but mostly backpackers and old hippies are more likely to stay, it seems. I usually stay in the Huay Keaw/Nimmanheiman area, a modern area to the west of the Old City. There are [...]