A Green Heron (Butorides virescens) demonstrates that it knows how to use bread for fishing.

Russia: 19th Century — 21st Century

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Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

NYT story:

A group of Sunni militants attending a suicide bombing training class at a camp north of Baghdad were killed on Monday when their commander unwittingly conducted a demonstration with a belt that was packed with explosives, army and police officials said.

The militants belonged to a group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which is fighting the Shiite-dominated army of the Iraqi government, mostly in Anbar Province. But they are also linked to bomb attacks elsewhere and other fighting that has thrown Iraq deeper into sectarian violence.

Twenty-two ISIS members were killed, and 15 were wounded, in the explosion at the camp, which is in a farming area in the northeastern province of Samara, according to the police and army officials.

Simon Kuper, last year, in the Financial Times, pondered the reasons behind Parisians’ notorious rudeness and concluded that being Parisian takes so much effort that everyone is perennially in a bad mood.

It’s the eternal paradox of Paris: why is the world’s most charming metropolis also the most unfriendly? As the universal phrase goes, “I love Paris. I just hate Parisians.”

When I moved here in 2002, I rejected that view. I was determined to learn Parisian codes. I knew this city has a complex etiquette. I thought that once I’d learnt the importance of saying bonjour at every encounter, or of not walking into a restaurant demanding dinner at 6pm while wearing shorts, I would gradually break through Parisian rudeness.

It was my mission. More than a decade later, I can say: beneath the snooty unfriendly façade, Paris is a snooty, unfriendly city. I can even explain why. …

[T]he strongest explanatory variable for Parisian rudeness (and I’m aghast it’s taken me a decade to work this out) is Paris’s very perfection. If you overlay an intellectual capital on an artistic and fashion capital in a former royal capital, all of it in the country that invented how to eat, there are so many codes governing so many behaviours that the demands of sophistication become all-encompassing. No other city makes so many requirements. Every moment of their lives, even at family breakfast or in bed, Parisians must observe the rules that govern eating, talking, thinking, dressing, making love et cetera. There’s even a generally approved life-long pose: never seem surprised; bored is much better.

In Paris, Big Brother (often in the form of oneself or one’s spouse) is always watching to see if you commit a faux pas. Whenever you do, he’ll let you know – perhaps with a silence, or a pained glance away. There is no intimate Paris where you can slob out in old underpants. (Admittedly, Parisian dress codes are less strict than in, say, Italy. Most of the time here it’s OK to look dowdy – though never weird.) In all, Paris is a nightmare of sophistication. Only in one field of local endeavour do no rules apply: driving.

Nor are Parisians allowed to laugh off their codes. My native informant Sophie-Caroline de Margerie – top civil servant, writer, fashionable Parisienne et cetera – says: “I’ve never met a bona fide French eccentric.” There is a right way to do everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you were born. All the French provincials, Africans and romantics from everywhere who land here battle to adapt, sometimes forever. You try to be Parisian, to meet all the standards of perfection that mark this city, and so you sneer at anyone who falls short – for instance, by sitting down at the next restaurant table wearing the wrong jacket. Paris is a sneer. This attitude was summed up by the definitive Parisian film, Dîner de Cons (“Dinner of Fools”, 1998): a bunch of stylish Parisians hold a weekly dinner to which they each invite an unknowing con, “a fool”, in order to crow over their cons’ appearance, tastes, conversation etc. Parisian life is like a dîner de cons except that nobody would ever really invite the poor cons to dinner.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Nas = “wet — Schnee = “snow” — Lawine = “avalanche”

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Samuel Beckett, circa 1970

Mark O’Connell explains, in Slate, how one line buried in one of Samuel Beckett’s obscure modernist works of prose pessimism rather miraculously escaped its confined context to become adopted as a Zen slogan by optimist achievers in Silicon Valley… and on the tennis circuit.

Stanislas Wawrinka’s defeat of Rafael Nadal in the final of the Australian Open last weekend was a milestone not just in the career of a 28-year-old Swiss tennis player but also in the posthumous life of one of the 20th century’s most unswervingly pessimistic writers. This is the first time a Grand Slam title has ever been won by a player with a Samuel Beckett quotation tattooed on his body (barring some unexpected revelation that, say, Ivan Lendl got himself a Waiting for Godot–themed tramp stamp before beating John McEnroe in the 1984 French Open final). The words in question, inked in elaborately curlicued script up the length of Wawrinka’s inner left forearm, are these: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

The quotation is from Worstward Ho, a late, fragmentary prose piece that is one of the most tersely oblique things Beckett ever wrote. But those six disembodied imperatives, from the text’s opening page, have in their strange afterlife as a motivational meme come to much greater prominence than the text itself. The entrepreneurial class has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a battle cry for a startup culture in which failure has come to be fetishized, even valorized. Sir Richard Branson, that affable old sage of private enterprise and bikini-based publicity shoots, has advocated from on high the benefits of Failing Better. He breaks out the quote near the end of an article about the future of his multinational venture capital conglomerate, telling us with characteristic self-assurance that it comes “from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly.”

Hat tips to Steve Bodio and the Dish.

Wawrinka‘s tattoo.

The kind of thing I would have done at his age.

Dr. Thompson, with gun, on bike.

In 2008, James Poulos (who takes the aesthetic Bohemian approach to American political life) bought into Barack Obama’s BS. He knows better now and can be found wistfully imagining the fun if Dr. Thompson was still around to observe and comment on the hideous smoking-and-burning wreck that the current administration has made of both the American economy and democratic government. Picture Hunter Thompson, stoned on several different potent substances, writing up an essay, which Rolling Stone could not bring itself to decline, on Michelle Obama’s covert 50th Birthday Party, conducted in the manner of Elagabulus, but obligingly neglected by the lapdogs of the MSM.

Hunter Thompson is fun and easy to abuse for one’s own political purposes, but we are woefully all the poorer for having lost him in 2005, before he had a chance to discover that the power dynamic he railed against at the peak of his powers was still with us, smarter and dumber than ever. …

[T]here are now so few Democrats with even a wistful, nostalgic connection to the days when Freak Power thrived on the left. On a bad day, the landscape resembles a shameful two-species ecosystem: old corporatist behemoths casting long shadows over flea-bitten packs of communists so young and frustrated that they’re always on the verge of bursting into tears. …

We were on the back half of the Bush years. Something new, possibly even wonderful, would soon be in sight. Sure enough, the impossible happened—Hillary Clinton was beat, fair and square, by someone so sonorous about the possibilities of choice and resilience that he received the Kennedy stamp of approval, and then America’s.

Innocent times. Now, that special someone has left the crown of hope in the gutter, overwhelmed and infected by the propaganda of neediness and choicelessness that fuels the rule of fear over so much of our daily life. Progress has somehow gone from an inspiring option to an individual mandate—a grim necessity we are obliged to grind out. …

This was the touchstone of Obama ’08. Now it goes all but untouched. There was a dazzling gonzo streak to Obama’s insurgent campaign—a sense not of historical inevitability but of people, real people, going off on an incredible tangent, so crazy it just might work. The mood of the moment was nearly the opposite of today’s Obama, with his nationalistic claptrap about how “America doesn’t stand still.”

No, Mr. President, we don’t. We shift with unease from one foot to the other. We fretfully pace the floor. America is becoming a waiting room.

We’re waiting for more shoes to drop. The nagging, nervous energy that dominates our personal and political lives belies the harsh lesson of executive action: the more constant the crisis, the more impotent it is apt to grow.

Two hundred years ago, the French liberal Benjamin Constant saw the same pathology in Napoleon Bonaparte’s waning days of despotism. Trapped in the cycle of permanent emergency and perpetual action, he wrote, “servitude has no rest, agitation no pleasure.”

An anonymous recon marine writes:

It’s freezing here. I’m sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, along the Dar’yoi Pomir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave.

Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I’ve actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but the scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.

The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that’s where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy.

I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, and shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware. …

I’ve been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtuns, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure:

These guys, all of ’em, are Huns . . . actual, living Huns . . . they LIVE to fight. It’s what they do. It’s ALL they do.

They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor for each other, nor for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life.

They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor.

Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other’s barbarism. Cavemen with AK-47’s.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.