Dear friends,

In London this past weekend I saw a man driving what I think was the Trojan 200 version of the Heinkel Kabine down the street in Soho. He was met by spontaneous cheers (from pedestrians) and gleeful honks (from cars). Forget resuscitating the woolly mammoth: I think we should bring back small extinct things, like those three-wheeler cars and the North African forest elephant (only about 8 feet high at the shoulder)! Joy demands it.

I hadn’t heard the term Cadmean victory before last week; it’s pretty much the same as a Pyrrhic victory, just ~2000 years earlier. (Herodotus dates the mythical king Cadmus to about 2000 BC; Pyrrhus of Epirus lived about 300 BC; so we’re overdue for a replacement phrase meaning “a victory that is actually a loss”. I’m sure no suitable candidates for a new eponym spring immediately to mind, something that name can be put on that’s actually representative.)

“Corydon and Thyrsis are favorite names given to shepherds by writers of pastoral poetry. So also, Phyllis and Thestylis are names often applied to rustic maidens or shepherdesses.”

Top ten most unusual rocks.

Last weekend was also London Gallery Weekend, and I managed to get to a half-dozen or so galleries, breaking up my usual London routine of fabric shops, bookstores, and museums. Including Christie’s, which they just … let you walk into? [After a thorough security check, where the extremely genial guard held on to my two-inch eyeglass screwdriver as a precautionary measure. Then, when I picked it up, he explained to me in great detail—unsolicited—the differences between winning the lottery in the US and the UK. A+ interaction, would engage again.] At Christie’s I got to see some truly outstanding contemporary art from the Middle East, including Boushra Almutawakel's Mother, Daughter and Doll. I don’t go to galleries as much as I go to museums, and the idea of being able to buy the art (well, in theory, most of what I saw was far beyond any budget I could set) was somehow disconcerting. (I’m running out of links, but other artists whose work I really enjoyed included Kat Lyons and Alice Macdonald.)

Stay well!

Your friend,

Erin