Cycling across London this afternoon with 20-plus kilos of leaflets in panniers and backpack, and nasty headwinds, I was reminded of how often physics just isn’t on your side. Found myself plotting a route not just to avoid hills but slight inclines… was reminded of those warning messages on drug packs “may impair performance”.
An amazing blog reporting from the frontline of trying to save mountain gorillas in the Congo.
There are thought to be only about 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, about half of them in Congo, where they are obviously under severe threat, and the rest in Rwanda, where, for the moment at least, they seem to be doing okay, protected by the tourism they attract.
In a magazine essay on “Woman”:
“It’s very unnatural to love those who are neither of a tender or delicate disposition; but n the contrary are of a bold, impudent deportment. What a grovelling soul must he have who can mix his passions with any thing so odious! … Courage in that sex is to me as disgustful as effeminacy in men.”
Now there’s a man with psychological problems…
Quoted in The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which well deserves its good reviews, even though irritatingly this quote is not footnoted… but we are presumably talking latish 18th century.
Just been pointed to a potentially brilliantly useful source of picture, sound and other files – Wikipedia Commons, which is in their own words: “a database of 1,685,294 freely reusable media files to which anyone can contribute”.
Parents have always played with their children, it’s “natural”, “essential”, normal… well no:
The goal of the Yucatec Maya is to keep babies in a “kind of benign coma,” through bathing and swaddling, so that parents can leave them and get work done. As recently as 1914, the US Department of Labor’s Child Bureau advised parents not to play with babies, for fear of overstimulating their little nervous systems….
To be sure, there are exceptions. Some African foraging tribes display striking examples of parental playfulness. And the Inuit make toys for their toddlers and get goofy — but they’re cooped up for months at a time in igloos, bored witless. Lancy suggests that the American milieu — caregivers stuck, without a community, in oversized homes — is not entirely dissimilar.
Well worth reading the whole thing…
A particularly fine collection it seems to me this week – don’t miss Rachel from North London’s piece, powerful stuff.
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