Wenchypoo explains here why she skips Thanksgiving and Christmas entirely. It is more interesting and more convincing than John Grisham.
I would never consider doing that, because I love the holidays. Blessing and I were talking about that yesterday. She said that people who are miserable at the holidays and don’t enjoy them shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate them.
I see her point.
I questioned how that could be arranged.
She thought that an official card would do it. It would explain that because they had a bad attitude and were spoiling the holiday, they would henceforth be forbidden to celebrate it. It could be handed over to people like a parking ticket.
I am still reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, interspersing it with novels (right now, the excellent 77 Clocks by Christopher Fowler). But yesterday I was reviewing a new science series, and I was stunned.
It was Millikin’s Kingdoms of Life. I was startled to learn that viruses aren’t necessarily living things, and that the position of oldest, biggest living thing in the world is no longer held by redwood trees, but by a 38-acre, 100 ton fungus.
But it was not the facts that most amazed me.
It was the drama of the whole thing. Oh, the animal kingdom has its drama of course. In the book on the subject one could find venomous platypi, indifferent amphibian parents, and fabulously successful arthropods. Not my words. These books make the whole panoply of life sound like a soap opera.
The protista throw up a fruited body now and then, even if they only resort to sex when under stress.
But perhaps the grandest image of all was that of the great battle among the monera. The new, aerobic bacteria arose — and I don’t think any operas have been written about this yet — and the anaerobic monera were cast out, dying in their thousands as the atmosphere became charged with oxygen, till the few miserable survivors slunk off to live in swamps, the depths of the ocean where the water is 400 degrees hot, and the digestive tracts of mammals.
Don’t feel sorry for them. They would, the author assures us, “feel at home in a flask of boiling hydrochloric acid.” But can’t you just see Mel Gibson doing this story?
Oh, and when they get to the saga of the spirochetes — !
May your holiday preparations be less dramatic than that. Oh, and not involve any monera. Or protista.
wenchy brings a very good point but isn’t it up to us to revert to what the tradition means?…
Series? Book or magazine? One of the most dramatic ways of describing viruses that I’ve read is that of agents of evolutionary change. Catch a virus – adapt or die. No wonder no one has found the cure for the common cold yet.
I am working toward getting all the Bryson books. First discovered them in the wonderful bookshop in Iowa City – hardly surprising seeing as how he hails from Iowa – but thought that I’d might go over my luggage weight allowance if I gave in to my instinct to buy up all his books then and there. At the moment I have 4 – the 2 I mentioned plus A Walk in the Woods (which has got me thinking about visiting somewhere in New England the next time I go a-wandering) and ‘I’m a Stranger Here Myself’ which was very appropriate reading when I was a-wandering last time.
The next time I get the opportunity to watch righthanded Americans use knives and forks, I’m going to pay close attention for any possible cutlery juggling.
I like holidays, but I wouldn’t mind hiring someone else to do the decorating, if I could afford such a wonderful luxury.
Right now I am upset over the holidays, but have planned my triumphant (?) return home for Christmas so as not to sit about and brood all day.