Books

As I have pretty much given up hope that anyone (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Feith, etc.) will ever be held accountable for their terrible war crimes and impeachable actions I will change the subject to books. I have recently read two very fine books (there isn't much else to do here at Sandhill in the winter).

There is an interesting book entitled simply Heat by Bill Buford. Buford was (is?) a writer and editor and also an amateur cook. He decided he wanted to know more about cooking and volunteered to work as a kitchen "slave" in Mario Batali's three star restaurant, Babbo. So he did so and eventually worked his way up to line cook. Wanting to learn still more he went to Italy where he interned in other restaurants learning the secrets of pasta and Italian cooking. Finally, he interned with one of the greatest Italian butchers to learn the art of butchering. If you are interested in such things this is a truly fascinating book that gives one insights into how these really fine restaurants manage to succeed and is quite entertaining besides.

I also read In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. This is an account of the terrible voyage of the whaleship Essex that was the inspiration and basis for Melville's Moby Dick. It is a gripping true story of how the Essex was rammed by an 85 foot Sperm Whale and sunk. The crew began a 93 day long, miserable, journey in three whaleboats trying to save themselves. Eventually they were forced to result to cannibalism to survive, and a few of them actually did survive. Some even returned to sea once more. This is an absolutely incredible tale of human survival under the harshest conditions imaginable and tells you a great deal about the hardships of the whaling industry and the central place of Nantucket in it during the early 1800's. I heartily recommend it. In fact, I found it much more compelling that Moby Dick which I think is a terribly overrated novel (unless, perhaps, you have some obsessive interest in the anatomy of whales).

For reasons I will not elucidate at the moment, I have come to the conclusion that many, if not most, of the citizens of my northernmost county here in Idaho, believe that scientists are people who spend all of their time and energy trying to prevent them from doing what they wish (like killing all the wolves, and caribou, destroying the salmon runs, tearing up the countryside with their godawful ATV's, fouling our waters with their personal watercraft, logging all of the remaining old growth timber, and etc.). As they do not read and get all their information from comedian Rush Limbaugh (they do not realize he is actually a comedian) and each other, perhaps this is not surprising. On the positive side there are a few kindred souls here and they seem to be increasing year after year. I sometimes wish that Gates, Buffet, Soros, or that crazy Englishman whose name I cannot immediately recall, or someone else like that would simply buy the state of Idaho and bring it into the 20th century (I think it would be impossible to try for the 21st century, at least right now).