Monthly Archives: August 2014

Space is Tedious, But Fascinating

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Love this and have needed to blog it for awhile. «If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: A Tediously Accurate Scale Model of the Solar System» is a brilliantly creative work that represents graphically the massive amount of space in space.

On the page, 1 screen pixel corresponds to 3,474.8 km, “which is the diameter of the moon or the distance between New York and Las Vegas.” Bring up the page and scroll to the right. You’ll soon get the idea. (To skip to a planet, click one of the icons at the top of the page.) Excellent work by Josh Worth.

Anniversary of Bittersweet Proportions

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Aug. 20 is always bittersweet now; not only is it Bayley’s birthday, but we also lost Fred on this day two years ago. Time always plays with my head; Bayley’s 20 years seems a very long time, but so does the last two years. An aggressive, fast-moving cancer robbed us of Fred-Fred, who was just 5. That was a Very. Bad. Day.

Strange how the furry, messy, loud, attention-hogging, walking stomachs get under your skin. Yes, “only” dogs. But they have a very special power to enrich and bless your life. Difficult and silly to explain and it’s different with people and all that but there it is.

We miss Fred and Bayley … lots, especially on this double anniversary. Still, no rest for the wicked—Fred’s brothers, Feargal and Fergus, are still going Beagle strong at 7-and-a-half and of course His Majesty The Roux has thoroughly Basset-ized the place. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sassoon and Gaza: A Hundred Years, An Unchanged Mankind

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In Palestine

“On the rock-strewn hills I heard
The anger of guns that shook
Echoes along the glen.
In my heart was the song of a bird,
And the sorrowless tale of the brook,
And scorn for the deeds of men.”
—Siegfried Sassoon, 30-Mar-1918

An interesting story of the month Siegfried Sassoon spent in Palestine is in the Los Angeles Review of Books currently. Nina Martyris in «Siegfried Sassoon and Palestine» notes that Sassoon “wrote [the words above] not on the Somme but in Palestine, where he was posted for a little over a month in the spring of 1918. He could easily be talking about the vicious war raging across Israel and Gaza’s rocket-strewn hills today.” She continues:

“To read Sassoon on war is to read about Israel and Gaza today. After he left Palestine, he wrote a tightly crafted sonnet called “Ancient History” on the fratricidal nature of war, told through the allegory of Cain and Abel. Ironically, that same story of brotherly murder provided the name of Israel’s Operation Brother’s Keeper, launched to search the West Bank for the three Israeli teenagers whose abduction and murder sparked the ongoing clash. In Sassoon’s scorching parable, Adam stands in for the cynical old politicians who watch their young kill one another.
…
“What makes this poem a moral grenade is its self-awareness. Sassoon knew that there were bits of Cain and Abel tussling inside him. At the start of the war, he had been a soldier filled with bloodlust, and made quite a reputation for himself for his revenge killings of Germans. But he had also sickened of the slaughter and campaigned for it to stop. In Sassoon’s case, Abel finally won, but the current war, with its far more ancient and complex metabolism, is inevitably stamped with the mark of Cain.
“The Gaza war has been fought as much with rocket fire and rhetoric as with cameras that have smote the world’s conscience with streams of pictures of Palestinian families half-buried under rubble. During the First World War, press coverage of the front was strictly monitored, and only photographs of dead Germans were allowed to be published in the British newspapers. In the absence of cameras there were war poems.”
—LA Review of Books

Fascinating reading, even if it is pretty depressing.