bink took this snap of me in the Milwaukee Art Museum's Pavillion, designed by Santiago Calatrava. It's like being inside the skeleton of a whale or a sailing ship.
Yesterday I finished the hardest bit of the Frindian war book---the "why?" part.
Hardest, even though the answers are obvious:
dirt, and all the things on it (tobacco, beavers, roads, children);
and glory (whatever that is).
Our hunger for goodies to put in our mouths drives quite a lot of human history, as you know:
tobacco, yes, and sugar (sugar, sugar, sugar), salt and pepper, chocolate, coffee, booze...
I like 'em all ('cept the baccy).
[Nice article by Michael Pollen about Americans and Food:
"Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream..."
You know there's a big "but" coming...]
And the machinery it takes to produce and transport those goodies is responsible for boatloads of human misery ...and human genius (e.g., the astrolabe, right).A favorite example of human adaptability (a kind of genius), from yesterday's reading:
Colonial militiamen eventually (sometimes) took to lopping off their uniform coats' long tails, so they could move unencumbered through the thick woods.
