Fig rolls!
Been working in the British Library lately. Golly, what a wonderful place. Rare Books & Music, that’s where you’ll find me, with my pencil sharpened and my head down.
Pumpkins on the front
“This morning the boys staked out a garden patch for the coming summer, but I fear the only thing we could raise would be some of the pumpkins, the vines of which grow so rapidly that they overtook the boy that planted them before he got out of the field, and by the time he jumped over the fence he found a full-grown pumpkin in his pocket.” — Washington Roebling, March 9th, 1862, near Budd’s Ferry, Maryland
Charles Dickens on the portage railway
“On Sunday we arrived at the foot of the mountain which is crossed by a railway. There are ten inclined planes, five ascending and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former and let slowly down the latter by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level space between being traversed, sometimes by horses and sometimes by engine power as the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice, and looking from the carriage window the traveller gazed sheer down without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below…” American Notes, 1842
Robert Harris takes on the Dreyfus Affair
An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, RRP£18.99, 483 pages
“There is no such thing as a secret – not really, not in the modern world.” It doesn’t matter what your privacy settings are on Facebook, all our information is going to get out: if we didn’t suspect it before, the likes of Edward Snowden and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning have rung the alarm. This is the 21st century, after all.
Or is it?
Fortitude and heroism
“It was thus, from over the ocean and from the Eastern States and older counties of the State itself, that Butler county was first settled. Sturdy men with strong arms and stout hearts felled her forests. Brave women, faithful to every duty of wife and mother, endured the loneliness of the wilderness, and met the many perils and dangers of everyday life, with a fortitude and heroism deserving of immortal remembrance…” — From A History of Butler County, Pennsylvania, R. C. Brown & Co., 1895
NOT Kraft macaroni and cheese
No, no, no! Ignore that little box on the left! Do you know what’s in that? I’ll tell you: ENRICHED MACARONI PRODUCT (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, FERROUS SULFATE [IRON], THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID); CHEESE SAUCE MIX (WHEY, MILKFAT, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SALT, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF CITRIC ACID, LACTIC ACID, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, ENZYMES, CHEESE CULTURE). CONTAINS: WHEAT, MILK. Can’t get enough of that Yellow 5, I betcha, never mind Yellow 6. Right then. No more mac ‘n’ cheese from a box;
Chili weather (well, nearly)
Nothing like the first spatters of rain, a chill in the air, to make me long for a bowl of chili. I know there are some in my native land stuck on the idea that there’s a Holy Grail of chili out there, the perfect bowl that knows no equal.
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
MAXINE TARNOW is riding the subway when this novel finally hits its stride. It is the year 2001 in New York City, not long after 9/11; Maxine, a freelance fraud investigator, begins to wonder how she is linked to what might or might not be a global terror plot flourishing online in the “Deep Web”, a nexus of servers and avatars which is still very much a hidden world. At 72nd and Broadway, her express train passes a local train: “the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her.” A woman gestures to her from the passing train, they meet, and the stranger hands her an envelope: it looks like things could get interesting.
Driving Forward
“Thus we see that once you embark in an enterprise, the exigencies of business constantly drive you forward. More capital is invested, one improvement and enlargement suggests and compels another — It never stops — My father often said he was tired and wanted to stop — but there were his sons to take up — so the grind went on — ” Washington Roebling, from A Memoir of John A. Roebling
Beeban Kidron: InRealLife, kids and the internet
It started when Beeban Kidron heard her daughter screaming. The 14-year-old was in her bedroom with a friend. They were online. “I heard screaming, screaming. Some boy had given them an email with a link to what he said was a jokey site. When they’d gone on it, it turned out to be a loop of very, very violent sex, involving men … really abject violence. It went on a loop, over and over. And they were profoundly upset.”