Concerning Forests and Tools
Photo by Jim Champion
If I’m ever allowed to return to England, I want to visit the New Forest, which has been a royal forest since just a few years after the Battle of Hastings. The people who care for the Forest are called verderers, and those who assist the verderers with the care of animals are called agisters. The agisters are especially focused on caring for the semi-feral New Forest Ponies.
Before William’s arrival, the area including the New Forest was called Ytene, which somehow — there is much folklore on this topic — provided a local word for “giant”: ettin. Tolkien knew this, of course, so he named the land where the trolls live the Ettenmoors. C. S. Lewis, also of course, borrowed this from Tolkien and named the giant-inhabited land north of the Kingdom of Narnia Ettinsmoor. I’m sure Tolkien was annoyed.
Elsewhere in England, and some decades ago: How English teenagers made a major geological discovery:
If [a boy named] Roger Mason really had found a fossil of a large, complex organism in rocks some 40 million years older than the beginning of the Cambrian Period, it would be one of the most significant geological discoveries of the 20th century. Ford gazed at the fern-like outline and mulled over this unlikely possibility. Mason’s rough graphite-and-paper rendering did raise intriguing questions. Could it really represent an ancient being from the deep Precambrian? If so, what kind of organism was it, and how did it relate to the bustling biota of the later Cambrian? And why had nobody spotted it before?
I wrote about why I’m not worried about the humanities.
And I wrote about delighting in my garden shears.
P.J. Ochlan is a voice actor who read How to Think — I mean, he read it aloud. Recorded it. For people to listen to. You know. Anyway, he did a fabulous job; P. J. has this friendly but gently ironic tone that I think is exactly right for that book. I am chuffed to learn that Penguin Random House has signed him up to read Breaking Bread with the Dead also. (See below.)
Maybe you’ve read enough about the coronavirus, and sometimes I feel that I have too, but I just have to go on record saying that in all this mess Ed Yong’s reporting has been deeply researched, incisive, clear, compelling, and little short of heroic.
Here’s a terrific brief explanation — by a Nobel Prize laureate in medicine no less — of why you should breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, especially in Covidtide.
Tim O’Neill, an atheist, writes for other atheists who embrace really bad history when they think it serves their cause. His recent essay on Hypatia of Alexandria is a classic.
Once upon a time, there was a Far Side cartoon that confused many readers. It has its own Wikipedia page. I find it useful to remember that there’s a Wikipedia editor out there who one day said to himself, “Wait, there’s no page for ‘Cow Tools’? THERE’S NO PAGE FOR ‘COW TOOLS’???”
