The Secret Life of Lobsters - Trevor Corson

"When the lobster is ready to shed, it pumps in seawater and distributes it through its body, causing hydrostatic pressure to force the old shell away from the new one. The lobster remains mobile and active until the last minute, when the membrane that lines its old shell bursts and the animal falls over on its side, helpless and immobilized. After twenty minutes or so, the lobster's back detaches and the animal pulls its antennae, mouthparts, legs, and claws out of their former coverings, aided by a lubricating fluid. The most difficult moment comes when the lobster tugs its claw muscles out through the slender upper segments that form its wrists. Before molting the animal must diet away half the mass in its claws or risk getting stuck in its old clothes. Worse, because a lobster is an invertebrate, every anotomical feature that is rigid is part of the exoskeleton, including the teeth inside the stomach that grind food. The lobster must rip out the lining of its throat, stomach, and anus before its free of the old shell. Some die trying."

Humorous self-loathing

I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character.

Or at least I used to think so. Since anyone with taste buds will respond to the trans-fat bells and whistles of a hot fudge sundae or super nachos, how better then to show a nobility of spirit than by broadcasting your capacity to discrern the gustatory equivalent of a hummingbird's cough as it beats its wings near a blossom that grows by a glassy pond on the other side of a distant mountain? No surer proof that one is meant for better things than an easily bruised delicacy. Such a perfectly tuned instrument can quickly suss out the cheap and nasty. So, the bitterness at the back of the throat; the polite refusal of the glass of whiskey marred by those (shudder) domestic ice cubes; the physical and psychic insult that are sheets of anything short of isotropic density. What is the thread count, Kenneth? We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.

=================

Behind them, the two Hooters Girls, one blond, one brunette, emerge dressed in body-covering track suits in sherbet-orange viscose. This is their more modest walking-around-the-airport attire. They look like Olympic athletes representing the tackiest country on earth, which I guess they kind of are.

- Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

Posted by Evan

Stand to the Right

The great public space of Washington might seem to be the Mall itself. The site of countless protest, celebrations, and pilgrimages, the Mall is indeed one of the world's great commons. But it is national space, not local space. In his book, The Debt, Randall Robinson images a District youth who feels unwelcome on the Mall, "surrounded by monuments and memorials" that "don't seem intended for him. They do seem, from the looks on their faces, intended for the white family of four from Nebraska standing near him." Robinson expresses the unease of an African American in a mostly white environment. But the boy's sense of trespassing might also reflect Washingtonians' displacement from the center of their city. Tourists from Nebraska and other distant locales do dominate the Mall, visually and functionally, just as federal functions dominate the city's core. In central Washington, the Secret Service can close off streets over the objections of local officials; the Wilson Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of city government, is surrounded by federal offices.

At the bottom of a Metro escalator, however, the locals are clearly in charge.....

Locals do not keep out ordinary tourists, but they do put them in their place. The hazing begins at the station entrance, where visitors find automated fare card machines, complicated fare schemes, bus transfers, and the challenge of exiting with insufficient fare....

More noticeably, tourists do not know the unspoken etiquette of riding...Others suggest aggressive responses. "Crowd the stubborn stranger who will not allow you to cross the car width," counseled one magazine in 1978. "You must shout, 'GOING THROUGH,' 'MAKE WAY,' 'MUST LEAVE BY NEXT STOP,' 'I HAVE SIZE 13 FEET,' or, simply, 'PLEASE LET ME OUT, I AM AN OLD NATIVE RESIDENT.'"

Such advice might suggest that Washingtonians wish tourists did not ride, but the surface hostility may overlay a native satisfaction that Metro is one downtown environment in which residents can assert ownership. Although Metro riders rarely talk to strangers, reserved Washingtonians will sometimes give directions to an obviously lost tourist. In doing so, they perform a kindness, yet assume an air of authority.

- The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro by Zachary M. Schrag

Posted by Evan

How Soccer Explains the World

"..Barca doesn't just redeem the game from its critics; it redeems the concept of nationalism. Through the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from philospher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity's evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we could finally get past natsy ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans - shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.

It's a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave indentifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. To deny this craving is to deny human nature and human dignity.

What's more, this strain of political theory makes a distinction between liberal nationalism and illiberal nationalism. The Serbs at Red Star..practice the illiberal variety, with no respect for the determination of other nationalities. But there's no reason that nationalism should culminate in these ugly feelings. To blame the Croatian and Bosnian wars on excessive love of country drastically underestimates the pathologies in Serb culture. Besides, in theory, patriotism and cosmopolitanism should be perfectly compatible. You could love your country-even consider it a superior group-without desiring to dominate other groups or closing yourself off to foreign impulses. And it's not just theory. This is the spirit of Barca. I love it."

-How Soccer Explains the World: An unlikely theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer

Forgive and Forget?

If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.


- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

... those 50 grams of resin-soaked dope, which had been so potent that on the second day it had given him an anxiety attack so paralyzing he had gone to the bathroom in a Tufts University commemorative ceramic stein to avoid leaving the bedroom...

The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches.... and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs... and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes... and were reportedly blinding them...

The Awakening

Then suddenly this also was clear to him, he, who was in fact like one who had awakened or was newly born, must begin his life completely afresh. When he left the Jetavana grove that morning, the grove of the illustious One, already awakened, already on the way to himslef, it was his intention and it seemed the natural course to return to his home and his father. Now, however, in that moment as he stood still, as if a snake lay in his path, this thought also came to him: I am no longer what I was, I am no longer an ascetic, no longer a priest, no longer a Brahmin. What then shall I do at home with my father? Study? Offer sacrifices? Practice meditation? All this is over for me now.

Siddhartha stood still and for a moment an icy chill stole over him. He shivered inwardly like a small animal, like bird or a hare, when he realized how alone he was. He had been homeless for years and not felt like this. Now he did feel it. Previously when in deepest meditation, he was still his father's son, he was a Brahmin of high standing, a religious man. Now he was only Siddhartha, the awakened; otherwise nothing else. He breathed in deeply and for a moment he suddered. Nobody was so alone as he. He was no nobleman, belonging to any aristocracy, no artisan belonging to any guild and finding refuge in it, sharing its life and language. He was no Brahmin, sharing the life of the Brahmins, no ascetic belonging to the Samanans. Even the most secluded hermit in the woods was not one and alone; he belonged to a class of people. Govinda had become a monk, and thousands of monks were his Brothers, wore the same gown, shared his beliefs and spoke his language. But he, Siddhartha, where did he belong? Whose life would he share? Whose language would he speak?

At that moment, when the world found him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy dispair, but was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and begain to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer looking homeward, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.

-Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Posted by Becca