Miscellaneous blogging
And, of course, we loved books. Books were the thing. Portable, durable, inexpensive—a marvel of technology, needing no intermediary save spectacles; that can be exceptionally beautiful, and may become valuable. Above all—free spirited, subversive, difficult to police.
Christopher Logue, Prince Charming.
[Written for another purpose and not used. May as well blog it.]
According to the relevant chronicles, a thousand years ago Irish monks used to have themselves set adrift in a boat with no sail or rudder, that God might choose where they would end up. You might think that only a devotion to some higher calling would induce anyone to throw themselves at the mercy of fortune’s good graces with no reliable means of setting a heading and such eejits are not to be found nowadays.
In 1932, one Robert Edison Fulton Jr., trying to impress an attractive woman in London, said that he intended to ride home to the United States on a motorcycle. The president of the Douglas motorcycle company was present, and offered him a bike for the trip. When Fulton later regained consciousness in Turkey, he examined the evidence and concluded that the bridge he had been crossing was unfinished. Examining his motorcycle, he found that “the only damage I could find was a slightly bent front fork which thereafter tended to turn the machine in circles to the right.”