Friday Odds & Sods Working All Day, Every Day

Another week brings the arrival of summer and with it the near midway point of another year.  I hope that the arrival of another season finds you well, Dear Reader, and that you are reading this in a beach chair or at least a comfortable hammock.  I, unfortunately, have been forced to spend this week in the drudgery that, alas! all too often makes up the majority of one's waking life.  But never fear! Friday Odds & Sods is here to provide a brief moment of living wakefulness as we move on into July

• As the poet said, he who speaks another language gains another soul. Of course, even the most fluent speaker must sometimes acknowledge that there are certain gaps of nuance that prevent complete mastery.  How then, a student might ask, are we to cope?
• A graphic that succinctly shows how Wikipedia is the most awful (in the original sense of the term) website ever.
• Finally two articles about the intersection between public memory, politics, good taste, and morality: The coming battle over Confederate monuments, and one man's obsessive collection of Hitler memorabilia.

Saturday Odds & Sods Will Never Let You Down, Baby

I hope, dear reader, you will forgive me for a late update to your weekly roundup of all the content fit to aggregate, or what a more naive age would have called steal.  It is a gloomy Saturday afternoon in the Metropolis, but a quiet and calm one, and for that I am grateful. Indeed, as some wise philosopher observed, the first sign of aging is the desire no longer to carouse on a Saturday but instead to see to domestic comforts.  Be that as it may, dear reader, I hope your weekend has gone well and will continue to go well, and will be at least marginally improved by this week's Odds & Sods.

• Two items on the misuse and abuse of the truth for political ends: The cinema under the Nazis and the mental gymnastics of climate change deniers. 
• On the lighter side of politics, a history of how Taft attempted to unseat Teddy's Bear as the nation's stuffed animal of choice.   
• The ability to choose when to die through doctor-assisted suicide is one of those topics that everyone has an opinion on and yet has probably not done much thinking about. This article, on the unforeseen consequences of legalized physician-assisted suicide in Belgium, thus serves as a useful corrective.  

The Guard Dies, It Does Not Surrender

Some mood music to get started with.

Napoleon Bonaparte was by all accounts a most exceptional man.  Indeed, such a statement seems laughably insufficient when presented with the plain facts of his biography.  One man rises from absolute obscurity in the remotest backwater of the Mediterranean to the supreme height of power, overthrows century-old dynasty, rewrites the map of Europe to his whim, makes even his brothers, sisters, in-laws, friends into glorious monarchs--and then in a reverse that could come straight from Sophocles, he dares much, loses more, and after one last grand bid for glory, is left abject on the remotest rock in the Atlantic.  

On The Banks of the Gyoll

Apologies, Dear Readers, for the lack of posting last week.  Just as the swallows return to Capistrano and the bankers to the Hamptons, so to does the summer mark my return to my ancestral stomping grounds in the Sunny South.  Unfortunately, divers distractions and a desire for a bit of unproductive, unhurried leisure kept me from my customary literary pursuits and robbed you of new content from your no-doubt favorite blog author.

Of course, the primary issue with free time is finding something to fill it.  And surely you know enough of  your host by now to guess that many long Southern afternoons would find me in tearing through the pages of a good book.  And in the spirit of summer's beachside paperback thrillers, I too turned from my usual academic fare for a rousing tale of action and mystery: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe.   Set in the incredibly distant far future of South America where the Sun has turned red and begun to die, the story follow Severian, a journeyman of the Torturer's Guild, as he unknowingly becomes a key player in a series of events that will save or damn the world.

Pictured: The Dying Sun.  Not Pictured: Surviving Life

Of course, the proof of the tale is in the telling, and the above could be the basis for a plodding sequence of pointless melodrama.  But Wolfe is a master of his art and know how to make the alien world really feel alien.  One technique that is particularly effective is Wolfe's word choice, which instead of taking the usual path of the genre writer and simply inventing terms for a story's monsters, mythology, and the like, pulls from the obscure vocabulary of prehistoric behemoths, medieval armaments, and classical mythology, frequently even leaving your humble correspondent reaching for a dictionary. For instance, rather than the world being infested with ogres or orcs, it is wild smilodons and megatherium stalking the hinterlands of Severian's world.