Day: August 20, 2007

I just finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (this is why I’m not asleep), and I think it’s easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. I only hope that I can put some of what he writes about into practice in my own life and eating habits:

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

I’m reading, among other things, Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue. He writes:

The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees (“John Cheese”). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight.

I find this interesting because, as it happens, John Cleese‘s father’s surname reportedly was “Cheese” before he joined the British Army in 1915, and his son could have easily been John Cheese.

An interesting observation in today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to explore the planets of our solar system….It’s the birthday of a man who would have shuddered at the thought of the Voyager missions into space: H.P. [Howard Phillips] Lovecraft.

Keillor also notes that Lovecraft’s “work had a big influence on Stephen King,” but I think that’s probably an over-simplification, if not maybe even misleading. It’s unclear how much a real debt King’s work owes to Lovecraft, and, as
I’ve noted here before, King will be the first to point out some of the real weaknesses in Lovecraft’s work.

But, still, in honor of the man: The Dream-Quest of Pooh Corner.