Month: September 2005

C.S. Forester wrote other seafaring historical novels besides the Hornblower books. To the Indies is a retelling of Christopher Columbus’s third journey to America by a Catalan lawyer who accompanies the (now) Admiral on a fact-finding mission for the crown. Published in July 1940, this one hasn’t stood the test of time quite so well.…

Read on →

Fun morning spent watching part of the San Francisco Grand Prix bike race. I checked the final results and saw that, as expected, the lone racer out in front of the pack for several laps was gobbled up. In fact, the lone race – Michael Creed of the Discovery Channel team – didn’t even finish.…

Read on →

When you’re in the mood for definitive history, pick up N. A. M. Rodger’s The Command of the Ocean, subtitled “A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815.” Like most of the non-historian audience for this book, my entrypoint to the “wooden world” was Horatio Hornblower and, more recently, Jack Aubrey. (The Wooden World is the title…

Read on →

I haven’t wondered, as some apparently have, why people choose to live in New Orleans where hurricanes were such a known threat. Here’s one funny/angry response. I’m sitting in the heart of the “big f***ing earthquakes” section. I’ve never been to New Orleans, but I do wonder just what the nation will pay to rebuild…

Read on →

Jim Fallows in the NYTimes explains why postal mail has not gone away, and won’t, even in the internet age. “Two-thirds of all consumers do not expect to receive personal mail, but when they do, it makes their day,” it concluded. “This ‘hope’ keeps them coming back each day.” Even in this age of technology,…

Read on →

Not quite sure what went wrong today, but the kids were at their worst today. Everything started off normally for a Saturday, and life was normal through mid-morning. Somewhere before lunch, both the boy and the girl just seemed to lose it, and most of the rest of the day was a wreck, with crying,…

Read on →