Life Magazine, August 7, 1939: "Harvard's Hooten", p.66: an article about an eugenicist anthro professor with a penchant for collecting biometrics on different social classes: "Criminals vary according to their crimes. Robbers are nearly eight years younger than the average of the criminal class. Murderers are older, have broader jaws, narrower, longer, lower heads. Rapists are shortest. Forgers look like pretty much anyone else." I find the final tidbit a particularly pleasing version of the crime fitting the criminal.

Searching these things up at iTunes.com can get a little addictive -- I don't even make albums, just track lists, such as this afternoon's:

The Last Words of Copernicus - Sacred Heart Singers (an Alan Lomax Joint!)
Kepler - Nobukazu Takemura
The Ballad of Sir Isaac Newton - Dr. Chordate
Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America - Randy Newman
Galileo - Indigo Girls
Harvey and the Old Ones - Banco de Gaia
Mendel's Theme - Dr. Chordate
Darwin's Children - Edwin McCain
Faraday - Djilia Phralengo
Descartes in Amsterdam - Dave Nachmanoff
Pascal's Egrets - Charivari
Halley's Waitress - Fountains of Wayne

Interestingly, when you search Google for "great scientists" 9 out of the top 10 listings are pages that append the phrase "who believed in the Bible".

[email fragment] Recently heard a fine (digitized) live performance from a folk/country artist named Kasey Chambers. Shades of Nanci Griffith and other favorites, plus the following fun facts:

a) she's Australian, & grew up as the daughter of an itinerant fox hunter on the wonderfully named Nullarbor Plain in not-quite-so-aptly-named South Australia.

b) most of the songs on her first album ("The Captain") were written in Africa

c) and then recorded in a studio on ... Norfolk Island

d) before being sent off to Nashville for final polishing.

Amazon.

KCRW live

Also if you don't 'lready, you should know about, and listen to, Nellie McKay, whose fusion of cabaret, rap, pop, rant, etc. is utterly winning.

KCRW live

Also, shift gears, what's this I hear about the arrival of Beard Papa?

[email fragment] Thanks for the reading update. I've read a couple by Vargas Llosa -- Feast of the Goat and El Paraíso en la otra esquina ("the paradise in the other corner"), the latter in Spanish and abandoned by me 100 pages in after an "if I'm going to be reading something and not really understanding it, it may as well be Borges and not yet another retelling of Gaugan's Tahitian sexcapades" moment. Gavan Daws' A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas treated it so well and, frankly, told me all I could possibly want to know.

I think I'd heard of the Jivaro and their shrunken heads sometime way-back-when. In fact, during my brief tenure in "Stockade", a church-sponsored boy-scouts-equivalent group, one of the father-son crafts was to make "shrunken heads" out of carved apples. All the skin was pared away, and then we had at it with our pocket knives. The leader took them away to dry over low heat for a week or two, after which the faces were wizened and leathery and ready for a preservative coat of lacquer. I kept mine in my closet for some time afterwards. What this had to do with Christianity, I've no clue.

Anyway, the tsantsa recipe you passed on reminded me of the passage in The Voyage of the Beagle where Darwin tells us how to catch an Andean condor:

Two methods are used; one is to place a carcass on a level piece of ground within an enclosure of sticks with an opening, and when the condors are gorged, to gallop up on horseback to the entrance, and thus enclose them: for when this bird has not space to run, it cannot give its body sufficient momentum to rise from the ground. The second method is to mark the trees in which, frequently to the number of five or six together, they roost, and then at night to climb up and noose them. They are such heavy sleepers, as I have myself witnessed, that this is not a difficult task.

[email fragment] Been a little while since we've swapped reading lists. I just finished W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, which I'd strongly recommend, and am getting started on Rick Moody's memoir The Black Veil. Also, as a TV-displacement therapy I've started downloading e-books and having my computer's speech synthesizer read them to me. The technology's good enough to where it sounds less like a robot than just a bad phone connection with an Eastern European woman. Which is, I think, what was going through Dickens' head when he wrote The Pickwick Papers anyway.

[email fragment] Also I found a NYC public schools PDF that says when they need to enroll the next flock of Kindergarteners, they put out fliers in ten languages: English, Spanish, Haitian-Creole, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Urdu, Polish, Arabic and Bengali.

Dredged up at a friend's request: a book review about the political efficacy (or lack thereof) of assassination.

[email fragment] I've been reading lots of Latin American stuff recently, much of it in Spanish, which has been fun. I'm currently reading some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, of which one can subtract 40-60 percent of standard comprehension due to my stumbling language skills, and another 30-50 percent due to Borges' own philosophical loops and labyrinths, meaning that my actual understanding ranges from 30 percent to minus 10 percent -- the latter being a number that doubtless would have especially pleased the author.

[email fragment] In your years in Dhaka did you ever hear anything about the mysterious Second Kumar of Bhawal? He was a member of a zamindar family in Dacca district who died and was cremated under mysterious circumstances in Darjeeling around 1910. A decade later a sannysai appeared in Dacca who claimed to be the Kumar, and was eventually recognized by most of his family and tenants, but not his widow/wife nor the Court of Wards, which was administering the estate and collecting the taxes. Thus began a series of lawsuits and appeals that stretched till the 1940s and supposedly captivated much of Bengal.

Anyway, I just finished a recent account of the whole affair, _A Princely Imposter?_ by the Bengali historian Partha Chatterjee. It's a nice bit of patient legal storytelling, with some enjoyable traipses into the philosophy of identity -- both Western and Indian -- as well as the occasional pleasant postcolonial aside.