The Nature of Things

This may be the happiest story I've read all week . It seems that a runway at JFK Airport in New York was shut down for over an hour today because of lovesick turtles. Diamondback terrapins that live in the wetlands around the airport mate at this time of year and then the females seek a sandy area in which to lay their eggs. As it happens, that sandy area is on the other side of the runway from the wetlands where they live, and so, around this time every year, they begin their trek across the runway in order to get to the nesting site. And traffic on that runway comes to a screeching halt! Today, more than a hundred of the turtles were crossing the runway. Wildlife personnel and airport staff picked many of them up and moved them to a sandy area where they could lay their eggs. But after the egg-laying, the turtles will likely be trying to get back to their wetlands which might mean another shutdown. Anyway, I just think that it is really cool that all those people in a hurry...

I will freely admit that I may just not be smart enough to understand this book. I've read a few reviews of it by people who obviously are more versed in modern literature than I, and, for the most part, those reviews have ranged from mildly positive to raves. Moreover, looking at Mr. Wallace's biography, one sees that he won multiple prizes for his writing and some of them were for this book. That biography also tells us that the themes and style which he used in his writing were metamodernism and hysterical realism. I would have to say that the emphasis was more on the hysterical than the realism. The events of this book take place in the not-too-distant future, when Canada, Mexico and the United States have come together in an organization of North American states, abbreviated as O.N.A.N. (Wallace makes a fetish of using abbreviations, often without explaining what they mean.) It is a time when vast herds of rampaging feral hamsters overrun the wastelands of the Northeast. T...

Yes, I admit it. I am addicted. I'm not quite sure how it happened. I didn't intend it to happen. I only did it really to placate my daughter who insisted that I should. I didn't know what I was getting into. I had never even heard of George R. R. Martin before I started seeing ads for the HBO series based on his fantasy series of books about the continent of Westeros and the Seven Kingdoms. But I watched the first episode of " Game of Thrones " when it started on HBO back in April, and now I am hooked. And how do I know that I am hooked? Because I am suffering withdrawal. The last show of the season aired on June 19 and yesterday at the time that the show would normally have been on, "True Blood" started its season. No more "Game of Thrones" until next spring. At 8:00 P.M. last night, I started suffering severe depression. How will I ever survive without my weekly fix? Admittedly, GOT does not fit the profile of my usual choice f...

What an odd little book this is. The book is only a little over 100 pages and in it the author presents different brief vignettes of our possible afterlives. Each imagined afterlife contains a deity, but each deity is different. One deity is actually two - a dissatisfied married couple. Another is a microbe, too small for us to see. Others are dim-witted beings who created us to be smarter than they are. Another is too big to even be aware of us. Well, you get the idea of the diversity contained here, I think. These short evocations of the afterlife (or afterlives) are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes funny, and sometimes just plain weird, but taken altogether, they comprise an interesting book, one that I would never have picked up if my daughter, the librarian, hadn't recommended it to me. Reading things outside our comfort zone is actually very good for us, I think. It is a way to stretch our minds in new directions. I know this book sent my mind running in all kinds of ...

Last year, I wrote a post here about a list I had seen of thirteen books that everyone says he/she has read but hasn't . One of the books on that list was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. At that time, I admitted my literary ignorance of the book and maintained that I would probably never read it. I didn't even know who David Foster Wallace was. That was the depth of my ignorance. After writing that, I felt bad. Who was I to dismiss a book and an author that I didn't even really know anything about? So, I decided to learn about Wallace and his work. I looked him up on Wikipedia and was appalled to learn that he had killed himself in 2008. He had suffered from severe depression for many years and had only been able to function with the help of medication. I discovered some of his essays and found them to be well-written and interesting and to express sentiments with which I could agree. To make a long story short, I decided to put Infinite Jest on my "to...

(1.) The FBI seems to be on a roll lately, having made several high profile arrests. The latest was this week's capture of one of their Ten Most Wanted, "Whitey" Bulger . Bulger had been on the lam for years, apparently with the complicity of some law enforcement people who had been paid off to turn a blind eye. Some of those folks are already serving long prison sentences and, with the capture of the man himself, it is possible that others will soon follow. Bulger, who is thought to be responsible for at least 19 murders, should be right behind them. We sometimes get the impression that our law enforcement agencies are incompetent, but the FBI is going a long way toward redeeming its reputation. It's very nice and confidence-building for the average citizen to see things working the way they are supposed to. (2.) If Rick Perry decides to run for president, it seems that he will have a rumor problem. The rumor is that he is gay . Whether or not there is any tr...