READING MATERIAL FOR AN ENDLESS WINTER

I found this intriguing place while writing the previous post. What can I say? It makes for interesting reading. It's a photo of the books on the Shackleton Expedition that became trapped in the ice and foundered there. I make the assumption that the odd pipe is the Charlie Noble and heated the space, at least a little, when the galley fires were lit.

The library, seen above in a photo by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, has been decoded for the first time-the Royal Geographic Society, working with Dutch digitizer Picturae, rescanned and analyzed the photo and was able to read the titles of the books for the first time.

In addition to Greely’s sad story, Shackleton carried the Encyclopedia Brittanica, plays by George Bernard Shaw, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and a lot more. The books, unfortunately, went to the bottom of the sea when the Endurance broke apart and sank on November 21, 1915. As most of you know, all 28 men survived.

Here’s the full list of books in the library:

Encyclopedia Britannica
Seven short plays by Lady Gregory
Perch of the devil by Getrude Atherton
Pip by Ian Hey
Plays: pleasant and unpleasant, Vol 2 Pleasant by G B Shaw
Almayer’s folly by Joseph Conrad
Dr Brewer’s readers handbook
The Brassbounder by David Bone
The case of Miss Elliott by Emmuska Orczy
Raffles by EW Hornung
The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett
Pros and cons: a newspaper reader’s and debater’s guide to the leading controversies of the day by JB Askew
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Woman’s view by Herbert Flowerdew
Thou Fool by JJ Bell
The Message of Fate by Louis Tracy
The Barrier by Rex Beach
Manual of English Grammar and Composition by Nesfield
A book of light verse
Oddsfish by Robert Hugh Benson
Poetical works of Shelley
Monsieur de Rochefort by H De Vere Stacpoole
Voyage of the Vega by Nordenskjold
The threshold of the unknown region by Clements Markham
Cassell’s book of quotations by W Gurney Benham
The concise Oxford dictionary
Chambers biographical dictionary
Cassell’s new German-English English-German dictionary
Chambers 20th Century dictionary
The northwest passage by Roald Amundsen
The voyage of the Fox in Arctic seas by McClintock
Whitaker’s almanac
World’s end by Amelie Rives
Potash and perlmutter by Montague Glass
Round the horn before the mast by A Basil Lubbock
The witness for the defence by AEW Mason
Five years of my life by Alfred Dreyfuss
The morals of Marcus Ordeyne by William J Locke
The rescue of Greely by Commander Winfield Scott Schley
United States Grinnell Expedition by Dr Kane
Three years of Arctic service by Greely
Voyage to the Polar Sea by Nares
Journal of HMS Enterprise by Collinson

Photo via the Royal Geographical Society

I suppose that all of the crew were glad they weren't playing tag with the Germans on the Somme by the time they got back and read up on the early days of the Great War. It remains interesting to wonder how many of them survived the Great War after wintering over in the Antarctic.

THE COLD EQUATIONS

This is a short story about traveling in space as reckoned about 4 years before NASA started putting together a government program to launch mankind into space. I read it long ago and was reminded of it again this evening. It has been a long time.

It won't be to everybody's taste.

ODERINT DUM METUANT

The United States has fired a number of mostly harmless cruise missiles into a Syrian airbase in retaliation for Assad being so incredibly stupid that he used sarin gas on harmless civilians and killed dozens of them even after being warned about using gas and being disarmed on that front by Obama and his silly plan to take all the chemical weapons out of Syria so nobody gets hurt in their civil war.

I'm not buying it. I don't believe Assad is so damned stupid that he would gas his own people again when he failed to gas ISIS when he had them in his bomb sights. I think we got played, again, by those wily evil terrorists who don't hesitate to gas women and children or burn airmen alive, kind of like what we just did to some more poor Syrian airmen with our cruise missile strikes on their base. Since Bush, we've been signalling with Tomahawks. How very retro.

Why would Assad use chemical weapons on harmless people? Who benefits? The evidence gathered by the notorious NSA must have been overwhelming if it showed positively that Assad ordered such an attack because anybody in the real world is scratching their head and wondering WTF?!

We gotta get some foreign policy experts that presidents listen to. Somebody has got to convince those boobs that decapitation strikes and deposing the strong men of the muslim world doesn't work at all and is 100% counterproductive if one wants calm and peace. Deposing Mubarak was unbelievably stupid. Gunning down Qaddafi was unbelievably stupid. In retrospect, toppling Hussein was stupid. That whole Arab Spring thing was a complete disaster on all fronts. Everybody lost except Al Quaeda and ISIS.

The only place I can think of that would benefit America if it was struck by cruise missiles, is Foggy Bottom at 10am on a Wednesday. We desperately need some real diplomats who understand diplomacy, geopolitics and grand strategy. Barring a cruise missile strike on our expert diplomats, toss in some sarin.

This is the State Department Expert on Middle East Policy

RAGE SHOULD FOLLOW SORROW

People, the ignorant people don't realize that when some people become just too dangerous to tolerate have been known to expel them with or without violence. Germany know it. Europe knows it. They did just after World War II when everybody decided that having any German in the population was just asking for the next Hitler to invade.

I suspect that even the rest of Europe is coming to conclude that having muslims among them is simply too dangerous to allow any longer.

It's a pity that the people are so far ahead of their leaders. That hardly ever happened before in Europe.

IN A PROGRESSIVE LAND

I'll admit, as I read the headline about SKYNET launching, I mean Daleks, I didn't suspect the humor of the media. I am properly appreciative for the work that she does.

You really should hit the link and read the article with photos.