Perhaps the most euphonious headline ever written, from Radio Australia:

Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia

I just want to keep saying it over and over. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia.

[email fragment] I've just taken delivery of a set of 300 or so unused European postcards, collected during the 1970s by an elderly woman from northwest Washington, D.C., and auctioned on ebay for the grand sum of $10. From this point on my location may become unclear.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "Job descriptions for some members of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands may have to be re-written to include "crocodile hunter". Four locals on the main island of Guadalcanal have died recently as a result of crocodile attacks. And it seems the success of RAMSI's gun amnesty may be the reason for the increase in the numbers of man-eating crocodiles. In less than a year, RAMSI has successfully restored law-and-order and confiscated most of the high-powered weapons previously used to kill the crocs." Ah, unintended consequences. And with teeth.

Wonderful resource: bobdylan.com, full searchable lyrics, RealAudio samples of every song -- I'm kind of shocked at how useful the site is, at least for answering my questions, because a) it's corporate; b) it's for an artist who's not, as the Zulus say, of the eGeneration; and c) is famously reclusive, purposely mysterious, etc.

Though now iTunes gives the artist site a run for the money, at least when it comes to title searches and audio (I found a great Mac utility, itunesMSP that will play in order every song sample that shows up in an iTunes music store search, which eliminates much clicking).

Atlantic Monthly on the badness of campaign TV ads.

Writing systems of the world: my are there many of them

My latest Spanish reading is none other than "Naufragios", the conquistador/explorer/what-not Cabeza de Vaca's account of his shipwreck and journey overland from Florida to Mexico City. It was written sometime in the 16th century, but I seem to be understanding enough to at least follow the basic plot.

My other new project is a little herb garden on this second-floor deck we've got. It's kind of inspired by Nelson Mandela, who kept a rooftop garden during his final years in prison. He'd give the guards vegetables to win their favor. My parents weren't too happy at first when I mentioned this comparison ("What does that make us? Prison guards?") but they came around in the end ... anyway so far I've got oregano, rosemary, basil, chives, and two kinds of thyme.

Against my better instincts I watched some of the Miss Universe pageant last week. All the finalists kept making me think of praying mantises -- long and lithe and firm, triangular heads and enormous eyes. Actually, most beauty and bodybuilding contestants strike me as at least vaguely insectile.

In other news, watched Monsoon Wedding this week -- a good 'un.

The German Air Guitar Federation

[email fragment] This morning I finished reading "Swann's Way". I'm not sure how many volumes of Proust you have to've read before you can say things like "well, I've been reading Proust and ..." I'm also halfway through Lauren Bacall's autobiography, which evidently won the National Book Award back in the late 70s. I still can't tell whether that was because it's a good book in its own right, or just a good book considering it was written by a movie star. Still, interesting Bogart tidbits.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "The sea cucumber may seem an unlikely icon to attract tourists, but it has been chosen by the Guam Visitors Bureau to promote the rich marine life of Tumon Bay. The bay is central to Guam tourism, as it is where most hotels are located, but encounters with sea cucumbers, or 'balate', have been keeping tourists away from the water. To change this, the Visitors Bureau has decided to turn the creature into a cartoon character and its latest educational tool."

"The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip-Hop 1979-1983"

I came up with an interesting a philsophy-of-surgery question the other night while watching the latest horribly, horribly written earthquake-disaster miniseries on NBC. Anyhow, there was a surgery scene and I was struck (though it wasn't really anything new) at just how fully masked everyone in the OR is. I understand why that is, of course, in terms of keeping things sterile and all that, but I wonder what the psychological and sociological effect the masking ritual has on the whole process of surgery. I was reminded of an article I read last year in The Economist, on the child-soldiers of LURD, the Liberian revolutionary group, and their penchant for cross-dressing, putting on makeup or wigs of shower caps before committing their various atrocities -- the point being that it was likely a modernization of traditional W.African usages of mask and costume, the idea being that once you don the mask (even one that doesn't conceal your identity), you become in some sense a different person, and so can't be held responsible for your actions. I suppose the Western traditions of Carnival, Halloween, or, in a different mode, bank robbery, are a long similar lines, though with a bit less emphasis on full possession.

Anyway, given the (often necessarily) ritual nature of surgery, it seems at least metaphorically significant that masks are involved -- perhaps as a way of distancing the surgeons from the patient, or indeed from each other, and I guess of disguising the emotions and keeping things as scientific/mechanistic as possible.

Perhaps just a bunch of psychobabble, but my question's this: if someone invented a perfectly transparent surgical mask, hat, etc. -- that would provide all the antiseptic effects as the current system, and allow for full view of facial expressions in the OR, would surgeons go for it? And how might it change the operating room dynamics, both between members of the surgical team, and, at least in one direction, between surgeon and surgee?

[email fragment] First off, Norfolk Island is not, technically, between Australia and New Zealand, in the sense that one couldn't travel in a straight line and intersect all three. It's a little too far north. But we can accurately say it's between New Zealand and New Caledonia, or between Australia and Fiji.

Secondly [in relation to a discussion of the distinctly un-pine-like Norfolk Island Pine], you really should listen to the Australian-born, Norfolk-Island-Recordin' country singer I emailed you about, Kasey Chambers. If only for her song "These Pines", which takes on oodles of new meaning when you consider where it was recorded:

These pines are not the ones that I'm used to
They won't carry me home when I cry
Am I too far gone to recover
Or can I turn if I try
Should I trade my soul for another
Should I stay and pretend that I'm happy
Like so many times before

Yeah these pines
Are not mine
They don't smell so sweet
like the ones in my mind
And I search the needles
'Til I run out of time
But I don't see you in These Pines.

These past few months I've been doing a lot of searches at iTunes.com for the frequency of specific words in song titles, mostly to see which words of a particular set had the most songs with them in the title. i.e.:

Morning 1481
Afternoon 173
Evening 301
Night 4250

Monday 226
Tuesday 83
Wednesday 31
Thursday 29
Friday 186
Saturday 293
Sunday 549

I also learned that, while iTunes has 564 songs with "mile" in the title, and 68 with "inch", only 9 contain "meter" -- and of those, none of the usages is in the sense of distance.

After that I dredged up an older question, at last near-answerable, about whether (and why) certain names were much more common in song titles than in real life. i.e.:

iTunes Counts for Top 10 Female Names in USA (1990 Census)

1. Mary 685
2. Patricia/Patty 33
3. Linda 134
4. Barbara 66
5. Elizabeth/Beth 111
6. Jennifer/Jenny 161
7. Maria 587
8. Susan/Susie/Sue 577
9. Margaret/Maggie/Meg 200
10. Dorothy 14

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.