This will hurt me...

Ezra is always keen on getting up close and personal with the wildlife. Henry, well Henry prefers to keep his distance…

A thirst for knowledge begins early, and is the mark of a remarkable person. Being interested is one path to being interesting . My boys are interesting .

Who knew when taking this photograph this morning, on the brief walk to the bus stop, that such a transformation would occur? Destiny thrusts herself – like a drunken and horny uni student – upon me! Prudency and constraints of time render it difficult to expand, but in some respects I feel like Napoleon after the Egyptian expedition . France is in dire straits. Rudderless, she drifts toward a precipice. In times of disorder, opportunities present themselves. Does one seize power from such disarray? Might one better consolidate one’s own position amongst a cabal of like-minded souls? Decisions, decisions. Interesting times are afoot...

I found yesterday a very nifty little application – Wordle – that lets you generate ‘word clouds’ for just about anything you like. For the uninitiated, word clouds are simply groupings of words with the most-frequently-used words in the larger, bolder font. The visual effect of the grouping is that of a cloud. Now, I decided to whack in all of the words that I have posted on this blog over the past couple of months and see what shows up. In my defence, each post has “posted by Kris McCracken”, so I am not SO vain as to refer to myself quite as frequently as the word cloud suggests. [I have had a little trouble with the HTML on this, so have posted the cloud as a JPG file for the moment. Hopefully I can get it sorted at some point.]

Worth a gander is the blog of a very interesting fellow living in Westminster, London, describing his daily experiences of music, women, pubs and clubs, the usual stuff. Only this blog is concerned with events that took place 343 years ago. Now, the blog has apparently been going since 2003, but I’ve only just stumbled across it. You’ve probably heard of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned seventeenth century diarist. Beginning his diary at a critical point in the history of Britain (1660), Pepys left perhaps the most important primary source for the English Restoration period. What makes Pypes so interesting outside of academia is the way that he recorded his daily life for almost ten years with remarkable honesty. No doubt this was made easier with the assumption that his thoughts would not become available for open discussion! Yet he recorded the women that he pursued, his friends, his enemies, and his public and private dealings. As with all great diaries, he reveals his jeal...

A very interesting discussion can be found in the New Yorker around the American Civil War and the impact of the resultant deaths on the US. Adam Gopnik's essay "In the mourning store" is well worth a read. Gopnik's essay revolves around three new works that explore the war and the impact of death on US society: Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War ; Mark S. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death ; and Mark E. Neely Junior's The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction . Especially interesting to me is how - in order to deal with the horrors of war - new forms of social ritual emerged. As Gopnik points out, these rituals were "designed not so much to 'blind' survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble". In many respects, this has been echoed in most subsequent wars. Even more interesting to me is the reflec...