heliopausa

Who does the internet think I am? Why have I been bombarded for weeks with an ad for bunk beds? and one for a military-grade torch? (Should it be banned? the ad asks.) and today, $99 sports shoes. I think the internet thinks I'm running a kids adventure camp, with exciting night activities, which I'm so not!

I don't have any great news stories to link to, but I enjoyed this metafilter discussion about who rules canon, or whose canon rules, beginning with Harry Potter, but taking off from there to discuss more widely.

In other non-news, it's Year of the Pulse! This weekend's celebratory pulse-focused meal at my place: Chickpea patties, served with yoghurt and the mango chutney I made a little while ago, and lettuce etc. Huge success. :)

More about W&P:
It's getting better and better! (Not to say it's flawless, though). ( Read more... )

I'm a little anxious about the coming election at home, especially about how the changes to the Senate voting will play out. (More than a little, actually.) But not to end on a morose note, here's a campaign ad (30-second youtube, not haranguing) put out by the classical music arm of our national broadcaster.

So... War and Peace! Volume Three opens with a stunning and sobering meditation on War, where does it come from?.
He's just spinning out in public thoughts that have been implicit all along, or at least since Prince-andrei-looks-into-the-sky in Volume One, but now he's really hitting stride with them and they are - well, arresting, to say the least! (This doesn't mean I let him off the hook for the totally dismissive way he writes women.) It's the Big Thoughts - in the midst of which he sketches out, just lightly in passing, the whole Great Man school of history, then skrunches it up and tosses it away as hopelessly naive.

and having done that he launches straight into several recreations of Great Man historical happenings, beginning with the scene when the Tsar learned that Napoleon had breached Russia's borders (I don't count that as a spoiler) but throwing in as well the thinking of one minor, fictional, prince, which acts as a sidenote on the aforesaid meditation, i.e. showing at ground level one tiny fragment of the process he'd just zoomed over at a great height. This was, as far as I know at this point, a totally unimportant fragment - minuscule, microscopic - but depressingly real, and crushingly illustrating the opening meditation.

Two questions for the collective wisdom out there:
- Is Tolstoy the first person to actually put his finger on the Great Man school of thought in history?
- Is Tolstoy the first person to point out explicitly that all it would have taken*, in those pre-drone days, for wars to stop was for every single soldier to refuse to fight?

I think he was, in both cases, but what do I know?

*(all it would have taken :( "he that will not when he could-a, will find he cannot when he would-a", as I read in a children's book long ago - probably written by a Tolstoy fan, now I come to think of it.)


(Tiny side-note: Hello, there marmota_b! I note your country's new name. :) are you pleased or doubtful?)