just asking

Is it completely perverse that I like eating dry breakfast cereal straight out of the box, by hand, as if it were popcorn? I’ve never met anyone else with this particular habit, but surely it’s reasonable enough that others must do it from time to time.

My favorite lately has been Special K Red Berries. It’s good. Special K is already perhaps the tastiest cereal of its general kind, but those freeze-dried red raspberries have a piercing tartness on the tongue that can almost make you sweat a bit. And for me at least, raspberries are already pretty close to a perfect object. Hot red raspberry pie… this was my favorite thing to eat on trips to the urban homes of grandparents living near pie chain outlets.

weirdest fact from Rhodes

Probably the strangest detail in the Rhodes atomic bomb history is one mentioned so briefly that I always forget it each time I reread the book… Along with the official German atomic bomb project, which famously featured Werner Heisenberg in a starring role, the German freaking Postal Ministry was funding a secret parallel effort. Apparently the Minister of Posts was courted by leading atomic scientist, and dreamed of presenting the Führer with the surprise magic weapon to end the war.

We can all be glad it didn’t happen, of course. But imagine it had. This would be one of those cases where history was both tragedy and farce simultaneously on the very first try.

ADDENDUM: It’s funny to imagine a couple of alternate scenarios. One would be the German Postal Ministry attaining the bomb before anyone else, but then turning on Hitler and establishing some sort of postal junta to rule Europe for centuries.

Another is to imagine the US Postal Service funding a private atomic bomb project, and succeeding. Just imagine the wind being taken out of the sails of Oppenheimer, Teller, Bethe, General Groves et al. when they are told that the Postmaster General has just announced the successful test of a U-235 prototype bomb.

“The Willows”

Both Lovecraft and Joshi rank Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 tale “The Willows” as the best weird tale in English. Click on the story title to get it on line, and allow 30-40 minutes to soak up the mood.

It’s pretty good, though I hope not the best of its genre; there must be better stories in this vein. Blackwood deserves credit for the fascinating setting– a weird island of willow bushes in a swampy area of the Danube just downstream from Pressburg (the present-day Bratislava, Slovakia). The story itself takes a bit too long to develop for my tastes, and the climax could have been a bit weirder.

Actually, maybe Peter Erdélyi can weigh in on this supposed swampy area of the Danube. Peter?

I’ve been to Bratislava myself, way back in summer 2001. It was a nice long Central Europe trip, featuring my first-ever visits to Warsaw, Krakow, Budapest, Bratislava, Brno, and Vienna.

Not sure if it’s ancestral memory, or what exactly, but I rarely feel so comfortable as when in that part of the world. Other places may excite me more, but none feel as much like home– and that includes eastern Iowa, Chicago, and Cairo, the three places where I’ve spent the most time.

check-in

It was a nice dinner last night– Moroccan food beside the Nile with three of the most pleasant people I know, all of them Egyptians. There were various things to celebrate for all the various people present, and the mood was upbeat and benevolent just as we should always be hoping for.

The other nice thing is that I had never been to this particular hotel, and going there filled in a strange blank on my map of Cairo experiences; the place isn’t that far off my usual beaten path, but for some reason I’d just never felt like turning in that particular direction. But in fact it’s a wonderful area with a previously unsuspected surplus of trees, and when you live in Egypt trees start to become a pleasant surprise when you encounter a large number of them together.

In fact, trees are on the list of objects that have played a greatly reduced role in my life since moving here. Coins would also be on the list, since this has been such a predominantly paper money country that people nearly roll their eyes when you try to pay with the not-so-common coins that are in circulation.

Pens and notebooks are another thing in shorter supply here than elsewhere. The notebooks, I can understand for the reason indicated above… trees just don’t exist here in abundance, and thus paper products are not nearly as ubiquitous as they are in the USA. (Restaurants with pancakes also give you the tiniest trace amount of maple syrup, but there probably isn’t even one maple tree in the entire country.)

Last week in Alexandria I had some sudden philosophy ideas and wanted to write them down. The search for a notebook took literally 10 minutes, and succeeded only because someone used “connections” with his cousin to dig one up for me from the bottom of some storage cabinet. Stranger still, all they could find me was a laughably cute little Mickey Mouse notebook from China that could be concealed in the palm of my hand if I so wished.

It is for this reason that the latest breakthroughs in object-oriented philosophy are merrily scrawled in a notebook that has the following words printed on the cover:

“Have a ball..

Happy Time!

MICKEY PROJECT

Mickey is rich in protein and
calcium which help build the
musclesyou need to throw
a ball or climb a tree”