solidarity

I'm trying out a new icon; the relevant background story is here.

I can actually understand why the local officials in Tikrit should deem the sculpture inappropriate for display in the grounds of an orphanage that is government property. I've no quibbles with that.

Where my hackles rise, however, is on discovering that Laith al-Amari's sculpture wasn't just removed but destroyed. Book burning, anyone?

So, in order it not be entirely destroyed, I'm adopting it as one of my icons.

book #3

While looking for something else at the local library -- a research item for Bogus Science -- I spotted Tim M. Berra's Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man (2009) on the Recent Acquisitions display. Since I remembered enjoying Berra's Evolution and the Myth of Creationism and since I'd just finished reading James Scott Bell's dire pro-Intelligent Design novel The Darwin Conspiracy (more about which later), and since I realized I'd never read a Darwin bio, and since Berra's new book is even more concise than the title suggests . . . well, home it went.

This is a really jolly little book, beautifully designed with lots of illustrations, and very nicely written. Based on a lecture Berra's apparently been delivering at regular intervals for some while, it gave me just enough for it to qualify as a genuine biography without very much excess. Plenty of interesting facts came out -- for example, I hadn't realized (or, more accurately, hadn't remembered) that the Beagle's voyage lasted just short of five years, or that Darwin laboured a full eight years of his prime working life classifying 10,000 species of barnacles ("I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he declared midway through), or that Darwin shared the same birthday, February 12 1809, with Abraham Lincoln -- a black day for bigots everywhere! And so on.

I'm quite reluctant to let the book go back to the library, in fact. At some point when I'm feeling a bit richer (its cover price of $20 is quite steep for something so small, however much it may be perfectly formed) I must pick up my very own copy to cuddle and cosset.