“For the last 500 years, the locals of Nongriat in Meghalaya, India have grown several hundred bridges across the region’s numerous water channels, using just the roots of local ribber trees. Some of the bridges extend over 100 feet in length and are strong enough to support more than 50 people at a time.”
Still going strong
“What would the dead want from us
Watching from their cave?
Would they have us forever howling?
Would they have us rave
Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled
Like some ancient emperor’s slave?
None of my dead friends were emperors
With such exorbitant tastes
And none of them were so vengeful
As to have all their friends waste
Waste quite away in sorrow
Disfigured and defaced.
I think the dead would want us
To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.
And time would find them generous
As they used to be
And what else would they want from us
Than an honoured place in our memory,
favourite room, a hallowed chair,
Privilege and celebrity?
And so the dead might cease to grieve
And we might make amends
And there might be a pact between
Dead friends and living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us
Would be such living friends.”
— New Yorker write-up on Christopher Hitchens’ memorial service. This is a poem by James Fenton that really landed in the right place this evening.
sport
one day i’d like to exist more in the mental form of a hawk. soaring; calculating ancient formulas of the old hunt with razor eyes and a monk’s patience, towering over ideals, strands of past and future, frayed, knotted, carrying winds of basically everything i did moment’s ago.
and to inhabit those orgies of power from a temple of food and drink, with good people, full of love and vision, heightened by the intensity of space and other humans.
i too much enjoy the sport right now. invested completely within the chaos, still with eyes like a machette, dancing through rhythms like a panther. as one leads and fights alongside one’s soldiers with the same ferociousness…
life:
Happy Birthday, Albert Einstein.
Here’s Ralph Morse’s famous photograph of Albert Einstein’s office — just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it — taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955.
(see more photos here)
(via npr)
cauliflower, the stove and the cast iron pan
i’ve never been hugely into cauliflower, but
tonight i put it in a cast iron pan with a decent chunk of butter. an entire head of it. just cut off the bottom and put it in facing UP.
toss in some aromatics… i had rosemary, thyme… a bit of cumin, pepper and salt. i drizzled a bit of olive oil over the top
and threw it in the oven at 400 degrees. for about 25-30 minutes, covered.
i read this somewhere, that rene redzepi, the chef of noma, likes to cook cauliflower this way…that cauliflower boiled is “awful” is his main stance on the matter.
anyway, it came out, and i was thinking, “this is probably going to be pretty good”
and i cut into it, right after i took it out, still on the stove, in the cast iron. a knife from nopa, no longer fit for service.
and it blew me the fuck away.
it was so fuckin good. best cauiflower i’ve ever had in my life.
and that’s my story
about cauliflower, the stove and cast iron pans.
prey
i’ve kept from hanging
various dangling successes
over the lumps of time and the flumes of measured loves
to maybe ventured sniffs of treasured perfumes that all mask any hunting
from whatever digging into the past i’ve been caught by
you or someone else
i suppose
i’ve certainly seen hunters surveying the crashes of promised horizon
so the angles of their defeats can be more sharply maintained
and expertly attended to, of course
i’ve often noticed the residue on a man’s lapel, after he sneezes an image of his desire into the air around his air
whatever crumbs of existence you can wipe your nose with i guess
i suppose i might be
if ever the moment arose
inclined to spit in such a man’s face
even if it my own
and i
walking in exaggerated sequence
like any shred of humanity could have two feet
a slap across the hands of rejoice is nothing more than a loss of your eye
in the storm of a day
two better than stay
one
for the better half of tomorrow
if it never comes let’s say that the man with the lapel, sneeze and residue of
yearning can easily disappear
if you’ve ever forgotten yourself at
pierce and fulton when the asphault reached up into your knee and gathered
footprints from the bottom of your shoes
although you’ve never really been there, not this time rapaz
Northern Lights and erupting Icelandic volcano produce stunning photographs by James Appleton.
Photographer James Appleton, 23, from Cambridge, risked his life trekking solo to the area and captured these incredible shots. The Cambridge University graduate spent five days observing the first phase of the eruption from a shack in nearby Fimmvorouhals mountain pass. He spent seven hours battling biting wind and freezing temperatures to get as close to the eruption as possible, against the advice of local guides. Despite being trapped inside a shack there for 48 hours, Mr Appleton managed to trek within 100ft of the volcano.
(via npr)
