I liked Parson’s A Geographer Looks at the San Joaquin Valley. I like to learn unexpected (and usually unimportant) things when I read. “there are more Azoreans in California than the Azores .” (pg. 378) which raises the wquestion “why?” or the role the Iranian crisis played in the San Jo valley pistachio industry. Everything else I knew about pistachios came from the kid’s story Pistachio. You know, the story about the little boy whose nuts grew whenever he told a lie.
I just finished The River of Doubt a book about Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 trip down an unexplored branch of Brazil ’s Amazon river by that name. Aside from the conditions the party endured, no modern medicines, no Gore-Tex, and no chance of rescue is things went wrong, it was surprising to learn that Roosevelt recorded distances in his diary using the metric system. Unexpected and unimportant facts. It also mentions that TR’s son Kermit had malaria. Kermit had spent quite a bit of time in South America as an engineer designing and building bridges but he had contracted malaria as a child in Washington D. C. That suggests that either malaria hasn’t always been confined to third world countries or that Washington D. C. was once a third world country.
I’ve started Coming Home to Eat and I’m going into it with a bias. I don’t know whether my pre-dislike for the book is because food is such a personal thing and I don’t like anyone trying to “improve” my diet or whether my knee-jerk reaction is because I just don’t like being told what is good for me.
This is a view of Northern Nevada from Amtrak. Last semester my wife and I rode the train up to Winnemucca. We just wanted to get out of the house for a few days. We had never been to Winnemucca and she had never traveled by train so we went up there, spent the night in a motel, had dinner, and did a little gambling. We could have done all that here but we both just wanted to go. Somewhere. Anywhere. We’ve lived from Alaska to Miami
2 comments:
I had to a great laugh reading your blog! You are a terrific, and fun writer! I look forward to more of your stories! I took the train from San Diego to New Orleans and then to Washington DC. It's nice to have a sleeper car for the longer trips.
I want to respond to your comment about malaria in Washington D.C. during Roosevelt's time. I went to the west coast of Africa two summers ago and contracted malaria. When we were preparing to go there, with the intent to visit some friends there, our friends said they don't see much malaria at all, so don't worry about taking malaria medicine. Well, when we got home and soon after came down with malaria, we wrote an email to them to say we had gotten it. Their response was that they never see malaria among the rich, only the poor, so they couldn't understand why we got it! This reminded me of an obviously little-known fact: "Mosquitos can't differentiate between the rich and the poor!" My friends have yet to learn this.
This was the case in the U.S. in the past. Malaria used to be a problem here in the U.S. too, but we have managed to eradicate it by controlling mosquito populations AND especially by treating the disease as soon as it shows up, thus slowing the spread of it (if you have the disease for less days, the odds of giving it to a mosquito are much less).
When my husband and I had it, which we did here in the U.S., if we'd been sucked by a mosquito, we could have possibly passed it on to someone else. As it was, we laid shivering and achy on the couch until the medicine kicked in inside our sealed and air conditioned house next to the wetlands that had recently been sprayed for mosquitos. Malaria has no chance here in the U.S. anymore. That is a primary difference between third world and first world--medical and technological availability.
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