Correspondence: Behold!

When the four got back to the hut, they were barely
recognizable. These were all men in their 20s and 30s...
they look ancient, weather-worn and leathery, almost
like those prehistoric bodies dug up from peat bogs.

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Behold! An enjoyable newspaper article. “Spirits of the South Pole” [Charles McGrath, NY Times Magazine, July 21, 2011]. Excerpt:

“It’s daft,” a man settled in a Glasgow pub said to me not long ago, talking about the sums that rare Scotch whiskies sometimes fetch at auction — the bottle of Dalmore 64-year-old, for example, that sold last month for nearly $200,000. “If you pay that much, you canna drink it, and wha’s the use a just lookin’ at the bottle?”....
    For $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one: whisky fabricated to resemble the whisky that the explorer Ernest Shackleton took with him to the Antarctic so long ago that people had forgotten all about it. In February 2007, workers trying to restore Shackleton’s hut there accidentally came across three cases of Scotch — “Rare old Highland malt whisky, blended and bottled by Chas. Mackinlay & Co.” — frozen in the permafrost....
    Shackleton would have loved the idea of a replica whisky. An improvident man, always in debt, he was partial to get-rich-quick schemes, including a Hungarian gold mine. By today’s standards, he was an unlikely explorer, with little scientific training or interest. He wasn’t even particularly enthralled by snow and ice. What motivated him was the lure of fame and wealth, and exploration was the best way he knew to get them. Shackleton’s great gift was his personality. He was irresistibly charming, especially to women, and for his time — he was born in 1874 — was a highly advanced adulterer, who liked sharing his girlfriends with their husbands. Men adored him, too, in part because he ignored social hierarchy and treated everyone the same. He was an instinctive, natural leader who somehow inspired others to share impossible hardships with him....
    The whole Nimrod expedition was almost comically ill equipped, partly because it was underfinanced but also because of Shackleton’s stubbornness. He believed in doing things the hard way — in manly, British fashion. Norwegian explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen had already demonstrated that the best way to get around in the polar regions was to use cross-country skis and to have sled dogs pull the supplies. Shackleton had skis, but neither he nor anyone on his team could be bothered to really learn how to use them. Robert Scott, whose 1901 Discovery expedition included Shackleton, detested dogs, because they had the ungentlemanly habit of eating their own excrement, and Shackleton seems to have inherited the prejudice. For the Nimrod expedition, he took along Manchurian ponies, who sank in the snow up to their bellies and proved more useful as food than as transport, and a motorcar, which repeatedly became stuck in the drifts. For most of the journey, he and his men pulled their own sledges, as Scott’s team had, sometimes trudging through waist-deep snow.
    There was no fresh fruit or vegetables, but in all there were 25 cases of whisky — for warmth and a little perk-up, presumably — along with 12 of brandy and 6 of port....
    Shackleton thought that the trip to the South Pole and back would take about 90 days, but in the end he was gone for 122, most of them miserable.... [read more]

A daughter is visiting her father and asks him how he likes the iPad she gave him for his birthday: The video is in German but I think you’ll get it:
http://www.snotr.com/embed/ 8965

This is very clever!

Ah, these Britishers! “England toil as Warner gives Australia control on day one of fourth Test” [Vic Marks, Guardian, December 26]. [read article]
    “It was a curate’s egg of a day” when Australia defended “as resolutely as a kangaroo does her joeys.” This is even more impenetrable than the usual description of a cricket match (test) in British newspapers, topping it for incomprehension – a result of assigning literary guys to sports reporting? Impenetrable and incomprehensible in the States.
    You can skip the kangaroo’s joeys; it is a less interesting, colonial metaphor. But the curate’s egg is excellent to describe an ironic, if not cowardly, mixture of good and bad, worth using by Americans today.
    How about: On the whole, the Trump presidency has been a curate’s egg of good and bad. Good description of Trump and US media coverage?
    Vic Mark actually meant to say that it was a lousy Boxing Day – an unmitigated disaster? – for the English national cricket team, which was being trounced by Australia, ironically stating “It was a curate’s egg of a day.” (Check out “Boxing Day” in wikipedia, as well as “Curate’s egg,” which was a caption of a cartoon in Punch magazine in 1895. This is a bad egg that cannot have partly good parts, as the junior clergyman says to his bishop at breakfast; it is by definition completely bad.)

Happy New Year!

The Peace of Wild Things,
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Ravens of the Tower of London

Many years ago, I observed two crows on the grass in the shade of a small tree. They stood right next to each other for over an hour and at one point one of the crows raised and placed a wing over the other, like a human would put his arm around another.

I saw a van ahead displaying stickers that seemed to announce, “We are dog people.” But when I drew closer, I saw that the two stickers were:

which reminded me of the dyslexic atheist who didn’t believe in Dog.

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle