[From A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad]

When I presented my self to be examined for master the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face in gray, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.

He commenced operations with an easy going “Let’s see. H’m. Suppose you tell me all you know of charter-parties.” He kept it up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in hand. It was very interesting. “What’s your idea of a jury-rudder now?” he queried, suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a point of stowage.

I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before, when in command of a three-thousand-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance imaginable. “May be of use to you some day,” he concluded. “You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam.”

There he was wrong. I never went into steam—not really. (more…)

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading Conrad’s Nostromo. Recent events have caused me to wonder if perhaps our President also did so. (more…)

There was a Star Trek episode where a planet-ruling computer had all the citizens under mind control and everyone behaved in plodding, sedate manner. The human temperment couldn’t endure a full duty cycle of dullness however, so the computer programmed a periodic Red Hour during which people smashed windows and raped women. As a child, Red Hour seemed a bit too fantastic. Now, I see that that it was too realistic. (link)

“Jews of European descent living on opposite sides of the globe are more closely related to one another than they are to their fellow countrymen, according to the largest study ever conducted of what it means genetically to be Jewish. Ashkenazis, the primary group descended from European Jews, are all as closely related as fourth or fifth cousins would be, the study found.”

—Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times