Saturday. Our usual postman is away in Dominica with his girlfriend. The stand in delivers four magazines. The New Yorker, The LRB, The NYRB and The Economist. Seems magazines are like buses - they all show up at once. It's the St Andrews film festival. 'The Font' goes into town for the first showing of a movie about an island. It turns out to be about the death of a fisherman on a Sabbath observing island ... on the Sabbath. This I'm told, on 'The Fonts' return , was 'very interesting'. 'The Font' doesn't stay for the question and answer session afterwards on Hebridean rites of death and passage. Tickets are bought for the screening of a Latvian Soviet realist cartoon about a man and his dog . It remains to be seen whether this will appear as interesting when the screening date rolls around. https://vimeo.com/764516710
Left alone I pick up the New Yorker. The New Yorker comes, without fail, once a week. I usually glance at the cover and put it in the soon to be forgotten ' read later' pile. Why we subscribe , and have done so for years and years , is something of a mystery. Somehow, the magazine has survived unchallenged the annual ' Do you read it ? I don't ' culling of subscriptions.
The magazine falls open at an article on flying cars. This is not a subject that figures on the list of things I wish I knew more about but the language is welcoming and the technical details are addressed with a 'who'd have believed it ?' openness that brings you along rather than shuts you out. The inventor of this particular make of flying car is described as 'tall, restless and rangy'. He says 'there are two things that will put us out of business - running out of money and killing people in our planes'. Guess he's right on that.
Bees again :https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/
9 comments:
Gail and Nobby eagerly await Angus's review of the Latvian Soviet realist cartoon which, judging by the trailer, looks 'different'...
I think I'd like to see a little more of the Latvian Soviet realist cartoon trailer before I bought tickets.
The sheep look supremely contented - the cauliflower leaves must be the equivilent of fine dining.
The article on animal and insect consciousness was most interesting, a fascinating field of study.
Croissant lovers might find this article in today’s New York Times of interest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/world/europe/france-crookie-croissant-cookie.html
Such pretty sheep, you can always win with more photos of sheep. New Yorker persists, because people keep renewing. It appears that the future of personal aviation, will most likely be drones, again they need to work out the kinks so people don't die. It is about time, pilots are still training in planes designed in the late 1950's early 1960's. The planes I grew up flying in.
When I left New Jersey for Japan, my father gave me a subscription to the New Yorker so that I wouldn't forget where I came from. I read it cover to cover for many years, for exactly the reason you describe - I ended up reading many articles that held no particular interest for me ex ante but were so well-written that I read them anyway and learned things I wouldn't have otherwise. I let the subscription lapse when I lost the international "pouch" that brought me paper mail from the US. A digital New Yorker was somehow not the same. I enjoyed the article about animal consciousness.
The sheep certainly know how to make their way through a field of cauliflower. Years ago the New Yorker was a must-read for me; I've not found it of any interest for some time.
The digital New Yorker is a treasure trove of deep catalogue for access to great writing and revisiting events and topics over the decades. The paper weekly for the cartoons continues to be must read on arrival for me as a long time subscriber.
Thirty years later, I still look forward to the weekly arrival of our New Yorker. First we share the cartoons, then I read two or three articles and stash the magazine away. Every so often, when the pile in the bookcase gets too high, I'll strip off favorite covers and perhaps a favorite article...and begin again.
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