Problem with fiction is how quick it goes.

Now onto the first of ten of these that my older sister gave me:



Kind of a 1912 mini-encyclopedia.

Right from the getgo one knows a set of mini-encyclopedia are going to be quality, when they begin with a series of black and white photographs of a few epic industrial items such as the electrical dynamos at Niagara Falls, and the Watts steam engine, and then roll directly into a bit of text like this:

The language alone is excellent.

Currently reading this, which I found in a lovely little used book store earlier:





Which is really a fantastic line.

The more i read of the minienyclopedia the more it makes me want a factory, or perhaps a hydroelectric dam.

The tone of this guy is perfect. Man's battle against nature and labor put so gloriously, as only a pre-WWI, pre-Great Depression era dood could manage with as straight a face and no industrial downside overtones.

I also love the sort of offhand oddly-kind-of-gloating bit about animals having inferior craft. Take that animals. We will always win, because we make machines! And our knitting looks nicer! It will ALWAYS look nicer! You know it to be true, silly baltimore oriole!

Orioles'll never win the World Series anyway.

Opposable thumbs, motherfuckers. Opposable thumbs.

And no one really talks like that anymore. It's quite unfortunate. No titanic man-vs.-nature battles. No sincere optimism about industrial mankind. The closest things we have are a few soulless plutocrats who'll say anything to justify the rapine and pillage of the Earth because there's a few bucks hidden in there somewhere, or religious weirdos who think an old man in the sky gave them dominion over the planet, which means it's totally cool if we trash the place- Jesus'll clean it up anyway; he's just some swarthy bearded guy; that's what we hired him for. Sooo not the same.




I just read a bit on General Grant where the phrases "incompetent, sulking lush" and "managed to get a colonelcy and a regiment of miscreants" came up. Now, this strikes me as monstrously unfair. Only because no one's given me a regiment of miscreants to command. Hmph.

One of the things i most like about History, is just how often throughout it, really interesting people who are otherwise dangerous to themselves and those around them, or to whom the granting is otherwise just clearly ill-advised for one reason or other, are given real power to wield.

These days it is just celebritydumbasses and rich fucks, business connections and lawyershit. I wonder who the last proper hooligan/oneofus was to get a proper shot at running shit?

Of course, it was probably someone actually ill-equipped and tragic like Mobutu or similar, i guess. Which is most likely why we can't have nice things, etc etc...

at "why we can't have nice things". Specifically because friends of mine use it in reference to their cats, but it's so very apropos to many other things.

Certainly here in The States we'd have to go back a ways. The closest most recent I can think of would be LBJ- a no-account scumbag from West Bumfuck, Texass who managed to become President of the United States for the better part of a decade. (The self-made men (Clinton, Obama) who've held the office since being establishment lawyer types) And who has a very ugly blemish of the Vietnam war on his permanent record. But who otherwise did a lot of genuinely good things- even if not always for the purest of reasons. Like becoming a champion of civil rights- which shored up his base during a time before the American political parties realigned on ideological grounds and the south was still actively fighting a century-long rear guard action against basic human decency. And was a crude, uncouth, mean sumbitch to boot.

On an international level... I'd have to think and do some research there, but yeah, it's probably someone sorry and embarrassing at best. Who may have really, genuinely meant well, but was/is completely in over their head.

Certainly plenty of the completely deranged and/or sociopaths seem to actively seek these sorts of things out. And it's one of the true absurdities of humanity that we allow them to rule our world. There has to be a higher proportion of the truly, genuinely dangerously fucked-up in whatever our civilizations want to call heads of state than any other profession on the planet. To the point where I wonder if the idea of merely installing a dull, sensible, rational bureaucrat in the position to perform administrative duties didn't finally occur to humanity until maybe half a century ago in somewhere like, say, Sweden.

This, currently:


I've been on a bit of a Civil War kick lately. I suppose because it was such a clusterfuck, and that always intrigues me.

I just finished my last book. Know No Fear. Fuckin Love warhammer novels. Its book 19, and i'm reading them in order

Because fuckit, that's why.

Moby Dick is a book that i need to get the crazy version of that my high school teacher had. It was wildly annotated, looked like the Compact OED, every spread was original text on one side, and super detailed commentary on the other. I have never seen it since, but it had so much fucking cool information and analysis points that i have kept its search in the back of me skull ever since. I assume it was some sort of "teacher only" thing, but it HAS to be out there somewhere.

Anyhow, i finished "Volume I - MAN AND NATURE" and have moved onto "Volume II - THE VEGETABLE WORLD".



Shit continues to be fantastic.

Pretty sure I am going to name one of these songs I've been sitting on The Wonders of Science In Modern Life. It is too OTT to deny.

Vol. II- The Vegetable World would make a pretty snazzy title as well.

The next chapter section is actually entitled "ENSLAVING THE SOIL."

Which is basically bandname/albumname/songtitle superior.

I don't think anything further can be said re: that, except perhaps:

Of course, the music in question is almost certainly: bad metal.

The bass player MUST have a Kahler on his bass.

That would be excellent.

You know, as much as I've always thought a trem on a bass was so-absurd-it's-cool, I don't think I've ever actually heard one used or seen one in person. Wait, no, Les Claypool. But still haven't seen one in the wild.

In keeping with my tradition of reading a bunch of stuff at once:



Science! Natural history is a close second to people-history for my non-music geekery. Pants and Aminals, Fossiles and Their Attendant G-ology, etc. are fascinating to me. Almost as much as the myriad ways and reasons humans have devised to bullshit, steal from and kill each other. And as majestic, enchanting, and full of awe and wonder as... No, more than anything, as it's all by definition observable and real.

As a book, I like the format 'cause I can skip around to whatever strikes my fancy, it being a collection of essays. I need more of his stuff. He was, er, Sort Of A Big Deal in paleontology and evolutionary biology. And an accessible read.

Now almost done with "Volume III - THE ANIMAL WORLD".

I now know things about tanning hides and extracting phosphorus from bone ash. Also, how to avoid several common livestock ailments via a measured analysis and foresight in the particulars of the various animals' dietary and environmental arrangements.